Die-ting On Christmas

By Klemente Cisneros

‘Tis the season to indulge. Under the mistletoe, besides the tree, on the table, or at the kitchen, you’re always eating on Christmas season. It doesn’t matter how much you want to stay healthy, face it. You’re on vacation, comfortable at home, and with real food in front of you at no cost and with no effort. But are these really the real reason why you just can’t stay healthy the entire time? Well, be surprised because they are not entirely guilty for your holiday naughtiness.

A study in the University of Alberta conducted by Robert Fisher says our conflicting rules and norms about eating are the consequence of our eating habits. Most of you know how to maintain a healthy weight, but it is the lack of will power to keep form over eating that makes you lose the battle. Fisher defines them as a conflicting set of descriptive and injunctive norms.

Basically, injunctive norms are whatever you believe is good or bad when doing something. It is all about what others, your family, peers, or organizations, say it’s wrong or good doing. Let’s say a family says it’s a good thing to get excellent grades and rewarded their kids for doing it, as whether other families do not reward their kids neither punish them for not doing so. Descriptive norms, conversely, are basically those actions or behaviors that everybody does and it’s perceived as regular daily life things; like eating pizza or beer on a regular Friday night.

Fisher discovered in his studies that the people who had higher BMIs were actually those who knew better how healthy or unhealthy were the things they consumed. The problem here is that most people who knew they were doing wrong had a less controllable urge to reject the food because of our nature about acting in a contradictory way. Therefore, Fisher concluded that knowing what’s healthy for you doesn’t guaranteed good eating habits and that people had all the knowledge but the problem laid on having enough motivation to do it. It’s all about changing behaviors.

Is it really about changing behaviors, thought? I think so. Most of us perceive diets as something temporary and completely out of our daily life. The majority suffers just hearing the word calories, fat, carbs and take dieting as a means to achieve something rather than a lifestyle change. Are we really fooling our system with this or is it fooling us? Truth is we are just fooling ourselves. Dieting is not about suffering because it will never be successful. I can personally tell you that unless you accept a lifestyle change in your eating habits, dieting will only make you frustrated, hungry and totally grumpy. Just like the many times you diet one morning and indulge in the afternoon, dieting will not make you loose weight successfully. Therefore you will never change your disorders, for your brain will always think you’re doing something wrong.

Think of it this way. Dieting is like doing something really bad when you were a child, that you got punished without allowance or TV for two or three days. As you grew older you learned some things were wrongdoing and you did them less often or never at all. Diets work the same way. When you deprive from the food you enjoy and punish (diet) yourself for it, you are telling your brain healthy food is bad for you, and therefore it should not be consumed without feeling regret and guilt, training your brain to enjoy healthy less and less. How can you change this?

If you change your injunctive norms to learn eating habits to reprogram your brain and make it think healthy food is doing the right thing, then your brain is going to focus less on unhealthy food because it thinks it's the bad deed. But how can you do this, you may think? Well, there are plenty of diets out there to lose weight healthy and without rebound. My favorite one is the Abs Diet from Men’s Health. You basically eat six delicious meals a day without suffering from starvation. There are other diets out there that also give you excellent recipes and tips to keep you from being hungry while losing weight. Yes, you’d have to prepare you own food, but, hey, nothing comes easy as 1,2,3. If you want to lose weight you’ll have to make some effort. Also, remember it is all about perceiving healthy food as good rather than how big your will power is.

Changing your descriptive norms can really help you change your injunctive norms easier. Learning healthy is good can be tough in any environment that sees unhealthy food as the cool kid. Therefore, find a group of people that eats healthy and exercises and unite them. Go to a yoga class, join a running crowd or connect with a community group that practices healthy habits. If you’re around people that are always eating unhealthy, you’ll have a hard time believing you’re right and they’re wrong. It’s a majority rule. Therefore, dieting on Christmas can translate into die-ing with a t. You’re surrounded by food and everybody’s eating tasty treats and tamales, if you’re Mexican. That’s why it is impossible dieting on the holidays, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Stuffing your muffin during Christmas is fine. It’s the holiday, there is food everywhere, and, yes, you will gain two or three pounds but you can work them off later with healthy food and exercise. Nonetheless, always remember not to hate anything you eat. Enjoy unhealthy food as if you were on vacation from work or school, like if it was something temporary and totally unusual. When you get back on your healthy eating, though, enjoy every piece of it. Never regret any healthy bite you eat. Rather think as if you were eating something totally normal and ordinary like sleeping. Every time you accomplish a goal prize yourself for it. Either buy a new jean, new shoes, or simply reward yourself with a spa day. After all, you deserve to treat yourself right. Being healthy is the right way to do it. Come on, let’s face it, if you’re healthy, you think good, feel good, and, most importantly, look good. And if you’re looking good enough, you might as well find someone who will toss your salad.

Happy holidays,

Klemente


Source: University of Alberta. Design and editing by Klemente & Co 2011. All rights reserved.

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