Eat::Live::Love

Holiday Eating:

by David Brochstein, L.Ac., O.M.D.

For many people the holidays seems more like foe than friend. Fudge, cookies, cake, cheese plates, dips, potstickers, dessert wine, beer, champagne... leer at us across the room.

Even worse is the guilt we feel after we over-indulge. We may assess a price for our indiscretions, sentencing our body to 50 crunches the next morning and a wheezing half-hour on the tread mill.

Give yourself a break this year. In many cultures, food = love. You know you will be plied with goodies wherever you go. Here are a few tips to help you navigate the rice krispy seas, and wake up on January 1st without a food hang-over!

1. Eat Three Meals a Day. When you skip meals it confuses your body's metabolism. From a TCM perspective, skipping meals can actually create cold-patterns in your digestive tract and can damage your blood. The digestive system is called the "middle burner" and is the body's equivalent of a coal burning stove. When you don't put fuel in the fire, it goes cold. Simple as that.

Skipping meals repeatedly can lead to digestive disorders, dampness, menstrual difficulties, weight gain, and decreased sexual function.

2. Eat the Right Three Meals A Day. Eat protein with every meal, combined with a balance of carbohydrates. Eating a sufficient amount of protein with each meal will deter snacking.

3. Choose Your Battles in Advance. Will you choose to defeat the tin of ribbon candy or the home-made apple pie? Allow yourself a limit such as one dessert a day. You can enjoy the merriment without getting caught in a cycle of craving and guilt.

4. Beware of the "It's Too Late Now" Attitude.

Once a moral food code is broken, people have a tendency to say "Oh, _____ it!" While the choice of expletive varies from person to person, the reaction is almost always the same. Don't paint yourself into a corner. You know deep-down that two cookies may be worse than no cookies, but a whole package is never a good idea!

5. Avoid Processed Foods. Perhaps avoiding these types of foods is the most difficult holiday challenge to undertake, but it is well worth it.

Here are a few hints about choosing good food:

* If you don't know what an ingredient is - don't eat it!

* Anything that starts with hydro- has been chemically altered and is not for you!

* Banish all artificial dyes and colorants: this is all FD&C #s, and then some...

* Watch out for shortening, MSG, and excess use of gums as fillers.

These processed foods are difficult, if not impossible, for our body to process. They confuse our cellular transport systems, and are often labeled as "waste" by our bodies. Unfortunately, instead of getting excreted as waste they are often stored in fat cells and congest our systems for decades!

Just Say No.

6. Carry a Snack. Perhaps you know that you will be going to a holiday party straight from work, and you will be hungry. Stop by a natural food store and pick up dried fruit/nuts, or an energy bar, such as BoBo's Oat Bars. Eat this snack before you go into the party. Now you can let your head, and not your stomach, navigate you across the buffet!

Eat: Live: Love

Dr. B

david@dbacu.com