Avoid the Festive Flab – and make someone else’s Christmas
Listen up fabulous people of Southampton, the Christmas box is back! Now in its fourth year, your chance to banish un-needed calorific Christmas stodge from your home, by donating it to families never normally able to afford it.
The Salvation Army un-needed Christmas food Amnesty idea came to me four years ago, after
several personal training clients and boot camp attendees expressed how anxious and stressed they were about all the Christmas stodge that ‘appears’ in their homes.
Even if none of the incessant rubbish on offer in the supermarkets’ ‘seasonal’ aisles gets put in their trolleys, toxic ‘treats’ still appear in offices, as gifts from families, at parties…often it can feel like there’s no escaping them!
Then comes the annual perpetual pattern of abandoning all fitness and health efforts for a few weeks in December, resulting in far more work to do come January.
And is restarting a New Year health kick really going to be any easier with darker days, colder weather and post-Christmas blues?!
If this sounds familiar, that’s the other reason for this amnesty. DO NOT GIVE UP – give AWAY!
Every year on Christmas Eve, the sight of the Salvation Army’s food parcels as far as the eye can see, is beyond heart-breaking. And it makes me even angrier, considering how much Christmas stodge corporations make available to us.
Do they care about this country’s obesity epidemic? Do they help us out by making healthy foods as cheap as unhealthy ones? We all know the answers…
Please don’t make yourself another New Year cliché by buying into it. You’ll feel miles better by
- not having stodge in your house and
- knowing what would have once made you feel sluggish and guilty has instead gone to a vulnerable family, as a Christmas treat that they could never normally afford.
Just take a moment to consider what a box of chocolates/ tin of biscuits/something stodgy that normally makes you feel guilty and sluggish would mean to them.
And it’s not just food that you can donate; many of my amazing clients have also cleared out their children’s old toys. There were so many donations last year, I couldn’t actually fit them all in the car so had to make two trips!
The donation box is currently in the foyer of my Park Gate Personal Training studio and will be throughout December. As always, all donations will be delivered by me personally to The Salvation Army on Christmas Eve.
So to donate your un-needed food (even if it’s not Christmassy!) and/or toys, please contact me today to arrange a drop-off time.
On behalf of myself and the Salvation Army, we’d like to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone who has donated so far. I very much look forward to meeting you and wish you a very happy – and now healthy Christmas!