How to Best Avoid Sweet Temptations
and Unhealthy Cravings This Holiday Season

However, a pound or two every year can quickly turn into a “gift that keeps on giving” -- easily leading to a weight gain of 10 to 20 pounds in a decade.

“The cumulative effects of yearly weight gain during the fall and winter are likely to contribute to the substantial increase in body weight that frequently occurs during adulthood," researchers wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Promotion of weight stability during the fall and winter months may prove useful as a strategy to prevent age-related weight gain in the United States."

This sounds good in theory, but unhealthy cravings during the holidays are really a double-edged sword. To start, there is simply a lot of tempting food around during the holidays -- treats that are only around at this time of year, and as you've worked hard and been a good boy or girl all year, you deserve to eat some holiday fudge or extra gravy with your dinner, no?

Then there is the emotional component, which is major around the holidays. For a season that's supposed to be about joy, the holidays can be ironically stressful. There are expectations of perfect dinners, mountains of presents, visitors coming into town, and dealing with your relatives. This extra holiday stress can easily prompt you to overeat on its own. Then add in the overload of sweets and comfort foods that are so readily available in November and December, and it's a wonder any of us make it through the year without gaining a pants size.

What is the Secret That Keeps Some People Trim all Year?

You’re probably expecting to hear diet and exercise, right? Well, eating right, limiting your indulgences and staying active WILL go far in keeping away extra pounds … but only if you’ve got your emotions under control.

You see, it is your emotions that drive you to have unhealthy cravings and to overeat. We eat for comfort, for entertainment, to be social, and to soothe any number of unmet emotional needs. We also crave unhealthy foods because we feel we deserve them, and we think we can’t really enjoy Thanksgiving or Christmas unless we have to be rolled away from the table.

This is why, even if you have the best intentions to avoid unhealthy cravings this year, your attempts will likely fail if you are still being controlled by your emotions (and the vast majority of people are).

The secret that many already use (and that you can too) to take back that control is called The Sedona Method. It works through the process of letting go.

“The Sedona Method can help you avoid cravings for sweets and the all too common tendency to overeat during the holiday season,” says Hale Dwoskin, CEO and Director of Training of Sedona Training Associates. “Most of us don’t realize that when we crave sweets or we find ourselves compelled to overeat it is motivated by our feelings. If you allow yourself to become more aware of how you feel when you reach for sweets or more food than you should, you will notice obvious patterns.”

Once you have learned how to identify these patterns and emotional triggers that cause you to overeat and crave unhealthy foods, you can then use The Sedona Method to let them go. You can let go anytime -- before a cocktail party, while you're gathering food from a buffet, in the middle of Christmas dinner -- anytime you need to get back in control.

“You can either address these patterns and feelings and let them go or you can simply welcome the feeling of the moment that is causing you to do something you know you will regret and let it go,” Dwoskin says. “The more you let go of the inner motivators for losing control of how you eat, the more in control you feel. You will also find that when you do eat sweets or anything else you actually enjoy it more while eating less.”

As you make letting go a regular part of your life, you will find that the inner struggle you felt about holiday food and eating is gone, replaced with an openness to have some holiday treats without overdoing it, and an ability to enjoy the holidays more than ever.

Source
National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development