If We Celebrated Thanksgiving in July, Would We Gain Less Weight?

Weight gain season has started: first Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and finally the Christmas/New Year holidays. The trick-or-treat candy has been barely put away (in our stomachs) when the recipes for Thanksgiving dinner are pulled from the drawers, or torn out of the November magazines. Even those among us who rarely cook begin to fantasize about a perfectly cooked turkey, moist dressing, gooey sweet potato casserole (will last year's marshmallows still be edible?) and pies...How many pies should we bake? Surely not just one. What will our guests think? And as the days grow colder, wetter, windier, and darker, we fantasize about spending an entire day focused on eating. No need to exercise. The gyms are closed on Thanksgiving anyway (at least most of them), and who wants to go outside for a walk when it is so cold and/or so dark?



So begins the season of real weight gain.



What makes Thanksgiving so fraught with weight-gaining potential is its position on the calendar. Presumably when President Lincoln picked the fourth Thursday in November as a day of national Thanksgiving, he could not have known that the holiday would be altered into a day of national overeating due, to some extent, it being plopped in one of the darkest months of the year. It wasn't until more than a hundred years later that scientists linked the short days of late fall with a winter depression causing significant overeating. Nor was President Lincoln concerned, skinny as he was, that the feasting on Thanksgiving was a prelude to weeks of overeating associated with December holidays. Indeed, for a country in the middle of a civil war, obesity was not something anyone worried about, nor was anyone in the position to spend much time in festive parties.



But just consider the impact on our food intake and weight if Thanksgiving were moved to the warmer, sunnier months like June, July or August. The benefits are obvious:



1. Menus would not be filled with butter and cream-infused carbohydrate dishes like mashed potatoes and creamed onions;

2. Stuffing soaked in the melted fat of the turkey would be incompatible with the warm temperatures of a late June afternoon;

3. Vegetables might come from the farmer's market and reflect what was harvested that day, rather than limited to what was harvested weeks earlier, or shipped from a country a continent away;

4. Desserts could include really fresh fruit whose tastes do not have to be enhanced by large amounts of sugar, or baked in piecrust made with copious amounts of butter or lard;

5. Long hours of daylight would allow outdoor activities before and after the meal, such as a lengthy walk after dinner instead of lying on a couch; and

6. Wearing bulky clothes to disguise large figures would not be possible, thus adding a bit of restraint to indulging in more than two servings.



Were Thanksgiving moved to another date not bookended by holidays characterized by overeating, there would be time to diet or exercise off the pounds that might be added by the meal. But coming as it does at the time of the year when we think wistfully of the joys of overeating and then hibernating until spring, it seems easier to 'go with the flow' and continue to overeat until January ads for diet programs make us get on a scale.



When the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in October (by the way), they did feast for three days on foods provided mainly by their Native Americans neighbors. They did not have to worry about overindulging a couple of months later at Christmas, as they did not celebrate this holiday. Moreover, they were worried that their food supply would not last through the winter, and so were very careful about how much they were eating. Death from hunger, not obesity, was their constant worry.



It is unlikely that Thanksgiving will be moved to another time of the year, regardless of the benefits that would confer on those of us struggling to maintain our weight. But if we, like Governor Bradford and President Lincoln, focus on the reasons for the holiday rather than the recipes, we might emerge with our weight intact.

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