How To Stay Nourished + In Flow: Holiday Edition Journaling Prompts
It’s one thing to welcome in wholesome nourishment and stay in flow with it in the routine of our regular lives. Once holiday season hits though, many of us are thrown off our game. We love the travel, the parties, the special time with family and friends but … we’ve worked so hard to create stability our bodies, minds, and food flow throughout the year and the holidays can be incredibly destabilizing. How do we stay stable and enjoy the holidays to the fullest?
Perhaps the hardest part of the holidays is balancing the joys and festivities of gathering with our most beloved friends and family with our shock and dismay at the quality and types of food that is the norm in most American kitchens and holiday tables. Once you’ve made the transition to a Nourish + Flow style of eating delicious, decadent, wholesome real foods that are healthy for People + Planet, you know how to balance your health and energy and you feel pretty stable and nourished through most of your normal life. Eating real food that works for your body has become your norm. The holidays remind us though, that is not everybody’s norm and that space between the food flow you have cultivated in your life and what you are confronted with during hte holidays, can create immense stress during this time of gathering and feasting.
You want to fully participate and you love to eat abundantly. You know that holiday meals can be filled with the joy of delicious, decadent, wholesome nourishment but you feel bombarded with more processed alternatives that you know don’t work for you (or anyone really). The toxic chemical additives are in every dish, in every slice of bread, in every snowflake shaped cookie, in every cured meat, in every dried fruit… The adulterations never end and you feel like you’re the only one noticing.
The non-Nourish + Flow family Food Culture norms feel overwhelming. You want to participate but you feel like you need to go to the grocery market and buy your own entire buffet. You wish you could forget about it and just be “normal” but you have pulled yourself out of a health crisis and you have found your stability and you fear a big, life altering backslide.
Perhaps your loved ones know you’re avoiding gluten and dairy (for example) and its taken them a few years to even remotely understand or be able to accommodate, but now they substitute those staples with less than wholesome substitutes. You’re proudly given highly processed junky alternatives. If only you could make them understand you’d rather have a potato or curried garbanzo beans than a slice of GF bread. They just don’t understand the carb substitutes or the dairy substitutes that work for a Nourish + Flow life.
Do you go with the flow and say thank you and eat it and plan to recalibrate and Reset later? January is a great time for the Foundational food reset, but…. You’d actually rather just feel good and be your vibrant self the whole time. Maybe you feel like your family always gets a deleted version of you and that’s just not how you participate in life anymore.
Do you say thank you and not eat it? This can be very hard for people to one, dissapoitn or feeling like they are insulting the chef, and two, peopel often don’t want to. have to cook every meal separately throughout he visit. It’s truly a touch situation…
Do you have a Family Conversation to explain yourself, your needs, your perspective or do you let it go and not cause a fuss? In Nourish + Flow, participants learn to have a Family Conversation but that tactic which works so well for your own household, doesn’t always feel comfortable or lead to the best results when in someone else’s home.
There are real decisions to be made and there’s no right way to do it. It might depend on factors like where you are with your health and health journey, how open to eh conservation yoru family is and what sort of problems or solutions will arise if you bring it up, and endless other dynamics to consider. I’ve created a list of contemplation questions for you to work with in advance as you plan for the holiday festivities.
Journaling prompts to help you navigate your decisions this holiday season.
The darkest part of the year lends itself to a bit of contemplation. I recommend sitting with these journal questions and writing out your thoughts for each one. After you take an initial swing through, I recommend reviewing each answer and creating a game plan for your holiday season. It can really help to set your intentions and make a plan in advance rather than being thrown for a foreseeable loop each and every moment over the next 2 months.
It’s totally up to you to decide how you want to navigate the holiday food situation. For those of you in the midst of a health crisis, you may want to stay more pristine and focused on your particular diet, stress, toxic exposure reduction strategy. If one little impediment will throw your stability into a tailspin that will last for months, then get clear with your needs and stick with it. Decide whether you will be prepping all of your own food or if you need to talk with others about yoru needs and ask for their participation.
For those of you who have some flexibility, you may welcome in a different level of decisions for the holidays. It’s truly your choice. Here are a few questions to help you gain clarity about your next month of eating.
Will it cause strife to bring it up? Are you ok with that or not? What kind of hostility or support will you face? How literate is your family or friends around these issues?
Is it possible to prepare a dish for shared meals that will serve and satisfy you, delight others, and take the pressure off of you to pick through less appetizing food?
Do you want to feed only yourself or do you want to share with others?
What are your main goals for food around the holidays? What is most important to you to maintain from your regular routine? Where do you have flexibility?
Do you want to discuss, educate, collaborate or is this a personal journey for now?
What kind of relationships do you want to cultivate with the people you will spend the holidays with? Do you want to share your health struggles and solutions you are working with or does it feel like something you want to keep more private?
When you wake up on January 1st, how do you want to feel?
What are some ways you could share your food and health journey that would be fun to discuss rather than create more stress?
How do you want to wrap up the past year? How do you want to honor the work you have done and the path you have been on?
What are some food ideas to share during the holidays?
What are your top 3 intentions this holiday season around food and health?