The holiday season is a wonderful time of year for family and friends and enjoying parties, cocktails, lots of baked goods, candies, and other tasty treats together. The down side of this jolly time is the excess junk food and alcohol consumed, and the negative impact it has on your body. Tis' the season to overload the liver and other detoxifying organs. Here are my top five tips to help counter the damaging excess of the season. Go ahead and enjoy some indulgences, knowing as you head into the New Year you do not have to turn back the clock on all of your healthy eating throughout the year.
- Start the Day off Right: How you feed your body in the morning sets the stage for your metabolism and how you will feel throughout the day. Maximize your nutrient density when it counts most and save the holiday foods and libations for later in the day. Exercising in the morning will also support getting the metabolism jump started and your body balanced.
- Balance Out the Sugar: To balance out the increased sugar consumption, eat more small meals and snacks throughout the day that include healthy protein and fats. After a sugar binge, or better yet, during a sugar binge, make sure you consume some healthy nuts or nut butter to help ward off the uncomfortable and damaging sugar crash caused by its quick digestion. The combination will help balance your blood sugar and reduce your cravings so you don’t eat the entire plate of cookies. Veggies with hummus is another effective option, as the fiber in the veggies slows down the absorption of simple sugars, and the protein in the hummus helps lessen the sugar crash by stabilizing your blood sugar levels.
- Get Moving: After eating too much sugar, move, don’t sit. Movement is necessary if you don’t want to store the sugar as fat on your body but burn it. Movement or exercise after eating too much sugar benefits the body in two ways; keeps the body from storing the sugar (aka putting extra weight on), and it keeps your body from experiencing a bad blood sugar crash later. If possible work up a sweat, and you’ll also rid your body of toxins consumed during the season. Grab a family member and head out for a walk. Aunt Edna and your body will be thankful for the time spent together.
- Detox, Naturally: Make sure you are eating plenty of naturally detoxifying foods such as the cruciferous vegetables. These include asparagus, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cabbage that contain glucosinolates which support liver function. They also contain sulfur, which attracts toxins and heavy metals and moves them out of the body. Other liver protecting foods are grapefruit, cranberries, blueberries, prickly pear, beetroot juice, and garlic. Drinking dandelion or green tea will also naturally detoxify the liver as will organic, high quality coffee.
- Boost your Baking: There are so many ingredient hacks and products on the market to upgrade the nutrition in your baking without compromising on taste. Here are a couple of our favorite ways to make our holiday baking more guilt free. Your friends and family will never know.
- High quality, grass fed butter. Yep, Kerrygold is worth the hype.
- Organic, gluten free flour. We love Bob’s Redmill 1 to 1 Baking Flour.
- Use natural, non-refined sugar sources like coconut sugar, honey, or maple syrup.
- Cut the sugar in half for what the recipe calls for, it will still be sweet enough.
- Add more of the real fruit ingredients which increases natural sweetness and fiber content
- Add healthy protein and healthy fat. We hear the Telos Vanilla Collagen Boosters work fantastic and taste great in blueberry muffins. Here is our recipe.
