Counting calories and sticking to a diet is a difficult but manageable task on regular days because it is easier to plan out your meal and keep track of everything that you ate. Special occasions, such as Thanksgiving and other holidays, can be more difficult, especially because it can be hard to determine the calories in unfamiliar foods or recipes, particularly if someone else makes them. This does not mean that it is impossible to count calories for Thanksgiving, it just takes a little more thought than usual.
Step 1
Plan out in advance what foods you will eat. If you plan out what you plan to eat at your meal in advance it makes it much easier to calculate the calories you will consume. Not only does this facilitate counting calories, it can also help you make healthier decisions during the actual meal, Starling Fitness says. If you don't want to make a plan in advance for what foods you eat, try to make a mental note each time you take a helping of food. It can be easy to forget about what you are eating during Thanksgiving if you are talking with friends and family during the meal, which will only make it that much harder to count calories after you are done eating.
Step 2
Factor in portion sizes. To count calories properly at a meal, you need to remember not only what you ate but how much of it you consumed. When you take a helping of food, estimate how much of it you put on your plate. In many cases, the nutritional information for a food item will have the calories calculated for 1 cup of the food, so estimate each helping in terms of cups.
Step 3
Put only as much food on your plate as you plan to eat. Even if you keep careful track of how many cups of food you put on your plate, leaving food unfinished can wreak havoc with your attempts to calculate how much you ate.
Step 4
Look up the nutrition information for everything you consume. If the food comes prepackaged, the number of calories per serving should be included on the packaging. Otherwise, consult a database that has the nutrition information listed for many common foods. One such resource is the Daily Plate, which has listings for the amount of calories and other nutrients contained in many foods.
Step 5
Multiply the calories in each food by the number of servings you ate to get the calories for each food item you had at Thanksgiving. Total the calories for all of these different foods to determine how many calories you consumed at Thanksgiving.
Member Comments