ONCE again, we
are in a yuletide
season, Christmas and the 2015 New Year are around the corner.  Expectedly, some of us have tagged the season a time to engage in food and drinking festival.
Well, if this is your mindset then you are inviting ill-health to yourself. Overeating and reckless drinking does not only make you sick, the habit can kill.  Therefore, during this festive season, limit your food/drink intake to a healthy level. Stick to your medical diet if you are diabetic, hypertensive or suffering from other debilitating illnesses which you are managing on a doctor’s advice.  Ignore pleas from anyone to ditch your diet for a while during this season and enjoy yourself a little.
Such an advice is misplaced.  For instance, there was this diabetic who decided to overeat white rice in the spirit of Christmas.  Not longer after doing so, he fell ill.  His medical doctor younger brother and I had to rush around to look for medication to save his life.
Impliedly, always eat well during festivities.  Don’t forget your organic vegetables and fruits.  Eat lots of them.  Ensure what you eat is ripe.  Consuming unripe fruits/vegetables or those forced to ripe is health-threatening.
Furthermore, watch your carbohydrate intake.  Too much of it will give you not only digestive disorders and constipation but will set the stage for you to become overweight and obese.  Dump processed carbohydrates.  They are nutritionally dead foods, choose, instead, the nourishing whole carbohydrates.  This category of food come with fibre which helps to stabilise your blood sugar level, control your hunger pangs as well as assist in bowel movements.
Note, too, that your carbohydrate intake should depend on the level of your physical activity.  If you are an adult and predisposed to a sedentary lifestyle, then you don’t have to overeat carbohydrates like the active teenagers who burn them off easily.  Also, be informed that as an adult, your metabolism is slowing down.  So, you don’t have to put it under more stress with excess carbohydrate diet.
White sugar is another food most people will overeat during this yuletide season.  They do this through eating lots of cakes, downing bottles of soft drink and licking plenty of sweet.  Well, this is telling you that white sugar is basically a poison.  For this reason, you are advised to limit your consumption of white sugar, which is a major source of empty, dangerous calorie.
Watch out in particular for soft drink bombardment this season.  Each bottle of soft drink contains lots of white sugar, a stimulant used to win the palates of consumers of the drink.  Children and women love its sugary taste, aromatic flavour and oral efferverscence.  That is why they tend to overconsume the drink.
All said, it should be stated that a soft drink per se is an unhealthy drink because of both its white sugar and other contents.  Hence, taking much of soft drinks is hazardous.  Following this, adults are advised not to be too patronizing with soft drinks to younger ones.  Don’t force the drinks or food on them.  Give them gifts instead.
Similarly, proteins should not be overeaten during this season. An adult needs only 39 grams of protein daily.  If you eat more, you will suffer from proteinuria, a medical condition that poses serious threat to your health.
Younger people can also have proteinuria when they overeat protein, even though they are still growing unlike matured adults.  This implies that everybody must watch his/her protein intake at this time.  On the other hand, choose fish and less of animal protein.  This is because fish is easier to digest and has friendly fats and no dangerous cholesterol unlike animal protein.  Also, a by-product of animal protein metabolism is uric a cid, an excess of which predisposes a person to arthritis.
As we celebrate this season, moreover, some of us will choose to live in the bottle.
Yes, this season is for boozing, some persons will tell you.  How mistaken they are.  We are supposed to take stock of our activities during this end-month of December 2014 to realise our successes, failures and challenges.  It is for this reason we should be in a sober mood of reflection this time around as well as during New Year day in 2015.  If you are always drunk this festive season, how then will you be clear-headed to re-engineer yourself for a better 2015?
Having said this, let me say here firstly that if you must drink, do so wisely.  Too much alcohol in the body does not only disrupt your social life, the habit can damage your brain, digestive system, libido, kidney and liver.  The habit can also, give you hypertension and metabolic diabetes.
Secondly, shun the attitude of thinking that an alcoholic hang over is “curable” with more alcohol.  This is a fallacy.  A hang over is the alcohol-distressed body’s SOS cry for help.  Therefore, what you need during a hang over is detoxification of the body to flush out the poisonous alcohol from it.  So, it amounts to over-stressing the body to add more alcohol to the body during a hang over.  This attitude of a drunkard exposes him to the serious health danger of knocking our his liver and kidney as well as further polluting his blood.
Thirdly, drinkers should scrutinise what they take during period.  Why?  A lot of fake drinks are now in circulation.
Finally, we must realise that both soft and alcoholic drinks dehydrate the body.  Hence, a lot of water should be drunk if you consume these drinks. Water is life.

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