Thanksgiving: Tips to reduce cellular stress during the holidays

This year, start your Thanksgiving day off with a breakfast that has plenty of fat, such as goat cheese and spinach scrambled eggs cooked in generous amounts of either ghee or my favorite, tea seed oil and serve with a side of avocado. The fat will provide your body with ample nutrients and stable energy, so that you’re not inclined to eat the entire Thanksgiving spread yourself. 

Save your carbs for last. Not only would I recommend you eat the carbohydrates on your plate after you first enjoy the main sources of proteins and fats but also time your carbohydrate choices so you eat them later in the day to help regulate stress hormones. The stress hormone cortisol tends to naturally be lower in the evening and thus responds better to the boost in blood sugar after eating carbohydrates. Are you completely over the infamous holiday blood sugar roller coaster ride of feeling famished to stuffed in a matter of minutes? You can avoid these uncomfortable highs and lows and even help prepare your body for a better night’s sleep by including one to two portions of healthy carbohydrates with your evening meal.   

Fat covers the trifecta of the top nutrition secrets that are going to make this year’s holiday a success! It’s satiating, it stabilizes the hormones responsible for controlling how much you eat and as a welcomed bonus, it contributes to that beautifully glowing holiday skin. The trick is to focus on getting the highest quality you can find. Do your best to select animal sources of fat from organic, local, and grass-fed sources and choose cold pressed and raw oils.  

Probably the most influential factor in how well you maintain a grounded edge over the sultry spread of Thanksgiving indulgences is how well you sleep. Do your best to keep to your normal sleep rhythm and go to bed 20 minutes earlier than you normally do the night before your holiday event. Sleep is one of the best ways we repair cellular damage and inflammation, helping you to look and feel your best. Our sleep also regulates hormones like leptin, cck, and ghrelin which help us eat just the right amount, not too much and not too little. When these hormones are balanced, our body burns fat instead of storing it. It’s utterly amazing how powerful sleep is for our metabolisms and appetites.

If you are going to a gathering where you know there will be a lot of temptations, make sure you bring a dessert that you’ll love and can make a healthier version of. Try substituting sugary desserts with fruit-based crisps that are naturally sweet, or try a healthy sugar substitute like monk fruit in your recipes. This will help you to avoid getting a sugar hangover.

Don’t deprive yourself either. Acknowledge that we are biologically wired to feel pleasure, just make wise choices like high-quality dark chocolate or a glass of organic red wine. Not only do these provide pleasure, but they are a rich source of polyphenols that will help buffer any inflammation that gets triggered.

Use a variety of herbs and spices in dishes you make like ginger, garlic, rosemary, thyme, cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg in your dishes. The polyphenols that get delivered in these delicious packages are not only pleasurable to our senses, but offer protection against oxidation and inflammation.

Be daring and try substituting more obscure root vegetables like turnips or parsnips for a more traditional dish like mashed potatoes. Or, if you don’t want to go all the way, substitute half of the recipe with nutrient dense root veggies. That way you’ll still get the familiar delicious mashed potatoes, but you’ll also get a boost in nutrition.

Choose dark turkey meat if you can, it contains more nutrients than white meat. Ounce for ounce, there’s twice the amount of iron and zinc in dark meat versus white meat. Dark meat also provides substantially more essential fatty acids, B vitamins, (especially B12) and it’s a better source of the relaxation mineral, magnesium. Who can’t use more relaxation around the holidays? And be sure to save the turkey carcass to make bone broth or turkey soup, so you can benefit from all of the minerals and fat that the bones and marrow have to offer.