8 Expert Thanksgiving Health Tips
I bet you’ll be willing to do at least three of these Thanksgiving health tips, because they’re easy and make sense.
ON THE Huffington Post, I just read an article where medical experts share their Thanksgiving health tips.
Doctors and health experts David Katz, Michael Roizen, Janet Taylor, Erin Marcus, Patricia Fitzgerald and Dean Ornish all submitted suggestions to help your Thanksgiving be more sublime:
Eat better, less, digest it well, and have gratitude for it all.
Below, I summarize the Thanksgiving health tips I think are most useful — peppered with my perspective — and add two of my own. (Read the original article which includes the three that ignored here.)
So, let’s get to it…
1. Earn Your Food
Simply, go outside and frolic about. Get the heart rate up, blood flowing, lungs expanding. Obviously, this activity will burn calories, offsetting the extra calorie load of Thanksgiving and making the food much more satisfying.
2. Gratitude Your Attitude
Other than stuffing ourselves with food, the whole point of Thanksgiving is to reflect upon and embrace gratitude. The majority of the people in the world aren’t feasting like most Americans on Thanksgiving. Forget your worries and fears and focus on an attitude of gratitude. By the way, having a part of your consciousness so devoted may make you more mindful about what and how much you’re eating.
3. Eat the Pumpkin, Skip the Crust
There may be several desserts at your Thanksgiving banquet, but do you have to sample every one of them to feel satisfied? How about selecting just the pumpkin pie? Pumpkin contains alpha-carotene, a precursor to Vitamin-A, and helps the maintenance of healthy skin and bones, good vision, and a robust immune system. (Nutritious pumpkin pie recipe here.)
4. Do More than Eat at the Table
If you slow down the pace of eating, you’ll eat less. This is because it takes some time for the stomach to, in effect, signal the hypothalamus in the brain that it’s full so that the hypothalamus “tells” us to drop the fork. One tactic to slow down the pace is to have something to do at the table other than eat. Conversation is good, but props are better. So, how about asking each person at the table to bring something to share, such as a book, poem, story, etc.?
5. Stroll after Your Meal
A 20 minute-plus walk after a meal improves digestion and improves blood sugar control (particularly important for those with diabetes or on the cusp of this disease). Grab that person you have yet to catch-up with and go stroll.
6. Ingest Calcium
“Getting too full can lead to heartburn or acid reflux. Calcium helps to stop heartburn by tightening the valve that keeps stomach acid in its place. The most effective preparation is calcium citrate powder. Take 250 mg, dissolved in water, after every meal and at bedtime (for a total daily dose of 1,000 mg). Swallowing calcium pills does not prevent reflux because the calcium is not instantly dissolved.”
Now, to my two suggestions…
7. Drink a Filling, Cleansing Drink
This idea helps in two ways:
- The drink takes the edge off your hunger so you will eat less at the Thanksgiving banquet table; and
- It will help you better eliminate (poop) what you eat.
About a half to an hour before you expect to eat, grab a jar with a lid so you can vigorously shake what you put in it, and add at least the first two of these:
- 4 ounces of pure water and 4 ounces of apple juice (8 ounces of water if no juice).
- 4 tablespoons of psyllium husk powder (at most health food stores).
- 2 to 4 ounces of aloe vera juice. (No worries if you don’t have it.)
- 3 tablespoons of bentonite, a liquid clay that absorbs toxins (not essential)
- 2 tablespoons of lemon juice (not essential).
- 3 tablespoons of liquid chlorophyll (again, not essential).
Drink it down before it congeals.
8. Drink Water Before You Eat
This is the last tip of this post. About 15 minutes before you sit down to nosh, drink at least 8 ounces of water. This will help fill you a bit and help curb your ravenous appetite that would typically make your fellow dinners wonder if you’ve been reincarnated from the Canidae genus.
Do you have any Thanksgiving health tips? If so, please submit them in the Comments section below.
Last Updated on December 25, 2019 by Joe Garma
