Counting down...

With just four and a half weeks left before christmas, countdowns are starting for holiday preparation as well as for the usual end-of-year frenzy at the workplace.
This year, I´m determined to pre-plan holiday meals so I can do the bulk of the shopping in advance. Maybe, if I stock up my freezer in time, I can avoid the annual price rush that comes right before the holidays.
It feels a bit strange that this will be the second christmas where I´ll apply portion control before preparing the meals.
In former years, at  christmas,  food was always the main event. So, the best cuts of meat and fowl were bought, and every meal went with at least two side dishes plus a sumptuous dessert. Everything was served in amounts big enough to allow everybody at least two servings of everything. At the end of meals, there were still plenty of leftovers, and everyone was stuffed to the point where belts become torture instruments.
The whole thing was costly, of course,  including the bags full of vegetables that we dragged home only to find that many of them didn´t even make it to the end of the holidays in spite of being kept in a cool place.
In the end, we regularly ended up overeating because we didn´t want any of those extra-special goodies to spoil.
The error in all this, of course, was that drive to overabundance I had. As if a meal weren´t as tasty if there was just enough of it for everyone to eat to the point of comfortable satiety, as if the very fact that there was twice as much food on the table as we needed was necessary for a meal to be a "real" holiday meal.
So, every year, I ended up with a too-big drain on the wallet and a too-big gain on the waist.
And I started to dread the holidays.
Now, there are some other reasons why I don´t like christmas, at least as it is commonly celebrated. But the food situation didn´t make things any better.
This time, I´ll apply the things I have learned during the course of the year to holiday cooking, too. Things like portion size control, meal planning, and most importantly, the knowledge that nobody has to overfeed in order to celebrate a proper holiday.
The best thing I can do to make sure of that is starting to plan early.
Especially as I am now so close to the point where I´ll no longer be obese. Less than five pounds away per this morning.
I intend to give myself a very special christmas present this year: a body that is no longer clinically obese, just overweight. And if I managed to get there before the holidays, I still want to be there after the holidays.

As I write this, Americans are probably already preparing their Thanksgiving turkeys.
Just as a reminder- if there are leftovers, most can even be re-frozen in single-meal portions, so, if you have a freezer that was big enough to hold the whole bird before cooking it, there´s certainly enough room for leftovers. From the point of food safety, deciding at once how much of the leftovers you´ll be able to eat before they go bad when they are just refrigerated and not refrozen, and then re-freezing the excess at once is best. Besides, it helps to get back on track immediately after the holiday meal.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!


Julia