How to Handle Festive Foods

It’s that time of year when temptation is all around us and no one wants to be a party pooper and munch on celery sticks and chicken breasts when there is mashed potato, turkey, sausages, bacon, stuffing, apple sauce and lots of Christmas pudding and brandy butter (in a 1:1 pudding/butter ratio if you’re lucky) to be had.  And that’s before you’ve raided the kids’ chocolate box selections or Granny’s After Eights!

As much as we may want to be strict and Spartan, I am a huge proponent of the credo that life is for living, and don’t see anything wrong with the odd festive blow out. However, caution must be exercised (you didn’t think I’d give carte blanche for gross piggery did you?!) and a Christmas Day feast should not turn into a weeklong food fest.  There are also ways to mitigate the oh so tasty, but not so nutritious, good stuff you will inevitably consume and these simple guidelines are something that should come in handy when confronted with the healthy eater’s hell that is a buffet meal!

The primary rule of thumb for limiting festive damage is to ensure that you drink plenty of water.  I know this is a boring point, you have all heard it a hundred times before, and you are expecting me to pull a few new surprises out of my nutritional bag of tricks (patience Grasshopper), but it is of fundamental importance. Adequate hydration will enable your body to cope far better with the deleterious effects of alcohol, it will fill you up and prevent you stuffing your face all in one go, and it will allow you to process your inevitably high carbohydrate consumption far more effectively.  

Overdosing on the Quality Streets will suck up your body’s available B vitamins, so keeping a few multi B vitamins handy is a smart way to enable your body to cope with an excess of sugar.  

Something that I always recommend my clients do in “party circumstances” is to strike a balance between carbohydrates and protein consumption. You may not feel like doing it, but a quick protein shake will blunt any sugar high and its inevitable crash, and this in turn will help to keep you lean by limiting the insulin / cortisol seesaw syndrome caused by excessive swings in blood sugar levels.   

One less well known but highly effective “trick” is to supplement with the widely available amino acid glutamine.  This product isn’t enhancing merely to the immune system, it also helps limit the desire for both alcohol and sugary foods! 5 to 10 grammes in a glass of water before you go out should help, and for those of you with carbohydrate cravings that you can’t control try 10 grammes of glutamine with 4oz of heavy cream.  It sounds awful, but it kills sugar cravings stone cold dead in its tracks.

Another supplement that should be at the top of all our Christmas wish lists is a high quality fish oil product. Ignore the fact that fish oils have been proven to have a positive effect on all diseases known to man and woman (both physical and mental), a decent dose of fish oil (minimum of 8 grammes daily) massively enhances stable blood sugar levels to the extent that 1-2 grammes taken with a “bad carb” meal can mitigate the negative impact of rapidly elevated insulin levels by up to 70%, and turns on the lipolytic gene whilst turning off the lipogenic gene (the former is fat burning, the latter fat storing).  Furthermore, fish oil is also anti inflammatory so that it can help fight the swelling and oedema associated with seasonal over indulgencies.