You know you’re full. Close to bursting, actually. You never would have piled your plate like that on a regular day, and you certainly wouldn’t finish it off.
But it’s the holidays, and it would be rude not to try every dish, and it all tastes so good, and some of it is healthful, and what the heck — pass the pie!
Research has proved what we already know: Our brains can easily override our bodies’ signals to stop eating, even when we know the consequences will be unpleasant.
We’re not even talking about obesity, heart disease, diabetes or effects of long-term, habitual overeating. This is about the short-term awfulness that can follow a high-fat, high-calorie holiday free-for-all.
While there is no such thing as an average dinner, registered dietitian Jennifer McDaniel of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics said a varied meal of 600 to 800 calories fits nicely into the 2,000-calorie daily diet referenced on nutrition labels.
But a holiday dinner can easily approach or exceed 2,000 calories by itself, especially if you dig into the appetizers before dinner and wash it all down with a couple of glasses of wine. (One estimate put a holiday dinner as high as 4,500 calories, but that would be extremely difficult for most stomachs to stomach.)
Even nutrition-conscious dieters tend to give themselves a pass at the end of the year. In a November survey of MyFitnessPal app users that was done for The Post, 88 percent said they plan to relax their food rules at least a little during the holidays, and 10 percent said they planned to chuck the rules entirely.
How the foodfest sits with you depends on your genes, your body composition, your system’s response to certain hormones and your regular eating and exercise habits, said McDaniel.
For instance, regular exercisers who work out 12 hours or sooner before a big meal fare better than others. Their bodies tend to have a more sensitive insulin response, allowing them to more efficiently process the excess carbs, and a more robust circulatory system to weather the influx of fat circulating in blood. What can you do after the deed is done? Don’t lie down, or many of these problems may be exacerbated. Helping to clean up the post-dinner mess would be a 170-calorie-per-hour head start on recovering from the feast.
