How to: Navigate Christmas
Christmas can be a time where your body image gets thrown through a loop. So here's a guide with some tips and tricks on how to get through it.
Christmas is meant to be about joy, right? And yet every year, without fail, we brace ourselves for anxiety, annoyance and stress, especially when it comes to food and our bodies.
Which aunty is going to comment on your weight this time? Which parent will inevitably say something about starting a diet in the new year? Who will be the one to pick the moment that you pick up the roast potatoes to tell you that carbs are naughty? Which cousin will say that they ‘feel fat’ like that’s the worst thing in the world? How will you feel about going into situations where your anxieties about your body and food may come to light?
One of our collective’s longest standing Christmas traditions is being weird about food and bodies, because the cycle is the same every year. We get encouraged to eat, drink and be merry in the lead up to Christmas and then get immediately guilt tripped by adverts to start a diet in the New Year and/or join a gym to ‘shed those Christmas lbs’. And we enter into the Christmas season knowing that that shame ridden end is coming.
Because we all experience this same cycle, and internalise these same messages, it means that over Christmas we brace ourselves for bearing the brunt of what everyone - including ourselves - have internalised about food and bodies.
Let’s be honest, the Christmas dinner table can feel fraught at the best of times. And we don’t always want to come in guns blazing, ready to throw verbal hands with Uncle Keith about diet culture over the yorkshire puddings.
Because we are so deeply in this diet culture, it can feel hard to separate ourselves from the content of what's being said from our sense of self worth; it can feel all encompassing and hard to separate ourselves from. If someone says potatoes are bad, that must be the truth, and we must therefore feel guilty for eating them. If someone says that we look like we’ve put on weight, that must be bad. If someone continues to say that they feel fat like it’s a bad thing, you learn that it is indeed a bad thing.
So aside from yelling at our family members, what else can we do to protect ourselves in the face of Christmas time body image bullshit?
A tool that is for life and not just for Christmas is learning to divorce yourself from the harmful societal narrative around food and bodies. By doing so, you create a shield around yourself so that those comments don’t hit as hard as they usually would.
Yes, these comments hurt us deeply, but what is key to remember is that just because we’ve all internalised something, it does not make it true or even helpful to us. When someone makes comments about bodies or food that are nasty or unkind, these comments are actually a product of what they have learned about these things, not an indicator of your worth or goodness.
In the work I’m in, I inevitably get some nasty comments in my direction, and one of the questions I am most often asked is how the hell I’m able to deal with them. Without fail, I say that one of the most powerful things that can help you navigate them is to realise that so much of what someone is saying about you, or food, is about what they have internalised about those things, and actually not about you at all - you are just a target of that projection.
Plus, as my pal Alex said so succinctly when I spoke to him about this topic, many people feel the need to conspire and collude with others on diet culture. Diet culture is cultish in its expression - it is a set of beliefs and values that are religiously followed as for many, losing weight and thinness is the Promised Land, where your worries are fixed and you magically like yourself. And for many, they must grip onto this rationale because if they lose that, they have to realise that they have been hard on themselves for years for no reason.
That, ultimately, is not your problem. People speaking badly about their bodies or yours is a them problem. It is not a you problem. You just happen to be on the receiving end of it. When I realised this in my own process of learning to accept my body, it felt like I had created a protective forcefield around myself. I went from feeling prodded, poked and triggered by every crappy comment about food and bodies to being able to internally dismiss and ‘Sure, Jan’ my way through them.
So how does this learning show up in practice?
Once you separate yourself from the content of what people are saying, it gives you more of a choice. You can absolutely choose to not engage.
For example:
Aunt Agnes: “After this I’m going to do a cleanse in the new year! Did you know that cleanses jump start your lymphatic system so it melts all your fat cells and turns them into water? I’m going to need to do one hundred cleanses after this because I’m so disgusting and fat!”
Depending on your energy levels, you have a few options in terms of potential responses:
You: Please may you pass the carrots?
Or
You: 🙂
Or
You: That’s interesting! (Does not engage further) (because what Aunt Agnes has said is utterly bizarre)
By choosing to not collude, you stand up for yourself, and you rewrite old scripts. As much as Aunt Agnes still clearly has a lot to unpack there, challenging or engaging with this will, sadly, oftentimes be like speaking to a brick wall. And whilst her comments may absolutely suck, they are not yours to hold onto.
If all else fails, I recommend this failsafe boundary trick: if it’s getting too much, excuse yourself to the bathroom. This is a trick given to me by my coaching teacher, Robbie Steinhouse. When you go to the bathroom, it’s not suspicious, it doesn’t draw attention to yourself, and in there you can take a breather or have a time out before coming back to the conversation. And, usually, by the time you come back, the conversation has moved on.
As much as it sucks that we have learned so many harmful things, there is a hidden magic in it: often, if it is learned, it can be unlearned; you can detach yourself from the maladaptive knowledge you have been internalising for years. In doing so, you make yourself much more resilient in the face of nasty comments.
This process of unlearning also helps you to challenge your own negative self-talk. When you start to challenge and separate yourself from these unhelpful narratives, you start to notice those thoughts coming up in your own head and can start challenging them. Ask yourself: where did that thought come from? What’s the root? Who’s voice is speaking to me in this way? Is it mine? Is it someone else’s? Why is this coming up for me right now? Does it serve me, or is it something I can let go of? Asking yourself these questions help you to strip them of their power, and loosen the hold they have on you.
This is particularly helpful because once you start noticing them, you can also take stock of what’s going on around you when these comments are coming up, and you can use these as signals that can show you what may be going on in your inner world. For example, for me, because I’m hyperconscious of body image messaging, I started to notice that I critique my body more in the lead up to my period, which made even more sense after I was diagnosed with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, or PMDD (a condition where you go through significant emotional and physical symptoms usually during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle). So, now when these thoughts do come up, that’s a signal to me that I may be in my luteal phase, and I can then take steps to do extra self care.
If you are struggling with negative thoughts around your body and food during this time, it makes complete sense. Our internal monologues usually get harsher when we are approaching or are in stressful periods, and you have a whole load of unhelpful narratives being thrown at you whilst this is happening. So the fact that they feel stronger right now in the lead up to Christmas is totally understandable.
No matter how you’re feeling this Christmas period, know that you are more resilient and stronger than you think. Negative messaging may be all around you, but that doesn’t mean that those messages are indicative of the wonderful person you are.
Take extra care this Christmas, in whatever form that takes. It’s been a long, eventful year, and this is a better time than ever to practice some extra self love.