Re-Make-Not of Holiday Recipes

Season Greetings… and Eatings

Every year we await for the holidays to arrive with a slew of cheery mood, family gatherings, friends outings, gifts and… yummy traditional holiday foods! The fall brings apple and pumpkin pies, homemade and ever so scrumptious. There’s roasted turkey slathered in gravy and cranberry sauce, eggnog in a glass, glistening ham, creamy and airy mashed potatoes, melty sweet potato casseroles, buttery biscuits, home-baked holiday cookies with decorative embellishments… List goes on as it, well, goes into December with yet more delicious meals and drinks. While all the foods are utmost decadent bringing mouthfuls of pleasure, they are rich in calorie-dense ingredients with the potential to deliver more energy than your body needs for the given moment. “To eat or not to eat” – is not the question, of course we eat, that’s an essential part of celebrations.

Shall we sub?

Every year I’d been trying to remake traditional holiday recipes into their healthier versions – sub butter and oil with applesauce and nut butters, reduce sugar, swap sour cream for low fat Greek yogurt and so on. While the caloric burden is slightly or significantly reduced, not surprisingly the magic of holiday taste is gone along with the calories. The pie sits on the counter for days barely touched, the cookies are hard, mashed potatoes are watery, turkey is dry. Disappointment of the family is added to ever increasing craving for the “real” deal and praising of the guests’ dishes featuring true tastes of holidays. Blog posts upon blog posts, magazine covers and well-meaning TV show hosts propose new-er re-vamped recipe ideas in efforts to support health and slenderness of Americans, missing a very important point – it is not WHAT we eat during holidays, it is the big picture of our daily diets that matters most and for the long-term. It is not the external factors – indulgent foods – it’s our internal beliefs about food, our ability to stop eating when we are satisfied, our stress-coping mechanisms that don’t involve food that cement the foundation for healthy eating and wellbeing, not occasional holiday meals with full fat ingredients and real sugar.

Let’s Keep Traditions – Traditional, and Be Mindful of How We Eat

So why would I try so hard to “healthyfy” holiday traditions if I could make them as they are supposed to be and let myself and others enjoy? We only have these meals on holidays, special types of holidays to be exact, we only eat so much of them – provided we eat mindfully, tuning into our bodies’ cues of hunger and satisfaction, picking carefully what we truly enjoy and leaving behind the foods that don’t rock our pallets. What if we just trust our bodies and tastes to choose the foods that please and satisfy? What if we indulge these few times in the course of the year, knowing that if we really want more – we can get more, but also keeping these very foods traditional and brought on by holidays?

When we are connected to our bodies, we let the internal gauge for energy regulate itself out –  if we overeat, the hunger is dampened over the next couple days. If we undereat, the hunger picks up driving us to eat more. The body is smart this way, provided we don’t meddle with it by intentionally depriving it of food through restrictive dieting or overexercising into exhaustion. With these clever mechanisms in place, we can fearlessly head into the holiday season whipping up yummy dishes and eating with joy and cheer!

Stay nourished my friends!