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 T...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news