Expert shows how to best manage holiday stress

The holiday season can be a stressful time of year for a variety of reasons, but one way to help “manage” holiday stress is to adjust your diet to help with overall physical and mental well-being. Doctor Loreena Ryder with the Naturopathic Physicians Group joined us earlier today to talk about “eating cleaner” during the holiday season. 

Ryder said there are a variety of reasons why so much stress emerges during the Holidays but it boils down to having many priorities during the time.

“We just try to fit so much into our life from the time we wake up from the time we go to bed we just have a huge checklist to manage and it wreaks havoc on our bodies,” Ryder said.

One way to manage stress is by “eating clean” according to Ryder because many junk food and unhealthy items can take up our diets during the holidays.

“My suggestion would be to remove one this holiday season from your diet and that one thing I would suggest removing would be sugar. sugar just wreaks havoc on our bodies it leads to many chronic health conditions, it causes inflammation which causes pain it can lead to brain fog, low metabolism just fatigue,” Ryder said.

Ryder suggests switching to fruit as a sweeter snack during the Holiday season. Another way to manage stress is to exercise according to Ryder.

“It gives you more energy, I encourage you to push past the notion whenever you’re driving home from work and you’re tired and you look into the gym and go ‘I’m so tired I just want to go home I encourage you to just pull in, go do your workout, and I promise you will leave with more energy than you went in with,” Ryder said.