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Class OverviewIt’s that time of year. Holidays, celebration, family and FOOD! Learn how to feast this Thanksgiving while maintaining balanced hormones and feeling *great* all throughout this season. (Check out the Top 10 Big Ideas from the class below!) Your ProfessorAlan Christianson is an Arizona-based Naturopathic Doctor who specializes in natural endocrinology with a focus on thyroid disorders. Alan co-authored the bestselling ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Thyroid Disease’How to Feast on Thanksgiving and Maintain Healthy HormonesDid you get stressed over the holidays last year?  Maybe you put on a few unwanted pounds.  If so, you are not alone.  Most people rate the holiday season as the most stressful time of the whole year, and weight is an added problem.  If you ask someone their average holiday weight gain, most think they gain between 5-10 pounds that they lose by spring.  The good news is that most actually gain closer to 1-2 pounds. The bad news is that those 1-2 pounds usually do not come off in the spring.  You can think of holiday weight gain like a ring growing around a tree each year. This year, you do not have to be stressed or gain weight.  In fact, with a tiny amount of strategizing and planning, this could be your best holiday season ever!  Yes, even if uncle Frank acts up.  The trick is all in managing your hormones.  The main problem is that with the food, inactivity and family dynamics, the holidays can ruin your hormones.   Cortisol, your main stress hormone, gets too high and testosterone, your main repair hormone, gets too low.  This is true for men and women.  When cortisol gets high you get anxious, edgy and pudgy in a bad way.  When testosterone gets too low, you get tired, achy, grumpy and maybe even sniffy because your immune system is weakened. Pre event The Top 10 Big Ideas1Don’t Show Up With a Sleep Debt Just because you do not have to work tomorrow does not mean that you need less sleep.  By making a quality 8 hours of sleep your priority, you will prevent uncle Frank from getting under your skin and find yourself suddenly able to do fine without second and third servings.  In fact, sleep may turn out to be a bigger factor with weight loss than diet or exercise.2HIIT Your Workout, Not the Snooze Button Your holiday mornings will no doubt be crazy busy.  Between prepping your food and primping yourself, it might be tempting to forgo the workout.  What if you could rev up your metabolism for the whole day in 15 minutes?  Here is a holiday version of a High Intensity Interval Training workout that you can do with plenty of time left to deck the halls.Choose an aerobic activity: running, hiking, swimming or biking.  Your favorite aerobic stationary machine, like a treadmill, elliptical, stationary bike or stair-climber, will also work well.  You will want to bring a water bottle, a timer and your ‘A’ game.  Doing this in the morning will you’re your holiday meal into muscles instead of fat.Here is how it works:Do an easy 3-minute warm up.  For 30 seconds, go all out, then cool down for a minute.  Plan to do six intervals like this.  By the time you get to number 3, give it 110% effort.  To really get in the spirit, visualize that a giant carnivorous turkey is chasing you.   After your 6th sprint, stay in cool down mode for 4 minutes and you are done. Why don’t we do this more often?Now comes the time to join up with your loved ones.  Why do social interactions raise stress for so many of us?  Because they are not fair.  The unfair part is that we know all of our internal feelings and intentions and we compare them against everyone elses’ external habits and communication.  We know our intentions are well, but since we cannot see inside everyones’ heads as well as our own, we may not assume the same for them.  3API for Your Kin API means assume positive intention.  Now if uncle Frank is engaging in behavior that is not legal in most states, it is safe to assume his intentions are not positive.  Short of anything this obvious, next time someone rubs you the wrong way, just imagine one scenario in which they really did mean well, despite hitting your buttons.  If you just pretend for a moment it is possible, your stress levels will plummet.Time to eat!By choosing which foods to focus on and in which order, you will prevent the afternoon crash and the holiday weight gain.  Not only that, but you will enjoy the meal more, as well as the company.  Traditional Thanksgiving foods are nice and simple, making eating right easy. 4Start with Fiber Have a large serving of green salad and a few spoonfuls of cranberries.  Wash it down with a big glass of water.  Now take a few minutes and help everyone else get situated. This fiber and water will make everything else you eat spend more time in your stomach.  You will feel full more easily. 5More Turkey Less Napping Did you ever hear that turkey makes you tired because it has tryptophan?  This idea may be fun to share, but it is not true.  Turkey does have tryptophan but chicken, pork and beef all have more.  The truth is overeating makes you tired, not because you are eating tryptophan, but because it is being driven into your brain.  What drives it into your brain?  That would be sugary foods and carbohydrates.  If you do crash later, blame the double servings of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, not the turkey.6Keep Moving If you were an evil scientist and you wanted to make a group of people stressed and full of cortisol, what is the easiest thing to do?  Make them hold still for several hours.  What is the easiest way to remember to move?  Drink a glass of water each hour and your bladder will see to it that you will not sit still for too long.  7Learn the Polite Bite Trick OK so you have done great at socializing and eating as you planned, but now Aunt May will be heartbroken if you do not have some of each of the 6 desserts she brought.  Yes, your brains’ pleasure center will light up when you taste a good desert, but guess what, only the first bite does this.The other cool fact is that people notice much less than we think.  If you have a bite and make a big deal about how great it is, all you have to do is handle your fork and plate a few more times and no one will notice that you did not finish it.  If you don’t believe it, watch the Invisible Gorilla video on YouTube.  By the way, the polite bite can also be the polite sip.As the afternoon goes on . . .Great job, you have survived the morning, the family, and the meal hormonally intact.  In fact by using the API trick and being around lots of people, you will form lots of oxytocin, one of the best ever feel good hormones.  Here are a few final things to think about for the home stretch.  8Group Cleanup–Olympic style Remember how important it is to move?  Here is a new family tradition that will move your bodies and evoke a healthy dose of testosterone.  (Oh yeah, it will also get the dishes done!)  Break out a stop watch and tell your loved ones you read about this family tradition by which everyone works together to see how fast clean up can go.  You can also tell them you read about a group your size that did it in 27 minutes flat.  Lay down a challenge: I bet we can beat that!9Designated Media Room One of our biggest sources of stress and hormonal dysfunction is the kind of pollution we often forget about – noise pollution.  If the big game is that important, let the fans enjoy it, but somewhere that allows the rest of you to not hear it.10Astragalus Tea As the afternoon winds on, instead of coffee, serve some unique tea.  After 10 AM coffee will prevent your cortisol from lowering and will disrupt your sleep.  Astragalus will prevent you from picking up any yucky colds, flus or unwanted pounds.  You can find tea bags of it in most health food supermarkets.  Bonus points if you find the actual root slices.  They look like tongue depressors.  To brew them, use 1 slice and 6 ounces of water per person.  Simmer for 30 minutes and serve.