Ah January, here you are.
With your promises of fresh starts, your good intentions and your freezing cold weather.
If you’re anything like me then you probably start January every year feeling a bit bloated, tired, very poor and filled with good intentions. In fact, you’re looking forward to early morning runs in the icy cold and lots of salad.
For 2 or 3 days anyway.
It’s tempting to start a New Year with the urge to change everything. However, while Christmas and New Year tends to be a time of gluttonous debauchery and spendthriftery that would shame us any other time of year, there are some positive behaviour changes we tend to make over Christmas that it might just be worth hanging on to.
I’ve picked 4, that I’m sure I do more over Christmas, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other people do too.
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Treating every day like it’s special
I bet on Christmas Day you ate off your best china and drank from the crystal glasses. Perhaps you just got dressed nicely and ate at the table when you weren’t even leaving the house. Maybe you made sure your pyjamas were all matching and colour coordinated. Or maybe you just lit your best smelly candles so the house smelt nice.
You should do that all the time. Really.
Making yourself feel special in little ways should be an everyday thing. Everyone deserves to feel good, and there’s no sense in sitting around waiting for someone else to do it.
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Staying in touch with friends and family
I’m terrible at staying in touch with people, and I spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it too. In fact, I’m so awful that I don’t even remember to send Christmas Cards and I have 3 years worth that I’ve bought in my decorations box *gulp*
At Christmas and New Year though we do often find ourselves renewing friendships in other little ways. We send New Year texts, special Twitter thank yous and we might find ourselves “liking” more Facebook statuses. We tend to reflect and think about all the people we love and how we’d like to see more of them.
Well KEEP IT UP! This year I’m trying to make plans for how I might actually get to SEE some of those people this year, instead of missing them at Christmas and then getting caught back up in the hurly burly of every day life.
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Buying good food
I bet at Christmas you also bought the Taste the Difference Cave Aged Extra Mature Cheddar, instead of one of those huge rubbery blocks. You might have bought a box of fancy decorated Belgian Chocolates and I bet you bought real, extra thick, luxury double cream instead of Elmlea.
If you buy the fancy cheese that actually tastes nice you’ll need less of it, eat less of it, and ultimately consume fewer calories and lose weight. But you won’t feel deprived, you’ll feel like it’s a treat. Happy people don’t comfort eat entire family sized pizzas and then despise themselves for not sticking to their lettuce leaf and ice water diet. Well, not every day.
Moderation is key, of course it IS possible to consume an entire box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting, I know, I’ve done it. Hopefully the treat element, and the cost, will help you with your moderation. You couldn’t afford to do it everyday, where as a daily bar huge bar of Dairy Milk could easily be within most people’s budgets!
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Eating proper meals
Most people eat 3 meals a day over most of the Christmas period, and a lot of them are eaten sat at a table that’s spent the rest of the year covered in piles of mail.
Christmas gluttony is bad. An awful lot of people also spent Christmas eating an entire chocolate orange in one sitting and wondering where that tube of Pringle’s they got out as a mid afternoon snack could possibly have gone. Â If you want to feel less bloated in January then skip the snacks and junk, but hang onto those good eating habits you acquired through December.
Stews, chillis, steaks and fresh veg are far less depressing than a prawn salad and less likely to leave you reaching for the takeaway menu. Eat them sat at the table and actually concentrate on your dinner and you’ll find yourself wanting to snack less and losing even more weight.
Comments
12 responses to “4 Things to Keep From Christmas”
So strange to read this as I do some already and the other stuff I’ve said I need to do this year! I don’t treat everyday like it’s special and I should, as I work from home I don’t make the effort often & I’m sick to death of the sight of myself, so yes everyday is special. I’m also super crap at keeping in touch with people so that’s another of mine this year.
I learnt a few years ago, when I successfully lost a lot of weight (sadly all back on now!) that low fat versions of food are far less satisfying that small amounts of the real thing. I have since never bought crap cheese & wouldn’t entertain low fat cheese it is in fact by product from rubber making *fact* well kinda fact! I also used to have a bar of good chocolate in the fridge and occasionally have a couple of squares to satisfy the urge, so I can testify that this all works!
And weirdly we have already started eating at the table again, even breakfast was at the table this morning, so much better for the digestion too, and we’re actually have conversations over meals instead of staring at the tv!!
Great ideas!!
Great post. I’ll definitely be doing my best to keep in touch with friends, especially as I’ve decided that I’ve had enough of certain people who claim to be friends but just take take take. I want to concentrate on the people who really care in 2012.
We’ll definitely be sitting down to meals this year as the house we’ve moved to has a separate dining room that opens onto the kitchen, so no more eating in front of the TV. No excuse now to not cook proper meals for the family.
I love this! These are sensible, achievable and affirming *resolutions* that can only improve everything else in your life.
Tip top tips as always! I need to start eating at the table again. It was so nice on the 25th. It will also encourage me to not dump the contents of my commute on the table and leave it there to grow for a week! Hurrahs!
That’s exactly what my dining table is for 😉
Mine is covered in small exercise books full of unmarked comprehension. It’s actually an installation of modern art, which is why I can’t DO the marking, because it would destroy the subtle arrangement.
What a lovely, positive post! 😀 I’ll do my best to remember these throughout the year!
What a lovely post, I whole heartedly agree! Xx
Very wise! Especially the buying good food and eating properly- really, quite cheap ingredients can be good food if you cook them well (for example good chicken legs are cheaper per portion than a battery-farmed-chicken-ready-meal but roast up in 30 min, you can have a ‘roast’ mid-week). It can take a bit of investment time-wise but there are ways round that, such as making and freezing ‘home made ready meals’ on a rainy day or just mastering a very quick dinner like a stir fry or omelette.
Yes! We always sit at the table for dinner (tea, I’m from the midlands!) after we’ve moved the piles of detrius to another surface! And, yes, we do have conversations, which is lovely, although the children are always trying to out do each others day, at least its not the TV. I have subconsciously started remarking more on blogs, tweets and posts, so maybe I do want to keep in touch (not just at Christmas). Nice food – hmm, we still need to get through the mountains of gorgeous food we bought at Christmas (mainly beautiful cheeses, so not so good – but a little each time and its lasting longer the cheap slab of cheddar I buy every week). I agree a nice steak on a Saturday lovingly cooked together, is so much tastier than a takeaway and has half the calories. Making every day special – maybe that’s why I get in a grump when my OH suggests a takeaway when I’ve bought steak and he thinks he’s spoiling me! Thank you for making us think, again.
Hi, love your blog!
I’m still sticking to my resolutions so far, even if we are only 5 days in!
I love yours, I agree with them all, especially the one about treating each day as if it was special 🙂
Have a great 2012 x
And so in the spirit of keeping / making contact…
Happy New Year from an avid reader in Cadiz, Spain! A
nd a big thank you for all the interesting writing you manage to keep producing.