It’s that time of year! Time for frosted sugar cookies, and peppermint hot chocolates, and candy cane ice cream treats, and caramels melted on pretzels, and…you name it, it’s time to eat it.
Let me play Health Coach for a minute.
(Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you to stop eating all the treats.)
A little backstory…I try to watch my sugar intake. For most of the year I was mostly sticking to a zero refined sugar goal. The last few months, though, I have been splurging. It’s nice to splurge if you can – enjoy some treats here and there, enjoy the seasonal things.
A number of weeks ago I became curious, so I looked up a peppermint milk shake at a certain fast-food restaurant to see how much sugar was in the whole shake.
It had over 90 grams of sugar. (Which converts to about 7 tablespoons of sugar.)
That was a pass for me!
Honestly, I am all for treats during the holiday season. But I’d like to encourage you to eat those sugary substances…well, responsibly! At the end of the day, sugar does a number on our bodies. Sugar feeds “bad bugs” in our insides – and can make us more susceptible to get sick.
My three tips for eating the sweet stuff during the holidays?
Make yourself a daily sugar threshold, if you can. (Preferably under 90 grams!) Or even a treat threshold if you’d rather do it that way. Make your goal reasonable – it’s no good setting yourself a very low goal if you know you won’t stick to it. Make your goal attainable.
If you go the counting grams of sugar route, please don’t stress over it. If you’re eating something and you don’t know what its sugar count is, that’s totally fine. Make a guess and go with it. It doesn’t matter if you are right on or totally off. Also if you go to a family member’s house and they desperately want to feed you all the things, and you feel inclined to eat all the things, go for it. Enjoy yourself, and then when tomorrow comes you can start again with your goal. Go for awareness, not perfection.
Drink lots of water. Water helps flush toxins out of your body, and can help flush excess sugar out as well. Try for 8 cups a day.
Move your body. Movement requires energy, and your body is going to use that extra sugar as energy. Movement is a great way to burn off some of that extra sugar. Find some sort of movement you enjoy doing and start with even 5 minutes a day. Some movement is better than no movement. Stretching, walking, jumping on a rebounder, having a friendly snowball fight… Movement is movement!
I hope you have a December filled with a reasonable amount of sweet things!
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