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10 Thanksgiving Eating Tips





10 Thanksgiving Eating Tips

Thanksgiving Eating Tips

Thanksgiving and Christmas are my favorite eating days of the year, with Thanksgiving eating being the bigger one I think. Thanksgiving dinner is now only a couple of days away in Canada and the Turkeys and Hams have already been bought and are waiting to be eaten. This thanksgiving maybe you can be more careful about your eating and well being and I hope that looking at these tip will keep you feeling better the day after as you get to go on your post Thanksgiving day shopping spree.

Thanksgiving Eating Tips

1. Decide what you are going to eat each day in the morning before you start. Think about 3 meals and 3 snacks. No one says you can’t have a snack, then dinner a while later and then desert a while after that.

2. Get some exercise right after you get out of bed. This will help you focus on your fitness and make you aware of how your body feels that day.

3. Drink lots of water throughout Thanksgiving day starting in the morning. We all know how important it is to drink water and to stay hydrated. Also the Water will keep your body from feeling hungry throughout the day and let you feel a little fuller.

4. Eat a small breakfast to set up a slow eating day. Maybe some All Bran or something else filling would be good.

5. Again you should have a fairly small lunch. Thanksgiving eating may be a big eating day but you still need to keep eating a few meals to keep your metabolism up and to make sure that you are not too hungry when dinner comes around.

6. Try to have some kind of snack a couple hours before dinner and then a walk. This is your first real chance to make a difference in your eating for the day that may normally be bad. Try making something interesting and out of season. I love fruit salad so you could always make a fruit salad and have it over low fat frozen yogurt.

7. Eat everything at dinner but only small portions of each food. For Thanksgiving eating it is not the amount of food that matters but the trying of all of the foods at the table. Remember you can have leftovers for days in small servings as well.

8. Go for another walk if the weather is good. The worst thing to me is that after having a great Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner there is no energy outlet so you end up just sitting and almost falling asleep from the tryptophan in the turkey (actually all those carbs and fat…) and then you don’t want to get up at all. Why not instead take a little walk around the neighborhood?

9. Dessert. If at all possible try to make a dessert yourself as then you can be sure how good or bad it is for you. My wife is always the designated dessert person for family get togethers as she makes Thanksgiving eating stuff that is not quite as bad for you but always different and always really great tasting. One of the favorites these days is angel food cake with strawberries and Cool Whip

10. Try to keep things interesting for the evening by having an interactive game to play or have the kids put on a play. What you want to do after dinner and dessert is keep away from the regular habit of snacking even though you are full.

Thanksgiving Eating to Remember

Thanksgiving is a day that people always associate with a lot of Thanksgiving eating food and what i have in mind is not to have you starve yourself on thanksgiving but instead just make sure that you have a great day and eat some healthy snacks to keep yourself from eating too much heavy food and to feel a bit better about yourself the next day.


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How to Stop Emotional Eating




Emotional eating is something that we can all get hit by and is something that we need to understand the triggers of and how to deal with. I tend to be a pretty emotional guy but I never seem to fall into the trap of emotional eating which can involve people eating large amounts of food to comfort themselves and get rid of the bad or tough feelings and situations that we can run into in everyday life.

The trouble is that often emotional eating can be caused by bad feelings about our weight and self image and we sabotage ourselves using food as a short term fix.

How Does Emotional Eating Start?

There are really five kinds of situations where we can get triggered emotionally and that may lead to emotional eating. (Thanks to medicinenet for these). Knowing the causes can really help us learn how to stop emotional eating.

Social – Eating when around other people. For example, excessive eating can result from being encouraged by others to eat; eating to fit in; arguing; or feelings of inadequacy around other people.

Emotional – Eating in response to boredom, stress, fatigue, tension, depression, anger, anxiety or loneliness as a way to “fill the void.”

Situational – Eating because the opportunity is there. For example, at a restaurant, seeing an advertisement for a particular food, passing by a bakery. Eating may also be associated with certain activities such as watching TV, going to the movies or a sporting event, etc.

Thoughts – Eating as a result of negative self-worth or making excuses for eating. For example, scolding oneself for looks or a lack of will power.

Physiological – Eating in response to physical cues. For example, increased hunger due to skipping meals or eating to cure headaches or other pain.

And what do many people do? Grab a tub of ice cream or cookies or other comfort food to try to make feeling bad feel better. If you are not in the situation this can seem crazy but in the situation and doing this emotional eating will feel really natural. Trying to fill a void with the great feelings of yummy food.

Trouble is yummy food can not fix a problem.

How to Stop Emotional Eating

How to Stop Emotional Eating

How to stop emotional eating

OK, now that we know the why it is much easier to figure out the how to stop emotional eating. So the best and really only thing that you can do is to distract yourself. I have found myself that there is no talking yourself or reasoning yourself out of an emotional problem or issue so a good distraction until your emotions go away and you can reason things is much better. Here are a few things you can do:

Watch some light TV – Get yourself out of the thought pattern that is causing your emotional distress

Talk to a friend about their problems – problem solving not your stuff but someone elses will get your mind fixing something else

Go and exercise – This can be a crutch in itself but really if you can concentrate on the issue of the exercise hopefully it switches the emotion to another issue

You can see from above that these are just a few things that you can do, there are a multitude more but the real idea is to get away from what is causing you pain right now. and then a few minutes or hours later you can revisit the problem in a detached way and find real solutions to your problems.

We all get too close to our own issues emotionally and blow them up so that they are insurmountable. By breaking away from our emotional explosions we can get some distance and avoid the emotional eating that can be so dangerous to our psyche and our eating goals.

How to stop emotional eating all comes down not to controlling your emotions but getting a distance from them until you can deal with the underlying problem.


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