With the festive season here, we would like to leave you with a very important reminder… Christmas can be stressful enough, there’s no need to add extra stress to it by worrying about ruining your health and fitness progress.

Here are a few recommendations for Christmas 2022:

-       If your schedule is thrown out of balance and you miss a few workouts during the festive season - do not beat yourself up about it.

-       Do not starve yourself in the lead up to Christmas. All it does is create havoc in the body and most likely will lead to binging later.

-       You do not have to run 5K to make up for what you ate. Or workout to earn your food! You can workout because it makes you FEEL GOOD - not as a self-inflicted punishment.

-       Eat without guilt - you will not gain 5lb in a week. Even if you feel like you did. It’ll mostly be water weight. Seeing as around 3,500 calories = 1lb - unless you eat 18,000 more calories than you normally do, you won’t gain 5lb. Progress isn’t made or ruined in a day or week - it takes time and consistency (not rigidity), over a long period.

If the above recommendations don’t sway you, let’s look at it another way.

Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? If not, generally speaking, it means eating ‘healthier’ 80% of the time and the other 20% of the time, you eat more ‘soul enriching’ foods, without worrying about their nutritional value.

It’s not something you have to take super-literally. Some people look at this on a day-to-day basis – they try to make sure their day is filled with 80% wholefoods and then fit in 20% of treats, while others do it on a weekly basis for example.

So, let’s look at the BIG PICTURE - what if we took that approach and stretched it over a year? Suddenly, that 20% looks a whole lot different. If you follow this general rule that means that a total of 73 days out of the year can be filled with less ‘nutritious’ foods.

73 DAYS! That’s 2 and a half months!

And yet, what do we do, every year - we freak out about eating some extra dessert or an assorted box of chocolates over Christmas.

This is not us saying that you should purposely take 2 and a half months off and eat anything and everything in sight. This is to highlight that every single day doesn’t need to be perfect, when it comes to weight loss or health goals. There’s plenty of room for days that include extra dessert, party canapes or drinks.

If you eat well most of the time (around 80% of your year), if a weekend or whole week gets away from you, that’s ok. Look at the big picture!

Your diet doesn’t need to be perfect – perfection is boring.