It's practically your patriotic duty to overeat on Thanksgiving: For all intents and purposes, you get off work for the sole purpose of digging into copious amounts of holiday food. But is it that-that bad to gorge yourself just one day a year?
First off, it's not "bad" – at least according to registered dietitian Keri Gans, MS, author of The Small Change Diet. "You should never beat yourself up over food," Gans says. "If you want to indulge at a meal, do it mindfully by giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want. The key is to do it only on the actual holidays, not throughout the entire holiday season."
While this sounds like a delicious plan, it only fends off food guilt – not necessarily extra pounds. To gain one pound of body fat in one day, you need to eat about 3,500 extra calories in a 24-hour span. While the average Thanksgiving feast packs about 3,000 calories, the average woman needs at least 2,000 daily calories to function, so you'd really have to try to eat 3,500 extra calories to gain even one pound of fat in a single day, Gans says.
That said, salty foods can make your body retain water, so it's totally possible to wake up to a few extra pounds the day after a holiday full of heavy eating, Gans says. Typically, that's just temporary bloating that goes down a day or two later – just as long as you go back to normal eating.
So that third fourth helping should be relatively harmless, weight-wise. Still, everyone knows it's uncomfortable to seriously overeat. From a medical perspective, all that high-fat, sugary holiday food can still elevate your blood sugar and blood pressure, and cause indigestion and acid reflux. The good news? You will probably feel 100 percent better the next day, Gans says.
"One day of overeating is only negative if you allow it to be," Gans says. "If you decide that all your best efforts for eating healthy are now a waste of time, and you go back to making poor food choices [after the holiday is over], that in itself is damaging." In other words? Knock yourself out this Thanksgiving. Just go easy on yourself (and the leftovers).
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Elizabeth Narins is a Brooklyn, NY-based writer and a former senior editor at Cosmopolitan.com, where she wrote about fitness, health, and more. Follow her at @ejnarins.
