Holiday dinners with family and friends are an important tradition you don’t want to miss, but they can be stressful for the low oxalate dieter–especially if your family’s traditional fare is laden with high oxalate treats. You don’t want to offend Aunt Opal by refusing to eat her sweet potato pie or hurt your mother-in-law’s feelings by only taking a bite of her famous mashed potatoes. You may also feel resentment or grief at not being able to enjoy some of your favorite family traditions. Or perhaps you’re the hostess for this year’s Thanksgiving meal and are wondering what in the world you could possibly cook and still eat.
Luckily, holiday gatherings can also be the perfect time to educate your family about your health and dietary choices. Many people are beginning to understand gluten-intolerance, food allergies, and food sensitivities and will understand your polite refusal to not partake in some of the family feast, especially if you explain your health requirements before the meal starts. Other family members may be willing to modify some of their recipes or at least their dinner menu to make sure you have some yummy low oxalate Thanksgiving choices. You may also want to ask to bring a side dish to a dinner hosted by a friend or relative to make sure you have at least one festive, yummy choice to fill up on. If you are making Thanksgiving dinner for a family that includes numerous non-low oxalate dieters, you will probably need to keep up some of the high oxalate family traditions. But there is always room to add new traditions and slight modifications to old family favorites. For example, my family used to enjoy a traditional Waldorf salad, but now we serve a low oxalate Thanksgiving version with apple, pineapple, raisins, and chopped broccoli stems and walnuts on the side for non-low oxalate dieters to add at the table. We’ve also added various stuffed squash dishes, pumpkin “custard” (pumpkin pie without the crust), and steamed asparagus instead of the ubiquitous green bean casserole. With just a few menu changes and a healthy appetite for turkey, I can usually navigate the family feast just fine.
Working out the menu and the family politics surrounding traditional fare can be challenging, but perhaps more challenging is choosing an “oxalate strategy” for the day and sticking to it. Here are four oxalate strategies I have adopted at various Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners during my 20 years on the low oxalate diet. By deciding ahead of time how I would manage my oxalate intake, I was better able to make confident food choices and to stick to my plan.
Strategy One: Stick to your daily oxalate plan with no concession for the holidays. This may be an important strategy for those who are still dealing with lots of serious oxalate issues that compromise their health. It may also be important for those who feel that deviating from their normal oxalate plan “just this once” would lead to more deviations in the future and a compromised ability to stay on the diet. If you are going to stick with your daily oxalate plan, it might help for you to eat a really low oxalate Thanksgiving day breakfast (and very low oxalate snacks at night), so that most of your daily oxalate intake comes from the feast. You might also pool your oxalate intake over three days, and eat very low oxalate the day before and the day after Thanksgiving in order to eat more oxalate at Thanksgiving dinner.
Strategy Two: Stick to your daily oxalate plan with a small concession for the holidays. For example, if you usually try to keep your daily oxalate intake below 6o mg., you may want to increase that oxalate intake to 70 mg. or 80 mg. for just one day. Like in strategy one, you may also want to “save up” you oxalate intake for the feast by eating very low oxalate for two or three meals before and after the feast. This strategy may also be more realistic than strategy one for those low-oxalate dieters that will be eating at a friend or relative’s house instead of cooking dinner themselves. What I like about this strategy is that it allows me just enough extra oxalate to partake in a small helping of mashed potatoes, my favorite high oxalate Thanksgiving treat.
Strategy Three: Forget about counting oxalate, just avoid really high oxalate foods (like pecan pie) and try to limit the amount of medium oxalate or “lower high” foods if possible. Again, eating very low oxalate for the three meals before and after Thanksgiving dinner may help alleviate the damage of eating higher oxalate during dinner. This is probably the simplest strategy that keeps you within bounds of the low oxalate diet without giving up too much holiday fun. It may be an appropriate strategy for low or medium oxalate dieters who have healed all or most of their oxalate-related symptoms and are on the low oxalate diet for health maintenance.
Strategy Four: Forget about oxalate for the day and just eat! After all, it’s just one meal . . . Again, this strategy may be okay for those who have been on the low oxalate diet for a long time, have healed their oxalate symptoms, and are only on a low or medium oxalate diet for health maintenance. Of course, you still might want to avoid the REALLY high oxalate foods and pass on the pecan pie or spinach salad. I’m sure you’ll still have plenty of medium and “lower highs” to chose from.
I’ve employed each of these strategies at one time or another during my long journey on the low oxalate diet. Strategies one and two worked well during the early, “healing” years of my diet. Strategy four wasn’t too bad when I was doing really well, although I did have minor pain flare-ups afterward. Now I usually stick with strategy three, although I will probably be a little more strict about the number of mediums I consume this year. Either way, I’ll start the day with a very low oxalate Thanksgiving omelette and make sure I eat very low oxalate the day before and after..
Hope these tips and strategies help you head into the holiday season with more confidence. Happy Holidays and happy low oxalate eating!
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