Post-Thanksgiving is always a difficult transitional time of the year. After consuming an immeasurable multiple of your ordinary daily caloric intake for several days in a row, going back to your normal diet kind of feels like you’re dying.  My stomach feels vacant and is calling to me as it is certain that I am starving to death. I managed to stretch my stomach so much in so few days that a normal sized meal will just not suffice. If people get gastric bypass surgery to reduce their food intake, then Thanksgiving is like a gastric injection, forcing food into your small intestine until it feels normal to overeat.

Breaking a routine which involves eating breakfast, snacking, eating appetizers, eating dinner, napping, eating dessert, and midnight snacking, is a real shock to your body. It’s extremely hard to quit consecutive over-consumption of turkey, well, cold turkey. This cycle is also littered with drinks of all colors and alcohol contents. You give up all your drinking rules and you no longer only mix drinks with club soda, diet drinks are no where to be found, and a mountain of mudslides is just a nightcap. Coffee is served with Baileys in place of cream and cream finds it way into the majority of the season’s drinks. Eat, drink and be full of dairy.

But ’tis the season to just give in. There is nothing quite like a guilt-free eating frenzy. There is no seat at the table for moderation or her pesky sister self control. You can take the dive down the gravy slathered slide into a mashed potato pool. Rolls are allowed , no required, to be covered in butter, and you can use beer to wash down various forms of cheese appetizers and you are expected to have more than one dessert. What a glorious time of the year.

During the holidays there is no instant post eating depression (PED) either. Instead of feeling bad immediately after you eat, you are welcomed to become a couch potato until everyone slowly morphs into a pile of mashed couch potatoes. PED doesn’t even start to set in until you’re on your journey home and although you didn’t take home any leftovers, you left with plenty of stuffing.

The gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a very difficult time. You’re trapped.  You are left with little motivation to undue the damage and confess your sincake, as you know round two is just over the mountain and through the woods. It is the period of time where you can’t wait to be surrounded again by forgiving family members, instead of unforgiving pants.

Enduring the vicious cycle of the holidays is like being a drug addict. Christmas is the relapse of Thanksgiving and everyone is jolly until the intervention of New Year’s Day comes around and it’s back to rehab. And just like every year, I swear, my diet will start next year.