ALT-4 Calorie Saving Tips for Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving means many things to people—God, family, and football among them—but what’s the very first thing that pops into most people’s minds in response to the word “Thanksgiving”? Almost certainly turkey, with lots of other food-related thoughts likely following close on its heels. (Do turkeys have heels?)
It’s no wonder that Thanksgiving is death to so many diets. Even people who normally have a decent amount of self-discipline routinely go off the deep end when confronted with a Thanksgiving feast.
So if you’re trying to watch your calories, what do you do when faced with Thanksgiving? Surrender?
Not necessarily. Here are some tips that might help you enjoy Thanksgiving while still at least mitigating the damage it does to your diet:
1. Don’t ruin the holiday.
Let’s put this one up front. However important your diet is to you, don’t let it crowd out the other things that you value about Thanksgiving. Don’t torture yourself by turning down your favorite foods. Don’t make yourself miserable with guilt just because you had a bite of candied yams. Don’t drive other people nuts by pressuring them to change their recipes and change what they serve to lessen your temptation. Don’t turn down Thanksgiving invitations because you’re scared you’ll overeat.
Enjoy the holiday. Enjoy the time with family and friends. And yes, enjoy the food.
2. Don’t take an “anything goes” attitude because Thanksgiving is an exceptional day.
Don’t misunderstand tip number one to mean you somehow shouldn’t be conscious of what you eat, shouldn’t care about its implications for your diet. It’s precisely the “Oh what I eat today doesn’t count; it’s a holiday!” attitude that gets you in trouble.
To say don’t let your diet concerns override everything else that’s important about the holiday doesn’t mean to ignore them entirely. The goal is to find a balance, to exhibit some self-discipline and make wise decisions that reduce your caloric intake without taking the fun out of Thanksgiving.
3. Offset the Thanksgiving damage.
Many people justify overdoing it on Thanksgiving by assuring themselves that they’ll get right back on their diet the next day, and hit the gym more than ever in the upcoming days and weeks.
Well, that’s better than nothing. If you can partly make up for the excesses of Thanksgiving with a little extra discipline later, that helps. But two things would be better.
One of course would be to not completely let yourself go on Thanksgiving to begin with. But beyond that, how about banking some of that extra discipline ahead of time instead of resolving to change your ways starting Friday morning?
Let’s say you know yourself well enough to know you’re going to go off your diet for Thanksgiving (hopefully moderately and not to an extreme). In that case, if for instance you’re on a diet where you consume an average of 1,800 calories a day, change that to 1,700 or 1,750 for a certain amount of time leading up to Thanksgiving. Or if you normally are allowed an average of one (real, not sugar free) dessert a week on your diet, make that one every two weeks or one every three weeks in the pre-Thanksgiving period. Or throughout November, do 125% or 150% of the amount of exercise you normally would do.
It’s fine to also do some “catching up” after the holiday, but it’s better to get ahead of the game beforehand.
4. Cut some corners with your recipes.
Typical recipes aren’t composed with dieters in mind, and often contain more sugar and fat than is necessary. There are plenty of dishes that if you used only 75% of the butter, oil, sugar, etc. that the recipe called for, and you conducted blind taste tests, people wouldn’t even know.
Look for opportunities to make substitutions where you and your family wouldn’t notice a loss of flavor, like using fat free chicken broth in the gravy and to baste the turkey, or fat free sour cream in the potatoes, or Splenda or other sugar substitute in the pie.
5. Don’t starve yourself before the main meal.
Ironically, consuming some calories early in the day might decrease the total amount of calories you consume on the day as a whole.
If you are impatient and famished when dinner is finally served, you’re a lot more likely to overeat. Whereas if you had a light, sensible breakfast in the morning, and a healthy snack later, you’ll still have a decent appetite when the turkey comes out of the oven, but not to an extreme.
6. Make sure there are plenty of healthy, low calorie alternatives among the holiday dishes.
You don’t have to sit there and eat a bowl of bean sprouts while everyone else is digging into the stuffing and mashed potatoes, but if you’re consuming a fair amount of salad, veggie snacks, fruit salad, plain white turkey meat without gravy, etc., then that limits how much of the “bad” dishes you can eat. Even if you gave yourself permission to eat as much of the fattening foods as you please, there’s only so much room left in your stomach, given all the lettuce and healthy stuff you’ve already swallowed.
7. Highlight the unique foods.
If there are ten high calorie foods you really like on display, but seven of them are foods that are available to you fairly often, enjoy the other three and skip or de-emphasize the seven.
Which are the foods you’ll likely only have once or twice a year? Stuffing? Cranberry sauce? Pumpkin pie? OK, then loosen up a little when it comes to that stuff, but don’t pile your plate with mashed potatoes and gravy, buttered rolls, and other items you’ll have many other times throughout the year.
8. Eat slowly.
It’s a simple thing, but it actually has an effect. If you eat at a leisurely pace, just enjoying the conversation with your family and friends, you’ll typically end up eating less. When you eat in a rush, in a sense you take your body by surprise and don’t give it a chance to signal you that it’s full and it wants you to stop eating.
9. Use a smaller plate.
One of the things that kills you at Thanksgiving is portion size. A psychological trick to deal with this is to simply use a smaller plate. Even if one plate only holds half as much food as another, our minds tend to treat it as if it’s nearly as big a portion.
10. Remember that beverages matter too.
It’s not just food that has calories. There’s a huge difference between, say, drinking plenty of water with your Thanksgiving dinner, versus consuming a lot of beer and wine, or refilling your soft drink multiple times.
Really you should be able to thoroughly enjoy your Thanksgiving meal and still stick at least reasonably close to your diet. It doesn’t have to be an either/or.
Sources:
Associated Press,“Avoid blowing your diet at Thanksgiving.”MSNBC.
Kathleen M. Zelman,“10 Tips for a Thinner Thanksgiving.”WebMD.
“Some Tips to Get You Through the Thanksgiving Day 'Hall of Food.'”Diet Bites.
