episode 256: how to handle the urgency of seasonal holiday foods

Dec 15

If you’re feeling the mental tug-of-war over peppermint mochas, office cookies, grocery-store “limited edition” everything, or the once-a-year foods that only show up for one amazing (and stressful) moment…you’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re human.

In this episode, I’m digging into:

Why food noise naturally spikes from Halloween through New Year’s (you’re not imagining it)
How scarcity + urgency hijack your decision-making — and how to get your power back
The “Jobs of Foods” skill and why remembering what a seasonal treat is actually for changes everything
How to enjoy the foods you love without crossing that line into feeling sick or out of control
A simple way to check in mid-bite so you can enjoy the moment instead of bulldozing through it

This isn’t about pretending holiday food is “no big deal.” It is a big deal — emotionally, culturally, and yes, biologically. But once you understand what’s actually happening, you can make choices that feel intentional instead of panicky.

If you want help applying these skills to your real life this season (because this work is so much easier with support), I’m here.

256
[00:00:00] Hello? Hello. Hello, friends. Thank you for listening, for being here for another episode of The Diet Diaries. This episode's gonna come out Monday, is it? Uh, December 15th. And I had one topic planned and I just decided to pivot today as I'm recording this. Um, because I just had a really great conversation with a client.
Um, and she had sent me a message in Voxer, which is like the app that we use to stay in touch in between calls like a week or so ago saying, Hey, the next time we meet, can we talk about this? And she said, I need to talk about like all the fun seasonal foods out there, like the Starbucks drinks and the cookies and all the cool stuff in the grocery store and the stuff that's out around work because I'm having like a lot.
Of noise around it and just taking up a ton of space in my brain and I'm just kind of like really stressed about it. So I'm like, okay, I need to talk about this on the podcast because I know that she's not the only one. This is something we all struggle with this time of year. I would argue maybe from like starting Halloween, like through January [00:01:00] 1st, and I wanna, I'm gonna kind of talk through a couple of.
The skills that she and I talk through to help her work through it and also some context. And here's something I kind of want to start off with. It is totally normal to be thinking about food more. This time of year, food is central to holidays. Regardless of what holiday you celebrate. This time of year, food is central to it, and even if you don't celebrate a holiday, there's just a lot going on and there's a lot more food around.
And so. It is normal to be thinking about food more often. Then you kind of layer on top of that, the scarcity around some of this, right? Like I think like the Starbucks drinks are a perfect example of this, and this is one of the things that we were talking about. Like she loves a peppermint mocha.
Peppermint mocha. I was gonna say pepper mocha latte, but those are two different drinks. I, I don't drink coffee, so I don't know all the drinks, but a peppermint mocha, and I know they come out probably right after Thanksgiving and they take them off [00:02:00] probably like, I don't even know, January 1st, January 5th.
So there is scarcity, scarcity around it. There is urgency around it. There is absolutely a real situation where you can only get that thing for X amount of time. And that is true for dishes that exist for one day, like let's say on Christmas for something like Lakas that we make once we make them twice 'cause we have like a friend party.
Um, or for any other foods that you may only get one time. Yeah, and there's a feeling that bubbles up around, oh my God, this is my only chance. And the reality is, unlike so much of what I talk about in the context of most other foods, the other, you know, 300 and, I don't know, 40 days a year, this is your only chance.
And that is a real thing. And we can't pretend that that doesn't have an impact. On the amount of food noise, on the choices that we make and on kind of all of the self-talk. And so if we're trying to treat this time of the year the same as we treat every other time of year, like that's [00:03:00] just not realistic because it's not the same for a million different reasons.
And specifically around food, everything I just talked about, it's not the same. And so we need to start expecting ourselves to make the same choices and behave the same when it's just not the same. And so I think like just acknowledging that upfront is huge and really important and can go a long way towards a little bit of like a perspective shift and a little bit of like, oh, a little bit of normalization around some of the stress that we feel around.
The urgency around, I ate too much or I ate more than I normally do. Um, around some of the noise, it's like, oh my God, I see all this sugar and all this. Like, no one says calorie dense. I say calorie dense, but all these like high calorie, you might say the words like fattening foods, right? That's kind of like the language that I don't use as a code, but that's the language that real humans use.
So I'm gonna use it here, um, because I see you and I know, um. Right. And there's a lot of noise around that and guilt and Oh my God, am I gonna [00:04:00] gain weight in all of this? And so a really helpful skill that I talked through with my client that I wanted to share here, um, is. This idea of the jobs of foods, and I've talked about this many times before and I'm not gonna like fully deep dive into it here because I wanna stay specific to these types of foods, right?
Most of the stuff we're talking about here are foods that are like a lot of like sweet foods. And even if they're not sweet foods, even if they're savory foods, they're really gonna be things, they're probably don't have a ton of nutrition in them, right? That aren't like protein or veggies or fiber or whatever.
They're probably like mostly like, um, more processed carbs or like lots of fat or sugary. And so the jobs of the those foods, the job of a peppermint mocha, we can just stay with that as the example. The through line is to taste good. That is literally its only job on this planet, and you have basically, let's call it five weeks in which to enjoy it.
And so if we let those foods exist. [00:05:00] In terms of the job they are meant to do, and we stop trying to make them be something they are not. We stop trying to make them be a meal or something that's going to fill us up. It really helps to pull away, strip away some of the emotion, the negative emotion that we have around it, right?
And if we start to use it in a way that matches up with its job, then we get to go even further. Right? So like. If you are, let's say like you're a peppermint mocha person, and you're like, well, that's, I, I don't, I don't even know, but I'm gonna guess like it's around four or 500 calories. You know, give or take, and you're like, well, there's four or 500 calories in this thing, so I'm gonna have to cut out something.
I'm gonna have to like skip my breakfast and I'm gonna have this instead to like, you know, let's make a deal. Even things out. You're just a total backfire situation because the pepperberry milk is not meant to fill you up. It can't replace a meal. It's just meant to taste good. And if you try to get it to replace a meal, you're gonna end up eating way more food than if you had eaten your normal meal and then supplemented it with the [00:06:00] peppermint mocha to begin with.
Right. So if you expect these foods to do something that they are just not designed to do, you're, that's where things are gonna get really stressful and you're gonna get in trouble and acknowledging that these foods are allowed to just have this one job just taste good. Again, I mentioned this a couple minutes ago, can help pull away a little bit of the guilt, right?
Like if you think to yourself, oh, these cookies, they're just meant to taste good, and they're just meant to like. There's something that we, a lot, like a lot of people I know make like Christmas cookies together and it's this fun family thing and you decorate and it's an activity and you're taking photos and it's an experience.
I'm going to a cookie swap next week. I've never, I'm not, never, but I haven't done that in a really long time. So I'm gonna come home with all of these cookies, right? And I'm looking forward to doing this with my friends and I'm hoping that it starts like a new tradition that maybe we do every year. Um, and so I'm gonna have all these cookies around, right?
And I'm gonna need to be thoughtful around it. But I also know these cookies. Aren't bad. They [00:07:00] are part of an experience. They're part of doing something fun. They're part of creating a memory. And when we start to acknowledge that these foods that are only meant to taste good often have these other associations with them, again, it's like.
Uh, it helps to start to pull back, not get rid of, but pull back some of the guilt that we start to feel like, oh my God, it's so much sugar. Oh my God, I'm gonna gain weight. Oh my God, this is so bad for me. Right? All of that noise gives you a way to respond to it. It's not going to replace that. It gives you a way to respond to it, and then.
You know, I think another big thing around this is because of the urgency, it makes it harder to check in and decide like, well, do I actually want this thing? Or am I only eating it because it's my only chance? Right, and there's urgency of like, there's five weeks of urgency around something like a peppermint mocha, and then there's like one day, one meal of urgency around, let's say, I'm gonna say LA like lakas, right?
Which we, again, we do make two times a year, but [00:08:00] even so twice, two times a year is still like so, so there's so much scarcity around it. Right. And I think practically the first thing around this is, well, you can bring home leftovers usually, right? So you can get a second opportunity. And I think there's a big decision here, and I remember talking about this after we went to Greece, which was, oh my God, three, three and a half years ago.
And I had a meal that I like stuffed myself at and felt really sick afterwards. But there are absolutely going to be times where you choose to eat more than you would normally eat based on the circumstances. An urgency and a specific food combined is gonna be one of those circumstances. You may choose to have an extra serving or two extra servings because it is so good, because it is so special, because you want to maximize your enjoyment of it.
And that is normal. You might, you probably wouldn't make that decision on like a random Thursday in September when. There's not like a limited time [00:09:00] offer on, let's say like a vanilla latte or like a piece of cake from the diner, or like a pint of ice cream from the grocery store. Stuff that's always around.
You're gonna make a different choice around foods like that when you're working your skills than you are around a peppermint mocha that only exists for five weeks, or around a plate full of lattes that you only get once a year and that is normal, but you can still use the same. Process, you can still use the same skills to check in and pay attention.
How much am I enjoying this? This same client, we had a conversation, similar conversation about this in the fall, or I guess it was probably like October, November, around a pumpkin spice chai. I think it was like pumpkin cream, spice, chai, whatever. And she was like, I look forward to this thing every year, and I had it this year.
And she was like, I did not enjoy it. There's something about it that did not taste the same and it made me feel sick and I didn't, she didn't even finish the one that she had and she never ordered again. And it was like a non-issue. Pepper and mochas this year, she's loving. But all this to say that like sometimes we anticipate things and we build something up on our head and then we try it and it's like, [00:10:00] oh, this isn't even actually like as good as I thought it was gonna be.
And in some ways, right. That's probably make, there's certainly, I think a disappointment. But I think also it can coexist alongside that a little bit of a relief. 'cause it makes things easy or easier, right? If it doesn't taste so good, it's like, oh well I don't need to eat this. It doesn't even taste good, right?
And if something doesn't taste good, why are you eating it? Right? I think that's a really important check-in. So noticing right off the bat, does this thing taste as good, is I have anticipated it all year, or as I remember it being, could be, yes. Could be no. If it's, no, that's really useful information because you're gonna be like, well, why am I eating this sun?
Like, right. So there's, that is a, that's some friction. That's some good friction. If the answer is yes, it's like, oh my God, I have been looking forward to this and it is fucking as good as I remember and as good as I wanted it to be. And it's like, oh my God, I love this. And then part of you starts to think, oh shit, this feels scary.
This feels dangerous. This is so good. I am gonna go off the deep end with this food. Right? So there's a both end on that side of it too. [00:11:00] And. Look, it sucks when you overeat something that you love so much to the point that you feel sick. It's no longer enjoyable, right? We've kind of sucked that pleasure out of it.
We've taken the one job that this food was designed to do, and we've kind of like negated the whole thing, and that's tough. And sometimes there's a fine line, right? So that's why taking home leftovers for a second day. If you want more, but you know that you're about to stuff yourself, take some home, right?
Give yourself that permission to have more or to bring it home. Even though you might not do that again, like on a random Thursday in September, because it is that really special food, right? And then notice like, if I keep having more, am I still enjoying this? Am I going to keep enjoying this? Is the way I'm going to feel if I eat a whole nother piece of cake?
If. Is it gonna be worth it, right? Am I gonna put myself over the edge so it's slowing down, taking a pause, right? None of this is, none of these are new skills, but you're applying the skills that you not always use, but [00:12:00] have hopefully are learning through listening to this podcast and, and from following along with me.
But the outcome might be different than it is on a random Thursday in September. Right. So you might choose to have a whole nother piece of cake, or you might choose to have another half a piece of cake, or you might choose to have three more lakas, or you might choose to take them home with you for the next day, but you wanna pause and slow down and check in and say, how am I gonna feel when I eat this thing five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour from now?
Am I still going to be able, am I gonna be in a place where I'm still enjoying this food? Or am I gonna be so stuffed that I feel sick and I've like crossed over that line? Right. And just pausing and thinking about thinking that through for 30 seconds can make a huge difference. And also kind of just rewinding a bit back to like the enjoyment piece of it.
Very often with food foods that we love it, the enjoyment starts to go down as we eat more and more of it. Like I think Mo, I think [00:13:00] you'll understand what I mean. Like the first. X number of bites. 3, 5, 10 bites of something often are the best of something that you really love. And once you're 15, 20, 25, 30 bites in, it doesn't taste as good.
You've gotten, you've kind of like maximized the pleasure and now you've kind of like adapted to it. I'm sure there's like a whole nervous system dopamine thing that's happening that I don't really understand. But I think that's an, that's an experience that is pretty. Universal. Um, that once we kind of enjoy that, that that flavor, that texture, that experience after a certain point, it like, quote unquote like wears off and the enjoyment starts to drop and when the enjoyment starts to drop.
That's a really, that's a cue that we wanna start to. Stop eating or slow down the eating or start eating less of it. But we don't know that that's happening 'cause we're not looking for it. We're not paying attention. We're going fast. We're, we're, because of the urgency around this thing, we're just shoveling it and we're not even paying attention.
Right. You've walked into this. [00:14:00] Family Hanukkah party or Christmas Eve, seven fishes dinner, whatever it is, and you're like, this is it. This is my chance. I am going in for it. And you don't even give yourself the space or time to notice, even with something like the peppermint mocha, it's like you've been looking forward to this thing all year and you haven't, and you're so excited that it's here.
You're not even stopping to pay attention to see, am I really enjoying this? And once that thing is three quarters of the way done, like does it taste as good now as it did 15 minutes ago when I started drinking it? Because you've already made the decision that this is my only chance. And so that is such a huge part of this is pausing and slowing down and continuing to pay attention the way that you're doing the other 300 and again, 40 days of the year.
You still wanna do that Now, it's just that the outcome of that may be different. You may choose to eat more because of the urgency, but you're doing it intentionally and thoughtfully. You're not doing it. Solely because of the urgency. You're not doing it because you've predetermined what you're going to eat or how you're going to behave.[00:15:00]
You are still staying to the extent that you can in the moment, right, and being thoughtful and noticing and checking in with yourself versus deciding in advance what you're going to do. This is how you deal with these seasonal urgency, scarcity, promoted. Foods. Um, and I think that's really, I'm looking at my notes for this.
This is really the, kind of the core of it, um, is using the skills that you always use and not just throwing them to the wind because of the urgency. And then giving yourself permission to make a different choice than you make on, again, on a random Thursday in September. And knowing that that is normal and knowing that it's normal to be thinking about food more.
It's normal to have more food noise. It's normal to maybe feel a little bit more stressed out. About food because there's so much around and that if you are worried about gaining weight, it's okay. What El Of [00:16:00] course you are. That's the only thing you know and you, it's the only thing you know because it's happened so many times before.
And because it's what everyone's talking about and because you know you're eating more and when we eat more food, sometimes we gain weight, right? Like there's a lot of logic behind this and I want to normalize some of these thoughts and again, remind you that. There's nothing wrong. There is nothing problematic with what you are thinking or feeling, and you can't really change those thoughts or feelings.
What you can change, what you can impact is how you respond to them. Do you let yourself spiral into oblivion or do you notice the thought patterns, the language, the self-talk and say, okay, hold on a second here. Here's my brain doing its thing. This is normal. It makes sense why I am thinking about food, because all anyone's talking about food and I have 64 dinners and holiday parties and all this stuff, and there's so much around, and I know it's only around for a limited time.
Of course, I'm gonna think about it more, right? And helps to normalize it and helps to give [00:17:00] you space to make a choice, to be thoughtful, to pay attention. So hope this is helpful. It's a little longer than I want it to be, but I, I actually had a lot of fun recording this one, and. Keep me posted if you want help, if you want support, I'm here and um, I'll be back next week.
I think I'm gonna take a week off over the holidays, but I'll be back next week for one more before we close out 2025.