Thanksgiving is a time to gather with friends and family... and stuff yourself silly with all kinds of delicious foods. In this age of running all the holidays together, it's also an unofficial kickoff to the holiday season of cookie swaps, office lunches, holiday parties, families' meals... all served up with tempting treats that can be hard to resist.
Then you might end up feeling way too full and questioning your decisions.
Bryn Beeder is a registered dietitian and visiting instructor of Kinesiology, Nutrition and Health at Miami University. She says it's important to note that overeating is a universal experience, and your body knows what to do with all the extra food.
How not to overeat
She does have tips for how to avoid overeating.
"If I had to kind of boil it down to my top two tips, it would be: slow down and stay upright," she tells WVXU.
Eating slowly will allow your body more time to send you those cues that let you know you're starting to feel full.
Larger meals, like those often found on the table this time of year, can involve more of all the macronutrients — carbohydrates, proteins and fats — that take time for your digestive system to break down. Larger quantities of food need more time to digest and move more slowly along your GI tract.
"A couple practical ways of slowing down during a meal would be putting down your fork and knife in between bites, looking around at the company that you're with, taking sips of water, finishing your story that you're telling your grandma, your sister, your brother, before you take the next bite," she recommends.
After you're finished eating, avoid taking a nap and stay upright to help gravity work with your body.
"It's really tempting to lay down right after a big meal because you can start to feel really tired and sluggish. This is a very normal thing. This is just your body redirecting a little extra energy to the digestive tract helping it for the workload ahead," Beeder says. "Rather than laying down, kicking up your feet and watching football, maybe stay upright and root for the team, on your on your feet."
She also recommends taking a gentle 10-to-15-minute walk.
"Light movement can really be useful in preventing potential heartburn, which is that nasty backflow of stomach acid that really burns the esophagus makes you have a sour taste in your mouth and just generally feel pretty uncomfortable."
In short, get the blood flowing a little to help move all those macronutrients along the digestion system.
She also recommends avoiding carbonated or bubbly beverages as they can make you feel bloated or cause stomach discomfort.
Don't judge your plate
Food doesn't have a moral value, Beeder points out. She encourages people not to focus on the idea of foods being good and bad.
"This comes up a lot at the holidays, and you'll hear it in when people say, 'I was good all morning so that I can indulge now.' Those types of sentences are really common, and it just continues to place emphasis on us being good or bad. I want to redirect it and say you are not good or bad just because you ate a slice of pie at Thanksgiving."
She says she wants people to stop labeling or focusing on what eating a certain food may be "costing" them. Instead, she encourages thinking about what a food is adding to your holiday traditions. For example, think about who you're enjoying food with, and how it's making you feel emotional in a positive way.
"A lot of times our food is really interconnected with core memories, a lot of the pathways by which we process and take in the smells of food and the sight of food are some of the same pathways where we form our core and long-term memories. For that reason, food and memory is really connected. That's why you can be transported by the whiff of a pie or a turkey or mashed potatoes. You can transport yourself back to the most beautiful memory of being at grandma and grandpa's house growing up and indulging in Thanksgiving," she says.
Little ears are listening
Another important reason not to talk about your eating habits as being good or bad is because you could be passing those ideas on to younger generations.
"There is a lot of research that talks about the how parents message foods to their kids, and how impactful that is on how they perceive food, but also how they perceive their body image," she notes. "A preoccupation of parents on a child's weight — regardless of whether it's being said — it'll typically impact how the parents are delivering food or withholding food from kids. That really can impact how they believe their body to be either good or bad in their eyes, and then how they will try to withhold food to please others or please themselves and how they look."
You're also internalizing them even deeper for yourself.
"The things that we speak to ourselves over and over are the messages that we're going to attach to those foods, whether it's something that you cognitively are believing and processing in the moment, or just how it impacts the actions that you take and the foods that you choose," she says.
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