The holidays often bring joy but can also add stress, especially if you’re prone to people-pleasing. Balancing self-care with a hectic holiday schedule will leave you feeling more at ease and less stressed, and that is so helpful if you’re working toward health and weight loss goals. So how should you make room for self-care during this often-busy time of year and not deplete yourself with people pleasing? Let’s look at how to choose self-care without depleting yourself with people pleasing this holiday season. We bring you excerpts from a chapter on people pleasing in my new book, Happy Life at a Healthy Weight: Creating a Shame Free Healthy Relationship with Food. Real-Life Success: Joanne’s Journey to Weight Loss and Self-Care Joanne was a nurse who had worked for the same organization for years. She had a habit of putting her clients and co-workers first. While other staff took their holiday leave and vacations freely, she worked extra hours and on weekends, which left little room for personal life. Joanne called me at a time when she was getting ready for surgery and needed to lose weight to make the recovery from surgery easier. We talked about how she could make room for herself in her life, especially at work. Joanne decided to begin setting boundaries and saying no to requests that robbed her of time for self-care. She began to reclaim her weekends and vacation days. She lost a significant amount of weight—thirty-eight pounds—before surgery and recovered well. Dr. Robert Kushner, an expert on obesity and creator of Dr. Robert Kushner’s Personality Type Diet, developed seven personality types and coping patterns, including people pleasing that can get in the way of weight loss. According to Kushner’s Coping Lifestyle Patterns Mini-Quiz, a people pleaser is defined as someone who answers yes to this statement: “You keep saying yes to everyone else, which keeps your own needs at the bottom of your ‘to do’ list.” How People-Pleasing Impacts Weight Loss During the Holidays 
How does people-pleasing apply to your weight loss journey and what can you do about it? A big clue that people-pleasing interferes with your weight loss is to ask yourself whether you are having a difficult time making self-care a priority. If you’re taking care of everyone and everything else other than your own self-care and weight loss action goals, it is a sign that your primary focus is on winning approval from others. A preoccupation with people-pleasing can rob you of taking care of yourself, your health, and your well-being. Actionable Tips to Overcome People-Pleasing for Better Health
- Reflection Questions:
What about you? Here’s your opportunity to reflect for a few moments on how people-pleasing applies to you.
- How does people-pleasing affect my self-care and weight loss intentions? How does it hold me back?
- When do I have a hard time saying no?
- What am I willing to do to stop wasting time and energy on what other people think?
- Life Hack:
Strengthen your ‘no muscle’ today by saying no to one request that interferes with your self-care or weight loss goals.
- How to get started now?
Start by taking my interactive quiz: Top Inner Roadblocks to Weight Loss Success: https://www.sweetlifewellness.com/roadblock-quiz/ Click here for another of our blog articles about how to eat mindfully at holiday gatherings for better self-care. Wishing you Happy Holidays this season! With love and joy, Kay 
Kay Loughrey, MPH, RDN, LDN Transformational Speaker, Breakthrough Coach, Nutritionist-Dietitian
Thank you for reading this blog post. Join the Sweet Life Newsletter to stay up to date on blog posts, events, and other ways to live your best sweet life.