Everyone has been there at least once in their lives. You’ve overindulged, and now you feel miserable. While you wish you could take it back, you’re stuck with a yucky feeling from too much food. The day-after-Halloween feeling can be the worst.
While you can’t undo your bad choices, you can take steps to help your body detox and get back on the right track. And once you are back on track, maintain the routine with tips you can always find on our Insta @weliveconscious.
A Glass of Water the Morning After
Start your morning off with a glass of water. This is a great habit to have every morning, but especially when you’ve overindulged the night before. A morning glass of water helps jump-start your digestion, rehydrate your body, and boosts your metabolism. Try adding a splash of lemon for some flavor. People swear my lemon water in the morning for benefits like vitamin C, glowing skin, or urinary tract health.
Eat Breakfast
You’re probably doing some calorie math and are a little shocked and upset with yourself for all those fun-sized calorie bombs you consumed. Skipping breakfast sounds like a good way to get back on track and make up for it, but it’s one of the worst things you can do.
Overindulging in sweets is about more than just calories. Too much sugar gives you a sugar rush, which inevitably leads to a huge sugar crash. It’s not just draining on you, but it takes its toll on your body.
To fight the sugar crash, aim to eat a low-sugar, high protein, and good fat breakfast. Avocado multigrain toast with a poached egg is a perfect way to keep your energy up and get your body back on track. There are also a ton of delicious and nutritious smoothie recipes out there that make it easy for you to throw in some Live Conscious® Collagen Peptides for hair, skin, nail, and joint support — not to mention the health benefits from the fruits and veggies (and cocoa) throwin the mix!
High Fiber Day
Moving all that junk through your body requires digestion. Your body will take care of that on its own, but you can help it along by focusing on foods that are high in healthy fiber.
While whole grains are obviously good fibers, you don’t have to only eat them to have a high fiber day. Bananas, raspberries, pears, avocados, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and many other delicious fruits and vegetables are high in fiber too.
If you’re in a rush, you can always incorpoate DigestWell® into your morning routine. Just one capsule a day is filled with 10 broad spectrum, plant-based digestive enzymes to help your body absorb key nutrients more effectively. This, in turn, helps support optimal digestion and can help support your gut against uncormtable systoms of indigestion.
Skip the Carbs
Carbohydrates are not the enemy that they’ve been made out to be, but after a day of sugar binging, they’re not your friend either. Cut out any unnecessary carbs for the day, and focus on more nutrient-dense foods instead.
Drink More Water
You drank your glass in the morning, but it’s time to drink more. While the rough guideline is to consume eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day, on this day it’s a good idea to have even more.
Make Protein Your Go-to Snack
One of the strange things about a sugar overload is that while you may feel sick to your stomach in the morning, by late afternoon you’ll be craving the sweets again. Your body is still recovering from having a very high blood sugar level and the subsequent crash. This is where the benefits of protein come in to play.
Fight the day after Halloween bug by planning ahead and keeping protein-based snacks at the ready. Think meat and cheese sticks and nuts. Or take it a step further with a quick protein drink to-go with Live Conscious® Organic Protein in either Vanilla Dream or Cosmic Cacao.
Exercise
Sweating out those toxins is a great way to kickstart your recovery. But it’s more than that. Exercise gets the blood pumping in your body. Once your circulation is revved up, it flushes nutrients throughout your systems to fuel them.
Now that you’ve had a healthy breakfast and you’ve focused on eating good foods packed with healthy vitamins and minerals, it’s time to take advantage of those good choices with the perfect workout.
Stick With It
Resetting your body after a huge sugar binge may take more than a day. This probably isn’t great news because there’s still a lot of candy left, but your body will thank you if you hold off for a couple of days.
After you’ve recovered and set things back on track, allow yourself a moderate amount of treats. Only one serving of candy per day, and if you’re doing that, skip any other desserts you would normally have.
Be Reasonable
Yes, all that sugar was a mistake, but it probably wasn’t as much of a mistake as you think it was. A pound of sugar amounts to roughly 3500 calories. If you consider that a fun-sized candy bar has an average of 70 calories, that means you’d have to eat 50 of them to have gained a pound.
While you want to recover you also need to accept the fact that people aren’t perfect, and a little binge here and there isn’t the end of the world.
Do You Have Other Health Issues?
If you binge on sugar one night, it’s not going to give you diabetes. It’s also not going to cause other health issues except for perhaps a stomach ache, some lethargy the next day, and maybe a headache. But if you have an underlying health concern that you were unaware of, a massive sugar binge could be more of a problem.
If you’re experiencing other symptoms, or your sugar crash symptoms seem very severe, you might want to schedule a visit with your primary healthcare provider to do some routine blood work.
This is the perfect time to look at your normal eating habits and how much sugar you’re consuming. If you’re routinely eating a lot of sugar, you might be putting yourself at risk for some very serious health problems.
Cutting back on the sugar you regularly consume will help you avoid binges or make them less impactful so you don’t have this problem again next Halloween.
Waking Up For Wellness
If it feels like you’re battling a hangover, it’s because you are in a way, but it’s more like a sugar hangover. While there aren’t the toxic effects of alcohol in sugar, sugar still takes a toll on your body. Any type of overindulging can leave your body struggling to find homeostasis again, so these tips can be transferred to other situations.
The key is to support the healthy functions of your body, get rehydrated and appropriately fueled, and support your digestion. Then, while your body is recovering, give it time to refresh and revive by finishing your day with plenty of quality sleep.
You can overcome your Halloween candy binge with the right care and a promise to your body that you won’t do it again.