How to Cope with Food Cravings Throughout the Holiday Season

We are now fully into the holiday season. It’s the time of year when we are inundated with treats, displays, parties, and leftover candy pretty much everywhere. You might currently find yourself trapped in a whirlwind of Thanksgiving plans and gatherings that will lead into a month of holiday parties, baking, and special treats everywhere - and this just continues into the new year.

When you struggle with emotional eating and food cravings, the holidays can feel overwhelming. If you struggle with stress and dread related to the holidays, this time of year can be particularly challenging. 

I wanted to offer some support for anyone struggling with food triggers, holiday triggers, or a combination of both. Hopefully you can reference this post all throughout the season!

I recommend having a journal or your notes app handy and consider the following:

When you arrive at the end of the holiday season, when you are welcoming 2025, how do you want to feel? 

What is one small, doable, and desirable goal that you can set for yourself this season? 

What action steps can you take to support how you want to feel to achieve this small goal? 

As you are moving through the season, it’s helpful to check in regularly and ask:

Have I been taking consistent action and using the action steps to ensure that I can feel how I want to feel once the new year arrives?

Am I getting enough balanced nutrition?

Am I hydrating?

It’s so easy to go into autopilot mode and become mindless and distracted and to just numb out when feeling triggered or stressed. This holiday season can be different! If you bring in some daily intention setting, connect with your feelings and experiences consistently, and practice some of the coping strategies below, you may have a different experience this year.

Here are some helpful ways to cope (even just slightly) more effectively this year:

Practice the 3-step cravings protocol - Pause, Reflect, Release: Use this anytime you are experiencing a food craving:

Pause: Take a deep breath, drink some water, relax your body, and create some space between you and the food craving.

Reflect: Use the BLAST technique, ask yourself, “Am I Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stressed or Sad, or Tired?” If you answer Yes to any of these emotions ask: What does this emotion need? To explore what the feeling you are experiencing is needing you can ask: What is the opposite feeling state? Here are some examples: Boredom needs Stimulation, Loneliness needs Connection, Anger needs Peace, Calm, and/or Kindness, Stress needs Relaxation, Peace and Calm, Sadness needs Uplifting, Tiredness needs Rest.

Release: If it’s truly an emotional craving, name the emotion and the opposite feeling state. Ask yourself, what would it take to get to that opposite feeling state? Practice being present with the feeling and see if you can receive the message of the emotion. You can use a coping skill such as journaling or talking it out to let it go. It can also be helpful to use self-affirming statements to help support the release, such as, “I am capable of handling my emotions,” “I am learning to listen to the messages from my body,” and “I can make a different choice.”

If you are experiencing a more general food craving and you find that you are truly hungry, eat it mindfully and listen to the cues from your body.
If you need additional support if it’s an emotional craving, you can try journaling through this decoding emotions practice:

Ask, what is the message from this emotion? What does it want you to know?

What does it need from you? Is there any action you can take?

Can you mindfully witness the emotion and let it be without needing to change it? Can you radically accept it as it is?

If the holidays are triggering because of others imposing their own thoughts and feelings about food, here are some ways you can practice setting boundaries with others:

Common irritating statements: “Should you be eating that?” “Are you sure you want seconds?” “Wow, that looks like a lot of food/sweets…”

Helpful Boundary Setting Statements for each of the above: “I understand you might not notice that it upsets me, but I don’t like it when you question my food choices.” “I prefer you not comment on my food choices.” “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t comment on my food choices.”

Sometimes during the holiday season you might find yourself with food guilt and shame, or criticizing your own choices. Here are some ways you can practice setting boundaries with yourself:

Common irritating internal statements: “I shouldn’t eat this.” “They are watching everything I’m eating.” “What’s wrong with me.”

Helpful Boundary Setting Statements for each of the above: “I deserve to eat what I am eating.” “I can only control myself and my choices.” “It’s normal to enjoy and indulge in food sometimes.”

One of the most useful ways to make it through the season is to have a plan for remaining present and mindful, to practice consistent self-care, to reflect and check in with yourself daily, and to have a plan of action. Having a plan is where you start; you can practice daily intention setting, daily decisions about your action steps that you will take to achieve your goals, reviewing the pause, reflect, release protocol, and journaling. Self-compassion is a huge part of remaining grounded and surviving the challenges of the holidays.

Practicing mindful eating, intuitive eating, and attuned eating can also support feeling connected to your body and discerning what is emotional and what is truly desired when it comes to food.

• Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with a nonjudgmental awareness.

• Mindful eating is applying mindfulness to the process of eating.

• Intuitive/Attuned eating is listening to your body and making choices based on your relationship with your body. Asking these questions can keep you more mindful and attuned to your body: What do I want? What am I hungry for? How hungry am I? How satisfied did this choice make me feel?

The last tip I will leave you with is to keep a Win-Log. This is a log of positive eating experiences daily, including allowing yourself to eat when you were hungry, finding the right food match for your craving, stopping eating when you felt satiated and satisfied, and being able to savor feeling good overall about your actions and choices.

Putting all of this together will allow more communication, acceptance, balance, and the ability to be more grounded and centered within your choices throughout this season.

When you can manage emotional food cravings more effectively, it creates a feeling of empowerment, deeper self-awareness, and more connection to your body so that you can begin to create a more peaceful relationship with your mind, your body, and food. Using tools to make a choice on how to manage your cravings builds self-compassion, self-trust, and self-empowerment. I hope you have a happy and healthy holiday season!

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 8: Respect Your Body

The eighth principle of Intuitive Eating is: Respect Your Body. If you have been following along with this Integrating Intuitive and Mindful Eating series on my blog, then you might have noticed how principle 7 and now principle 8 are not directly related to food. (Principle 9 isn’t either—stay tuned!) These principles address how to be with yourself in a more mindful and compassionate way both internally and externally which naturally impacts how to be with your food.

With this principle I will explore and address how to be with your body in a respectful manner, which most people struggle with at some point in their lives. If you notice the chatter in your mind or out loud about your body, what is it usually about? Is it usually positive or negative in nature? The truth is that all bodies deserve respect, yours, hers, his, theirs and mine. There are no exceptions.

When you notice any internal bias you have in relation to what is a “good” or “healthy” body and alternatively what is a “not as good” or “unhealthy” body, where did these biases come from. Let’s be clear, it’d be rare not to have some internal bias seeing as how much emphasis is placed on body image, weight loss and standards of beauty in our culture and naturally we are always concerned about how we are measuring up in relation to these standards.

How you think about, speak about and interact with your own body is what this principle is about. However, it is helpful to consider any body shaming, judging or otherwise you notice that you do internally, or say out loud, towards others and practice shifting these thoughts and words to body neutrality, positivity and kindness. This will support your own process in offering these same concepts to yourself.

Mindfulness offers a significant amount of support to this concept of respecting your body, especially as it relates to the aspect of being nonjudgmental. One of the most effective ways to begin to respect your body is to practice body neutrality through nonjudgment. This is a very useful practice and just like is was applied to food in the fourth principle of intuitive eating: Challenge the Food Police it’s tremendously powerful to apply the concept on nonjudgment to how you relate to your body.

Learning to understand body neutrality is simple but not necessarily easy. To practice body neutrality, find a time when you can just be. Close your eyes and scan your body in your mind’s eye from head to toe moving intentionally through each part of your body. With each body part, first name it and then find the facts about it, for example: ears-used for hearing located on the sides of my head. Notice how there are no judgments, just facts, just what is true about this body part in this moment. Maintain neutrality and nonjudgment throughout. Notice how this feels with body parts you may not have any positive or negative associations about and parts that you do.

The body parts you find it most difficult to be nonjudgmental about with yourself, you will need to practice more regularly. For many this simple and yet not easy body neutrality practice is very helpful and eye opening. Get really curious about why you have the judgments you have about your body. With each judgment consider:

• Where did each judgment come from?

• What messages did you hear/receive about your body or body judgments from your family growing up?

• What messages did you hear/receive about your body or body judgments from your peers?

• What messages did you hear/receive about your body or body judgments from society?

• Who set the standards for “beauty” and body shape that you adhere to?

• What messages do you wish you’d heard or would like to live by?

• Can you begin to offer these messages to yourself now?

Once you practice body neutrality until it feels more natural, acceptable and your mind does not attempt to pull you towards the negative, you can begin to practice body positivity and body gratitude. Within this practice, you go through the same exercise, resting comfortably and work your way from head to toe in your mind’s eye and name each body part and something you like about it and something you can be grateful for about it. If you find it difficult that’s ok! Stay with the practice and continue a few times per week until it becomes a more and more comfortable practice.

Try taking this attitude with you wherever you go. As you begin to shift your own internal judgments about your body and allow that to impact how you judge the bodies of others, begin to notice and reflect on the following:

• How much mental space is taken up by body judgment?

• How often do you judge the bodies of others?

• How often do you compare your body to the bodies of others?

• How does this make you feel?

• Why do you think you do this?

• Are you ready to shift this internal experience?

If so, begin practicing body neutrality of others. Even if your thought begins with a judgment, can you create a neutral thought such as it’s just another person in the body that they have today, it’s not good or bad, it just is. As this becomes more comfortable, begin to shift into body positivity of others. What compliment can you offer either internally to recognize it for yourself or out loud if it’s possible to do so.

These simple but not easy practices can transform your relationship to your body, to yourself and to food. When you can just be with your body without the negativity and noise you will create a less stressful internal environment for yourself. When you begin to shift from body shaming, judging and comparing you open yourself to feel a great deal of respect for your own amazing body as well as respecting the bodies of others.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 6: Feel Your Fullness

The sixth principle of Intuitive Eating is: Feel Your Fullness. This principle is about more than stopping when you are full. This principle is about listening to your body, respecting your body and making choices based on how you feel versus the programmed stories from your past about food.

When you were growing up were you told to clean your plate? Were you told that there were children starving in another country that would be grateful to have the food you are refusing eat to or complaining about having to eat? While children might feign fullness so they don’t have to eat their vegetables, these stories you hear stick in your mind and can influence your choices and feelings about food as an adult.

How do you know when you are full? What signs does your body send you so you know you’d be best off to stop eating? In order to hear and respond to these messages from your body, you have to be paying attention. Mindful eating allows you to sense and tune into these signals from your body. It’s helpful to discern how full you feel when you are truly paying attention to the process of eating and the impact your food has on your body.

This principle requires that you listen to your body and respect how it feels and make choices accordingly. The principle is about feeling your fullness, meaning you need to be connected to your body, fully aware of your experience in the present moment. The following guide can be a helpful place to start. It is directly from the chart in my book: Wholistic Food Therapy: A Mindful Approach to Making Peace with Food.

Full Scale:

0= not at all full
1= not at all full, but aware of food in your stomach
2= slightly full, still could eat more
3= fairly full, may be helpful to wait 5-10 minutes and see if you are satiated
4= overly full, slightly uncomfortable or bloated
5= completely stuffed, very uncomfortable

Ideally you want to stop when you are a 3 on the full scale. If you find after a pause that you are not quite full, then eat more food. If you find that after a pause when you are at a 3 that you are full, stop eating. While this may seem simple, those food stories can take over and create all kinds of justifications to keep eating or to stop eating rather than listening to your body.

Some of the most common stories/internal excuses include:

• It’s so delicious, I don’t want to stop eating

• There’re only two bites left, what’s the difference?

• I don’t want to waste this food

• I should clean my plate

• This is a “cheat” meal/food so I need to eat it all since I can’t have it again for X amount of time

Here’s why each of these above justifications are ineffective and potentially harmful. For the first mental excuse, “it’s so delicious I don’t want to stop eating,” we’ve all been there. The question to ask yourself is, how am I going to feel if I finish this despite how delicious it is? If you are going to feel stuffed, uncomfortable, bloated, in pain or even sick, is it worth it? Only you can determine the answer.

For the second excuse, “there’s only two bites left, what’s the difference?” Here’s another way to consider this, if you eat it are you respecting how your body feels? What will be the impact of those two bites? Again, only you can answer this. If it feels potentially harmful to eat those bites, is it worth it to you?

The third excuse, “I don’t want to waste this food,” it can be helpful to really consider what wasting food means. Can you save the food for later? If you can’t, ask yourself what is the difference between stuffing it into your body when your body is already full or throwing it into the trashcan? There really is a difference here that can be difficult to discern and yet important. Throwing the food away is actually the more respectful choice for your body and ultimately the less “wasteful.”

The fourth excuse, “I should clean my plate” is a story you are telling yourself. Question this story, ask yourself, why should I clean my plate? What’s the purpose? If this is a story you have been telling yourself due to your childhood associations with meals, it can be a tough one to change. If this feels important to you, one way you can practice overcoming it is to always make a point to leave a bite or two on your plate and just see how it feels. If you truly are still hungry, eat it, if you are not, leave it. Give yourself space to practice a new story such as, “I do not need to clean my plate, I deserve to stop when I am full.”

The last reason is quite common. For those who are still struggling with the first principle of intuitive eating: rejecting the diet mentality, then this reason may feel really big. If you are restricting certain foods and only allowing them as “cheat” days or meals, then you will most likely overeat on those days/meals. If you are allowed to have that food again tomorrow—if you want it again tomorrow—would you feel such a compulsion to eat it all? Restricting leads to overeating and potentially binge eating. Pay attention to any restricting or judging of your food. The same applies to if you are restricting at a meal in order to over indulge in another meal. This pattern is dangerous and ineffective.

If feeling your fullness is an area that you struggle with, try starting with practicing this principle with one meal or snack per day. As always, try to limit distractions and eat mindfully. Pay attention to how your food tastes and the impact it has on your body. Listen to your hunger cues and your full cues. Practice pausing and tuning into your body. You might begin with setting an intention such as, “for this meal (or snack) I intend to listen to my body and stop when I feel full and satisfied.” Note what satiation and true comfortable fullness feels like for your body. Honor this feeling and allow yourself to continue to create closer alignment with your body’s wants and needs each and every time you practice.