We’re only days away from Thanksgiving Day, so allow me to share my scorn for what now seems to be its most treasured tradition. To eat way too much good food, bad food, or any type of food in between and then snooze off and on while remaining motionless in a recliner watching way too much football.

Sure, many Thanksgiving meals still start by saying grace or giving a toast, and the gratitude expressed during either is genuine. But both last only moments, as well as any thoughts about them.

And even if the dominant thought during a Black Friday food hangover is “never again,” most will stuff themselves and immobilize themselves when Thanksgiving comes again.

This article, though, will rant no more about Thanksgiving overeating. Nor will it summon you to exercise more and recall all you have to be grateful for on that day.

What comes next is only related to Thanksgiving Day because it’s the ideal way to show gratitude every day for everything and everyone you love, including yourself. This ideal way is to go about each day with the underlying goal of squaring the aging curve.

Since you can’t do what you don’t know, here’s the layman’s lowdown on what’s also known in medical circles as compressing morbidity.

Picture a graph (or get pencil and paper and draw one) where the vertical line indicates health and fitness, the higher the better. A number line representing age beginning with 30 and showing 10-year increments until 100 serves as the horizontal line.

Place the average American lifespan upon it, and the line resembles the arc from 12 to 3 on a round-face clock, and it touches bottom just before 80. Graph the lifespan of someone who’s squared the curve, however, and the arc stops curving at whatever age that someone decided to get serious about health and fitness.

At that point the arc straightens, maybe even ascends for a few years, stays fairly straight for a few more, and then dips gradually as the line passes 60, 70, and 80. And then, somewhere after 85, it creates close to a 90-degree angle — and drops like an anchor to the bottom of a lake.

What’s the best-case, real-life scenario if that’s your life that’s just been graphed? After a rather pleasant and fully functional day, you go to bed one night and don’t wake up.

No protracted illness and hospital stay. No time spent in an old folks’ home.

Instead, you pass suddenly — but only after spending the last 30 years or so being far more active than your contemporaries. So active, in fact, you just might’ve started competing in sports and kept competing in the one you came to love right up until the end.

Like Olga Kotelko.

Kotelko truly mastered the art of squaring the aging curve, so much so that in his book about her, Bruce Grierson writes she “squared the curve with a ruler.” She also dominated Masters track and field competitions so thoroughly that at the time of her demise at 95, she held every world record in every event she ever attempted for a total of over 30 world records in all.

Moreover, in just the five years before she died, she garnered over 750 gold medals at Masters track and field competitions.

I tell you about Kotelko’s accomplishments not so you search for a Black Friday sale on track spikes, but so that you consider a single question. One that Kotelko once asked an interviewer.

“Do you want to have years in your life, or life in your years?”

She asked it rhetorically, for sure. For why in the world would you not want the second?

Maybe because of the constant and coordinated effort it requires.

“For what is each day,” my favorite motivational video asks, “but a series of conflicts between the right way and the easy way?” And to square the aging curve, you need to string together thousands of days where the winner of these daily conflicts is rarely the easy way.

That means you exercise, at least for a bit, on days when you’d rather not but know you should. Say, “No thanks,” about 90 percent of the time when co-workers offer you birthday cake or similar goodies at coffee break and lunchtime.

Reduce your preferred form of late-night screen time and increase your sleep time when you’ve had a low-energy day or sense an illness coming on.

To live like this day in and day out is a tough task, no doubt. But it does much more than add life to your years.

It expresses gratitude for everything and everyone you love and ultimately allows you to die the right way — retaining all your dignity, most of your functionality, and without ever becoming a burden to your family.

Squaring the aging curve is a concept worth considering today and talking about on Thanksgiving Day. Right before Dallas commits yet another turnover and your uncle starts snoring.