Holiday Health Check *

Isn’t December the happiest month of the year? Holiday lights radiate a festive glow wherever you go. We engage in shopping spree for Christmas gifts to express our appreciation of loved ones. Family and friends gather at parties to share joyful stories while feasting and enjoying their beverages of choice. Children indulge themselves with sweet delicacies that their parents usually limit during other times of the year.

As much as we enjoy this holiday season, many of us experience some side effects of the exuberance with which we celebrate. Fatigue, indigestion, hangover, and SAD (seasonal affective disorder) may affect us even before Christmas arrive. Luckily, we can avoid all these by making small but effective changes to our lifestyles. The following is the master list to achieve a jolly healthy Christmas. Put it into action for the upcoming holiday season and the many to follow. Have a healthy Christmas and New Year!

• Keep shopping time under 2 hours. As much as we take pleasure in holiday shopping, our bodies and wallets can handle only so much. Navigating from stores to stores and carrying heavy shopping bags can create mental and physical stress, not to mention the apprehension of paying credit card bills in the following months. Any shopping trip longer than 2 hours diminishes the joy of holiday consumption.

• Maintain regular exercise routine. With relatives coming to town, shortening holiday hours at health clubs, and a queue of parties to attend, we tend to forgive a lapse in our normal exercise routine. But exercise is the most effective way to reduce stress, burn off the excessive calories that we intake during all the Christmas parties, and boost serotonin (happy brain chemical). Intensive cardio work-out the day after a feast helps with digestion and avoids weight gain.
  

• Have 3 meals a day like usual. We are tempted to skip meals so that we can indulge ourselves with abundance at holiday parties. Binge eating one day and limited eating the next day interfere with the body’s regular metabolism, and send out false signals to the digestive system. This increases the incidence of weight fluctuation and digestive diseases. Don’t change your meal times just for the holidays.
  

• Eat citrus foods. We all realize that we are only human and that we will overeat during the Christmas holidays - no matter how discipline we think we are. To avoid indigestion, introduce citrus foods into your feast. Known as nutritional powerhouses for vitamin B6, folate, and thiamine, grapefruits, oranges, and tomatoes help liver to digest foods and metabolize toxins. If you are already experiencing indigestion, drink some hawthorn juice. When the stomach is challenged by unfamiliar foods, drinking a glass of hot water mixed with honey and lemon can quickly calm down a digestive rebellion.

• Remember to take a deep breathe and meditate. Although we look forward to Christmas, company parties, gift shopping, holiday traffic, and pleasing relatives all add u to a sate of stress. Being able to manage this stress is important for the prevention of seasonal affective disorder caused by holiday activities. Remember to take a deep breathe whenever we feel overwhelmed. Better yet, medication, especially before sleeping, moves brain waves from the stress-prone right frontal cortex to the tranquility-receptive left frontal cortex.

• Drink green tea after alcohol consumption. Few of us would say no to wine, beer and oher alcoholic beverages as we celebrate the holidays. Having a cup of hot green tea right after drinking helps you remain sober. According to a study published in Biological Chemistry, green tea extract protects against early alcohol-induced liver injury in rats. The natural antioxidants in green tea reduce ethanol oxidative stress in the liver. Green tea is one of the easiest and the best cures for hangovers.

* This article was first published in Yellow Magazine December 2008 issue.