The standard plan before a big holiday dinner is to eat nothing all day and arrive starving. It reliably produces the opposite of what people want, and the appetite literature is fairly blunt about why.
In a 2022 crossover trial published in the Journal of Functional Foods, subjects who drank 20 g of whey protein 20 minutes before a buffet meal ate 193 fewer calories at that meal if they were lean, and 216 fewer if they carried excess weight. That is a 16 to 18 percent drop in intake, from one small protein dose taken less than half an hour earlier. Protein preloads shift how much you eat at the meal that follows. Fasting all morning shifts it in the wrong direction.
the metabolism argument for grazing is wrong
Here is where the old advice needs correcting. The usual justification for eating small meals through the day is that it “keeps your metabolism up.” It does not. The International Society of Sports Nutrition reviewed this directly in its 2011 position stand on meal frequency and concluded that increased meal frequency does not meaningfully raise diet induced thermogenesis, total energy expenditure, or resting metabolic rate. Some of the acute studies found slightly higher thermic response with fewer meals, which is the exact reverse of the bodybuilding folklore.
Thermic effect of food scales with how much you eat and what it is made of, not how many times you sit down. Six meals of 300 calories and three meals of 600 calories burn essentially the same amount in digestion.
So the case for eating before a holiday dinner is not metabolic. It is behavioral, and behavioral reasons are the ones that actually change your day. Arriving at a 4 pm dinner having eaten nothing since 8 am means you are making food decisions while blood sugar is low, the appetizers are in reach, and everyone is standing around the kitchen. Nobody exercises restraint in that state, and there is no reason they should have to.
what a useful pre-dinner meal looks like
You want protein, some fiber, and not much volume. A blended drink is the easy version because it takes two minutes and does not compete with dinner for appetite.
A workable build: one cup of unsweetened almond milk, one scoop of whey or a plant blend (roughly 20 to 25 g protein), half a frozen banana, a tablespoon of ground flaxseed, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. That lands near 250 calories with about 25 g of protein and 4 g of fiber. It is not exciting. It is not supposed to be. It is there so that the meal you care about is the meal where you make choices deliberately.
If blended drinks are not your thing, two scrambled eggs with spinach does the same job. The dose matters more than the format.
the plank, and what the numbers actually say
The other half of the old holiday advice was to hold a plank, on the theory that a stronger trunk keeps you sitting upright through a long meal. Sitting posture over a two hour dinner is not really an endurance limitation, so let us drop that reasoning and keep the exercise, which is genuinely useful for a different reason: the front plank is a decent low risk way to train the trunk without repeatedly flexing the spine.
On what counts as a good hold, there is real reference data. Stuart McGill’s lab published normative torso endurance values in Occupational Ergonomics in 2010, including plank scores from 401 firefighters tested in 2006. Average hold times ran about 113 to 124 seconds across age groups in that population. Separate clinical work using the McGill trunk endurance battery reports side plank times near 45 to 52 seconds in general adult samples.
Which means the popular internet standard of “everyone should hold two minutes” describes trained firefighters, not a baseline. If you can hold a clean 60 second front plank with your ribs down and hips level, you are in reasonable company.
Past roughly two minutes, adding time stops teaching your trunk much. McGill himself has argued for shorter holds in the range of 8 to 10 seconds, repeated, rather than one long grind, because form degrades once you start shaking and the extra minutes mostly train tolerance for discomfort. If you want the plank to keep doing something, make it harder rather than longer: lift one foot, walk your elbows further forward, add a slow reach.
one thing worth disagreeing about
Plenty of holiday content frames a single big meal as damage that needs undoing. The prospective data does not support that framing. Yanovski and colleagues tracked 195 adults through the American holiday season and published the results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2000. Average gain across the six week Thanksgiving to New Year window was 0.37 kg, well under a pound, and far below the 5 lb figure that gets repeated every November.
The catch in that same study is the part people skip: the gain was not lost afterward. Small annual increments that never reverse are the real pattern, not any individual dinner. That reframes the whole exercise. Eating a normal lunch on a holiday is not damage control for one meal, it is one of the small repeated decisions that determine whether the year drifts upward.
Eat something at noon. Have the pie.