#124: Weight Loss and Christmas Baking

weight loss and christmas bakingAre you already gathering butter and flour for your Christmas baking preparations? Do you find yourself overwhelmed with so much baking to do and you’re feeling a little bit anxious about all of it? I’m interested in hearing about your relationship with Christmas baking. Today’s episode you will hear why baking is so significant during the holidays and how to still enjoy Christmas without all the baking.

I’ll be sharing some tips on how to make your Christmas less stressful, allowing for more joy and connection with those around you. Ultimately, what we all yearn for during this season is not just the treats but genuine connections. We discuss how if we are continuously looking for that false pleasure from that sugar and the flour,  it’s not sustainable. Tune in to discover how we can truly find joy in the holidays without relying solely on food.

Weight Loss for Quilters | Weight Loss and Self-Sabotage 

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why we bake during the Christmas season
  • Ideas of how we can show love without baking
  • What we really crave during the holidays is connection

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • If you are ready to lose weight and change the way you think, sign up for the lifetime access membership for Love Yourself Thin! Doors are open and you can find all the information by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:

Dara Tomasson Podcast

124. Weight Loss and Christmas Baking

Have you already made your list of all your Christmas baking, started stocking up whenever butter has been on sale for the last few weeks because you have so much baking to do and you’re feeling a little bit anxious about all of it? Well, today’s episode is going to be so helpful. And even if it’s not even around Christmas that you’re listening to this podcast episode, I promise you, you will be so surprised at what I’m going to say that you will be changed forever after listening to it. Are you ready? I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 124, weight loss and Christmas baking.

Okay. What is your relationship with Christmas baking? I want to hear it. I want to hear them all. So as a kid, my mom was vigilant about her Christmas baking. She really was. She had containers, she had special containers that she would put all the different treats in, we’re talking like margarine containers and ice cream containers and things, but she had it all set up. And then she had all of the certain cookies and squares and things that she would make. She would have them all lined up in the garage where they would keep cool. And yeah, she was very consistent about doing that. And it was very important in our house. You always knew the days that she was baking because we’d come home from school and it was just wild. Our house was usually, like, extremely clean, but our kitchen was just flour and nuts and all sorts of things. My mom also made Christmas cakes. She would make them months in advance and they would be sitting down in the cold room and she would take care of them. And we would give Christmas cakes as teacher presents. And it was a big deal at our house.

And so I felt like I needed to take over and I needed to continue that tradition. It was a lot of pressure and a lot of stress and some of the things that she made I didn’t love. So then I felt like I needed to curate this beautiful collection of cookies for my own children. And talk about a lot of extra pressure to put on myself as a young mom and doing all the things that I wanted to have the Christmas magic for my own children. And so I’m curious about you, what is your relationship with Christmas baking?

So today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what is the purpose of Christmas baking? If we should do Christmas baking anymore or what is that all about? And then I’m going to give you some magic on how to have a less stressful Christmas, where you’re going to have more connection and more joy with the people around you. So are you ready for this? Well, I hope you are but before we go into the meat and potatoes of the episode I’m gonna share a quick win.

I have a client who joined and has struggled with her weight for a long time and just felt like at 62 it was just impossible to change it and she is down 34 pounds. I actually tell my clients to go and do this. I don’t know if they ever do, but some of them do. I said, the next time you go to Costco get a 20 pound and a 10 pound bag of flour. And then get four pounds of butter or something and walk around for a while. And she started laughing. I said, no, but for real, do that because you are no longer carrying 34 pounds on your body. And think about the impact that 34 pounds has on your body. On your knees, on your hips, on your heart, on your veins, on all of that. And one of the big takeaways that has been helping her recently, because she had a bit of a plateau for about, I would say she was on a plateau for about two and a half, three months and she’s had a knee surgery, so that was kind of stressful for her. But she is breaking up with snacking. And so just so happy for her.

All right, so let’s go to our Christmas baking edition. So, why do we bake? What is the point of it? So there’s a lot, there’s a lot of reasons. One is we want to carry family traditions. That’s important. To honor our mothers and our grandmothers. My sister one year made a really sweet cookbook from my grandma, she died when I was seven. And she was an incredible baker. And so, and my mom has done a, did a great job at continuing those on. And one of the reasons we do that is to honor our past.

Another reason we do Christmas baking is because we want to create magic for our family, we want to have things that are special and things that we can look forward to. We want to have those wonderful memories. There’s a lot of research that talks about when kids have these successful traditions, like how much happier they are. And so that’s a good thing. That’s wonderful. We also want to share with others. Christmas is such a wonderful time for caring and giving and helping others, showing love to others. When we lived in Red Deer, there actually was a, the husband, and they had four kids, and their, their kids played with our kids, and he would make, he spent, I don’t know, a day or two just making butter horns, which are basically like sweet rolls, and they were delicious, and we got on the list a few times, and boy oh boy. It was amazing and we were just so excited when we got the butterhorns from the Holtz. So it’s a way to feel special. It’s a way to show that you appreciate someone.

So the problem is are you really getting the results for the amount of work that it is and then not only the amount of work, but is it really meeting the goal? Are we creating the kind of healthy body, the healthy relationship with food, when we’re always relying on the sugar and flour to make us feel a certain way. Because, where do feelings really come from? Feelings don’t come from butter horns, or from whipped shortbread, or from Nanaimo bars. That’s not where feelings come from. Feelings come from our thoughts. And so if we are continuously looking for that false pleasure from that sugar and the flour, it’s not sustainable. And think about the effect of what happens when we eat them. We’re chasing an emotion and then we have all this extra weight gain that doesn’t feel awesome and it breaks trust with us.

So the month of October was so powerful in Love Yourself Thin because we had daily, 21 daily CEO meetings. They are power. Because these women are finally looking at their life as a CEO of their life. I am in charge of my life. I get to decide what I want in my life. And what I think is the most important. And that’s not selfish. It’s actually power. So, if emotions are always the end goal, and we’re trying to get our emotions from false pleasure, we’re living a lie. And then when we have to pay the price of all the extra calories on our body, and so now our knees and our hips and our, our health is out of control. Is it worth it?

So, I have this question in the worksheet, and I would love to hear your response. If a doctor told you that you were not able to eat from October 1st to January 31st, would you still be able to enjoy the holidays? And answer that truthfully. And I can answer it that there would be parts of my holiday if I couldn’t eat any food, if I just always had to have this like intravenous or something, that would be a bummer for me. I would actually struggle. I would feel sad. My mom makes this really awesome chocolate log, a bouche de Noel, and I would be really bummed out if I couldn’t have that at Christmas. And I make this really yummy my sister makes it and now that we don’t live so close I don’t get to enjoy it, but I make it myself, it’s a score bar dessert we call it. It’s basically like a chocolate pudding, whipping cream trifle with score. And I don’t really need a lot of it, but I sure do enjoy it.

So I’m the first one to say it would be a bummer if I couldn’t have those things, but would I be able to still enjoy my holidays? A hundred percent, a thousand percent. And so this is where I want to offer you some different ways of doing things that are going to help you to really find the feeling that you want. And I’m going to talk about the Christmas eating in the next podcast. So I’m just going to focus on Christmas eating and we’re going to talk about how to create a protocol and just different ways of thinking about it in that episode. So don’t forget to go check that one out. So if everything we do is because you want to feel a feeling and if a doctor said you couldn’t eat any food for those few months, what would be the repercussions if you didn’t do the Christmas baking? Let’s just talk about that.

So some people would be disappointed. They would say, Oh, you didn’t make that. I sure loved it. You’re like, yeah, I’m disappointed too. And you could also actually take that as a compliment, be like, yeah, of course you’re disappointed. I make amazing things. So that’s okay. So people can be disappointed. You might miss them. Yeah. That’s okay too. There was things about COVID Christmas that I actually loved. There’s things about COVID I actually miss now. I loved that my kids were home every single night. I didn’t love homeschooling, but I sure loved that our nights weren’t crazy, going all over the place with all the basketball and all the extracurricular. So there’s things that you’re going to miss. And you might feel a little bit awkward about coming to something or doing something empty handed. And this is where I’m going to give you some ideas. Because this is where, as the CEO, when we did Meetober, we brought in our evaluation brain. We’re able to look at things from a place of power, not of a place of fear. So, evaluating and saying, am I getting the result that I want? And the problem is, you know, I’ve seen this happen where people bring these, these homemade cookies and these homemade treats and I don’t like them. I don’t eat them. My kids don’t eat them. We had a bunch of treats in our pantry for like months, Christmas treats that someone had painstakingly made, but nobody in our family liked them. And they just went in the garbage. So is it really worth it? Does the amount of time and effort equal the result that you want?

Now I’m going to say what we really want at Christmas is connection. What we really want is to show love. So does it have to be butterhorns? Because someone like me who doesn’t really eat butterhorns, I really just appreciate that I could see him spending all day on Saturday making all these trays of butterhorns for all these people. And then the idea of him being in his car with his kids, dropping them all off. That’s the magic. That’s the beauty of like, we’re just showing love to the Tomasson’s. And so what are some alternatives? What are some of the ways that you can actually show love?

So here are some suggestions. What would it be like to make some homemade gifts? I have for the month of November and December making these gift boxes for everyone who joins Love Yourself Thin and I made these homemade ornaments. They are free motion quilted ornaments and I put ribbons on them. Some of them have little buttons. They’re all unique and different. But that is a something that I made with my own hands showing love and appreciation to those who invested in themselves. And so what about making some homemade gifts? What about handwritten cards? What about, one of my favorite things to do is just randomly call people from, I’ve lived in lots of places and I just go through my phone. I’ll just call random people and be like, Hey, I loved living in Red Deer with you. I loved your smile or I loved how you were always really kind to me. That’s, that’s connecting. That’s really what we want. One year I organized a sledding party. So there was five families. We all contributed so it wasn’t all on one person and we went sledding with real horses and a real sled and there was a bonfire afterwards and it was amazing. What about just singing? What about having people come over and doing some Christmas caroling or how about organizing to go to a senior’s home and doing some singing? We’ve done that several times at church and we’ve organized it for various families and just coordinated it. What about doing something like that or what about saying, hey, I’m going on a walk and anyone who wants to join me, you can do that. Or, hey, my grandma made this really cute yo yo wreath. And if anyone wants to learn how to do this yo yo wreath, I’m going to be doing it here. For about five years, my friend and I in Red Deer, we had craft night and we always did a really big deal for Christmas crafts. And we just had a blast. And so it was a way to connect with people. It was a way to offer an inexpensive Christmas options and gifts and ways to connect. Or what about like a, Christmas ornament exchange, something like that. Or even just any sort of way that you can connect. What about even just going to the dollar store and just buying a mug and putting some of your favorite herbal teas and say, when you use this mug, I want you just to think about how much I love you. Or a thrift store and buying mugs or whatever.

Whatever it is, please, I want you to just decide right now, how do you want to celebrate your, your friends? What kind of connections do you want to have? And start making plans now. One of the members in my membership, her kids are far away now and it’s hard for her to not be with her family at Christmas, her grandchildren and her kids and so she started back in beginning of September to start getting involved in Christmas things now so that she can plan it for her husband and her so they can have a more meaningful Christmas. So they’re not feeling that sadness that they’re really making their life more interesting and exciting so that they don’t have to turn to the food, or they don’t have to feel despair.

One last thing I’m going to share, which is we talk about Christmas traditions, and the Christmas baking was a big Christmas tradition. But I have allowed my mom to take over that tradition, so for any of my kids who want to do the baking with my mom, they can. But there’s lots and lots of other traditions that I have carried on. So my mom used to light a candle and she put 25 little lines on the candle and she would have Christmas stories that she would read to us. And then we would have to stop the story wherever it was, and then she would continue the next day. I didn’t do that exactly, but I have all these Christmas stories and I made 25 bags with the numbers on them and so every day we have different Christmas stories that we read and it’s a way to connect. We also do Secret Santa and we decorate our house and we go and we cut down a fresh tree and we’ve created some really wonderful family traditions that I have in my own family and I also honor that my kids will do something a little different and that’s okay.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts on how could you truly enjoy Christmas without the food? And I’m so excited for you to come to our next episode on holiday eating. Alright, you have an amazing day. Take care. Bye bye.

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