Jason’s Recipe Replay! How to Enjoy the Healthy Holidays!

Local fitness enthusiast Jason Murphy remakes favorite meals of his youth into healthy dishes. See the full list of his recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.

I have to assume if you are a regular reader of this column, then you are serious about maintaining a healthy lifestyle and making each meal as healthy as possible. Fair warning to all those new to this way of living, the peer pressure from family and friends to put that all aside from Thanksgiving until January 1st is real, and it is unrelenting. I’ve even had family members that were only weeks removed from stents being inserted into blocked arteries ask why I wasn’t eating like everyone else. Luckily for me, I’m entrenched in my way of life, and somehow a heart attack survivor questioning my food choices doesn’t do much to convince me to throw all that out the window. What they don’t realize is that I finally broke that unrelenting cycle of eating until I was sick during the holidays, and now those days are so much more enjoyable. I can also observe as everyone else not only overeats, but does so with massive amounts of added sugars, unhealthy fats and simple carbs. Then they all complain of feeling miserable and sick the rest of the day, unable to get out of whatever couch they plopped down on for hours, moaning and complaining. I, on the other hand, can go outside and play football with the young kids, moving around like an actual living human being and not sounding like an extra on The Walking Dead.

I listen to a podcast by the actor Ethan Suplee called American Glutton. You might remember him from Remember the Titans, American History X, and My Name is Earl. Ethan was morbidly obese for most of his life. After years of fad diets and exercise regimes, he finally found roughly the same eating lifestyle and weight-lifting centered exercise program that I use. Being able to stick with a livable everyday plan, Ethan went from 550 lbs to a muscular 255:

He had a guest that made a profound statement. He said most people don’t realize that you shouldn’t feel sick after you eat. Food is nourishment, and you should always feel better after you eat. That is such a foreign concept, as most people just accept as fact that after a meal, the expected result is to feel terrible for hours afterwards, and that is a daily occurance. The truth is, if you feel sick or unable to move after a meal, you are eating the wrong things, and too much of that wrong thing. In this country, it’s not just one or two holidays a year, it’s day in and day out where most people are getting excess calories, and yet still are malnourished because those calories are empty and stripped of any nutritional value. So when friends and family try to pressure you and make you feel like you are missing out, take a second to think about all you are missing out on is feeling terrible and a month of potential double digit weight gain.

Missing out on great food is something you will not be doing, by the way. That’s what makes this lifestyle work, learning how to reconstruct favorite foods with healthy ingredients. My Thanksgiving plate was full of healthy versions of Chicken and Dressing, gravy, cauliflower mac and cheese, sauteed Brussels Sprouts with pecans and cranberries, deviled eggs, and butternut squash casserole:

Every item on my plate was reworked from the original and not only delivers healthy complex carbs, protein, and fats, but tastes better than the originals as well. My young grandson said after Thanksgiving “The thing I like about eating here is I know the food is good for you, and then it’s also delicious.” If it passes the taste test of a 10 year old, you know it’s doing something right. Desserts can also be healthy. I made flourless chocolate cake, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting. Impossible to make those and still be healthy? Not if you use coconut flour, grass fed dairy, 85% dark chocolate, monk fruit sweetener, and pasture raised eggs:

So don’t let anyone convince you that you can’t or shouldn’t continue to eat healthy during the holidays. Food is so much more enjoyable when you don’t think you might slip into a coma after dinner. Does it take a little extra effort in the kitchen? Sure, it does. If you’ve made any of my recipes, or looked up a low carb or healthy version of a dish on the internet, it requires more work than just popping a pre-made frozen pie in the oven, or making a box of pre-packed mac and cheese. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Give yourself the gift of feeling better and see what that does for you. You can go through my back catalog of articles for some of the recipes here, or search for them on the internet…there are no shortage of reworked recipes out there to try. Give it a shot and remember, it’s no one’s business but your own on what and how you eat. Do what makes you happy and feel good, and if anyone tries to peer pressure you into old habits, remember you can always just walk away from them as they lay in the recliner groaning and unable to move.

See the list of all the Shirtless Chef recipes at www.mysaline.com/shirtless.