Throughout the course of the last couple years I’ve learned a lot about maintenance and how to properly navigate vacations and situations that usually lead to weight fluctuation.
When successfully losing weight there’s a temptation to avoid situations that may limit your control but I urge you not to. You’re soul purpose in life is not to lose weight, give yourself permission to enjoy yourself while you’re on your trip. Drink the margarita, enjoy the chips and guacamole!
When you come back to home base, lay off the scale for a couple days. The scale can be a source of encouragement but it can also be a source of unneeded tension. You just went on a marvelous vacation, you had amazing food experiences, and you don’t want anything to put a damper on those experiences! It was an incredible time, own it! You deserved it!
Give yourself a bit of grace and allow a couple days to pass to allow the post vacay bloat to fall off before weighing yourself again. Trust me, you will feel much better.
It’s important to keep in mind that if those extra vacation pounds are going to fall off, you have to get back into your regular normal everyday routine when you get home.
Do not let vacation follow you home.
I’ve fallen into that trap time and time again. It’s easy to come home from a vacation and order takeout because you don’t have groceries in the house yet. Still stuck in relaxation mode the pizza man gets called the following night. Now there’s groceries in the house but you just don’t feel like putting anything together. Rinse and repeat until two months later you’ve regained 20 pounds and are left wondering how it happened when you were doing so well!
So, how do we combat that?
We combat it with getting back into our routines right away! Lots of nutrient dense foods, tons of water, and limiting sodium intake. If there was a lot of lazing around on your trip, get back to being active, don’t delay! The longer you delay the more difficult it is to get back to it!
This is definitely an exercise in self discipline that I have learned over time. It’s about protecting the lifestyle that I’ve cultivated over the past couple years because it’s important to me.
I was morbidly obese for so long, that there’s a part of me that gets a bit nervous to see the number on the scale go up after vacation because that somehow means I could go back there. I acknowledge those feelings, because they’re valid, and I speak truth to them.
The truth is that I’ll never go back to where I was before because I’m a different person now. I’ve conquered so many unhealthy habits in my life, diet being the least of them.
The temptation is to let those feelings dictate what I know is best for me.
Let them tell me that I need to exercise more, that I need to eat less, that I need to cut out fruits and vegetables and healthy carbohydrates. But that’s not the truth, the truth is that this is living! Bodies don’t stay the same size, there’s bloat, hormones, and delicious food that happens! It’s important to embrace fluctuation as part of living a normal healthy lifestyle instead of letting it upset and derail you.
Click here to some of my favorite nutrient dense recipes!!
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