Get out of the punishment trap

There is nothing wrong with celebrating and feasting in December. If your body is healthy it can handle that. Xmas is however only one day but most people feast the whole month of December. Office parties, friends parties, seeing family and parents. No wonder that people get sick. It is too much drinking and eating the wrong stuff on an already overloaded toxic body. But most people won’t acknowledge that. They prefer to blame the weather, the sniffy colleague or the coughing person they met on the bus.

Getting back to some sort of health, January is often depicted as the month of suffering. People are starting to workout again or coming back to the gym after a long time. And because they have been lazy and have fallen of the wagon, they feel the need to punish themselves with excessive cardio and strenuous exercises.

January is also the month of sobriety, new diets, detoxing, juicing and vegan diets. In short more suffering. The reason why it mostly never last longer than 3 weeks, because it is based on punishment and not about talking care of yourself and loving yourself.

Do you think a juice fast is wise to do in January? If you live in the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, it could be great. It is Summer over there, so a juice fast makes sense. Here in the Northern Hemisphere it is Winter, so a juice fast is not really helping your body. First of all you are using fruits and vegetables that are not growing in Winter. These juices are cooling to the body, while you need heat in the Winter to keep you warm. Instead of having a healing effect, they will make you feel more miserable. If you want to do a liquid fast, take bone broths and live on soups.

Vegan January is also heavily promoted in supermarkets. If you look at it, it is mostly vegan junk food. Just because it is vegan, doesn’t make it healthy. Here again, there aren’t any fruits growing in the Winter and hardly any vegetables. That they are year round in the supermarkets doesn’t make it good for our bodies. We need to eat more with the seasons. And learn to listen to our body. It knows what it needs.

If you want to follow any diet in January, then Keto or any other low carb diet would be a wise choice. Keto is a high fat, medium protein and low carb diet. This keeps you warm and fills you up. You can combine it with intermitting fasting after a few weeks or eating just 2 meals a day or even 1 meal a day. In Winter food is not always available. Doing some form of fasting would be natural. Here again, listen to your body. If you are not that hungry don’t eat. If you are, just eat. Many people have great results with it; health wise and with losing weight. You don’t have to stick to Keto forever. When Spring comes you can eat more veggies and fruits again that are growing in that season. To do a month of vegan food would be more natural to do in Spring. A vegan diet is very cleansing, so that is great to do after the heavy foods from the Winter period.

In the end it all starts with mindset. If you see getting healthy as suffering and punishment, it will feel like that and you won’t stick to it. If you can make it into an interesting journey to loving yourself more and taking care of your body, mind and spirit, you can make it into a long lasting habit. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t any slip ups. It is just that you pick yourself up and go back on it.

It means that you set low targets for your workouts and start in a gentle pass. Letting your body getting used to exercise and building further up from there. Smiling on the way when you see how quickly your body is getting stronger and fitter. The same with new diets. Transition into them slowly. Spread it out over a couple of weeks, so your digestion system can get used to the new foods and adjust to it. It also helps with avoiding too much detox symptoms. And always keep in mind am I punishing myself or is this healing for me. Your body is unique. Do what is right for your body. Become your own healer.