Day 74 Thanksgiving Day My Way

Day 74

Thanksgiving Day My Way

The most challenging part of today was keeping my hands out of the food as I cooked. It wasn't until I sampled my stuffing that I remembered the Trident, I immediately grabbed a piece of gum, and after that I was fine. You can't nibble if you're chewing gum! Instead of carving the turkey at the table, I always de-bone the entire turkey first, then arrange the meat on a platter, pouring the turkey broth over for added flavor and moisture. I de-boned two turkeys and didn't sneak one bite. Normally Irene and I share in the cooking duties, but this time she had worked all night long and needed to sleep for at least a couple of hours before dinner. So I didn't have Irene over my shoulder monitoring me for potential “nibbling violations”, I really had to police myself and of course the Trident helped tremendously.

In all my years of enjoying Thanksgiving I never bothered to check the calorie count in my all-time favorite holiday desert. Pecan pie with a dollop of Cool Whip is so good, but after today I'll never look at pecan pie the same. I knew it was expensive calorie wise but I didn't expect it to be over the top loaded. One 1/8 piece had a calorie count of 470! The pumpkin was much easier to take, coming in at 270 for a 1/6 (bigger) piece. I modified my pie consumption plan. I had a 1/16th piece of pecan and i cut the pumpkin pie into eight pieces instead of the recommended six. A piece of pumpkin pie then became a very manageable 202.5 calories. I'm telling ya, I love me some pee-can pie, but I don't love it that much! 470 for an eighth of the pie? That's crazy calories. Forget that! I enjoyed my sliver of pecan pie very slowly because I wasn't having another, not today. Absent from our holiday meal was egg nog. If I have anything to say about it, we'll skip the egg nog on Christmas too. An eight ounce serving of egg nog has 375 calories. Those little 16 ounce individual bottles of egg nog at your local convenience store: 750. And that quart of egg nog will set you back 1,500 calories. A half-gallon? 3000. I made sure to have a 140 calorie egg nog ice cream sandwich before I finished off my calorie allotment tonight, that satisfies my egg nog craving very nicely without blowing several hundred calories. My sister in law made the most wonderful sugar free apple pie. After quizzing her on the calories and the ingredients, we looked at some ingredient labels and discovered such a wonderful thing. A piece came in at a really low 100 calories. “Give me two!”, I exclaimed. So in case you're keeping score, that's four pieces of pie today. I honestly could have kept with the everyday plan of 1,500 calories, but in the name of “but it's Thanksgiving!”, i stuck with the original plan of adding 1,000 calories, for a total of 2,500. I've posted my Thanksgiving food diary in a seperate blog titled Day 74 Bonus Feature-The Food Diary. As you can see it's fairly complete. I had chocolate, three kinds of pie, a cookie, cheese, crackers, summer sausage, ice cream, and the traditional late night leftover turkey sandwich on white with that tangy zip of Miracle Whip all in the same day. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting with everyone today. More so than I ever have in the past. Thanksgivings past, I was always too busy eating to really focus on anything but my next plate. It was nice to stay in control on this holiday. If you're a regular reader of this blog you have read about how much Thanksgiving has tripped me up on some very deep runs of weight loss. It didn't this time because instead of just saying “ah the heck with it, eat whatever today”, I was ready with a plan! And it worked to perfection!

Instead of heading straight for the sofa or recliner for a little after dinner snooze, we hit the trail! Our schedule ended up not meshing with Candi's schedule and Irene got sick, so heading out to do the 1st Annual Anderson Family Thanksgiving Day 5K was Amber, KL, Courtney, Uncle Keith, and me. I had forgotten how many inclines Boomer Lake trail had! It was a very challenging walk. I was surprised at how many people had the same idea. It wasn't packed by any stretch, but we encountered at least a dozen other Thanksgiving Day exercisers out there. I was so happy to accomplish the 5K today. I really needed that workout to counter any bad feelings I might endure for increasing my holiday calorie allotment.

Tomorrow it's back to the regular routine, except of course I plan on sleeping until at least 10am. No show for me in the morning, and good thing, because it's late my friend! I hope you too had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I gave special thanks today for all the incredible support I receive everyday through my friends, family, and daily readers of this blog. Traffic to my blogspot version of this blog has really picked up lately too. My network of support has increased significantly because of this blog. Thank you for reading, good night and...

Good Choices,
Sean