How to stay healthy during festive season and still have fun

Christmas and New Year’s Eves’ are nearly here and 2021 is very close. This period of the year is synonymous with joy, love, sharing and also abundance, sometimes very abundant!

As this happens only once a year, rather than restricting ourselves or feeling guilty when we yield to temptation, why don’t we put in place a balanced rhythm and alternate between these joyful moments where excesses are allowed, together with moments of frugality.
By doing so our body will be able to rest and restore so that balance is achieved, like a pendulum which oscillates from one side to the other.

This practice will be much more beneficial for our body and our mood rather than after each bite saying to ourselves “I should not …” , “I eat too much”, “I will put on weight” and so on.
When we blame ourselves, our body is more stressed, even if this is unconscious, and stress increases the blood level of cortisol. This has an impact on our weight which tends to increase, and this is not really what we want. During this holiday season:

The best we can do is to eat less in between abundant dinners or even not eat at all, that is to say: consider fasting

Periods of abundance should be balanced with periods of frugality. In any case, if we eat “too healthy”, surprisingly enough, our digestive system becomes weaker. It is indeed useful, from time to time, to throw a little “bomb” at it, a heavy meal for example, in order for it to be able reinforce and become stronger.

We can eat everything it is just a question of balance

Tips on how can we organise ourselves to stay healthy despite the festive season?

During our festive meals, let’s just enjoy these precious moments, but the next day let’s put our digestive system and our entire body at rest. There are several different ways to do this:

• Eating only raw or steamed vegetables (or at a temperature below 100 °C) with a bit of olive, rapeseed or walnut oil for example, added after the cooking.

• Skipping one meal: the most effective will be to skip either breakfast or dinner, the time between two meals will be longer because of the night. This practice will be really beneficial, without rush to the next meal, of course. We may want to skip two meals the effect will be stronger.
• Fasting for a whole day: the last meal will be in the evening, the next day we will drink only water and the day after we will eat again.
• Eating only filtered vegetable juice and/or fruit juices (the pulp has to be removed). Needless to say, these juices must be freshly squeezed at home. The juices we find in supermarkets or stores are not recommended. At best they have already lost a significant amount of vitamins, at worst they really only contain sugar.

The objective is to have as much time as possible in between two meals with no food. The longer this time, the more effective the practice will be

We should remind ourselves that our primitive ancestors were used to alternating between period of abundance and period of famine. Well, there is no need to get to this extreme, however it is not natural to eat all the time and too much. For example, three meals a day and snacks in between. Why don’t we take advantage of this holiday season to come back to our true nature and from time to time put our digestive system and our whole body at rest?

Why is it so useful?

When we eat, 30% of the energy we have available is used to digest and when we eat a lot, it is even more. When we do not eat or when we eat very little, we give our digestive system and our entire body a kind of holiday. It gets back this energy to rest, to detoxify, to repair and to grow. Believe me, our body will be very grateful to us!

It is therefore not true to believe that we have to eat to get more energy. Actually, it is rather the opposite that occurs, because we are using energy to digest

Children (and animals) have understood this quite well: when they are sick, most of the time they do not eat, by doing so they get back the 30% of energy from digestion, to heal.

It is important to point out that there are certain contraindications and exceptions to this practice. Talk to your doctor first if you have any health issue!

Join us next week as we share tips on how to ease our digestion.  Wishing you good health till next week!