7 Tips for Healthy Holiday Eating from an Herbalist

From noisy tables to rich menus, holiday meals can overwhelm our systems. Here are seven gentle practices to bring your body back to “rest and digest,” so you can enjoy the feast without the fallout.

When we go to town on our food, we break it up into manageable, lubricated pieces (thank you, thank you, says our stomach) and introduce the first round of digestive enzymes. Chewing slowly also helps to prevent overeating—we give our digestive system the time it needs to send us the satiation signal.

When we’re relaxed and enjoying our food, our nervous system slides into parasympathetic dominance (the “rest and digest” branch of our autonomic nervous system), which allows for optimal digestion. Watching the news, engaging in stressful debates with our family, and eating on the run are all recipes for a bellyache. Consider taking time to offer a blessing or a moment of gratitude before eating to set the mood.

This is certainly easier said than done. Try eating slowly by thoroughly chewing and putting down your fork in between bites. Many people find that if they stop eating at 80% satiety, the sensation of fullness catches up in a few minutes. Overeating not only increases the risk of becoming overweight but also taxes all digestive processes.

We each have a personal relationship with food, which can include idiosyncratic reactions that may not be necessarily common. For example, most people digest sweet potatoes just fine, but they can cause gas in a few sensitive individuals. Trust your experience and your intuition about what nourishes or harms your body.

As much as finances will allow, eat organically—this one act will greatly affect your personal as well as planetary health. Every time you go organic, you support not only yourself, but also the health of rivers, clouds, frogs, hawks, and so on. The chemicals used in conventional agriculture—pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides—are known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors that have the ability to wreak havoc on our hormonal systems as well as those of our offspring for generations to come.

If we focus on eating fresh vegetables and fruits in season, we’ll naturally consume plenty of fiber, vitamins, and minerals, along with antioxidant flavonoids and related pigmenting compounds. Colorful pigments in plants are some of the best dietary measures for protecting our bodies against the free radical damage and mutagenic potential associated with modern environmental toxins. The more we eat from the garden, farmers market, and produce aisle, as opposed to packaged and processed “food,” the more vitality we are consuming—and eventually embodying.

This is perhaps the most important point in our whole discussion on nutrition. It’s all too easy to fall into a dogmatic and rigid approach to our food choices—enough so, that we give ourselves a tummy ache from food worry. Let yourself step out once in a while and eat something naughty. I’m talking shamefully unhealthy crap! It’s OK once in a while to eat something sinfully delicious as long as your daily choices are on the healthy side. In fact, sometimes these trespasses are what will keep you on the right track.

Trust your intuition; notice how your body feels, and look to how your ancestors ate. Trust all this more than the advice of experts. Because time has proven over and over that the experts can be wrong (even with reams of data supporting their dietary admonishments). And sometimes their advice is right for their bodies, but not for yours.

Your spice cabinet is medicine masquerading as food—and so is your culinary herb garden. Below, I explain how garden sage not only complements the flavor of some of our favorite foods but is also one of the best culinary herbs for enhancing the digestion of fats.