1. Start your day with two large glasses of water, ideally one of those glasses will have some freshly squeezed lemon. This rehydrates your cells and sets your gut up for success as you launch into your day. After 15 minutes of allowing that lemon to fortify and balance your cells, then you can consider coffee or tea.

2. For breakfast, we feel great when we eat fruit, and fruit alone. Until noon or so, we stick with fruit because it’s easy to digest and offers some incredible benefits. A favorite smoothie bowl: blend a fresh GMO-free papaya, frozen raspberries, fresh mint, freshly squeezed lime, & 2 dates, top with shredded coconut and banana. The enzymes in these fruits are incredibly healing. The Medical Medium offers this recipe and many more! 

3. Can you find a way to squeeze in at least one salad or vegetable centric meal every day? This allows a hefty dose of nutrients, while also adding much needed fiber. Roasted vegetables, stir-fries, kale salads: the reason these meals are all the rage is because they actually add nutrients that are “medicine” into your digestive system. 

4. Have you ever tried putting your fork down between bites? This forces you to slow down and savor each bite, as opposed to eating so fast that your stomach doesn’t have time to register if it’s full yet. We should always stop eating before we have that feeling of being stuffed, that way the stomach can effectively digest. Also consider counting your bites. If we chewed each piece of food 20x, it would digest so much  more comfortably, and we would never over eat! 

5. If you do get heartburn from overeating, we’ve noticed two simple things that help. Taking a teaspoon of ACV (we mix ours in water) encourages your gut to produce more acid to break down food. The digestive enzymes from Garden of Life do a really nice job of settling an overactive stomach as well. We always keep a jar of those around the house. 

6. Ayurvedic medicine encourages people to keep their eating window to the 12 hour mark. If we eat a meal at 7am and finish dinner by 7pm, this allows our digestive tract to do its work of breaking down food for the other 12 hours in the day, without disruption from more and more food that keeps getting added to the tract. 

If you are attending gatherings at other people’s homes, consider contributing a meal to the table that works well for you. Maybe it’s a fennel salad? Fennel works wonders for soothing our guts. Maybe it’s a tray of roasted squash and pomegranates? Over here at Organic Krush, we can help! We’ve had years of making sure the dinner tables we attend are full of “food as medicine” type meals. For us, dairy free and gluten free offer the most comfort, so we create a lot of meals with that in mind! 

We think of the digestive tract as this complex and beautiful tunnel that is meant to serve you as a best friend: supportive, energizing, and caring. If we take our time when we eat and if we consider eating foods that make us feel amazing ~ like papaya and dark green vegetables ~ we will not only have success during the holidays, but also throughout our lives around the table. 

Towards Great Health,
Fran and Michelle