With Christmas and New Year celebrations still fresh in memory, many people will be beginning to regret the excesses of the season. Whether you ate or drank too much this time around, January is a good time to go easy on your body and give yourself a chance to recover from all the rich food before it all starts again for Chinese New Year next month. Here are some easy tips to help make yourself feel a bit better after all the partying!
REMOVE TEMPTATIONS
Sometimes it is easy to overeat purely because there is so much food left over! Find a way to remove the extra food from sight; cookies and biscuits can be taken to work or as gifts when visiting, while meats and cooked products can be frozen and enjoyed in a few weeks’ time.
EAT YOUR GREENS
Eating vegetables is a good way to get more nutrients flooding your body, so opt for salads, soups, or plates piled high with the healthy stuff this month. Many vegetables are high in goodness, but greenery thought to be particularly good for detoxing include broccoli, artichokes, garlic, and onions.
H2O ALL THE WAY
The festive season will, no doubt, have been lubricated by alcohol, after-dinner coffees, sweet fizzy drinks, and cups of tea, so it’s a good idea to stick to water and herbal tea for a bit to rehydrate your body and get anything nasty flushed out of your system.
SOUR SAVERS
They may send your tongue into a tingle, but lemons are thought to be great for giving the body a helping hand after too much food and drink. The juice of the fruit helps stimulate the release of enzymes, which in turn help the body to remove toxins, so a squeeze of lemon in some hot or cold water first thing in the morning could set you up nicely.
BEAUTY SLEEP
With all the events, parties, and outings of the season, your sleep with probably have suffered. Make sure you have a few early nights and get plenty of time to rest – even if you can’t sleep early, just head to bed and read a book or watch a film to give your body chance to recuperate. GET MOVING
Alongside all the eating, you have probably spent the last few weeks sitting around, so make an effort to get active. This can be as simple as having a walk in the evening or as elaborate as joining a gym, but it will make you feel a lot better and could start a habit that will last the year.
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NEW DOGS, OLD TRICKS
It may be easy to assume that the art of detoxing is a relatively new fad, spawned in the hills of Hollywood where the rich and famous desperately try to keep their weight down, but the origins of detoxing go right back to those clever Ancient Egyptians and Greeks.
These ancients believed that “autointoxication” was important as a way of purging the body of toxins that built up due to an excess or deficiency of one of the four bodily fluids: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. This idea underpins the theory of Humourism – so named because each fluid linked to one of the four humours, and thus strange behaviour was thought to stem from a fluid imbalance too. The fluids also corresponded to four elements: fire, air, water, and, earth.
While it may seem a little archaic to our modern ears, these ideas actually underpinned modern medicine until as late as the 19th century!
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Source: The Expat January 2013
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