Most of us wait all year for the holidays. After all, it’s the most wonderful time of the year full of family, gifts, and wonderful food. Unfortunately, along with rich meals comes bloating, constipation, and extreme discomfort. Mainly, this comes after consuming things that leave your gut imbalanced. It may arrive early or late, but once it’s there, it may not leave until you make the changes necessary to promote a happy, healthy gut.
Fear not! You don’t have to sit out your aunt’s famous cooking this season to avoid an expanded waistline. Keep reading for our most valuable tips for gut bliss during the holidays and beyond.
1. Limit Dairy Intake
If you experience gas and constipation after consuming dairy, try coconut milk or nut-based milk as a delicious alternative.
Dairy is usually a culprit of inflammation and consequent bloating. This comes as no surprise since
1 out of every 10 Americans is lactose-intolerant, which means they lack the enzyme needed to digest lactose.
The best way to avoid painful gas and constipation is by avoiding dairy altogether. Also do your best to avoid dairy in hidden sources, like soups, cream sauces, and desserts. Beware of dairy in holiday drinks as well.
2. Consume Cultured Fermented Foods
Adding things like kombucha, kimchi, non-dairy yogurt, sauerkraut, and kefir will surely do your tummy some good. They’re fairly new to the trendy health food world, but fermented foods have been around for ages.
Imagine these foods as if they have been “activated” by the beneficial bacteria that ferment them. In exchange, we benefit from their ability to assist our digestion and improve the make-up of our gut flora.
3. Utilize Probiotics
We have more than 1 trillion bacteria in our guts…more than the number of cells in your body, outnumbering them 10 to 1. These tiny helpers have evolved to live within humans for centuries, but in our
modern world, we have disrupted this delicate ecosystem within our abdominal regions with antibiotics, pesticides, genetically-modified (GMO) crops, medications, and stress.
Repairing the state of balance within this “internal garden” is not only the key to gut happiness but also the key to health.
4. Avoid Sugar
Desserts are prone to run rampant during the holidays. But be aware of the fact that sugar is a catalyst for inflammation, which causes abdominal discomfort. Remember, sugar feeds yeast and also unfriendly bacteria, leading to very uncomfortable conditions known as SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth) and the less recognized SIFO (small intestine fungal overgrowth).
Symptoms usually include diarrhea, constipation, bloating, gas, fatigue, mental fog, headaches, and body aches. Not only will too much sugar raise the scale, but it will also expand your waistline in more ways than one. This holiday, instead, fill up with fruit rich in fiber like grapefruit and apples, or berries for their lower sugar impact.
5. Pop A Digestive Aide Before Or After You Eat
Make yourself some detox tea as a digestive aid, which can help even if you
went all out on dinner.
Before you eat or at the end of a meal, take a digestive aid, like ginger or fennel tea. You can add a stick of cinnamon for a sweet-spicy anti-bloat agent as well. These spices help relax the stomach, stimulate digestion and promote peristalsis (the involuntary movements that move food down the digestive tract).
Slowly sipping tea can be a great substitute for eating dessert, without feeling cheated at the end of a meal. Tea is an old-world ritual; it interjects a moment to pause, getting your body into the relaxed state of your autonomic nervous system, which allows for easy digestion to take place.
So, with these foods, we’re sure you’ll be able to enjoy guilt-free meals this holiday season.
Jasmine Browley holds an MA in journalism from Columbia College Chicago, and has contributed to Ebony, Jet and MADE Magazine among others. So, clearly, she knows some stuff. Follow her digital journey @JasmineBrowley.
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