48 Hours of Thanksgiving

How did you prepare yourself for the Thanksgiving holiday?

Studies consistently demonstrate that Americans under-prepare for the Thanksgiving festivities. While they devote significant energy toward preparation for the other major holidays, especially Christmas, Thanksgiving is relegated to the back-burner.

Thanksgiving is a culinary anomaly and it would behoove us to treat it as such. You wouldn't run a marathon without training. You wouldn't buy a car without checking the Car Facts report. I hope you wouldn't approach the Feast of Feasts without first preparing your GI tract.

Proper preparation for Thanksgiving begins 48 hours before the Feast and continues through the end of the munchie bonanza. You will want to make sure you don't have any significant social obligations before Thanksgiving and that you can devote the menu at every repast toward making the Thanksgiving Feast a successful experience.

48 Hours Before the Feast

INSTRUCTIONS: The key to the Feast diet is to enlarge your stomach while keeping it empty at the appointed time. This requires meal plans that enlarge the gut but allow for quick digestion. This means you want to be eating a lot of simple sugars. And you want to eat them quickly so that your stomach feels the need to expand. The day two days before Thanksgiving, eat two times. Eat a large meal around noon and eat an even larger one just before you go to bed. You will feel sick and probably won't sleep very well. Put these temporal pains aside by thinking about the wonderful Feast you will enjoy.

MY EXPERIENCE: It worked pretty much as explained. I had a plate of dough-nuts for the first meal and several plates of pasta for dinner. It felt as if someone had surgically inserted a bowling ball into my gut and my anti-bodies had been programmed not to reject it. But I slept okay and was ready for day two.

24 Hours Before the Feast:

INSTRUCTIONS: Eat a very small first meal. Starve yourself until dinner, then bomb your stomach with as much food as it will hold. Allow it to stretch some and bomb it again with second and third courses.

The purpose of this diet is to allow your stomach to empty (starvation) and then ensure that you keep it nicely enlarged for the Feast tomorrow (bombing).

MY EXPERIENCE: I attended a basketball game the day before Thanksgiving so I bombed my gut with three concession stand personal pizzas and two tubs of nachos. It was expensive, but worth it, until I noticed a teenage girl texting her boyfriend in front of me at the game. She had the gangly appearance of a Miley Cyrus fan who desperately wanted to be allowed to go to a Lady GaGa concert. She looked to be somewhere in vicinity of 16, but wore accessories and makeup to look older. I wasn't fooled: Her textgility revealed her youth. The correspondence went something like this:

Boyfriend: Yeah... [evidently referring to something previously texted]
Teenage girl: Why do u hav to be so short? Are u mad at me? Gosh, ur stressing me
BF: [after a pause] No. Chill.
TG: See? ur treating me like **** u havee no respek. im srsly worried about us
BF: Babe...w're coo. ur stressing me now.
TG: I think were done.

Et cetera.

I was watching this exchange with awe. I may have been witnessing this girl's first breakup. Over text no less! Although, in all probability, she had done this a thousand times and whoever "Travis" was on the other end of her conversation was just another innocent victim.

Anyway, watching the breakup reminded me of my own failings at love and took away my appetite. So I didn't go back for a fourth mini pizza.

Before the Feast

INSTRUCTIONS: Do not eat before the Feast.

MY EXPERIENCE: Easy enough. I used the time to recover from my concession stand food hangover.

During the Feast

INSTRUCTIONS: Go to town. Remember that every forkful of stuffing is three forkfuls of something else you can't eat.

MY EXPERIENCE: I liked the diet. I think I will avoid drama with teenage girls next year (always a good idea) and maybe see about what I can do 72 hours before the Feast...