Turkey Day is One Week Away! Take My Four-Step THANKSGIVING PLEDGE and Commit to Sensible Eating During The Year’s Biggest Food Holiday

One week to Thanksgiving! This is my 9th year taking my Thanksgiving Pledge, which allows me to enjoy whatever I want on Thanksgiving, without feeling terrible the next day or completely abandoning my healthy living efforts. I encourage you to take the pledge, too!

Thanksgiving is practically synonymous with overeating, but it doesn’t have to be. I work way too hard on my weight loss maintenance (160 pounds lost and kept off since 2010) to abandon it all in a turkey and gravy free-for-all.

So I created my Thanksgiving Pledge. It’s my way to get through Thanksgiving, enjoy everything I want, not feel guilty, and not open the floodgates for a month-long binge of poor choices. 

I created the pledge in 2010, and I’ve taken it every year since (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. It really works!

Here’s the low-down: You pledge to follow four rules on Thanksgiving Day. That’s it. Just four. Here are the rules, with my notes in italics:

Rule #1: I will exercise on Thanksgiving Day. (Go for a walk, a bike ride, do an exercise DVD, play football with the family, rake leaves, ANYTHING. I run a 5K Turkey Trot.)

Rule #2: I will photograph everything I eat during Thanksgiving dinner. (I’ll share my photos on this blog, but I encourage everyone to do this, whether you blog or not. It’s about accountability. Taking a photo creates a record of your choices. You can’t ignore, deny, or forget about the food you’ve eaten when there’s a record, nor can you sneak food, because you gotta take that photo!)

Rule #3: I will not get seconds. I will indulge in a reasonable portion of anything I want, and I will enjoy it, but I will not go back for more. This includes dessert.

Rule #4: I will not graze or pick at food as it is prepared, emerges from the oven, or gets transferred to serving platters or leftover containers. I must place all food that I intend to eat on a plate, and eat it at the table.

Here are some additional tips, because some of these rules aren’t easy.

• Get your exercise over with in the morning. Schedule it into your day if you have to. It will be harder to do once family and friends arrive, or you arrive somewhere else, and you won’t want to do it after dinner, that’s for sure!
• Rule #4 can be the hardest, because Thanksgiving dinner takes hours and hours to prepare. So chew gum if you have to, or pop a breath mint. Keep a bag of baby carrots nearby, so if you’re feeling peckish, you can munch on something healthy.
• If you break a rule, don’t sweat it – just get back on track. I’ve broken a rule or two in minor ways, and I don’t beat myself up. The main idea is that this pledge provides a strategy, and I need that, because otherwise, it can be a free-for-all for my mouth and my fork, and I want to enjoy the holiday – and the long weekend that follows – without regret.

I hope you take the pledge – and drop a line in the comments section if you modify it to suit your situation… your modification may help others!

I’ll share my Thanksgiving photos after the big day. Let me know how it goes for you!

Keep it up, David!

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