Portion control instead of saying "no"

The same question is always on the minds of those who make a holiday program: "My diet will be spoiled during the holiday, what will I do?" These questions have created stress and pressure on many of you before you even started your vacation. But I have news for you: Stress affects your body more than eating sweets.

I would like to explain this mechanism… When our body is under stress, it produces a hormone that will trigger the fight-fight mechanism to survive: Cortisol. This is a hormone necessary for our survival. This hormone also has a tendency to keep everything. Juice, oil… Therefore, if you ask, “Oh my, my diet is broken, what should I do?” If you experience stress by thinking, cortisol will be secreted here as well. Because a life-threatening condition does not need to occur for cortisol to be secreted. Due to this hormone secreted, your body will also keep your weight. In other words, you will get yourself into a spiral that you cannot lose weight before you go on vacation.

At this point, you need to convince yourself that your diet will not deteriorate during the holiday, because what we call diet is to acquire a nutritional habit that will meet the needs of our body. There are no restrictions or prohibitions in healthy eating habits. There is as much food as you need. It includes understanding your hunger, eating with pleasure and enjoying it. Do you know what happens if you do not limit yourself and stress, but enjoy and taste the food you eat? You do not continue to eat at the point where you are automatically full or meet your needs. I would like to explain this with two examples:

In one example, there is a person A who has decided not to eat sweets and pastries because he is on a diet. For this reason, he refused the first dessert offered and did not eat it, but his mind remained on how it tasted. He didn't eat the second dessert either and turned it down, but wondered about that too. He also refused the offered pastry and did not eat it, but wondered about its taste. Then person A rebelled against the pressure he put on himself and found himself eating a tray of cake. Person A was angry with himself for failing on the diet this time.

In the second example, there is a person A who says, "You can eat sweets and pastries in a diet, I already know where to stand". He did not refuse the first dessert offered, he ate it. He didn't eat the second dessert because he ate dessert and he didn't want dessert again. Then he did not refuse the pastry, but he chose to leave it where he enjoyed it, since it was all too much. Person A didn't go out of her diet and didn't lose portion control. For this reason, person A did not feel himself a failure.

Let's underline with colored pencils that a healthy diet is a diet where you get rid of the feeling of guilt and restriction, listen to your body and give it what it needs. For this reason, the desserts or pastries you will eat during the holiday are not “getaways”, because you already deserved it.