Ep. 043 - Staying Fit and Festive: Your Roadmap to Healthier Holidays

SHOW NOTES

Ready to emerge from the holiday season feeling vibrant and confident instead of sluggish and regretful? 

I bet you are! 

I'm excited to arm you with strategies to navigate the festive period, keeping your health and fitness goals on track. From savouring your favourite treats without overindulgence, to maintaining your exercise routine amidst the holiday chaos, I've got you covered. 

For extra reinforcement, I’ve even prepared a handy PDF (CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR COPY) to help you stay focused and intentional about your health during the final 6 weeks of the year.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to man in the Arena, your go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity.

Hey guys, welcome to man in the Arena. Thank you so much for stopping in, whether this is your first time listening or your long time listener, I'm so excited about today's episode because it's going to offer some really practical, helpful advice as you head into the holidays. Now I'm actually recording this on Halloween, and I was actually inspired by Halloween because I know this is a time when we tend to be surrounded by candy and lots of sweets and, of course, we tend to overeat at this time of year, and I was planning for upcoming episodes and I thought you know what this is actually going to tie in perfectly, because when you hear this and when this gets released, it's going to be a couple days before American Thanksgiving. And, of course, this time of year you know, November, let's call it November 22nd through until just after January 1 is an intense holiday period and, if you're anything like me and anything you've experienced in the past, it can be a time of high stress, lots of pressure, lots of socialization, lots of overeating, because we have access to so much great food over drinking, and so I really wanted to bring to you a episode that can help you manage the holidays and also help you focus on your health during this period, because this is a period when we tend to put our health sort of on the back burner.

This is when we tend to limit our exercise, we tend to overeat, we get less sleep, we experience way more stress, we over drink, and a lot of this is due to the fact that we've got three really big holidays. We've got Thanksgiving weekend coming up in the US, we've got Christmas holidays, which is at the end of December. If you have another faith, then you have other holiday that you're celebrating. This means travel, this means parties, this means being social, this means going to the shopping mall and doing all that sort of stuff. And then, of course, we've got New Year's Eve, and so there's just lots of opportunities to be surrounded by food, to be surrounded by a really stressful time. And one of the things I'll offer to you as you listen to this is how are you framing this time of year? What are you thinking about? Because, remember, these are neutral events, and I know they're neutral because we have a whole bunch of different thoughts about the holidays.

Some of you think you know what I really don't like the holidays. It's too many people. There's all the gift giving and the shopping and the food. No, thank you. It's just a time where you feel stressed and overwhelmed, and I know others think that you just love this time of year. It's a time for you to kind of let loose a little bit. You are sort of you can have more food and more drinks and you like to party, get to see family you haven't seen all year, and so maybe there's this feeling of kind of entitlement or this feeling of reward. Right, and either way, if we're not conscious about what we're thinking going into this time of year, we're going to feel intense emotions. This is going to lead to a lot of buffering and of course, like I said earlier in the episode, we're going to put our health on the back burner and oftentimes this means increased weight gain. We feel a lot more guilt, we feel a lot more shame and we just think about well, once the new year hits, then I'll be able to get back on track. Something I really want you to take away from this episode is that whatever you make the holidays mean is going to determine the outcome you have at the end of the holiday season. So you have a choice.

Do you want to go into the holidays sort of unconscious about your health, or do you want to be conscious about your health Now? Being conscious doesn't mean you have to be rigid and committed to a particular goal. It can mean being indulgent, but it does have to be intentional, and I want you to make decisions, starting today. In fact, as part of this episode, I have a special PDF that I want you to download and go through. It's in the show notes so you can download it there, but the purpose of this PDF is to get you into a conscious holiday mindset. So I want you to decide after this episode, going through that PDF, what is your holiday mindset? And again, there's no right or wrong here. I just want you to make a decision. Do you want this to be a time of indulgence? Do you want it to be a time where you're sort of just letting loose, or do you want it to be a time where you're in control, right, and you're confident and you have a plan? So one thing I want you to ask yourself right now and I want you to ask yourself and answer this, even if you have to pause this episode is how do you want to feel at the end of this holiday season, so after January 1, how do you want to feel? Do you want to feel sort of lethargic, fatigued, run down?

Do you want to feel sort of bloated and unhealthy, like you have a lot of work to do, or do you want to feel this confidence, this in control, sort of this fresh start heading into the new year Right? I often consider the time after Christmas so kind of Boxing Day through until the new year, new Year's Eve. It's kind of this dead zone because we're often not working, we're either on vacation, there's nothing really to do. Christmas is over, so a lot of socialization is sort of over. I really utilize that week and I'm planned going into the new year. My goals are set, I have a very clear understanding of what I want to accomplish in the new year. I have a vision. And then, come New Year's Eve, I'm hitting the ground running. And how I set myself up is I make sure I get better sleep, I make things right at home, so I organize, I declutter, take down all the Christmas decorations and I really utilize this time to get into a routine. This way I'm starting fresh and I'm not sort of slumping into the new year. So I want to offer to you a very simple process that you can go through in order to make sure that you have a really productive and effective holiday season. So the first step is to decide, as I mentioned earlier in this episode, what you want the holidays to be. And it could be a number of things and again, there's no right or wrong.

It can be a time to pursue goals. So maybe this is the time where you focus on losing some more weight or getting in some more exercise or sleeping better, and for a lot of you, this will be possible because maybe you're working less, there's more downtime, there's more holidays, and so you have a much more flexible schedule. So in deciding what you want the holidays to be, you can also decide you know what. This is a time to do some work. Maybe you use this as an opportunity to download this worksheet and manage your mind and really get clear on your thinking and what you want the new year to look like. Okay, so maybe you do some work. Maybe the holiday season, to you, is a time to maintain, so you're not going to put any pressure on yourself and you're just going to keep your weight the same or your health sort of intact and just kind of go through the routines that you've set up through the year and, lastly, maybe you decide. You know what, I really don't want to think about my health at all. I am just going to go into the holidays relaxed and allow yourself to put on some weight. Either way, you're making a decision, you're deciding this. You're not just going to kind of go through the motions over the next six or seven weeks, all right. So that's step one. Now, in step one, you have to make a decision. Like I said, there's no right or wrong, you just decide. In step two, this is where you create some parameters and you create some baselines. These are some rules to kind of help guide you. So one of the concepts I teach in the arena which is my coaching community, and something I coach in my one to one, is this concept of ultimate baselines. What this mean is we focus on raising our floor rather than raising our ceiling. So a lot of times we focus on what we have to get better at. We sort of have to re-raise, we try to pursue a goal. We raise our ceiling. What I want to offer to you, what's more effective, is to actually focus on raising our floor.

So creating a baseline for sleep, exercise, nutrition and mindset. Picture a graph that kind of set out over the course of a year, and you've got your quarterly marks, you've got your half year mark, and then each quarter is divided up into months, and each month is divided up into weeks, and each week is divided up into days, and so you've got 365 days sort of graft out over this chart. And imagine you tracked every day and you defined each day as either a growth day, where you improved, so you would color that green, or a baseline day, which was kind of neutral. You met your baseline, you met your floor, or you met your, or you actually sort of regressed a little bit and you had a regression day. So you have a growth day, a baseline day and a regression day. Now let's say we plotted those out and you had sort of a downward trend. For a regression day you had just a flat line. For a baseline day and you had an increase on a growth day. And if you actually tracked these all out over the course of a year, you would see a trend. Either the graph would go down if you regressed you had too many regression days or you had the graph would go up and you had too many or you had a lot of growth days. Now what if our goal wasn't to increase the number of growth days we have, which is what we're often taught. We try to raise our ceiling and instead what we tried to do is remove the number of regression days. So if we removed all of our regression days, we'd actually see a really positively trending chart over the course of a year.

So the goal is really to meet our baseline most days and if we could do that remove our regression days and have the odd growth day we're going to grow significantly over the course of the year. So this is something that I teach and what I really ask my guys to do is say set your baseline in sleep. So maybe your sleep baseline is seven hours, maybe your sleep baseline is to get in bed consistently at a certain time and you just try to reach that baseline each day. You are going to see a growth trend over the course of the year. Now, of course, you still want to define your growth day. So maybe your growth day is eight hours of sleep, or maybe your growth day looks like not only do you get to bed at a certain time, but you wake up at a certain time, so you create more consistency.

So what you want to do is define each of these baselines and so, as you head into the holidays, you don't have to set a baseline for sleep, exercise, nutrition and mindset, but maybe you want to set a baseline for one of those areas. Maybe you want to set a baseline for your sleep, maybe you want to set a baseline for your exercise just say 10 minutes a day or your alcohol intake. Maybe you decide. You know what I really want to make sure that I don't over drink this holiday season. So one of the things I'm going to do is create a drink plan or a drink protocol for the holiday season. So this is defining your parameters. This is defining what your baselines look like, and they give you a framework as to where you're going to sort of focus your energy, depending on, like I said in step one, what your conscious decision is. All right, thank you. Really.

Download the PDF that I've mentioned a couple of times already and it's going to help guide you through this process. And the last thing that I want you to do is to set a reminder and check in with your plan each week. Put it in your calendar every Monday morning and then check in with the worksheet that you've filled out. Just put that aside. Check in with that, make sure you're on target for whatever you've decided to do.

The key takeaway here, guys, is you have intention going into the holiday season. It's not a free for all, unless you want it to be, but I highly recommend you can go into the new year feeling in control, feeling confident, feeling refreshed, just by making a few key decisions about how you want to approach the holiday season, because, remember, the holidays are a neutral circumstance. Your brain is going to make them mean something entirely subjective to you, and whatever you make the holidays mean a time of stress, a time of worry, a time of anxiousness or a time to relax, to recharge, a time to focus on a particular area of growth. Whatever you decide is going to heavily influence the outcome that you achieve. All right. So, as always, guys, you don't have to do this alone. You're more likely to succeed if you surround yourself with people who are also doing this work.

So I encourage you to connect with me. Sign up for my monthly membership called the Arena. This is where we show up, we make conscious decisions and then we do the work to get us to our goals. That's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to next week's episode. Until then, keep living a legacy of good health and longevity.