109. 5 Holiday Diet Rules to Break (and What to Do Instead)

If you’ve ever been told to “skip breakfast before Thanksgiving” or “earn your pie with a workout,” this one’s for you. Those diet rules sound smart — but they actually backfire.

In this episode, Dr. Stacy dives into five common holiday food rules that are keeping you stuck in the overeating–guilt–restart cycle and shows you what to do instead. You’ll learn how to enjoy your favorite foods, keep your energy steady, and avoid the “I’ll start again in January” mindset.

She covers:
 ✨ Why skipping meals makes you overeat later
 ✨ How to move because it feels good — not as punishment
 ✨ The smart way to enjoy dessert without guilt
 ✨ How to stop cleaning your plate out of habit
 ✨ Why “holiday weight gain is inevitable” is a total myth

You’ll leave this episode knowing how to enjoy the season, feel good in your body, and stay consistent — no food guilt required.

Listen now to drop the diet drama and keep the joy this holiday season!

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Want to jump start your weight loss? Schedule a free call where Dr. Stacy Heimburger will work with you to create a personalized plan to lose 2 pounds in one week, factoring in your unique circumstances, challenges, and aspirations. Schedule now! www.sugarfreemd.com/2pound

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Today I want to talk about some holiday eating rules that we should break this year. First of all, know I hate diet rules. I think that they've caused so much diet trauma for so many of us that have sort of been over-dieted. So many of these rules you have probably heard before or you have told yourself and they may or may not have worked out. So if they worked out for you, great, but I find most of the time they have not worked out and so that's why I wanted to do this episode today.

So, the week of Thanksgiving and the first holiday party, maybe we're thinking things like, I should save my calories for dinner, like I won't eat all day, or I'm going to work out extra hard tomorrow so I can have this dessert, or even more restrictive, like I'm just not going to eat any of the carbs. Right? Making just these sort of rules for ourselves. And in the back of all of that, our brain is like, we can just restart in January. We'll just start over when there's not as much going on. It's not a big deal. I don't have time for this. I'm too busy. Right? So anytime we kind of start that first excuse or that first really drastic rule, our brain immediately just takes it all the way down the highway, right? It's like, we can just forget it, we'll start later.

So these rules are not really helping. They feel like and sound like we're just being disciplined, but they're actually really fast tracking our overeating and then our guilt and then our sort of like, F it, I'll start in January, okay? So let's detox from our diet rules, shall we?

Diet culture has really trained us that control and willpower and the ability to resist are the right way. If you're listening to me, hopefully you're thinking there are other ways. But our body really doesn't like those rules, okay? When we say, let's not eat all day so that we can enjoy dinner, our brain hears we're in danger, we're starving ourselves. So our cravings go up, our ghrelin goes up, and then it's like so ready when any, like the sugar cravings, because that's all it wants, right? It wants, our brain runs on glucose. So when our brain thinks I'm not going to get food, it makes total sense that it would spike our cravings for sugar. Okay? So it doesn't like rules.

Then we, when we make these rules, we have this tendency to make food good or bad. So then it becomes this moral issue, right? And so then it's good food, bad food, and it's this all or nothing. And then if we're good all week, we can be bad on the weekend or bad at the party. Or sometimes what even happens is we say we're going to be good at the party. And then that little part of us that hates rules is like, really? I'll show you, right? And so it becomes naughty to eat the bad food and it becomes even more enticing. Then we, again, then we have like this shame spiral and they're like, I'll just start later. So these rules and behaving and good and bad can all play into overeating and shame and guilt. And so let's maybe not do that.

So let's talk about one rule at a time. Save calories by skipping meals. So this looks like I'll just skip breakfast. I won't eat all day and then I will have enough calories for dinner.

This is why I don't always love the tracking apps because I feel like it feeds into this a little bit. Because when we then, let's say our app says we get 2000 calories and we don't eat all day, it's like, we can have this amazing 2000 calorie dinner. So many things wrong with that. First of all, all calories are not the same. And I'll argue anyone to death who says that. But when we skip meals and our blood sugar drops and our brain hears I'm starving and then like we want sugary foods, by the time dinner hits, we're like a mess, right? And anything logical, our planning brain, our smart brain that's like, I want to lose weight or be healthy or have longevity, like has checked out, has left the building because now we're like a starving ravenous animal who wants sugar because it thinks we're dying.

So we get into this like feed me now survival mode when we walk in and it's really hard to make good decisions or stick to the plan that we've made prior when like we've been in a really nice head space. So I don't love the like skip all day for the party. If you are someone who's very used to fasting and your brain knows this is your normal routine, I am not talking to you. I'm talking to everyone like your normal routine is three meals and snacks or three meals or whatever it is, if you just try and skip all that, your brain is going to freak out. And a freaked out brain does not make good food decisions. Maybe we should just simply say that, okay? If we freak out our brain, it does not make good food decisions, especially not in the moment.

So a better plan might be a little bit of protein, okay? Maybe instead of a huge breakfast, we have like a couple of hard boiled eggs. Maybe we have a light lunch. So if you can't let go of the diet rule of like save up calories, you don't have to totally give it up. But maybe just instead of none, we do smarter choices at breakfast and lunch. So veggie omelet, Greek yogurt, protein heavy breakfast, and then maybe we do protein or healthy fat lunch or snack, we can like reassure our body and our brain that we're not starving to death. And then we can be in a better head space, not freaked out when we go to the party and make smarter food choices.

GLP-1 people, more important than ever because skipping meals and not drinking enough water can actually make your nausea worse. And then you might end up like not even going to the party because you don't feel good from your medicine. So instead of thinking I need to skip all day and earn my dinner, let's think if I like, if this was your child, would you ask them to do that? So can we feed ourselves with love like someone we care about instead of someone we're punishing and starving until dinner? Just something to think about.

All right, next food rule that always shows up is this earning food with exercise idea. Exercise is not a punishment, okay? Movement feels good. So you know my opportunities to move. I hate the idea of getting our head in that brain space of exercise is punishment. And when we're trying to barter it for food, it absolutely feels like punishment for overeating. I can't really see any way out of that. So when we tie it, food and exercise, like this transactional method, it can really hurt our consistency, our consistency in our food choices and our consistency in our movement, right?

Our body, like we don't have to punish it to eat what we like. Like we want to be synergistic with ourselves. It's like doing things that are nice for our body and things that are good for us and things out of love instead of this like very transactional, you must exercise to eat this. Like if you're going to eat the pie, you must run 10 miles. Like, no. We want to move for us as a reward as this feels good. This is good for my, like my brain and my body and not as like this is my way to earn pie.

Movement also helps with digestion, so it's just like a nice thing to do for ourselves. But we're not going to earn our food. Again, the apps can sort of reinforce this, so just really be careful. And I used one of the popular ones for a really long time. And sometimes I would not even log my exercise. And then I would log everything very neurotically, and then I would add my exercise and I'd be like, ah, can eat so much more, right? Or I'll lose so much more. It just became this really punishing, was no way around it. It was just punishment, right? Punishment for reward.

Rule number three, no carbs or no dessert. Now, if you don't like a lot of carbs or you do not have a sweet tooth and dessert is not your thing, I'm not talking to you. If dessert is your thing, or carbs are your thing and sort of saying, no, you can't have that. Again, it becomes this good food, bad food punishment idea and it can lead to overeating, right? We sort of want to rebel against that. We start to crave it twice as much because we've told it no. Like we've told our brain no, like the child in the candy store, right? When we do this lots of times, that is the first thing we go for in like the middle of the night when no one's looking the next morning, right? Because our brain starts fixating on it. Like, oh, I'm not going to have the pie. Oh, I bet that pie would be good. I'd really love that pie. I don't get to have the pie, right? And our brain's thinking about the pie like 10 times more or a hundred times more than when even think about the pie if we just said, I'm going to have a couple of bites of pie.

So this no carbs, no dessert is this all or nothing, this good or bad can just really set us up for disaster. And if something is our favorite, we want to do that, right? We want to savor it or share it or like it's special to us and that's okay. So we just want to plan and make room for it. We talked about building our plate to have room for dessert. So we just do it in this really nice loving way where again, it's not this punishment, transactional behavior.

Anyone else part of the Clean Plate Club? I don't know that we were. I think we were though. Like, let's not do that. If we're done eating, we're done eating. So if you were part of the Clean Plate Club, it sometimes is very hard to figure out when you're done eating. We've kind of ruined it for ourselves. When we were satisfied and tried to stop and somebody told us to keep eating, all we taught our brain was how to stop listening to our hunger cues and our fullness cues. So if you were part of this clean plate club, it makes total sense that you would have a problem figuring out when enough is enough.

I love the experiment if you notice that you're someone who has a hard time stopping. There's a couple of ways we can go about that from a tactical standpoint. If you notice, no matter what, I have to clean my plate, like it's just in there. While we're figuring that out, in the meantime, we can make our plate, get a second plate, take half, and just go to the table with half. And when we finish that half, we just need to take a pause, maybe have a glass of water, maybe just take a 10 to 15 minute break, then if we're still hungry, we can go back to our original plate and take half again.

And we can start to train our brain, this is really training our stomach, of how much is enough and we can start to tune in to like what does full feel like and maybe like what does satisfied feel like instead of full, okay? Maybe we like being satisfied more than the feeling of full. And so we can do this half plate kind of exercise. The other thing that you can do if you're kind of a visual person as well is try and leave two bites of everything on your plate and then sit back and listen to your brain and see what happens.

It's very interesting, lots of times when you run this experiment, but we can then take that. If we're able to let it go, we can take that, like put it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer. And if you do that with every meal for like a week, the amount of food that you have not eaten and still felt satisfied can be very visually like mind blowing and can sometimes help switch that wiring or, you know, give our brain something like a little string to pull on to unravel this truth of this like, I have to finish my plate. So if you're a clean plater, I'm with you, I see you. These are the two things we can do if we want to start working on what does satisfied or full feel like.

Remembering like our brain and our stomach, it's like a 20 minute disconnect. So slowing down during this process is really key. I feel like that's an old diet rule too, like put your fork down between every bite. That actually makes sense, okay? Like not eating all day or running 10 miles to eat two bites of pumpkin pie does not make sense. Putting your fork down, taking a sip of water, talking, that actually does make sense from just a physiologic standpoint of giving our brain and our stomach time to connect.

This is the biggest rule that I want you to hear me and know that this is not fact. Holiday weight gain's inevitable. That statement is false. And everybody says it and our society thinks it's true. And so everyone, like it gives us this free pass to just be mindless about food during what I think is what we're being told is the most mindful time of the year.

So we're being told like this is all about gratitude and family and being together and all of these things and like mindfulness and gratitude. And then we're getting this other messaging about don't care at all about your body or your food or like what feels good. Just worry about that in January. Just everybody gains weight so who cares? I don't think that one of my clients that coaches with me has gained weight during holiday season, ever. Now, we might make a goal to sustain our weight loss, right? We might not lose more, that's a conscious decision, but this mindlessness that inevitably causes weight gain should not, I don't think should be associated with the holidays. It is not inevitable, okay?

Do we get busier? Yes. As busy women, do we have a tendency to drop our self care first? Absolutely. Does planning meals feel harder? Yes, but I'll challenge that too. Okay. So what we believe determines how we behave, right? Thoughts, feelings, actions. So when we think it's inevitable everyone gains weight during the holidays, we are giving ourselves this free pass to just forget it and be mindless. And so I want to challenge you that that belief is totally false and that we can absolutely cruise through this holiday season without gaining weight. And I have plenty of evidence for you. Every one of my past clients, plenty of evidence.

All right, so those are some holiday rules I want you to break this year. And we're getting very close to Thanksgiving. So I'm so thankful for you listening or watching, and I will talk to you next week for our special Thanksgiving episode. All right, bye guys.