How to manage your eating on holiday
It’s coming up to holiday season here in the UK. For a lot of people especially mums with kids home from school, that means their normal routine goes out the window. There’s all the holidays, festivals, camping trips, days out and trips to the beach. Lots of opportunities for your normal eating habits to slip…
My clients often tell me they struggle to manage their eating on holiday.
When you’re on holiday you want to enjoy yourself and let your hair down – nothing wrong with that of course. Clients tell me they have more treats on holiday. Or they want to get their money’s worth when they’ve paid for a full-board holiday. Does this sound familiar to you too? Maybe when it’s warm or you’re exploring a new place you have more meals out, ice-creams on the beach or cocktails by the pool. I’m the last person to tell you not to do any of those things, but a change in routine can interfere with all the hard work you’re doing to build healthy habits.
Good news though….
Going on holiday doesn’t have to be your ‘downfall’!
When you’re stuck in that cycle of yo-yo dieting, it’s easy to think that holidays ‘ruin your diet’. But when you change your perspective about eating – to ditch all that dieting mentality – you’ll see that holidays don’t have to get in the way of your health goals.
Here are my tips to help you manage the holiday eating:
Check your attitude
Be honest with yourself about your usual perspective on holidays. Is it a healthy attitude that helps you? Or do you go on a slimming frenzy, restricting yourself in the run up to going away? Followed by letting your hair down on the holiday and completely over doing it, piling all the weight back on then beating yourself up for failing?? Time to take a step back from that dieting mentality and remember it’s not about what you do in the short term, focus on building healthy habits for life. Following healthy habits that leave you feeling good, is much more important than reaching a certain weight!
Be aware of what you’re doing
If you’re not happy with your eating habits on holiday, get clear on what it is you want to change. How could you tweak things a little compared to what you normally do? If you normally drink alcohol every day, have ice-creams every day and try to eat everything on offer – ask yourself do you really need to have it all? Could you prioritise the best bits? Or is it more important to you to get your money’s worth? Only you can answer that for yourself and decide what’s more important to you.
How could you eat more mindfully? Are you listening to your body and following your appetite? Or are you eating and drinking because the food and drink is just there?
Be realistic about it though. Don’t expect that you’ll be able to perfectly keep up the new habits you’ve been working on. Things will probably slip a little, but that doesn’t mean you might as well give up and completely forget everything.
Draw a line and ditch the guilt
Once you’re back from holiday, draw a line under what you’ve been doing. Ditch any self-guilt about drinking too much or having too many ice-creams etc. It’s only been a week or two so it’s not going to make that much difference in the grand scheme of things; remember the bigger picture. Whereas guilt-tripping yourself is more likely to lead to overeating coz ‘you’ve blown it – might as well give up!’
You’re allowed to enjoy yourself, you’re allowed to overeat or drink a bit too much occasionally. You’re not a bad person and you haven’t failed in any way. Do you really want to never enjoy yourself on holiday ever again? Give yourself permission to let your hair down, but recognise when things are getting out of hand and draw a line under it. You can’t change the past, you can only focus on what you do next.
Get back into your normal habits asap
Once you’ve drawn a line under the holiday eating, focus on getting back to normal. If you get back into your normal routine asap then it won’t make a difference to your health goals in the long-term. Remember what goals you were working towards before the holiday and what habits you were building. Ask yourself what habits have slipped – do you need to get back on track with going to exercise classes? Do you need to get back into meal planning or going to bed earlier? What’s the first step towards getting back into your normal routine? What’s the smallest, easiest thing you could do that’d make the biggest difference and make it easier to get back into your other habits – that’s the tweak to make first.
How are you feeling about your eating over the summer holidays?
Remember I’m here to help if you found this useful, but need more support.
Need help to ditch dieting forever?
Want to eat normally again AND lose weight healthily? While still enjoying the cake & chocolate? Hell yes!
I will help you ditch dieting forever, either with my 1-2-1 support. Or if you prefer to work independently, you will learn all the skills I teach my 1-2-1 clients, on my ‘No More Diets’ online course.
Freebies!
My Weekly Round-up! AKA; what I’ve been up to recently…
- This blog has been brought to you by English Breakfast tea again, plus loads of water! It’s been so hot this week!
- Wow we got sociable again at the weekend. We had friends over to stay and it’s just been so lovely. Need more of this after the last few years of pandemic lockdowns and distancing!
- We didn’t manage to go walking up another hill this weekend, but I did do one of my favourite summer activities. I went on the Belle Vue Open Garden and Scarecrow trail. I love having a nose around other people’s gardens to get inspiration. Although I still have a list of loads of things I want to do that I haven’t got round to doing. One thing it’s reminded me of though is that we need more colour in our garden, so I’ve been making a list of flowers I want to plant either this year or next.
- I finished another book to add to my list of new books I’ve read this year. For 2022 I set myself the challenge to read 22 new books as I’d got into a rut of reading a lot of the same books over & over again. This week I finished reading ‘The Shadow in The Glass’ by JJA Harwood. Another creepy little tail set in Victorian times that I’ve enjoyed.
- This week I impressed myself. Not only have I managed to get out for a walk along the brook every day as well as doing my little exercise routine every day. I also managed to do a more intensive work-out on the punch-bag using some kickboxing combos. Feeling really good for it and going to try to keep it up at least once per week from now on.
- I also mixed up my walks a bit this week so I walked a little further away on a couple of days. The one day I saw a cute little weasel or stoat, which was exciting. I tried to look up which it was, but apparently the only way you can tell the difference is by the tail and I didn’t see the tail!
- Bird Nerd Report: Yet again I’ve seen kingfishers every day this week and still that flash of electric blue makes me smile. I think it’s helped that the route I’ve taken a few times has gone past what I call ‘Kingfisher Corner’. Its where the brook winds round a loop and the banks are totally covered in greenery. The perfect spot for kingfishers to be perched.
