Before me was a table full of food. Good, good, good food.
It was like many Thanksgivings, and I just needed to know where I was going to start, and if my plate was big enough.
This year, it turned out that the plate was plenty big enough. For the first time ever, I got a spoonful of everything and could still see some of the plate.
It was the first time I ate Thanksgiving dinner and didn’t immediately go back for seconds. There wasn’t any pressure to eat as much as I could, or to clean my plate. No one made jokes about being a piggy. It was like any other meal.
No kidding, the only time I went back for food was a couple hours later, and then it was just for sweet potatoes, vegetable casserole and a roll.
I feel pretty proud of myself. It isn’t often during the holidays that I can say I exerted self-control over my eating.
The real test comes over the weekend when I know there are lots of leftovers that I don’t want to waste. The biggest challenge was not eating all of the leftovers.
Thanksgiving also was a chance to try new things. We made a fat-free pumpkin cheesecake, instead of making pumpkin pie. It, um, well, was OK. Frankly, I didn’t like it. Fat-free cream cheese took away some of the richness that I associate with cheesecake. It was light and almost fluffy, but it wasn’t as tasty as I had hoped.
The real success was reducing the sugar in the sweet potato casserole. The recipe calls for one cup of sugar. I used a half-cup of sugar and a half-cup of sugar substitute. It was pretty good, and I still felt like I was enjoying a family favorite.
Food Junkie Discovery
Cheese is a favorite snack, but I have two problems with it. It isn’t always calorie- and fat-friendly. Worse yet, it is easy to go over board and eat too much. So, I have started buying low-fat mozzarella string cheese. It is tasty and comes in pre-packaged serving sizes.
