Getting Back on Track: A Guide to Post-Holiday Eating

The morning after Christmas often arrives with more than just wrapping paper to clear away. Whether you carefully managed your portions but still indulged in foods you normally avoid, or found yourself in a full-blown binge that lasted several days, you might be wondering how to return to your usual way of eating without shame, restriction, or another cycle of overconsumption.

Let me start with what matters most: you haven't ruined anything. Your body is remarkably resilient and understanding what's actually happening physiologically can help you move forward with confidence rather than panic.

What happens when you eat carbohydrates again

When you've been eating a low carbohydrate, wholefood diet for some time, your body adapts beautifully. Blood sugar levels stabilise, inflammation decreases, and your brain learns to run efficiently on ketones and steady glucose. Then Christmas pudding happens.

Here's what occurs when you reintroduce significant carbohydrates, particularly the refined variety found in festive treats: your insulin spikes, your blood glucose surges and then crashes, and suddenly you're thinking about food again in a way you haven't for months. This isn't a character flaw. This is biochemistry.

For people with insulin resistance, which includes the majority of adults with mental health conditions, obesity, or metabolic syndrome, carbohydrates trigger a genuine physiological response that drives further consumption. Your brain receives signals that mimic addiction pathways. Dopamine floods your reward centres. Your blood glucose drops below baseline, creating urgent hunger. You genuinely feel like you need more food, even though you've consumed plenty of energy.

The processed food industry understands this perfectly. They've engineered products to maximise what they call "hedonic eating", combining sugar, refined carbohydrates, and specific fats in ratios that override your natural satiety signals. You're not weak. You're human, and you've consumed substances designed to make you want more.

Why you shouldn't restrict now

Your first instinct might be to "make up for it" by eating very little today, or to jump into an aggressive fast, or to eliminate even more foods from your already careful diet. Please don't.

Restriction after a period of overconsumption triggers the exact psychological and physiological mechanisms that perpetuate disordered eating. Your body interprets restriction as scarcity. Your brain becomes hypervigilant to food cues. Your metabolism downregulates. And the next time you encounter tempting food, you're even more likely to lose control because your biology is screaming that resources are unreliable.

This matters particularly if you have a history of disordered eating. The binge-restrict cycle is one of the most difficult patterns to break, and it doesn't matter whether your binge was "planned" for Christmas or felt completely out of control. Adding punishment through restriction only strengthens the neural pathways that maintain the cycle.

What to do instead

So what actually helps? The answer is simultaneously simple and challenging: you return to your normal, nourishing eating pattern as though nothing unusual happened.

This means eating your regular meals at your regular times with your regular portions. Not smaller portions. Not skipped meals. Not "being good" to compensate. Just normal.

Your body knows what to do with this consistency. Within 24 to 48 hours of returning to low carbohydrate eating, your insulin levels will settle. Within three to five days, most people notice their cravings diminish significantly. Within a week, you'll likely feel completely back to baseline.

During this transition period, you might experience some uncomfortable symptoms. Headaches, irritability, fatigue, and strong cravings are common as your body clears the glucose and returns to fat burning. This is temporary, and it's not a sign that you need carbohydrates. It's a sign that your metabolism is shifting back to the state where you function optimally.

Staying well hydrated and ensuring adequate electrolytes, particularly sodium, potassium, and magnesium, can ease these transition symptoms considerably. Some people find that a small amount of MCT oil or exogenous ketones helps bridge the gap, though these aren't necessary.

Dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings

The thoughts that accompany post-indulgence recovery can be harder to manage than the physical symptoms. You might be experiencing shame, disappointment, anxiety about weight regain, or fear that you've lost all your progress.

Let's address the weight concern directly: yes, you've likely gained weight. Most of this is water retention caused by glycogen storage. When you eat carbohydrates after a period of restriction, your muscles and liver rapidly refill their glycogen stores, and each gram of glycogen holds approximately three grams of water. This can mean several kilograms of water weight within 24 hours. It's not fat. It will disappear within days of returning to your usual eating pattern.

As for the shame and disappointment, remember: not all feelings fit the facts. Eating foods you don't normally eat, whether at Christmas or any other time, doesn't mean you’ve done something wrong or make you a failure. It makes you a person who sometimes eats different foods. The guilt serves no protective or motivational function; it only makes the return to healthy eating more difficult.

If you find yourself caught in harsh self-criticism, try speaking to yourself as you would to your best friend or child in the same situation. You would likely acknowledge that they faced a challenging food environment, that they're human, and that the path forward is simply to resume their healthy habits. You deserve the same compassion.

When eating felt out of control

If your Christmas eating felt particularly out of control, or if you have a history of binge eating disorder or other disordered eating, the recovery process requires extra care.

The most important distinction to make is between a planned deviation from your diet, where you decided to eat Christmas pudding and enjoyed it, versus a genuine loss of control where you couldn't stop eating and felt driven by something beyond hunger. If you experienced the latter, this warrants professional support, not just a return to your meal plan.

Binge eating disorder is a serious psychiatric condition that responds well to treatment, particularly when metabolic factors are addressed alongside psychological interventions. The combination of ketogenic nutrition and cognitive behavioural therapy specifically designed for binge eating shows remarkable outcomes. If you think this might apply to you, please reach out to a psychologist like myself with expertise in both eating disorders and metabolic approaches.

Even if your experience doesn't meet the threshold for binge eating disorder, noticing patterns of loss of control around food is important information. Many people find that their relationship with food transforms completely when they address underlying insulin resistance and consistently maintain stable blood glucose. Others need additional psychological strategies to manage emotional eating or food-related anxiety.

Your next steps

Tomorrow morning, or whenever you're reading this, eat breakfast as you normally would. If you don't usually eat breakfast, don't eat breakfast. If you normally have eggs and avocado, have eggs and avocado. The same portions you always have.

Continue through the day with your regular meals. Don't weigh yourself for at least a week; the number will be artificially high and will only distress you. Focus instead on how you feel: your energy levels, mental clarity, mood stability, and sleep quality. These are the true markers of metabolic and mental health.

If cravings feel overwhelming, remember they're temporary and chemically driven. You're not actually hungry in the way your body is hungry when it needs nutrition. You're experiencing the downstream effects of insulin and blood glucose fluctuations. Riding out the craving without acting on it weakens the neural pathway. Giving in strengthens it. Each time you successfully wait out a craving, you're literally rewiring your brain.

Some people find it helpful to have a specific plan for intrusive food thoughts: when a craving appears, acknowledge it, remind yourself it's temporary, drink electrolytes and engage in a brief activity that requires focus. Others prefer to simply observe the sensation without judgment until it passes.

The longer view

Your metabolic health is built over months and years, not determined by a few days of different eating. The consistency of your usual pattern is what creates lasting change, and that consistency includes the ability to return to your baseline after deviations.

In fact, how you handle these moments matters more than whether they happen. Someone who eats differently at Christmas, returns calmly to their usual diet, and continues on is in a far better place than someone who never deviates but lives in constant anxiety about food, or someone who avoids all social eating to maintain perfect adherence.

Metabolic flexibility, the ability to use different fuel sources efficiently, is valuable. Psychological flexibility, the ability to adapt to circumstances without rigid all-or-nothing thinking, is equally important for long-term health and wellbeing.

You already know how to eat in a way that supports your brain, metabolism, and mental health. You've done it before and you can do it again. The path back is simply the path you were already on. No drama, no punishment, no complex protocols. Just the same nourishing foods and regular meals that have served you well.

Your body is ready to return to metabolic efficiency. Trust it, feed it well, and move forward.