How To Survive Thanksgiving On A Diet

Thanksgiving is around the corner and if you are on a diet, you know this will be a tough test. Here is what you can do to enjoy Thanksgiving and still leave your weight loss goals intact.

Enjoy Yourself!

The most important tip right at the beginning: Enjoy Thanksgiving, because it is a unique day and just one day out of 365 in a year.

Even if you go all out during Thanksgiving, you still have the other 364 to follow your diet thoroughly. If you deprive yourself too deeply, you may lose interest in losing weight, and that can spell a worse outcome than one single day of mindless feasting.

Thanksgiving is a great day to enjoy being with your family

Psychological And Physiological Tricks

But still, you may feel that your mindset of being on a diet gets out sync if you go all out during Thanksgiving. Let’s look at  a couple of psychological and physiological tricks that can keep things at bay:

• Don’t go to Thanksgiving dinner starving and instead fill yourself up with some low cal foods like vegetables before. Everybody probably knows how appetizing food looks at the supermarket when you go shopping hungry. The same principle applies here.
• Before the big feast commences, have two or three glasses of water. Water carries zero calories and nicely fills up your stomach before you ever put a fork in your mouth.
• Pick a smaller plate, because visually a smaller plate needs less food on it to look full than a bigger one. In a study, people choosing smaller plates subsequently ate less food.
• Eat slowly, because no matter how much you have eaten, it takes about 20 minutes for your brain to send out a signal that enough food has been consumed.
• Wear tighter clothing, as a snugly fitting jeans will pinch your waist line much sooner than comfy sports attire. When you feel that pinch, you get a very strong reminder to ease back on eating.
• Eat a little bit of everything, so you don’t get the feeling that you couldn’t fully participate in the meal.
• Make your main stay the foods unique to Thanksgiving. The bird stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are truly special to this day, while mashed potatoes and turkey practically are everyday items.

If You Lost It

So what if you got carried away and practically cleared the entire bird yourself? And took care of the pumpkin pie before Aunt Trudy even got a single piece?

Again: Rest assured that it is simply impossible to wreak total havoc on a diet you followed for weeks by what you eat during a single day. If your weekly weight loss so far was 2 lbs, then even if you managed to eat the highly unlikely amount of 7,000 kcal during Thanksgiving day, your setback is less than one week, when we substract the calories you’d have normally eaten (1 lb weight loss equals about 3,500 kcal).

Pictures courtesy of “Calgary Reviews” and Monik Markus.