I will have a house full of family on Thanksgiving. Everybody comes to my house. My wife and I cook the turkey and mashed potatoes and everybody else brings the side dishes. This year is the first Thanksgiving that my wife and I are on our diet... so modifications will be made by us for our side dishes. We are going to make a cauliflower mash and a lower calorie version of the green bean casserole. I also saw a recipe for a mock stuffing that substituted cauliflower for bread. I'm not sure about that one, but I might try some mock stuffing recipe.
I am not going to be super restrictive on Thanksgiving. I will try to stay on my plan as much as possible, but if I eat a little more than I normally do or eat something I normally wouldn't, I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I'll just make sure I get right back on my plan.
To that end, after dinner is over I am going to make my family take most of the leftovers home with them after dinner. (I'm sure I'll have to twist a few arms to get them to do that.
That includes all of the mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy and desserts. I will keep some turkey and whatever sides that my wife and I make for ourselves. That way, the temptation to vary from our diet plan will not even be present, so there will be no worry about giving into the temptation.
I flirted with the idea of not even bothering to stay on plan for that one meal. I have a friend who does a doctor supervised diet and they recently told him to do one cheat meal for the purpose of preventing / getting past a plateau. I don't know if the science behind that theory is sound, but it makes it tempting to try! I am, however, going to try to do my best to stay on plan. However, if that fails, then I'll chalk it up to preventing the onset of a plateau.