Feeling sluggish after a holiday meal is a common experience, but it doesn't have to be your norm. In this podcast, I share effective strategies to combat that dreaded food coma, focusing on simple yet impactful actions you can take after eating. One of the best recommendations is to go for a family walk right after dinner to stimulate digestion and boost energy levels. Additionally, we dive into the effects of alcohol consumption, particularly how certain wines can contribute to tiredness due to hidden sugars. I also discuss the benefits of digestive enzymes and ginger, both of which can significantly speed up digestion and help you feel more energized, allowing you to fully enjoy your holidays without the post-meal slump.

Chapters:

• 00:06 - Overcoming the Thanksgiving Food Coma
• 00:57 - Navigating Holiday Indulgence
• 05:08 - The Truth About Natural Wines
• 10:10 - The Power of Ginger in Digestion

Info@therealityofhealth.com

Welcome, healthy friends, to the reality of health.

Part two of Thanksgiving Food coma.

Right?

Nobody wants to go through this.

I'm going to teach you some ways to not feel so groggy and, you know, tired.

And, you know, I feel like I've had too much to drink or I've had too much to eat.

That typical carb coma, you know, that kind of thing.

To give you some tips, Remember, a lot of times it's just the food.

You ate too many carbs, as we talked about in part one.

Too much sugar, too many carbs.

Maybe you ate too much and not usually, but it's.

It's.

It's generally the carbs.

Okay, let's be real.

Almost the entire plate is carbohydrates.

Go back.

Listen to part one.

I break it down for you.

So this episode, I want to get into what you can do to not feel so tired and, you know, enjoy your holidays.

And it could be even a birthday.

It doesn't have to be just, you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The first thing that you can do is after you guys are done eating dinner, is go for a walk.

Matter of fact, take the whole family.

See, it's a great family exercise to do.

Get you out of the house for a few minutes, go for a walk, get the blood moving.

This is fantastic for digestion.

Really good for you.

Wakes you up.

Get your central nervous system functioning.

You know, I know that maybe the football games on.

You don't want to go for a walk because you just ate or something like that.

I get it.

But generally, if you can do this great family exercise, get everybody out, the whole family.

Eric, I've got 50 family members over.

Well, then you all go for a walk.

That would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

Go for a walk with 50 of your family members.

That would be awesome.

People in your neighborhood would be like, what is going on out there?

Oh, that's just John's family.

They're all over for Thanksgiving.

They go for a walk every time they eat.

That would be hilarious.

Be kind of fun, though, because usually you go for a walk by yourself or your spouse or your child or something, or with a dog.

Here you are with all of your family.

It would be hilarious.

Anyway, this is fantastic.

Great way to get out of that funk and get the digestion going.

Getting to the next level.

Next is the alcohol that you consume.

Talked about it in part one, but the alcohol is a big deal.

Wine especially has a lot of carbs, Eric.

No, it doesn't.

I heard beer is the one with all the carbs?

Yeah.

Beer is like liquid bread.

It has got a lot of carbs in it.

But guess what?

I would be willing to bet you that more of the wine you're drinking has more carbohydrates than the other alcohols you're drinking.

I did a whole episode, as you can see here, episode 70 on wine and the Al.

Then everything that's in it, from the alcohol to all of the chemicals and toxins and everything.

If you're not buying additive free natural wine, you're basically just buying Kool Aid with alcohol in it.

Literally.

I am not even kidding when I say that.

You could literally take purple food coloring, mix it with some vodka, add some grape juice, like that, and you have wine.

Oh, but Eric, I love this stuff.

This stuff that I buy.

You know, it's $100 a bottle or it's a $500 bottle.

I'm telling you right now, if it's not additive free or natural wine, it is loaded with sugar.

I don't believe you.

Well, you can listen to my episode or I could show you right here.

This is.

Even the BBC even talked about this.

They analyzed 30, more than 30 bottles of wine, found two glasses.

Two glasses could be enough to reach the recommended daily sugar limit for adults.

Research by Alcohol Health Alliance UK found some bottles had up to 59 grams of sugar.

That's more than a glazed donut.

And by the way, that's all the different types of alcohol, or, excuse me, of wine.

But listen, that's low.

59.

It's low.

It actually goes more than that.

It can be up to 100 grams in a bottle.

A bagel is 60.

So if you had, you know, you've been partying for five hours, you end up drinking, you know, a bottle yourself or, you know, the bottle plus the food, you're at 3, 400 grams of carbohydrates.

No wonder you're feeling tired and you want to take a nap.

It's crazy.

Wine and the alcohol plus all of the food that you had is going to make you tired.

But natural wines, look at this.

This is just a.

This is pinkfortitude.com.

so it's a wine wine, natural wine, dry farms, wine website.

But this is more like what's in a normal, properly fermented wine.

0.15 grams per glass.

So you drink the whole bottle and you might have a gram of sugar because the yeast consumed all of it.

Now the alcohol is a little bit lower.

So you're like, well, I don't get quite the buzz I usually do, yeah.

Well, that's because you don't have the alcohol plus all the sugar in the wine.

You're going to have lower sulfites.

It's going to be much, much cleaner for you.

No hangover.

So look for all natural wine.

You're not going to find natural wines in the grocery store and liquor stores.

You're going to have to go to like a wine shop near where you live and say, hey, I'm looking for all natural dry wines.

These kinds of things that have low sugar.

If you're going to do Italian wines and you don't want to ask, you want the, and I talked about this in episode 70, but you want the bluish.

There's a label on top of the wine.

There's a.

On the collar of the bottle.

They've got like a greenish yellow and a blue.

You want the blue.

Blue is no additive.

They haven't done anything to it.

Very minimal processing that's going to have your least amount of sugar in the, in the wine.

If you're not a wine person and you do cocktails well, you should really go for vodka.

And vodka, depending on the brand that you are buying, could have a lot of sugar because vodka companies will add glycerol.

It helps to keep the throat from burning.

So you say, wow, that Grey Goose or that Chopin or whatever brand you're thinking of, it doesn't burn well.

That's because they coat it with sugar.

Valentine, who is arguably the best that you can get.

It's my brand that I would ever buy.

I don't buy any other vodka than Valentine is additive free, glycerol free, sugar free, completely win awards constantly because it is that good.

So this is a great way to do it.

Now they only, you know, make three.

They've got standard vodka, a white blossom and a berry.

If you want, you know, the cleanest vodka and be able to control the carbs you get.

You don't want flavoreds like these because I don't know if you can see this.

35% alcohol on both of these and 40 in the Valentine.

That's because they add sugar to make them taste like that.

So find whatever vodka you like and make sure it doesn't have any added glycerol or sugar.

If you say, but I don't drink vodka, Erica, I'm a whiskey guy, I'm a bourbon kind of guy.

Well, be sure that those are single malts.

Make sure they are actually additive free and you can contact the company and find out, do you add Sugar, do you add flavorings?

Do you add caramel, color, Any of these other kind of things that can affect you.

Okay, now before you eat and after, you can take enzymes.

What the heck is an enzyme, Eric?

Well, you know about digestive enzymes.

Well, you can also buy digestive enzymes and this will help speed up that digestion process and make that food go through faster, quicker.

So you're basically just kind of jump starting your digestion for the most part.

Awesome.

And if you have a whole bunch of food, because you know, you don't normally eat like Thanksgiving dinner the same way you eat your, you know, Wednesday night type of food, your dinner, there's so many more things and there's probably more carbohydrates, There's a lot on that plate and you're like, oh my gosh, your body's like, what is all of this ingredients in these?

There's so much going on.

Rather than just like, let's say Wednesday night you had, you know, some kind of meat, maybe chicken, let's say asparagus and mashed potatoes.

Just as a standard American kind of thing.

Well, that's only like three things.

But, but when you have a holiday meal, you're piling on all kinds of different things.

There's a lot going on.

Digestive enzymes can speed this up and make you feel so much better, so much faster.

Now the amount to take, I will tell you, it's not medical advice at all, but you can't take too many, if you know what I mean.

If it was me, I would take like five or six of these capsules before I ate, like right before, and then five or six after I'm done eating.

You can't overdo it.

You're never going to have side effects from digestive enzymes.

But why not just get back to normal as quick as possible and enjoy a good holiday meal?

Fantastic.

You know what else digest food much, much faster?

That would be ginger.

And if anybody knows me, it's one of my favorite things on the planet.

You can do so many things with ginger, but when you add that to your meal in any way possible, you can digest your food much faster.

Now there's research done with this.

Prove it.

It's just how it is.

A lot of the ethnic type foods that use ginger, they digest.

They, their types of foods digest more easily in the body because they have a lot of spices that increase digestion.

The other thing it does is it reduces bloating and gas and these kind of things.

So if you have a big meal and you have Your eating food you don't normally do, maybe more alcohol during this time of year.

Ginger will calm your stomach, make it feel better.

Very nice way to go.

And there's a lot of ways you can do it.

But first check this out.

This is from Hopkins Medicine.

So a natural component of ginger root, but basically we're talking about ginger here.

The rate at which food exits the stomach and continues along the digestive process.

Eating ginger encourages efficient digestion, so food doesn't linger as long in the gut.

It's everything from nausea, chemotherapy, pregnancy, bloating and gloating and gas, wear and tear in your cells.

Anti inflammatory, on and on and on.

Notice here, 400 natural compounds.

It's much more than that.

Those are the ones we know of.

There's so many after that that they can't classify or name.

They just give it a number because they don't know what it is.

Awesome, awesome food.

But the key is, is it will digest your food, help you digest food so much faster.

You will feel so much better.

So how do I use ginger, Eric?

Well, let's say you all drinking alcohol and you want to make a punch.

Why not a ginger lime or ginger lemon or a ginger citrus?

So you use an additive free alcohol like of like valentine vodka.

Add water, add lime juice, add lemon juice, that kind of thing.

And then if you want sweetener, then use club soda for your water if you want to.

But you could add some stevia or dare I say maybe in some honey, good honey for a sweetener.

You just need it a little bit, right?

You don't need a super sweet, heavy punch.

That, that becomes Chloe.

Now this is something that you could do.

Alcohol free version and a regular one.

So this kind of citrus plus very low carbohydrate, plus ginger juice in there.

Because you can juice ginger.

You add the, any way you can get the ginger into the punch, you get it in there, okay?

You can juice ginger, you can slice it up and add it the night before with the alcohol like the vodka, so that it starts to steep out of the ginger itself.

But the more ginger you get in there, the more this punch becomes digestive, okay?

And it's delicious.

And at this time of year you get a little bit of like, you know, gingery warmness because it's, it's Thanksgiving, it's cooler and Christmas, it's cooler.

But then you also get the freshness.

So this is a great punch to do.

There's probably, I don't know, there's probably a hundred recipes on how to make this kind of a thing online doesn't really matter.

I'm using this as a larger kind of idea to make one thing everybody can drink increases digestion.

You still have fun, if you know what I mean.

Right.

And you can make one for the kids so they feel like they're involved.

It's just not alcoholic.

The other thing you can do is make your own single beverage as you are, you know, going through the evening.

So let's say everybody else is drinking wine.

You know that that wine is full of sugar and you don't want that.

So you can use club soda, for example, get some ginger juice or sliced ginger or ginger powder.

Anything you want to use.

Maybe a little bit of lemon.

Here we have rosemary.

But even better for digestion would be mint.

So a ginger, lemon, mint, club soda vodka that has additive free is delicious.

Good for digestion, refreshing.

You can add ice like this to kind of like extend it so you're not getting too drunk.

Great way to go.

This is just a really, really nice drink.

Anybody can drink it.

If you want to turn this into.

You use the same thing and use bourbon or whiskey as well.

All right.

Just giving you some quick tips on how to take care of that food coma so you don't feel like it all night.

Thank you for listening.

Appreciate you as always.

Take care of yourselves.