177. Tactical Christmas Strategies for Healthy and Stress Free Holiday Eating

Do you worry about planning for the New Year and you get really nervous about how to make your best New Year happen because you don’t have a lot of self confidence? Well, just like the sheet on here is a blank slate, so is the next year, but I’m going to teach you some really practical doable strategies to help you to have your best New Year. 2025.

My name is Dara Thomason and I am the Quilter’s coach and this is episode 177, how to create the best year yet. Hello everyone. So I am excited to share with you how to plan your best year. And this is coming out December 12th. So there’s a few more weeks before we have the new year. And right now you’re probably thinking, Dara.

I do not have time to think about the new year. I am deep into Christmas and preparing for Christmas. I get it, but. The best time to plant is the best time to have, if you want to have peace for your garden, you have to have started earlier. And so this episode is here to really help you start thinking about different ways on how you can guarantee your success for 2025 or wherever the new year is coming.

All right, before we go into the meat of the episode, I wanted to share a win from one of my clients. And this is from one of my clients who, um, attended my workshop that I did in person. And I was talking to her about what it is, what did it mean for her to take that time? And one of the things that I found that was really interesting about what she said was uh, and she’s a business owner and she has a lot of, um, responsibilities.

She owns this business and she said, it’s easy to be on the fence, but, and it’s easy to make excuses. She says, but you have to change to take action. And I, I feel like this is really appropriate going into the new year because a lot of us have an incredible life if we allow ourselves to see it, but in order for us to really make the change and to really shift into the person we want to be.

We also have, um, with my, with the American Constitution, we talk about the pursuit of happiness. And so again, this is now believed that we don’t create our unhappiness. We need to go and get it. Okay. So marketing has done a really good job of saying, Hey, in order for you to be happy, you have to have this car or have this, whatever that is.

Now we actually know it’s not true. However, for me to take care of my children, I need to ensure to be a good mom. I ensure that they have food. They have clothes that fit them and they have their needs met. So there is definitely that balance. Now, the problem I see, especially with the women I work with, is they will say to me, well, I can’t be happy or satisfied with my life until I look a certain way until I weigh a certain amount.

Or maybe it’s me until I finish a certain amount of quilts or I have a certain kind of house or cleanliness or whatever that is, or a certain level of happiness in my marriage. I remember one of my clients, um, the first thing she asked me was to have better sex with her husband. And I was like, all right, let’s do it.

Right. And so we’ve got, we have this balance of, yes, we want to have joy in our life and we have been persuaded or we have these ideas in order to be happy. We need to have a certain number of things, but that definitely is not true. Okay. In order for us to be happy, we have to learn how to do it inside of us.

And I’m going to prove it to you. If I said to you, if we were having a conversation, sitting beside each other and I said, Oh my goodness, you are the most beautiful person I have ever seen in my life. If you don’t believe my words, then you don’t, it’s not true. Cause you’re like, no, I’m not the most beautiful.

Are you ready? All right. The first thing I’m going to recommend is, and this actually comes from my perfectionist recovery book. Okay. So at the back of my perfectionist recovery book, I have what’s called a time capture. Okay. Now I am sure that there is a very fancy, um, like a, a fancy time tracker app or something that you can have, but what this is basically is you could just print off.

Um, a schedule right for the day. And what I want you to do is I want you to collect data. So I want you to, to just take a, uh, you can just print off three pieces of paper with a calendar from seven in the morning till when you go to bed and you basically just write down, oh, I woke up, had some breakfast.

I scrolled on my phone. I watched some YouTube videos. I went to the grocery store. I came home. I cut out some fabric, I went and picked up the grandkids, I came home, scrolled a little bit more, made some dinner, and then sat and watched TV with my husband for the rest of the night. Okay. If that’s a typical day, then great.

You can just do that. And then what you’re going to do and just be very transparent, like this is just what I do. This is just who I am. There’s zero judgment. I know that’s going to be hard. So, what happens now is that you have collected data. This is basically how you live your life. And so now we have a realistic view of who you are.

So now you can, I want, I want you to do if you can print off another piece of paper if you want or however you want to do this and then you decide this is the person I want to be. So you write down, you know, I wake up, I do my exercises, I have some meditation, I only eat if I’m hungry. So if I’m not hungry, I’m not going to worry about it.

Then I’m going to go, um, volunteer or I’m going to go work on a quilt for a couple hours. And then I, once I’m hungry around 12, 12: 30, I will go and make some lunch, connect with my husband maybe. Um, then if I want to pick up my, you know, this is if you want to pick up your granddaughter or whatever, if you volunteer to do that, um, and then you come home, you have a nice, Maybe you go for a walk or you can scroll a little bit like whatever your ideal day is I want you to picture it.

Okay, so I want you to picture your ideal day, the person that you want to be Okay, and then the last thing I want you to do is write down What would it take for you to become that person? What shifts and changes would you have to make? You create that kind of life. Now, Dr. Joe Dispenza, he talks about your personal reality as your personality, and he has a really good explanation.

You know, you wake up on the same side of the bed and you do the same thing, you know, you have the same coffee or breakfast, you drive to work the same way, or you do this thing. And basically, as he explained it, it’s like, you’ve basically become a robot in your life. And that’s it. I thought it was so fascinating.

He has a book called breaking the habit of being you and it’s a very interesting book. I had to read the book and have the audible at the same time. So look at all the pictures, the diagrams and everything. I, this was a few years ago, but it was very interesting for me to read this book and to really look at how much robotic life that we have.

Um, and how different, um, we can, we actually are, we can, how robotic we can create our life. And if we have this intention and this awareness, like setting, like putting the lights on and realizing, oh my goodness, I am really just going through the motions of my life. I don’t want to be this person anymore.

And I just had a really hard time changing. And, um, we were able to, um, kind of made a deal, um, with heavenly father, with God. And I said, you know, if I get this new coaching client, That’s my sign that I can do this. And so I got this amazing coaching client. And so I knew that I could go and buy that.

And I had, I had full approval from my other kids and they were all in, and it was very exciting. And so, but Christmas morning, I had crackers for him. Cause we have this whole thing where I start saving boxes in October, like Halloween, I’m sorry, cereal boxes and things. So instead of like, opening the cereal box and finding a new shirt or new shoes or something.

He was actually getting cereal. And, um, he’s starting to get a little bit like I’m getting actual crackers for Christmas. I’m actually getting cereal for Christmas. He was kind of getting confused cause everyone else is getting, you know, all these other presents. And then at the end we brought out his brand new bike and it was magic.

It was, it was just amazing. And the reason I share this story is because we have a lot of old traditions and ways of thinking, just like what Dr. Joe Dispenza said. It’s like we wake up on the same side of the bed, we do the same things, and um, we kind of just live this robotic life. And so for me to break that norm and to create that new family tradition and to have set that precedent to my children, that, um, it’s okay to do those different kinds of things.

And this is what I do inside my membership. One of the things that I feel is a disservice when I say to people, I’m a weight loss coach for quilters, they expect that they’re going to get You know, sheets that say, here’s some recipes and here’s some, this has calories and these ones have bad calories and these ones have good calories.

You think you’re going to just get another diet. No, that doesn’t happen. What you get is you get the learning and training on how to be in your own brain and look at your thoughts, look at your patterns and you create a whole different life. It’s very exciting. And then the weight loss. happens as a side effect.

So I want you to do that exercise. I want you to go and print off a calendar, um, a daily schedule for three days and collect that data. And then I want you to take yourself on a little date or even when you’re doing the dishes or whatever that is and ask yourself what is an ideal day and then write it down.

This is the big difference when you write these things down. It’s going to make it more of reality. And then the third one is what do I need to change in my life so that I can create the life that I really want? And. And this is what happens in semi membership. This is how people change because they work on it throughout the calls.

They work on it in the, uh, we have the modules, so they learn the tools and then there’s, um, all the different worksheets. And I literally have tutoring for every single worksheet. I myself have recorded tutor tutoring sessions for each workshop. That’s all there in the membership. And so you never have to feel like you’re alone.

And then you have support on the calls and say, Hey, I don’t understand this. And if you’re too nervous to say that, guess what? We have this feature called ask a coach and you can write in anonymously. And you can, and myself or my other coaches will answer your questions. So there is no excuse. So just like this, this lady who came to my retreat, she says, it’s easy to sit on the fence and it’s easy to find excuses, but you have to do the work.

And I promise you to have your, to create your best year yet. Doing this exercise is going to make a huge difference and I cannot wait to celebrate them with you. All right. You have an amazing day. Take care. Bye bye.