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5 Post-Thanksgiving, Pre-Christmas Pointers

It’s hard to resist the spoils of the holiday season. Heaping amounts of delicious food are available for the taking. If you ate a lot during the Thanksgiving week and are looking to make a turnaround before the second onslaught comes (Christmas, you are just on the horizon) than this article is for you. Follow these five pointers to help trim away those extra calories.

1. Drink a lot of water.

Hydration is ideal if you plan on returning to feeling pre-Thanksgiving again. Rich foods like those during Thanksgiving are often high in sodium. Sodium is an important component of nutrition, but sometimes too much of a good thing turns bad. One way to counteract this is by monitoring your water intake. By increasing your water, you will be less likely to feel hungry throughout your day – and you’ll feel better, overall, too.

2. Consider cutting the sugar.

Many Thanksgiving foods are high in sugar. Take these facts from MyNutritionPal, for example:

Sweet Potato Casserole (1 serving) – 28g sugar

Cranberry Sauce (1 serving) – 23g sugar

Pecan Pie (1 slice) – 25g sugar

Let’s go ahead and assume you ate each of these on Thanksgiving, and perhaps one of each on the days after with the leftovers. Added together this comes out to 76g of sugar. According to Healthline, men should consume a maximum of 37.5 grams of sugar a day; women 25 grams. If you’d like to shed a couple of the extra pounds, stop by cutting out the sugar.

3. Monitor your calorie intake.

On top of the sugar, it’s also easy to consume excessive amounts of calories during the holidays. How couldn’t you? So much delicious food available! If you find the thought of tracking everything you eat a bit daunting, fear not. There are solutions that make it easier. One recommendation is any app/website combo for tracking nutrition. These sites have you create a personal profile and simply log every food you eat. The nutrition facts are automatically calculated based on information from their database.

4. Look at a daily regimen.

One small habit could make a big change. If you’re thinking of ways you could introduce a fitness habit into your life, one way of doing it is by implementing it into your daily routine. According to a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, habits take around 66 days to fully materialize in the brain. If you make your intended behavior a part of your daily routine, the consistency will make it easier to speed up this process.

5. Increase…FATS?

You may see this and wonder, who on earth would recommend increasing fat intake? Surprisingly, fat may not actually be as bad as you’ve heard. The 2016 book The Case Against Sugar hypothesizes that fat got a bad rap in the early 1970s as a result of the lobbying sugar industry, who in turn downplayed sugar’s negative health effects. Some kinds of fats are really good! Fat is important because it keeps you full.

  • If you can, avoid trans fats (desserts, fried foods, etc).
  • Eat saturated fat only sparingly (red meat, whole-milk dairy, coconut oil, bacon).
  • Good fats include monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Examples of monounsaturated fat include olive oil, nuts and avocados. Polyunsaturated include corn oil, sunflower oil, and omega 3-fatty acids like fish. Eat plenty of these.

Have any other post-holiday recovery tips? Share your thoughts below!

 

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