Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Joyful Holidays! Whether you are following a particular religious practice or just swept up in the season because you live in a multicultural society, this is the time of year to appreciate your friends and family and overindulge. I’d like to offer a few tips to survive this holiday season…

Whether you have bloated beef bellies or super sugar highs, you can survive the holidays without gaining several pounds and feeling stuffed and tired for the majority of the season. Here are my seasonal eating tips to enjoy a healthier holiday season:

Begin each of your meals with a digestive enzyme. This will help your digestive system breakdown the massive amounts of food we consume at this time of year and leave you feeling less bloated and fatigued. Did you know that our bodies expends between 60-80% of it’s energy on digestion alone? Taking a digestive enzyme helps to save some of the energy required by our bodies to digest and gives it more energy to do important tasks like detoxification from all the sweets and booze we are consuming.

If you are a meat eater, I recommend Wobenzym digestive enzymes and if you are a vegetarian or vegan, I recommend Digest Gold by Enzymedica.

There are candy canes, chocolates and fruit cakes everywhere you look. At some point in time, even the strongest will indulge. In order to compensate for all this excess sugar in our diets, be sure to eat plenty of veggies, making sure that you have at least 2 servings of greens per day. They will help to replace the B vitamins that sugar depletes and will give you more energy to sustain you through those long holiday evening parties!

Here is a favourite smoothie recipe of mine that you can have for breakfast to boost you energy:

1 cup almond milk
1 scoop Sun Warrior protein powder
2 tbsp sprouted, dehydrated and pulverized flax seed
2 tbsp coconut oil
5 leaves of kale, de-veined
1/2 cup frozen blueberries or other mixed berries

Place in a Blendtec (or other high power blender) and blend until smooth.

This will provide you with antioxidants, clean protein, healthy fats, B vitamins and good fibre. Fibre is essential to controlling blood sugar levels so will help when you are having those yummy desserts at lunch or dinner.

Everyone deserves to enjoy their holidays. Being savvy to how we will be eating our way through all the parties will help us to make better choices when we are eating at home and work and help us to survive the holiday season.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Holidays to All!