By Alicia M Brown MS, RD, CSSD, LD • Health and Wellness Marketing Manager

If your family is anything like mine, Thanksgiving is a highly anticipated holiday. When I was younger and lived at home, our family would venture over the river and through the woods… well, it's more like we suffered an 8 hour drive across I-10 to my Grandma's house in central Louisiana. The entire time I was stuffed in the back of a Dodge Caravan, I daydreamed of my grandma's cornbread stuffing and homemade pumpkin pie. Even though I take a different route to my grandmother's house now, as soon as the air turns cool I begin to long for this fall holiday.

My family has many different tastes and preferences. At Thanksgiving dinner, my mom takes a tablespoon of everything, my sister fishes all the cherries out of the fruit salad, my grandpa sneaks a piece of both pumpkin and pecan pie, my dad likes to be helpful and eats every last crumb of cornbread dressing (you know, less to clean out later) and my grandma enjoys making her secret leftover turkey sandwich in the days following Thanksgiving.

My grandpa and dad like real food. "None of that fake stuff" they say. Translation, they don't like artificial sweeteners, low-fat foods or food substitutions. The women in my family like to save some calories during Thanksgiving. So what's the family chef to do? Below, we've taken a few traditional Thanksgiving foods and shown how you can make them lower in calories or enjoy the original and spend some time working it off.