8 Steps to a Healthier, Happier Holiday Season

Let's make this holiday season a time of joy, health, and body confidence. These 8 steps to having a healthy holiday will shift your mental and physical health without stress and overwhelm. 

We're shunning the stressful, restrictive holiday advice you'll find on the internet and creating an overall wellness routine that can used even by your kids.  It's all about balance, not obsession over calories or skipping your favorite holiday treats.

The goal? To carve out a path towards finding peace and freedom in our bodies and relishing the holiday season without the extra stress. So, sisters, gear up for a holiday season where health, happiness, and body confidence reign supreme.

Learn more about Body Gratitude on Episode 19

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Transcript

Danielle La Rose: 0:09

I've got eight steps to living your healthiest, happiest, most confident holiday ever. If you're like, yeah, I do know I get it right. I'm supposed to have a healthy holiday, I'm supposed to make healthier choices, I want to stay in shape or I want to get fit or whatever, and I see everywhere of how to be healthy right and over the holidays, and a lot of the things are things like skip dessert, bring your own healthy holiday meal and eat separate from your family. Go to the gym three hours, work it off tomorrow, you know. Count your calories, donate all day, eat only at your big meal, save it for then. And all of these tips are terrible. They're terrible for your body, they're terrible for your mind. You know I live by the motto of if it's not good for your mental health, it's not good for your physical health, meaning that if something is stressful to you, you know, for me it would be stressful for me to go to my family's holiday and feel like I have to count calories while I'm there, while everyone else is enjoying their food. That would call stress and anxiety and overwhelm about my body, about my health, about my wellness, and that stress is actually terrible. It's worse for my body, probably than a lot of those calories. So for me, it's all about making sure that I'm making decisions that are good for my mental health at the same time that they're really good for my physical health, and a lot of the tips that we hear around the holidays are absolutely terrible for our bodies. I am a certified personal trainer, nutrition coach, degrees in sociology with a focus on women's health. So like this is what I do, this is what I know, this is my passion, and I am obsessed with helping women truly look in the mirror and love who they see, and we do that by seeing food and fitness as fuel. Right. Food can be simple and fitness can be fun, and we can make it super like, doable and super enjoyable as we go throughout life, and especially around the holidays.

Danielle La Rose: 2:16

You're already homegirl. You already stressed enough. You know what I'm saying. Like you got so much going on. You got family, you got life, you got work, you got all the things your house needs cleaning. You're supposed to be decorating, you're supposed to be doing all these things. The last thing I need you to worry about is your body. The last thing that I want you stressed about is food and fitness, and so that's my spiel to ask you to go into this holiday this week, or, you know, whenever the holidays come around whether it's a birthday, it's 4th of July, it's whatever it is that time when people start getting stressed about oh my gosh, I'm going to gain all this weight, I'm going to not be able to wear my pants. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. By having those thoughts, it's actually making that a reality. And so we get to shift the conversation around our bodies. We get to shift the choices that we make. We get to make this doable and fun and easy without even thinking about it. Like that's.

Danielle La Rose: 3:12

My ultimate goal is that you find peace and freedom in your body, that you love and appreciate your body toy. You don't even have to think about what you're eating. You don't even have to think about the workouts that you're doing. It's literally just becomes second nature to make healthier choices. And I'm not talking just apples and grapes and bananas and those were all fruits, broccoli and spinach. Okay, I'm not talking about just the foods that we choose, right. So I'm going to stop there, but I hope that I've gotten a little bit of buy-in of why this strategy. I'm giving you eight steps to truly have a healthy holiday, and, yes, some of them are around food and, yes, some of them are about fitness, but, more importantly, they're about the mindset, and so I'm going to give you my eight steps that I personally do every single holiday to not think and stress about food and fitness and simply to just be and enjoy life.

Danielle La Rose: 4:02

So let's jump in and how to have eight steps of our healthy holiday. Let's start with each have. I want you to have gratitude, and what I mean by that is not for your house and your family and your foot. All of that is very important. Okay, please have gratitude for that. What I mean by have gratitude, though, is having gratitude for your body. So much of what we do is we think about our bodies for how it looks, without thinking about our bodies for what it does. So, as you're going through the holiday, I want you to have gratitude for your body, for what it's allowing you to do.

Danielle La Rose: 4:35

Are you able to give your kids a hug today? Are you able to speak to your partner? Are you able to have a dance party, like I just did before jumping on here? Are you able to to write? Are you able that was typing type? Are you able to write? Are you able to speak? Are you able to? What are the things that you're able to do today? Because you woke up Right?

Danielle La Rose: 4:56

We go throughout life and we're so overwhelmed and consumed with being healthy that we haven't even taken a second to express gratitude for the very thing that is allowing us to live. We get one body to do one life, and so it's important that we take a second throughout this time. Really, my dream for you is that you take a second every single day, but especially around the holidays, when we're talking about gratitude and thankfulness and all of that. When was the last time you stopped and thanked your body for processing the food that you just ate, for allowing you to walk to go meet your best friend, for allowing you to have conversations right? Having gratitude for your body? Because we know what happens when we have stress in our body it actually holds on to chemicals. That prevents us from losing weight. Now, I don't care if you lose weight or not. I don't help you lose weight, I help you get healthy. But if you are someone who is like, oh my gosh, I want to lose weight, if you're finding yourself stressed and in a negative relationship with your body. It's holding onto stuff that's preventing that from happening. So the best thing that you can do for that for the holidays, for your life, is to have gratitude for your body Every single day.

Danielle La Rose: 6:11

There's a podcast episode I did where I shared my body gratitude process. I can drop the link here. But body gratitude process where you literally just take like a minute and call out different parts of your body and what you're thankful for it that it did for you in the last 24 hours. Talk about building a healthy relationship with your body. That's going to last long term and help you shift your mindset, so you shift your choices, which creates health. Okay, so have I drilled it into your head? Have gratitude for your body Got it?

Danielle La Rose: 6:43

Are we good High fives? Okay, now we're going to eat all day. We are eating. Exclamation point we're eating all day. We are not waiting until that precious, delicious, ginormous meal that we plan on eating for dinner or for our big lunch. We are not waiting because we have an event planned with our work or with our best friends where we're going to have a big meal and we're like man, it's going to be loaded with carbs and sweets and all the things, and so we wait until that point because we're like I'm saving the calories.

Danielle La Rose: 7:19

Let me explain something to you. Your body is a really magical machine and it's not dumb, it's very, very smart. So when you don't eat, when you don't eat all day, your body actually goes into starvation mode and it's like oh my gosh, right, because if you've trained your body which we all have, so I've trained my body, right. It knows that we're eating breakfast at 7.30, by 9.30, 10 o'clock it gets a snack, by 12.30, it's having lunch, right. So my body has a process and it understands how we work. So if I choose not to eat throughout the day because I'm holding all my calories back which I don't even count calories, so that wouldn't work for me If you're one of those people, right, and you're saying I'm gonna hold my calories for later, your body actually shuts down and what it does is it starts storing things because it's like oh my gosh, are we ever going to eat again?

Danielle La Rose: 8:16

That's really what our bodies do because they're so freaking smart. So our bodies are like okay, she hasn't fed me in three, four, five hours, or maybe she's just giving me a little bit. So, like, I have to store all of this right, and so it turns all of these things into fat, because it allows us to live longer if we were actually to be in starvation, and so that is absolutely the most terrible thing that you can do for your body. So, to have a healthy holiday, we're going to eat all day long, just as normal, completely normal. I don't care what your dinner's going to be at night. Now let me also say this If I know that my meal tonight is going to be full of bread and it's going to be full of, like sweets and things like that, I might choose to limit those things throughout the day, and I might choose to have more lean protein.

Danielle La Rose: 8:59

I might choose to have more veggies, which I'll talk about next. I might choose to have more fruits, I might choose to have right Like. I might make those choices. I might swap some things around, but literally I'm not changing much throughout the day. I'm eating all day long Because my body, the metabolism, is what I want going and that my body's going to love me for that. Okay, so think about what is my body going to love me for? It's not going to love me for holding back food. It's going to love me for fueling it, because it needs, literally, the definition of a calorie as a unit of energy. So our bodies need energy to function and if you ain't got no energy, sister, you just found out why.

Danielle La Rose: 9:36

Okay, eat all day. We're going to piggyback off of that. We're going to add veggies. Okay, add veggies throughout the day. Doesn't matter, right? Veggies have. And again, this has nothing to do with weight loss or body shape size, anything. I'm literally talking about nutrients that our bodies need. So veggies are full of nutrients and vitamins that our bodies need, and typically what we do on holidays is we skip the veggies because we're like, oh, this other stuff is so good. So all I'm asking you to do in order to have a really healthy holiday actually healthy mentally, physically is to have some veggies, because that's going to fuel your body even more and your body's going to love you for that. Okay. So, lunch snacks during your meal with family or friends or whoever, right, whatever that meal is, if you can add in some veggies, that's going to benefit you. So we'll keep that simple, right, you know, add veggies, all right.

Danielle La Rose: 10:33

Next, load Load up, sister, load up. I wish I could have some music so we can have dance parties at the same time. All right, load up on water. You're not dumb, you know that already. Right, we're going to load up on water all day long. Water, water, water, water water. Now, you should know this already, especially if you do my 75 healthy challenge, that that's one of our goals every day is to load up on water. It's important for our digestion, it's important for our bodies, our hair, our skin, everything. Water is so important.

Danielle La Rose: 11:04

Nothing changes. The only thing you realize from this whole entire process is nothing changes. Majority of things don't change from a holiday to every other day. The problem with our holidays and the reason why people struggle through the holidays is because they think that everything has to change for them to stay healthy. In order to be healthy, you actually need to do the same things, consistently, the same thing. Now, if you're like you know, I ain't drinking no water in five days. Well, home, girl, we got to go to the basics, right, we got to go to water. So if you haven't been doing those things, then obviously we need to work on that, but most of the things that I'm talking about, nothing changes. It's just another freaking day. It's a great day, but nothing should be changing drastically. Okay, so we're loading up on water. Got it, get it good. Next we're going to turn up. T is for turn up. Sister, home, girl, turn up.

Danielle La Rose: 12:01

The reason why I say I don't say workout is because you have this mentality that workouts are boring, that burk workouts, that workouts are stressful, workouts are time consuming, workouts right. We have this negative feeling when it comes to working out because what has been ingrained us in us is that workouts should be going to a gym, spending two hours doing hard things that we don't want to do, don't know how to do, and then going home and then being exhausted and having no energy and not ever wanting to do it again. Or maybe that was just me, but that's what I used to think about workouts. So now what I do instead is I turn up. So what I want you to do throughout the holiday is turn up for yourself.

Danielle La Rose: 12:45

What is a fun workout that you enjoy doing? Is it a dance party? Is it taking a walk? Is it lifting weights? Is it playing tag with your children? I don't know what it is for you. It's different for everybody.

Danielle La Rose: 12:57

For me, if I'm like man, I need a fun workout session. I turn on some jams. I have a dance party. I do some punching and kicking people. In my powerhouse moves program. You get a workout for me almost weekly, bi-weekly, of me teaching you these fun classes, these workouts, and so I want you to turn up and have fun every single day, the day before the holiday, the morning of the holiday, even if you have 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, you ain't going to work out longer than 30 minutes. That's my, that's my feeling is I tell all my clients 30 minutes is perfect. We don't have to do 45. We don't need to do an hour 30 minutes, which is also why I don't go to a gym, because I'm like, by the time I get to the gym, I spent more time driving than actually being at the gym. So I just do my workout at home. So, whatever that sounds like to you, I want you to write it down right now. What are three types of workouts that you would find somewhat enjoyable to do? To get your heart rate up, to get a little sweaty? Right, turn up, have fun, get your family involved. All right, turn up Now. We have H's for help redefined.

Danielle La Rose: 14:12

What I mean by that is what does health mean to you? Right, we can talk all day long about having a healthy holiday, but what does health mean? Health is not a shape or body size. Health is how you feel right and you get to decide how you want to feel. Do you want to feel energized, right People all the time? Really, do you know? How do you have so much energy? I'm like. I focus on my health, mental and physical right. I do help, different than 99% of trainers and nutrition coaches, because I care more about how I feel. I care more about having energy and passion and fun. I don't have time. Life is too short to do boring workouts. Life is too short to be stressed about food. Life is too short to be stressed about how I look to other people. I want to feel good for me. So what is your definition of health? So, health redefined.

Danielle La Rose: 15:10

I want you to define what health means for you, especially for the holidays. Is it a feeling? Is it choosing a certain number of veggies? Is it drinking so much water? Is it spending a certain amount of time with children? Is it getting enough sleep? Enough by your definition of sleep? Is it? What is health?

Danielle La Rose: 15:28

So many of us go through life just taking everyone else's opinion of what health means, of what fit means. What does it mean to you? Take a second today and define, redefine what health means, because when you define what health means for you and not what everyone else has been telling you, you make different choices on everything else which leads you to feeling confident and healthy and happy. When you are making choices that are based on other people's definition of health, you're out of alignment. You're not living life based on what you want, based on your goals, based on your desires. You're living life based on what everyone else is telling you. So we get to change that. We get to redefine what health means.

Danielle La Rose: 16:23

So come up with a definition of what health means for you, especially for the holidays, right now, and decide what choices you get to make that will help you be healthy. And let me tell you, you don't have to wait until tomorrow to be healthy, or next week or next month, or whenever you accomplish XYZ. Health is a daily choice. You get to choose to be healthy today, so healthy to find. Okay, last one of healthy, and then I got one more for you. Okay, why is get to come?

Danielle La Rose: 16:53

What I mean by this is that tomorrow, the day after a holiday, the week after a holiday is important, not because of trying to lose a whole weight that you just gained from eating your meal. The get to come is because the day after the holiday, guess what we do? We get back to everyday life. We get back to the choices, we get back to our regular scheduled programming of the food that we eat, of the movement that we make. So we get back to everyday life. You get back to the workouts that you do. You get back to the choices that you make. You get back to the food that you're eating. And guess what? That day of holiday where you just ate that big meal, if that's what you chose and you don't have to choose to eat a big meal but I'm saying a lot of people are stressed about that but if you chose to eat a big meal on your holiday, guess what happens the next day? Nothing, nothing changes. Nothing changes. Your whole life is so many days. One day of having choices, of eating whatever you wanted isn't going to change much of anything.

Danielle La Rose: 18:11

So I want you to focus on the day of truly enjoying the day enjoying the food, being grateful for the food, being grateful for the family, being grateful that you get to live another day and then we get to say the best is yet to come. Tomorrow I get back into my regular routine. Tomorrow I get back to the normal food that I eat, the normal workouts, that I do the normal, the normal. I get back to that. So there's no reason for me to stress and be upset and frustrated whatever feelings I would have around what I'm choosing to eat or not eat on the holiday, because tomorrow is yet to come and that's what I get to focus on. No need to stress about today. We know that it's one day or it's two days, let's shoot. Let's just say it's three days, who cares? You get to say the best is yet to come. I get to just go tomorrow and we're not falling off track. We are simply making choices. There's no track. The only track that you're on is your health definition and let's remember that if it's not good for our mental health, it's not good for our physical health.

Danielle La Rose: 19:29

So if you find yourself stressed about calories, about how your body looks, about whatever, and you're sitting in that during a holiday, that's not good for your physical health. Okay, so that leads me to my final number eight. We're gonna say hold body, talk, shut your mouth. Shut your mouth Today, tomorrow, on the holiday, the next holiday, three weeks ago. I don't care. Here's what we need to do. We need to hold the body, talk while you're sitting there enjoying your delicious mashed potatoes and ham and turkey, whatever you're choosing to eat, I don't know, Got me some mac and cheese. Oh, I'm so excited. All right, whatever you're choosing to eat, while you're eating it we don't need to hear oh, I shouldn't be eating this. Oh, my pants aren't gonna fit. Tomorrow, oh, I'm supposed to be healthy, I'm supposed to be trying to get fit. Oh, tomorrow, starting Monday, I start my diet. No, here's what I need you to hear me on.

Danielle La Rose: 20:42

When you talk like that to yourself, number one, it's not good for you. Okay, I care about you, but even more importantly, I care about making an impact. And what happens when you talk about your body like that, when it comes to food, when it comes to fitness, when it comes to how you look. When you speak like that, what it does is it gives permission to the people around you to think and talk about their bodies. Did you know that the average woman spends about 12.5 hours a week thinking about her body, the little girls in your life that you might sit next to on that holiday. That little girl is going to grow up thinking about and stressing about and trying to change her body, spending 12.5 hours a week. The average woman spends about $250,000 in her lifetime trying to change her appearance. Your daughter, your niece, your best friend's daughter these little girls in the world are going to grow up and be women that are throwing their money and their time and their energy towards wanting to change their body because they heard grown-up women like us talk about things at the holiday about how we shouldn't be eating things, about how we need to change our bodies, about how we need to start a diet, how we need to not eat this, not eat that. Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. We get to do better for ourselves because we have more important things to talk about than how we look.

Danielle La Rose: 22:14

Enjoy your freaking food and shut your mouth. Talk about life, talk about your passions, talk about your strengths. Ask questions of the people around you. We don't need to hear you say, oh, this is for someone with a belly like mine, or this shouldn't happen, or I shouldn't eat that, or you shouldn't eat that, or oh my gosh, are you really going to take another serving of that. Or oh, I shouldn't have more than this. Or oh, I really should skip dessert. If you want to skip the dessert, just skip the dessert. You don't have to talk about it. If you truly do plan on starting a fitness routine on Monday, that's great. You don't need to talk about it. We don't need to demonize the food that we're eating, especially around other humans who might pick up on that and think that that is what we're supposed to do.

Danielle La Rose: 23:05

Is we talk about our bodies? We stress about what we're eating, we worry about working it off which, by the way, isn't a thing. That's not how our bodies work. But the people in our lives don't need permission to think and talk about their bodies. They have it already and they're probably already doing it. So do yourself a favor and hold the body talk and enjoy your holiday and encourage the people around you to hold their body talk. You don't need to hear them complain about that. You don't need to hear them stress about that. Tell them to enjoy their food. You can even send them this video, but tell them to enjoy their food and to talk about something else, because how they look is the least interesting thing about them. So enjoy your food All right. So those are my seven eight healthy holiday. Those are my eight steps for truly having a healthy holiday, mentally and physically, and I hope anything that you take away from this if there's anything that you take away from this is that you deserve to enjoy your food and your day and your family and your life, without the stress and the room about your body and how it looks and how you fuel it with food and fitness.

Danielle La Rose: 24:23

I always say that if what you're doing for your health and your fitness and your food, if it's not something that you would encourage your daughter to do and you wouldn't be happy she's doing it then you shouldn't be doing it either. So everything that I share, everything I do in my business with coaching, is something that your kids can do, you can do for the rest of your life, because it truly is about health, not about weight loss, and I promise you one of the clients I worked with we were doing one-on-one coaching and she went through my process and we did not focus on weight loss, although that was her goal. We didn't focus on that and I actually told her you got to step off the scale. So we focused on body image, because she really struggled with her body image. We focused on that. We focused in small habits, adding small habits. And guess what? After a few weeks, she was like okay, do you know, I stepped on the scale. She's like guess what? I lost five pounds and I wasn't even trying. I was like home girl. Yes, you see what I'm talking about.

Danielle La Rose: 25:22

Your body changes and it moves and it flows and it will go to where it's supposed to go when you focus on your health, when you focus on your health, when you focus on trying to lose weight and you lose weight. Guess what? Guess what typically happens? 95% of people gain their weight back because they weren't focused on health. They weren't focused on something they can do long term. They were focused on quick wins, which, to them, a win was weight loss, and their body didn't approve. It's time to help your body approve by being healthy. So, all right, go use these throughout the rest of your holiday. Have the best holiday. If I can support you in any way, shoot me a message, drop some questions. However, I can support you. Please, please, please. That's what I'm here for. All right, have the best holiday. Thank you for being part of the Hype Girl Squad and I will talk to you later. Bye friend.