AVOID THE PITFALLS OF CHRISTMAS MARKETING
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Episode 283:
Show Notes
This is Episode 283 of The Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast hosted by Dr. Mary Barson and Dr. Lucy Burns, weight management and metabolic health experts. The episode focuses on navigating Christmas from a health and wellness perspective, offering practical strategies to manage the festive season without derailing health goals.
Christmas as an Extended Challenge
Christmas isn't just one day but extends to approximately 10% of the year, including work parties, social gatherings, and events from early November through the New Year. This prolonged period creates ongoing challenges for people trying to maintain healthy eating habits.
Marketing Manipulation and Scarcity Mindset
Companies exploit scarcity tactics by promoting limited-edition Christmas foods and seasonal products. The hosts emphasize that ingredients in Christmas-themed foods are available year-round, and recognizing this marketing technique helps reduce vulnerability to overconsumption. Online grocery shopping is recommended to minimize exposure to these marketing messages.
Emotional Eating During the Holidays
Christmas triggers various emotions including stress from difficult family dynamics and loneliness from lack of social connections. The brain uses food to provide comfort and make us feel better, making emotional eating common during this period. The doctors emphasize developing alternative coping tools beyond food or alcohol.
Hot Tools and Cool Tools
The episode introduces the concept of "hot tools" for immediate cravings and overwhelming feelings, and "cool tools" for maintaining general background mood and health. Skills like tapping, deep breathing, walking, hypnosis, meditation, journaling, and cognitive reframing provide alternatives to emotional eating.
JOMO vs FOMO
Cultivating a "Joy of Missing Out" (JOMO) counteracts the "Fear of Missing Out" (FOMO) that drives overconsumption during Christmas. Dr. Lucy shares her strategy of cultivating contempt for ultra-processed food companies rather than the food itself, which has helped reduce her processed food consumption by approximately 95%.
Low-Carb Alternatives
The hosts advocate for creating delicious low-carb Christmas meals and desserts using alternative sweeteners like Allulose. Examples include pavlova, cheesecake, and brownies that allow participation in festive eating without negative health consequences. They emphasize that having one piece of Christmas cake isn't problematic, but daily consumption over six weeks leads to weight gain and increased insulin.
Intentional Choices and Accountability
Setting clear intentions and obtaining accountability support helps maintain focus on health goals throughout the festive period. The doctors promote their "Santa's Little Helper" program—a digital advent calendar delivered daily throughout December offering recipes, meditations, cocktails, and tips to stay on track. They discourage the "clean slate" mentality of waiting until January 1st, comparing it to filling a garage with junk before cleaning it out.
Episode 283:
Transcript
Dr Mary Barson (0:04) Hello, my lovely friends. I am Dr Mary Barson.
Dr Lucy Burns (0:09) And I'm Dr Lucy Burns. We are doctors and weight management and metabolic health experts.
Both (0:16) And this is the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast!
Dr Mary Barson (0:21) Hello, lovely friend. Dr Mary here, on what is still fairly rubbish southern Victorian weather. But I am happy to be here with my beautiful colleague, Dr Lucy Burns. Lucy, how are you today?
Dr Lucy Burns (00:37) Well, I am a little bit fabulous. And part of the reason for my fabulousness is that we have a new puppy. Our family situation is that we used to have four dogs and four cats. We live on a bit of a rural property, so we also had four horses and a cow and a goat and all of these things. As happens with children, my kids have grown up and turned into what we call kidults. So they'll still always be our children, but they are both now adults. And, in fact, they've moved out of home and took the pets with them. So some of the pets sort of numbers dwindled despite natural attrition. But both the girls have taken cats and dogs each. And so we had a period with no indoor pets. And my husband and I would come home, well, he'd come home because I worked from home—and we'd sort of just be mooching around the house because there was no dog to play with. And so on our way home from holiday recently, I just said to him, right, we need to get a dog. So anyway, we did a little mini research and found a little Jack Russell puppy. We had Jack Russells; our very first dogs were Jack Russells. I love the wirehead ones. So we've got this beautiful little wirehead Jack Russell, and we have called her Sunny as sort of homage to our favourite place, which is the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but also as some sort of impetus to the universe: could you make Melbourne a bit more sunny?
Dr Mary Barson (01:04) Anyway, she is totally adorable. I can't wait to meet her. I have puppy jealousy.
Dr Lucy Burns (02:13) Yes, I know. She's very, very cute. And she's actually very – and, again, I feel like one of those parents that brags about their children's intelligence because we haven't had her very long. She's only eight weeks old. She can already sit. She doesn't wee. She's already toilet trained. She only took a few days to do all of that, and I'm thinking, clearly our dog is just gifted. You've got a gifted puppy right there. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, lovely Miss.. I thought this week we would talk a bit about Christmas, which is coming up. I know we've just done the Christmas Masterclass. Maybe some of you listeners out there came, but for those of you who didn't, I thought we'd give some practical strategies because Christmas, for many people, is just a kind of time of ambivalence. You know, there's good and bad, and sometimes they can be really good and really bad existing, coexisting at the same time, and our brain can, you know, do a mini explosion inside.
Dr Mary Barson (03:10) Yeah, it's a minefield too. For those of us on, you know, a health and wellness journey, Christmas is fraught. It can be fabulous and fraught. And a lot of people struggle with Christmas. They struggle with the overabundance of food, the expectations to eat, the social pressures, the expectations to cater and over-cater, to get along with people that you might not want to get along with, to navigate work lunches and work cocktails and parties, and barbecues, and Christmas lunch, and Christmas puddings and chocolate Santas, and leftovers, and that annoying uncle that you never, ever got along with. It's a lot. It is a lot. It is. You know, people can find that things just blow up in their face in this Christmas minefield, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. You can navigate it with a few helpful brain-based tips and tricks, I reckon.
Dr Lucy Burns (04:11) Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's tricky because our brain, at one level, our brain goes, oh, Christmas is just one day of the year, but it's actually not. It's like a month. You know, there's Christmas break-ups for work for lots of people. Everyone suddenly seems to want to get together before Christmas. So you've had the whole year, and all of a sudden people are going, oh, well, when can we fit you in before Christmas? It's like, oh, like something happens after Christmas. I don't know. But it's just the way our society runs.
Dr Mary Barson (04:40) I think it's about 10% of your life is Christmas. Like, to one extent or another, my son's daycare just had their Christmas party on November 6th, you know. It's already started. You know, 10% of your life is navigating Christmas, so it's important to devote some time to developing skills.
Dr Lucy Burns (04:58) Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the tricky things is last week we talked about our own, you know, your and mine vulnerabilities to diet culture, but we are all vulnerable to marketing tricks and marketing culture. And one of the most prolific techniques that companies will use around Christmas is the scarcity mindset. So, limited offers. This is only a Christmas flavour. This is something that is part of Christmas, you know, that you can only get this at this time of the year. And so our brain goes, oh, well, I better, you know, stockpile it. And, again, that makes sense. That helped us from an evolutionary point of view when food supplies were scarce and we could, you know, be like a squirrel and fill up our cave with whatever. But it doesn't help us, this mindset, in our current lives where we just live with abundance, really.
Dr Mary Barson (05:54) There's nothing particularly helpful about eating in excess of mince pies right now just because mince pies are only available November, December, and you can't get them the rest of the year. But our brain will play these tricks. And I've got stories about mince pies that relate to my grandfather and my grandmother making them. So it's not just the scarcity, it's this whole idea that the mince tarts were love and that I used to seek them out and eat them so that I could be closer to my grandparents, which makes no logical sense at all. My grandfather, bless him, has been long gone, many decades. And wherever he is right now, my beautiful papa, I don't think he cares whether or not I'm eating mince tarts in November. I really don't think that makes any difference to him or to the relationship that we had and have. But yet it is something that my brain used to tell me all the time.
Dr Lucy Burns (06:51) Yeah, and I think food is love is a very strong message that we have all grown up with. So we will use food as demonstrating love. We will cook for people. We will give people food. And our own brains, when they feel like they might need a little bit of love, we'll seek out food to, you know, replicate that emotion. And, look, it's not bad. Like, you're not a bad person if this is what you're doing. We all have done it and do it from time to time. It's just recognising when it gets a little out of control or a little out of balance, and that if every time you feel a bit sad or a bit lonely, then you're reaching for some sort of food product to fix that feeling, then that's probably not going to be helpful. And Christmas is a time for many people where they do feel lonely. You know, at one extreme you've got all the people who are going to barbecues every five minutes, and at the other extreme you've got people who are going, well, I'm not going to any barbecues and everybody else is, so therefore I'm lonely and feel like a loser, so I'm just going to sit at home and, you know, munch my way through Christmas shortbread.
Dr Mary Barson (08:00) That's right. You'd better hurry because the Christmas shortbread won't be available for that much longer. No, no, we'll stock up. Yeah, that's right, exactly. There's two things here that you've brought up beautifully, Lucy. First up, the marketing mischief and that kind of idea of that scarcity. How could we reframe that scarcity? Like, surely I have to just buy all the chocolate centres now because they won't be available in January. Like, how can we reframe that? And make ourselves less vulnerable to this marketing mischief?
Dr Lucy Burns (08:28) Yeah, so I think recognising that the ingredients in a Christmas Santa, i.e., chocolate, they're available all year round. There's nothing magical about a Christmas-shaped chocolate or an elf that's, you know, got popping candy in it. They are all available all year round. Christmas shortbread is, you know, the same as essentially scotch fingers, all year round. You can buy it all year round. But we're not there hankering in August for scotch finger biscuits necessarily. So the limited offer, that is a marketing technique that's as old as Methuselah, Methuselah, whoever, old as Adam, as old as somebody who's old, because our brains are vulnerable to it. So there's a couple of things that I think are really helpful. So one is to reduce your exposure to that message, which is where, for me, online shopping, online grocery shopping is so helpful, because not only do I just have a list that I just go and repeat so I don't even look at the specials, I don't even look at any of that stuff, it also means I'm not going into the supermarket every day, which I know some people do, and that means every day your brain is getting exposed to messaging around particular food products or bargains or whatever it might be. Bargain, we'll talk about bargain as a separate—it’s a separate marketing strategy. But the idea too that it's limited. Like Lindor balls, you know, Lindor balls, which were one of my nemesis items, they're available all year round. They're on special frequently. But yet sometime at Christmas our brain goes, oh, my God, right, well, these are extra special ones because there's some sort of mint flavour or something. I don't know. It's just recognising the absolute onslaught of advertising and marketing that comes with an occasion. And I reckon the marketing gods, whoever they might be, just look at Christmas with glee and go, oh, my God, these people, I'm going to make a mozza is what they're saying.
Dr Mary Barson (10:37) Absolutely. Commercialisation of the ancient religion definitely works in their favours, yes. A bit harder and a bit deeper though, what if your vulnerability is emotional eating because of all of the emotions that get stirred up, whether that's stress from having to deal with people you don't want to or loneliness from not having people to deal with. At Christmas, it creates all of these societal and social expectations that, you know, we get with loved ones, that, you know, we hang out with our friends. But that's not always easy for people. And that could definitely lead us into the Christmas shortbread to try and mitigate those unpleasant feelings.
Dr Lucy Burns (11:18) Yeah. So I think, I mean, emotional eating is the brain's way to make you feel better. And people have heard us say this before, but you can distill it down really basically. The brain has two jobs: to keep you safe and make you feel better. So often, behaviours that we do are centred around those. And people kind of sometimes don't always understand how their brain is working with safety because you're thinking, oh, well, you know, it's just stopping me from running out in front of a truck. Yes, it is doing that. But it's also stopping you with fear of judgement, fear of failure, all the fear-based things that we've spoken about. But the emotional eating, it won't work just to stop it. But we can't just say to our brain, well, I'm not doing that anymore, because then it goes, well, what are we doing instead? And you go, oh, nothing. Well, that just—it's trying to make you feel better. So it is going to find something for you to do. So you have to have a little plan around that. And I guess this is where the Momentum, our members, we spend a lot of time teaching different tools, alternate tools to feeling better that aren't food or alcohol.
Dr Mary Barson (12:27) Yes, and in Momentum in December, that's our monthly focus: about your tools, all the tools that you have got to help yourself, to help yourself in the moment when, like we call them, your hot tools—you just feel overwhelmed by the craving, by the negative feeling—what can you do to help yourself immediately, right then and there, as well as your cool tools: just things that you can do that you can pull out when you need to that are just generally going to help the background mood feel better, going to help your health in the background. And we need both. We need hot tools and cool tools. And it is possible to regulate your emotions without reaching for food. And for most of us, it's going to be far more helpful.
Dr Lucy Burns (13:10) Yes, absolutely. I think learning those skills is invaluable. It really is. And some people get worried because they go, oh, I've learnt this skill but I'm still doing it. But again, our brains love seeing the negative. Forget that they've maybe reduced their emotional eating by 95%. Like honestly, how good is that? You think, wow. But, of course, the brain will focus on the 5% of the time they're still doing it. But 95% of the time, you're using a different tool, you know, whether it's tapping, whether it's deep breathing, whether it's walking, whether it's talking with a friend, whether it's hypnosis, whether it's doing meditation, whether it's journaling, refocusing, cognitive reframing. Like, there's so many of them, and they are skills. It's not just luck.
Dr Mary Barson (13:59) Yes, that's right. It's skills that you can obtain. And once you've got them there in your metaphorical toolbox, you can use them so that you can navigate Christmas whilst just living life in line with your goals and living life in line with your values.
Dr Lucy Burns (14:16) Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest tips for me really around Christmas food, particularly processed Christmas food, has been the absolute contempt that I hold ultra-processed food companies in. I've cultivated that contempt. That hasn't just arrived. You know, I read about it. I focus on. Again, it's not about the food itself or the people that eat the food. It is the companies that make it. They don't just make ultra-processed food and pop it on the supermarket shelf. They have a marketing juggernaut behind it. So they make the drug and then deal the drug and make sure that you get hooked. And I think that that is wicked. So that process has helped me a lot because it means that do I ever eat processed food? Yeah, of course I do. I still do every now and then. But what it is, again, it's 95% of what I eat isn't processed food. And so it is so helpful to cultivate mindsets that help you do the thing that you want to do.
Dr Mary Barson (15:24) That's it. I think what you have described there could be described as you've cultivated a joy of missing out. You know, we have a fear of missing out, and Christmas can create FOMO in so many respects, and especially if we are wanting to nourish our bodies well. We're not wanting to overdo the sugar. We're not wanting to overdo the processed foods. Then FOMO can really, it can be quite rampant. And it's a fear. Like, we feel it in our amygdala. We feel it in our bodies. It's a real feeling. But a good way to counteract that FOMO is to cultivate your JOMO, which is your joy of missing out. You can see that sugary processed, hyper-processed food for what it is. I know it's actually brilliant that I'm not eating these. I'm going to go and enjoy some delicious prawns instead or whatever it is that you want to eat, which I think leads us to another point, that it is totally possible to create delicious Christmas meals that are low-carb real food, even delicious Christmas desserts with, you know, the right kind of alternate sweeteners. It's actually very, very doable.
Dr Lucy Burns (16:32) Yeah, absolutely. And the thing, you don't have to restrict and do nothing. Like, you don't have to be over there going, oh, well, I'm just going to have, you know, my prawns, which are, of course, amazing. And I'm not going to have any sweet stuff. You can. It's really about alternatives and making it smarter and recognising that, I mean, my favourite Christmas dessert that's an alternate one is pavlova. Like, pavlova is so easy to make without sugar, with just a low-carb sweetener. And now that Allulose is available in Australia, I think that will be great. Now I could say to myself, oh, good, Allulose is here. I'm going to eat that all the time. That's not going to be helpful, but it means that on occasions when there is desserts available or everyone's participating in desserts, you can choose one that is going to be helpful to you. Or you cannot because you're the boss of you. Like, that's the other thing. No one actually cares what you eat. No one.
Dr Mary Barson (17:33) Eating is not a team sport. That's right. No. I love me a low-carb cheesecake. Yes. Fabulous, easy, amazing. I admit it. I am not a very good baker. I have limited baking skills, but I can make an excellent cheesecake because it's really easy.
Dr Lucy Burns (17:50) Yes. I remember somebody, I think it was Barb actually from Momentum, she was a guest on our podcast last year or something, had a family function coming up and she put a photo of her dessert table on there, which was all of these low-carb real food desserts and included cheesecake. I think there was an eaten mess style thing with, yeah, again, really helpful for those of us who aren't very aesthetically organised and make perfect-looking desserts.
If you bugger it up, you can just mush it all into a plate and call it a mess, yay. Love that. Yeah. But you can, you can make low-carb brownies. There's some things that are really probably too hard. Most Christmas cakes have a lot of dried fruit in it. Dried fruit is largely high carb. Now, I think the thing that is helpful for our brain, if you have one piece of Christmas cake, that's no big deal. Honestly, it's not. No big deal, nothing, you know, you're not suddenly going to have a heart attack or develop diabetes from one piece of Christmas cake. If you have Christmas cake every day for six weeks, then there will be a consequence to that, which is likely to be some weight gain, some increased insulin. And so this is really where having the knowledge around what food you're eating and being really mindful of the consequences of what you do is key. Not to make this whole episode about me, although I often like to talk about my experiences, my holidays recently. As I said, I went away with my gorgeous friends. We had alcohol every day. The consequence to that was I actually came home. I was actually really keen to get home and just sort of reset because my sleep was a bit off. Yeah, as I mentioned, I'd gained a couple of kilos. I was just feeling a bit blah, and so it's good to reset. And so every single thing that you do has a consequence some way or another. It might be a good consequence or an unhelpful consequence. What I know to be true is that feeling guilty is never helpful.
Dr Mary Barson (19:53) No, it's not a constructive emotion. It's natural and normal, but it's not constructive. And reframing guilt is going to be extremely helpful. A really important point: that you are the boss of you and you can choose to do whatever you want, but choosing what you do with intention is helpful. That turns one or two pieces of Christmas cake. It keeps it at one or two rather than it being six weeks. And setting your intentions is a really sensible strategy, and also if you can get some accountability. You have to be careful here. You have to pick your right people. But some sort of accountability, some way, could help you keep front and centre what your intentions are over the Christmas period. You can choose to do whatever you want, but it's good to get some support so that you can actually do what it is that you choose to do. And there are lots of ways you could do that. We love accountability, and that is something that we provide in our Momentum Inner Circle. And in our Momentum Inner Circle, we've got a special product that we give out for free every December, which we call our Santa's Little Helper program. Lucy, tell us about Santa's Little Helper.
Dr Lucy Burns (21:07) I love the way you describe it. So Santa's Little Helper is like a digital advent calendar. So every day into your inbox, you get a little surprise And, you know, humans do love surprises. These are surprises. You don't know what's coming. Sometimes it might be a little recipe. Sometimes it might be a low-carb cocktail. Sometimes it might be a meditation. Sometimes it might be a little just Christmas poem. There's lots of things that come in here to keep your brain focused on doing the thing that is helpful without feeling restricted and miserable. So it's bringing a little bit of joy into Christmas and a little bit of fun into lifestyle techniques because, you know, let's face it, we know that lifestyle, doing the right thing all the time, can feel arduous and boring at Christmas, which is all about fun and excitement and bonbons. And here's just a little way to add a bonbon into your day.
Dr Mary Barson (22:00) Yeah, I love that. Yes. So beautiful people. If you want to know more about our Momentum Inner Circle, it is a beautiful, supportive group of women all helping each other get well, stay well, achieve our health goals. And you can learn more by going to rlmedicine.com/momentum, and we'll put the link in the show notes to learn more. And if you join before December, you get Santa's Little Helper for free, our beautiful Christmas support program. Just drop it into your inbox every day throughout December, all the way through to New Year, to make it just staying on track through Christmas can be fun and doable and easy with the right help, the right support.
Dr Lucy Burns (22:43) Yeah, absolutely. And I know our brains sometimes get tempted to go, oh, I'll just deal with this all in New Year, which is why everyone has their New Year's resolutions and loves a clean slate. But it is a little bit like the garage analogy that we've both spoken about, which is where, you know, you've decided you're going to clean out your garage, but just before you clean it out, you're going to go around to all the neighbours and get all their old crap and stick it in your garage so that you can clean it out January the 1st. So keep your garage. Let's do a low-carb garage clean. Yeah, you know, so that you don't have to start New Year. I mean, you don't have to start. You can start whenever you want. In fact, you can start right this second. But you're not waiting to New Year, and in the meantime, while you're waiting, you're gathering more and more, you know, more and more fat, if you like, if we want to be really blunt, but more and more neural pathways that aren't going to help you, which is the other thing we do when we're not focused on our mindset. We just start gathering tools that are unhelpful, and then we have to unlearn those tools as well. That's right.
Dr Mary Barson (21:51) Change your brain for the better, and you can do that with, yeah, new thoughts, new skills. Absolutely. Hot tools, cold tools. That's right.
Dr Lucy Burns (24:00) All right, lovely friends. We will be back next week with another episode of the Real Health and Weight Loss podcast. If you feel kindly, we would love a review if you happen to feel like that on Apple or Spotify. You just go to their platform and scroll on down somewhere, and it will tell you what to do. But it is really helpful for us because it does put the podcast front and centre. And, you know, five years on, we're very, very proud of our reviews. So please, we would love one from you too.
Dr Mary Barson (24:30) Thank you. Bye, guys. See you.
Dr Lucy Burns (24:34) The information shared on the Real Health and Weight Loss Podcast, including show notes and links, provides general information only. It is not a substitute, nor is it intended to provide individualised medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, nor can it be construed as such. Please consult your doctor for any medical concerns.
