Another year, another Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday of the year. None of the hype and crype of Christmas with the debt-inducing pressure to BUY. Just plain & cheap. Probably not unlike the original Pilgrims – plain and cheap. A gathering of family and friends, a major league spread representing all the food groups, and sometimes even the full spectrum of colors. Cranberry sauce, yams, green beans, turnips, stuffing and gravy, “buh-day-dohs” (as my great aunts from Worcester, MA pronounced “potatoes”) turkey-lurkey, yummers. An edible cornucopia of delectable dishes.

It is also the day where binging, for lack of a better word, is allowed and actually encouraged by society. Pile the poultry on top of mountain of mashed and stuffin’, drown it in the butter/flour/broth concoction known to non-cooks as ‘gravy’ because, well, turkey and dressing can sometimes be dry, and give it some color with a spoonful (or 2) of cranberry sauce. The 6-week-period from pre-Thanksgiving to Christmas is pretty much the only time of year where you can buy 2lbs of butter for $5. Normally, a pound of butter is in the $$3.49-$3.99 range. Not from mid-November to December. Nope, butter is cheap.

In any case, I am not here to discuss the latest circular. I want to discuss how I made it through this Thanksgiving without diving into a full-on bacchanalia. I have been tracking my daily calories on Livestrong.com since the middle of October. I set up a goal of losing 2 lbs a week, and Livestrong offers a suggested daily caloric intake based on my weight and my target weight. It is completely reasonable. So reasonable in fact that I have been consistent with entering my food selections for over a month now. And feel immensely better physically because of it.

For me, this is HUGE. Like seriously mammoth. The approaching holiday was giving me some agita though around the tracking. Do I track it if I know I am probably going to go over? Can I stay within the daily goals? Is that a realistic expectation on Thanksgiving? To be perfectly honest, I am not anywhere near the point where I can divorce my feelings and my self-esteem from a long weekend of indulgence (working on it, it’s all about “progress not perfection”), and I also knew that I was not ready (or willing) to preach some edict about how I would be stoic and full of willpower and make it through the weekend overindulgence-free.

So, I came to the realization that approaching the weekend trying to living under a self-mandate edict of “no sweets, no treats” would pretty much guarantee a near-to-full regression to the days of not tracking calories, not being aware of the food intake, and ultimately, binging (without the purge). Clinically, ‘deprivation’, i.e. willpower holding me back from eating a cookie or 3, is contraindicated in my case. In every day speech, if I don’t have a cookie today when I want it, I’m going to eat 20 tomorrow. Big old ugly backfire, and the reason I am where I am today. So, eat the friggin’ cookie or cookies, and don’t worry about the calories for this weekend was my motto.

(It’s just now occurred to be that I probably could have changed my goal of losing 2 lbs a week for those 4 days so that I would be “allowed” more calories, and that way, I could have stayed consistent with the tracking. Oh well, next time)

And guess what? I started back on Monday tracking the calories, and went a little over the reco, but nonetheless, am back tracking. I did, however, manage to eat oatmeal every AM during the long weekend, and I think that helped keep me in more ‘check’ than I might have normally been. So, little by slow, steady, steady – just keep doing the drill.