How to Stick to a Routine to Stay Healthy During the Holidays
A simple way to stay healthy is to develop a routine for your day-to-day life. Routines often turn into habits. Habits can be either good or bad. So why not create healthy habits that drive you automatically to do the right thing most of the time. After all, perfection isn’t required, but when you create a habit, you get close because habits are hard to break.
The following are three powerful tips to help you stick to a healthy routine during the holidays:
Establish Healthy Boundaries Guilt-Free
Your kitchen doesn’t have to be open all the time. It’s not just about you needing boundaries. It’s about establishing limitations for the entire family surrounding healthy food.
Eating happens when you’re hungry around certain times of the day and not 24/7. You’re not a short-order cook, which is often true during the holidays. While you don’t want anyone to go to bed hungry after a few nights of sticking to your boundaries, most people will ensure they eat enough to avoid nighttime hunger during mealtimes.
Strive for Simplicity, Not Perfection
Whether it’s a meal plan or something else in your life, the simplest things are often the best. A meal of grilled fish, rice, and a salad is just as good as a more complicated casserole and better for you. Roasted sweet potatoes are just as good (some would argue better) than the sweet potato casserole you grew up with and less work.
Plan Ahead and Use a Calendar
When you want to ensure something happens, always set goals, and plan using a good schedule that ends up in your calendar. For example, setting up a family calendar based on your joint family goals is a very powerful way to ensure that everyone in the family is on the same page and that everything isn’t on you.
For example, if your Christmas meal is going to be on the 25th and there are ten things to do before that meal, it should end up in the calendar assigned to the person who needs to do it. Then, everyone can check their calendar every day to find out what to do.
You can make sticking to a routine easier by doing similar things daily, which creates powerful, healthy habits that will expand past just staying healthy during the holidays into something that is working all year long for you and your family.