A Winter Holidays Encyclopedia — 9

A previous Childhood Obesity News post made passing mention of a piece by Clinical Mental Health Counselor Jessica Maharaj that deserves a closer look. For starters, Maharaj has a lot to say about the importance of managing expectations, which we have mentioned also.

There is a condition that used to be called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. This nomenclature was later changed to Major Depressive Disorder with a Seasonal Pattern. To avoid the problem, the recommended lifestyle fixes include adequate hydration, which is crucial for good brain function. Exercise is endorsed, to get the endorphins flowing, along with other forms of self-care like a warm bath or a massage. Stay from unhealthful foods, or too much of any food. Adults: go easy on the alcohol, and everyone: skip the sugar-sweetened beverages. And for goodness sake, get enough sleep.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” one may say. “Heard it all before.” But guess what? This might be the year to finally try some of those tips we’ve heard a thousand times.

Self-care for the brain

This is a good place to add some new hints suggested by Nicole Pajer from, of all places, the American Association of Retired Persons website. These are things that parents and grandparents need to know. First, only a fool perpetuates a grudge, and a study found that resentment and negativity are consistent with cognitive decline. The author quotes the advice of psychologist Patty Johnson:

Make a list of five specific things that you are grateful for and focus on those.

Take some deep belly breaths, try a new task or change your focus to something in your environment.

When a negative thought pops up, greet it with “Hello,” then tell it “Goodbye.”

Also highly recommended is a sense of purpose, so now let us focus on the specific subject of holiday gatherings and their deleterious effect on everyone’s efforts to avoid obesity. Whether host or guest, do not let a sense of purpose overwhelm you. The purpose ought not to be staging the most impressive blowout in history. Let the purpose be ensuring that everyone is comfortable, and unthreatened by any aspect of the festivities.

While a sense of responsibility can be a lovely thing, an obsession rarely is. The whole holiday entertaining concept needs to be taken just seriously enough. Participants depend on an event’s organizer to plan well, and of course, the organizer also needs to depend on others for a lot. It should always be a two-way street and if it isn’t, try to spend the rest of the year catching up in order to be ready for next year’s winter holiday emotional extravaganza.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Avoiding Holiday Stressors: Tips for a Stress-Free Season,” NAMI.org, 12/03/18
Source: “The 9 Worst Habits for Your Brain,” AARP.org, 12/06/22
Image by jilblacktown/Flickr

A Winter Holidays Encyclopedia — 8

These comments are elaborations on some past Childhood Obesity News posts. In this problematic season, there is no such thing as too much advice. Just one of the suggestions we have gathered over the years could have an amazing effect on a person’s mental health. What does that have to do with obesity? Everything. Both adults and children tend to overeat in response to stress and let’s face it, the winter holidays are fraught with opportunities to experience stress of all kinds and degrees.

One fact about holiday excess is very clear. If adults have modeled and enforced sane, healthful eating patterns consistently, the holiday challenge will be much easier to meet. In the very optimal best-case scenario, the habits instilled throughout the year will hold steady, and the damage will be minimal. Hopefully, temporary overeating will end when the winter holidays are over. Even at worst, family members will revert back to their normal good habits when the new year commences, and any atypical weight gain will be easy to shed.

Useful notes

A lot of advice about these matters revolves around a very important life skill, expectation management. To cherish expectations is to set oneself up for disappointment. An expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. When we give a gift, we need to do ourselves the favor of not forming a mental picture of how the recipient will react. In a conversation, we need to avoid writing scripts in our heads where other people say the lines we hope to hear. Because if they deviate from the dialogue we have created for them, we will feel bad. So, why ask for trouble?

A very useful resolution for not only for the new year, but for this holiday season we are in right now, is to clear our subconscious minds of expectations, and instead listen to others with an open heart and a willing ear.

Specifics

The previously mentioned post and the next one in line both offer some specific suggestions to handle the various situations that can arise. Sometimes it is possible to game out a few scenarios in our heads and figure out possible non-harmful reactions. (Note: This is not the same as harboring potentially hurtful expectations.)

In general, it begins to look as though the most meaningful contribution any individual can make to the group is forgiveness, in all its varieties. Forbearance, amnesty, clemency, absolution, reprieve, mercy — there are a lot of terms for the idea of cutting the other person some slack. Never mind whether they deserve it; that judgment call is not ours to make. Sincere forgiveness is something a person does not for others, but for our own sake. To cherish a grudge is like carrying around a pocket full of mud that we want to sling at the offender. We’re still the ones with the pocket full of mud.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

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A Winter Holidays Encyclopedia — 3

Do we want mental and physical health for 2023? Yes, please! Here is a review of hints for fitness and sanity over the winter holidays.

Get Ready for the Christmas Calorie Blitz

Eliminate the mindset that says, “So what if I go a little nuts over the holidays? January 1, I’m back in the gym. No, that’s a Sunday. Okay, January 2, the gym, for sure.” Then along comes January 3 or 4, and somehow you haven’t made it yet. So you decide to make a clean start the following week — on Monday the 9. See how this works? Or rather, doesn’t work? It’s almost as if today is the only day we ever really have.

How do we show children we love them without ruining their health? How do parents withstand the pressures to abandon all caution and splurge out on treats? How do we restrain kids from accepting every offer of a free cookie or candy cane without coming across like ogres?

Holiday Eating Trauma — A Field Ripe for Harvest

It isn’t only that there is food. There is a lot of it, magically appearing everywhere, even at unexpected places like the bank. At work, people bring in goodies to share. Fancy stuff arrives in the mail. At home and wherever you visit, chances are the edible offerings are more calorie-laden than usual. Depending on what school the kids attend, it is possible that they are being plied with treats.

Some family norms break down, as parents simply surrender to the atmosphere of indulgence. The estimable Dr. Billi Gordon, an expert on obesity and compulsive eating, described this time of year as “a recurring nightmare.”

Holidays and Childhood Obesity

Obese children face ferocious hazards during the holidays. Relatives who are rarely encountered will seldom refrain from remarking on how much bigger a child has grown since last time. Guess what, grownups? Even positive comments are not welcome. Just zip it. Better yet, have another piece of pie. Go ahead, put on a few pounds, and see how it feels to have people making your size a topic of conversation. Just leave the kid alone.

In Search of Holiday Sanity

For some reason, many grownups feel free to bust loose on holidays and break all the rules. If they were the only persons who suffered the consequences of this abandon, that would be bad enough. But the kids are watching. They are observing and absorbing, and tucking away the excuses they hear for future reference.

What exactly do we want them to see and hear? Could we, as mature, responsible holiday celebrants, maybe do better? Must we really overdo it in every possible dimension, or can we act a little more responsibly for the sake of our families? And, incidentally, for our own sake?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Whitney/CC BY 2.0

A Winter Holidays Encyclopedia — 2

In a Glasbergen cartoon, someone says, “I’m already in the holiday mood… stressed, broke and exhausted!” Ouch. Sadly that is all too often the case. A lot of uncomfortable travel may be involved. Money is tight. Kids are out of control, and adults might be kind of ornery too. Family members are not always the presidents of one another’s fan clubs. And anyone who normally meets life’s challenges by eating is now officially at risk of getting even worse.

Here are more short hints about our holiday-related posts.

Coke Legacies

In the old days, it was very easy for parents to keep young children away from unhealthful influences. Kids had no way of knowing what dangers they were protected from, simply by not being taken to certain places. It’s more difficult now to keep them out of harm’s way, but we can still draw the line when it comes to transporting them to events that glorify values we don’t want to endorse. We might, for instance, choose not to take them to a giant decorated truck for free samples of sugar water.

By the way, did you know that Santa’s red and white color palette was chosen by, and culturally enforced by, the Coca-Cola Company?

Escaping Winter Holiday Hell

The late Dr. Billi Gordon knew more than most people about the mental and emotional stress imposed by holidays, and all from traumatic personal experience. Once he had to pass up a critically needed MRI because there were 150 pounds too much of him to fit into the machine. Yes, this is grim stuff. If people come from dysfunctional home environments — and, around the holidays, a lot of us seem to — no amount of tinsel can cover up the distress, so it might as well be faced.

Fitting Into the Winter Food Festivals

We can pretend that family time is all love and bliss, but what is the point, really? Is there enough armor in the world to protect us from our relatives? Dr. Billi Gordon casts a neuroscientist’s eye on the trauma that comes with the holidays and causes our rational systems and self-preservative instincts to shut down.

Is there any hope for binge eaters, compulsive overeaters, or even moderate eaters who are conditioned by a lifetime of thinking of the holidays as a permission slip for imprudence? Can we possibly separate the cycles of destruction from the positive and desirable parts of the holiday experience?

Get Out in Front of Holiday Stress

There is a lot of recreational food around. The atmosphere is often stressful. We feel obliged to set a good example for our own children, and all the rest of them, too. Over the holidays, a person can gain enough pounds to keep them chubby all year. Demands and obligations are at an all-time high.

Look for the silver lining. Maybe the hand-knit scarf you love, from the crafts website, will be marked down in January. Or if you are a scarf-knitter, maybe people who get checks for Christmas will buy a few in January.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Rudolf Ammann/CC BY 2.0

A Winter Holidays Encyclopedia — 1

A popular social media message reminds us that from November through mid-January, the combined total of holidays observed by several major religions reaches almost 30. That’s a lot of celebration. Here is a collection of Childhood Obesity News posts on a sometimes difficult subject.

A Holiday Reminder

Holiday stress comes in so many dismal varieties — financial, interpersonal, and intergenerational. There may be harsh weather to cope with, and even in good conditions, the aggravations of travel can unravel a family’s equanimity. But relatives have to be visited or hosted, and there may be religious duties.

Most of all, there are “refreshments.” From the most basic primeval instinct to share resources and preserve all members of the group, to the most cynical entrepreneurial ambitions of a glitzy gift-basket delivery service, everyone has reasons to ply their fellow humans with food and drink. Advertising goes into hysterical overdrive, urging us to eat-eat-eat, and eat some more.

All Hail the Lord of Misrule

In days of old, life was tough and boring, winter was dark, long, and cold, and any excuse was seized upon to fling mundane routine aside and boogie all night long. The tedium was relieved by raucous trick-or-treat type behavior, which later transmogrified into gentler customs, like the singing of Christmas carols beneath the neighbors’ windows.

But we still eat and drink enormous amounts, and maybe that set of behavioral expectations needs a makeover, too. This post mentions some of the psychological difficulties that trouble people in modern times.

Be the Change You Want to See

If there is ever a time for adults to put on their role-model hats, the holiday season is that time. Everything about it holds a potential for trauma. If there are things we don’t love about our family or affinity group holidays, it’s up to us to change those toxic patterns.

Did your uncle drink too much and pitch face-first into his mashed potatoes? Did your parents hurt your feelings by making everything revolve around the visitors, and relegate you to the ranks of an assistant housekeeper? Or did they just need you as an audience to bizarre behavior, as they sidled up to one relative and created opportunities to put another firmly in their inferior place? Here is a mantra: “The only one who can change things is me, and the best time to do it is now.”

Clean Up After Thanksgiving

What is a food coma, and how do we avoid experiencing one? Without getting all extreme and signing up for a retreat, can the average person achieve a bit of detoxing? Are there other seasonal health hazards to watch for?

Here is a hot tip: Find extra things to look forward to, once the worst part is over. Like after-Christmas sales. This is the time to find wrapping paper and everything else at discount prices, and stash it away for next year. Just avoid the chocolate-covered cherries. And, no. Candy canes are not low-calorie just because they are hard instead of gooshy. Whatever gave you that idea?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

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