Healthy Thanksgiving Recipes

Everyone wants to have a great and yummy thanksgiving meal. The problem is that the tradition thanksgiving meal has turned into a fattening, face-stuffing, sleep-inducing meal. How often do you look forward to your thanksgiving feast, then over eat because it’s so good and everyone else keeps pushing you to have more? This is not a healthy way to go about eating, even if your excuse is that you only eat like this once a year.

Let’s find out some healthy tips and tricks to stay healthy and keep your weight level the same, during thanksgiving season.

First of all, decide on the amount of food you’re going to eat. If you want to have a have portions the size of your hand, that’s fine, fill up your plate with only what you want to eat. Once you have your plate, do not go for seconds. If other people are asking you why you don’t want more food, you should promptly reply that the food is excellent, but that you’re watching your weight and you don’t want to overindulge.

Another way to keep your waistline in check is to bring your own dish. By bringing your own dish, you don’t necessarily need to stick to traditional thanksgiving food and you have an alternative on what to eat. You should choose to make something that is low in fat, that is full of vegetables and that will help keep you healthy during your stay at the relatives.

Here are some healthy thanksgiving recipes, that make great alternatives to the typical turkey feast:

-A fresh green vegetable salad: everyone loves salad, but it might be hard to convince people that it’s better than turkey. So this is where you need to add the turkey on top of the salad! Try to keep the salad dressings to minimum, and don’t put any nuts, dried fruits or fruits in the salad. Stick to lots of vegetables and include some purple cabage, lettuce of all kinds, carrot slices, green, yellow and red peppers, onions and garlic, tomato slices and more. Remember that thanksgiving is a time to thank nature for our bountiful harvest. So eat lots of harvested foods like vegetables!

-A simple fruit salad: this dish should be served 20 minutes before the main meal. Hopefully you will make enough fruit salad to just get everyone’s saliva going, but not to fill them up. Although if you want to watch your weight, eating more fruit salad and less of the main course is going to be extremely beneficial to you. Everything you eat stays in your body unless you move it through your bowels. Turkey and other high fat foods are hard for your body to process and expel, so eat some fruit to facilitate that process.

My favorite fruit salad recipe is as follows:

Chop 4 oranges

Chop 6 bananas

Chop 1 avocado

Chop 10 strawberries

Add 30 blueberries

Chop 3 peaches

Add 30 cranberries

These numbers are rough estimates and if you want more of a certain fruit and less of another, go for it! Remember that cranberry sauce is one of the staples of thanksgiving… So why not spice things up and have some raw cranberries along with it!

The lesson here is that healthy thanksgiving eating is possible, but you just need to create your own possibilities. So decide which dish you want to bring, make it in the morning before heading out to your family’s place and enjoy responsibly. Weight loss is possible, even during the holidays!