How To Eat During The Holidays
Our sweet holidays begin with Halloween candy and slide into Thanksgiving pie season. Some of us suffer from digestive issues, constipation, acid reflux, or even heartburn. Holidays bring on stressors so we might overindulge, and once we start with fatty foods, it’s hard to put them down. Traveling can offset our dietary plans with sweet treats. Many foods are high in saturated fats and sugars tearing up our digestive system and causing bloating and gas. Dr. Julie Gatza is the co-founder of the Florida Wellness Institute and she has some suggestions regarding how to eat during the holidays. One of them is to give your food a background check. Make sure whatever you are consuming is the finest you can purchase or grow.
Only eat when you’re hungry
Many people eat when they’re not even hungry. They eat because they think they should eat: it’s lunchtime. Or, they have to eat because they’re on a schedule at work. Forced eating starts early, with our kids. We make them sit down and eat with us. But if we were living in Nature, foraging for our food, we would eat only when we were hungry. When your body is hungry for the plainest of foods, it’s telling you that it’s ready to manufacture the enzymes for proper digestion. And don’t mistake thirst for hunger — try water first.
Use spices and natural digestive aids to help break down what you eat. Certain cultures add ginger to their food, which is super for digestion. Others add hot peppers –a stimulant to the digestive tract which helps secret more hydrochloric acid. There are cultures that use a lot of turmerics, which is good for digestion. There are other aperitifs that get the digestive enzymes flowing. Some people add pineapple to their meat dishes to help break it down and you can always use formulated enzyme supplements, like AbsorbAid.
