Why do we eat more sweets during the holiday season? And why can’t we stop once the holidays are over?
I hear from a lot of people that the struggle is real when it comes to avoiding sugar throughout the month of December. With all the parties and preparations, it’s hard to avoid the stuff. We celebrate time with family and friends by indulging in all sorts of cookies, chocolates, and pies. What is it about this time of year that makes sweets so satisfying?
According to Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, sweet flavors contain certain properties that impact how we feel physically and mentally. This is true of all tastes. Ayurveda classifies taste into 6 categories: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, and astringent. All six tastes (yes even sweet!) are necessary for a balanced, healthy life. Taste informs us of the food’s quality; that meaning how the food affects our physical, emotional, and mental state. In fact, the Ayurvedic word for taste is rasa, which also translates as essence.
What are the qualities of sweet?
To better understand why we indulge more in sweets during the holiday season, let’s explore some of the qualities of sweet foods and how they make us feel.
Sweet foods do not only refer to foods containing sugar like cakes, cookies, and candy. Sweet foods naturally occur in fruits, starchy vegetables, grains, dairy products, meats such as beef & lamb, and sweeteners like maple syrup and honey.
Feelings of Comfort
Sweet foods carry heavy, dense, and moistening properties. This means they make us feel grounded, nourished, and comforted. Think about when you crave sweet foods; is it during times of stress or emotional discomfort? Sweet foods can soothe aggressive emotions such as anxiety or anger. They encourage feelings of love and togetherness.
The holiday season is all about sharing these feelings with our loved ones. It’s a time to return home, rediscover childhood, and embrace the magic of life. Sweets, when eaten in moderation, can bring out these feelings in us. Imagine your favorite holiday movie: all the characters are cuddled up next to a fireplace with a warm cup of cocoa, while a soft snow is falling outside. The lights on the tree are twinkling and laughter fills the air. Sounds pretty comfortable, doesn’t it? It’s easy to see why baking cookies and other treats has become a classic holiday tradition.
Promotes relaxation & calm
Sweet foods help slow us down. They calm the nervous system and create relaxation in the body. The holidays are often a time where ideally, we are working less, and spending more time with our loved ones. It should be a time to slow down in anticipation for the cold months ahead.
Unfortunately, in today’s fast paced society the opposite tends to be true. The holidays can be a time of extreme stress for many, spending money on expensive gifts, planning extravagant parties, and trying to live up to the expectations of the season. When this happens, it’s easy to see why someone would turn to sweet foods as a way to relax.
Replacing refined sweets with natural, whole foods
When sweet foods are eaten in their whole food version, they provide other vitamins and minerals that nourish the body along with the grounding, calming, and comforting effects. It is ok to indulge in sweet foods during the holiday season as long as we choose naturally sweet foods to bake with such as pumpkin, squash, root vegetables, fruits, spices, and natural sweeteners.
When sweets are eaten in excess, and obtained from artificial or refined sources, we can easily become addicted and experience the negative effects of sugar consumption. These include blood sugar imbalance, poor digestion, weight gain, uncontrollable cravings, moodiness, lethargy and eventually diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
Why is sugar so addicting? To better understand why so many people struggle with cravings, stress, and weight gain around the holidays, let’s explore how eating sugar can become an unshakeable habit.
Sugar activates our reward system
Sugar triggers the release of dopamine, the reward system in our brain. When dopamine is released, we experience feelings of euphoria and satisfaction. The more sugar we eat, the more we become addicted to the feeling. That is why our culture often uses sugary sweets as way of celebration or reward for a job well done. Small children, who crave sugar even more than adults, are taught at a young age that they will receive sweet foods for behaving well, achieving their goals, or for celebrating special occasions like birthdays and holidays.
Our bodies don’t contain an off switch
Biologically speaking, our bodies are designed to crave sugar, and once we find it, we can’t help but eat as much of it as possible. Quitting sugar isn’t a matter of willpower, it’s a matter of evolution. Let me explain. Sugar is a highly calorie dense food. Simply speaking it is the easiest source of energy for our body. We are able to metabolize sugar extremely fast, and any excess sugar we aren’t burning for fuel gets stored in the body as fat, to be burned later. Because of this, leptin, the hormone responsible for letting us know when we’ve eaten our fill, doesn’t turn on when consuming sugar. This means we literally have no off switch when it comes to eating sugary foods!
This worked out great when we lived in a society where sugar was scarce and hard to come by. However, in the past 150 years alone we’ve gone from eating 0 lbs. of sugar a year to over 150 lbs. a year, with no change to our metabolism in the process. Biologically speaking we are designed to binge sugar, which is why it is so important to eat it in moderation.
To learn more about the addicting effects of sugar, check out 5 Ways Sugar is Destroying your Health
So if the properties of sweets naturally appeal to us during the holiday season, and our bodies are evolutionally designed to be addicted to the stuff, what are we to do? The best option is to enjoy sweets in their whole food form, in moderation. Sound impossible? It’s not!
Here are a few quick tips to help you get through the holidays:
• Stay away from processed, store bought sweets as much as possible. This includes packaged cookies, cakes, and candy, as well as premade baking mixes. Turn to homemade sweets instead
• Upgrade your pantry to include natural sweeteners such as coconut sugar, maple syrup, honey, monk fruit sweetener, stevia, and brown rice syrup
• Indulge in naturally sweet fruits and veggies such as pumpkin, squash, sweet potato, carrots, beets, coconut, banana, berries, and other fruits. Much of these foods are easy to incorporate into baking recipes
• Choose whole grains over refined grains whenever possible and add lots of fiber to your daily diet
• Satisfy your need for comfort and relaxation by spending time with loved ones and engaging in stress relieving activities such as physical exercise, time in nature, meditation, reading, and feel good Christmas movies of course!
The holidays are a time to enjoy the sweetness of life, and this often includes sweet foods. Having a happy, healthy holiday season isn’t about restricting sugar all together, but learning how to enjoy it in moderation, in a way that works for you.