As you prepare your menus, your invitations, your shopping lists, and your homes for Thanksgiving this Thursday, you need to add an extremely important item to your list: preparing your own belly. Now you might be thinking “what the hell does that mean?”

Well let me ask you this…
…how did you feel the last time you ate a holiday dinner that included hors d’oeuvres, wine, bread stuffing, meat, potatoes, cruciferous vegetables, and cake topped with whipped cream or ice cream?

It is not unusual for people to complain of eating too much, but the complaint is often accompanied by groans of swelling and grunts of pain. This discomfort can be serious! I know I’ve been there! – and I want to do my best to avoid it – before I deprive myself of all food. Even if it’s organic and whole, the combination of those foods can wreak havoc on our gastrointestinal system.

So what can we do to prepare our own stomach for these delicacies?

Two things, and you can start right away.

I.-acidophilus
II. – digestive enzymes (Excerpt from Blog November 20)

Additional Information:

I. Take your acidophilus or probiotics daily to help populate your gut with some good bacteria, the kind that will help balance the ecological terrain of your internal environment. It’s important to take them on an empty stomach, even if you read some labels that say to take them with food.

In fact, I’ve found less expensive acidophilus (the kind they sell at drugstores or places like CVS) that claim to take with food. My guess is that they don’t have much or any living culture in them; if they did, they wouldn’t tell you to take them with food! Taking a good quality acidophilus on an empty stomach helps to ensure that the bacteria take up and are not diluted by food.

Besides taking acidophilus/probiotic capsules, there are other ways to get these good live cultures into your belly: yogurt (preferably unsweetened), kefir, and cultured foods like cultured vegetables (culturedvegetables.com).