Dr. Alison shares how to recover after a cheat meal (day, weekend, vacation) and how you can recover quickly without the guilt!
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Hello and welcome! Today. We are talking about recovering from a cheat meal or a cheat day or weekend, and how to get back on track quickly to your food plan, your meal plan. So you can get rid of the bloating and the stress and just feel good again. If we haven’t met, I’m Dr. Alison DiBarto, Goggin, I’m a functional medicine physician and doTERRA wellness advocate. I help women overcome chronic health issues, anxiety, and weight gain, so they can start feeling good living life that they’re passionate about and get back to feeling like themselves. Again, maybe you are here because you indulged over the weekend. Maybe you had a party. Maybe you just had a moment where you’re craving all the things that you’ve been missing in your meal plan, and you fall off of track.
So today we’re going to talk about how to get back on track, whether you’re on a specific diet for a very specific health issue, maybe around something general, because it really works for your body like keto or AIP, or even paleo, or maybe you’re someone who works with someone like me as a functional medicine physician, where we’re just having a specific meal plan with specific foods to help your body heal, recover, and support the immune system as well.
First of all, the thing that you need to know is that it’s not a big deal. If you fall off of your food plan, you had a moment or a weekend or something like that happen, and you don’t have to beat yourself up. As normal is common. We have sugar cravings and you know what, honestly, you’re allowed to enjoy your life, your food, your friends, your relationships, your time off your vacation. So it’s okay. So number one, you don’t have to beat yourself up, going crazy and trying to undo what you did by either fasting for a really long time, punishing yourself, exercising more, doing two days, things like that. Aren’t going to help you get over the binge any faster. So stop any of those bad habits. You don’t have to punish yourself something like fasting might help within the first few hours, like the first 12 to 15 hours.
But if your body is not used to fasting, I would absolutely avoid it. If fasting leads to more bingeing, I would absolutely avoid it and really allow yourself to just to come back into your diet, like nothing even happened. So the first thing that I want to talk about is what supplements to use because your body isn’t used to all of the excess sugar. If you’ve been on a plan for awhile in carbs and different types of foods. So there are some supplements that can help your body. We regulate the blood sugar. So the first one is chromium and the second one is potassium. And the third one is B vitamins. So taking these in combination will help your body decrease that insulin response, help the cells utilize more of the sugar and carbs that you’ve taken in instead of storing it and also help the kidneys excrete it.
So you can get rid of the sugar instead of it floating through your bloodstream. And then eventually getting stored as fat. These three supplements also help reduce salt, which will help reduce the swelling in your cells because there’s a sodium and potassium balance. So these things will help create a better balance to decrease the swelling. One of my favorite herbs to use really on a consistent basis is gymnema. And that helps also with insulin signaling, it helps with hunger control helps with appetite, and it also helps with craving sugar. So if you take it on a regular basis, this will help decrease your need for sugar and snacking. The next thing I want you to do is really focus on rehydrating yourself because all of the sugar, maybe even there was some alcohol can really dehydrate you and help you feel worse. So we want to bring more hydration back into your body.
So of course we want to drink more water, but I would also encourage you to have electrolytes. So that way you’re getting more sodium potassium and glucose in a healthy way. So my favorite electrolyte is liquid Ivy, and they have packets. Just add them to your water. They taste great, can get them pretty much anywhere. And then after that, I do want you to start exercising just a little bit. So there’s a couple schools of thought. There’s some research to backup both sides. Some research says for people who are diabetic or have these high blood sugar issues, more chronically that high intensity interval training will be better the next day, after a binge or a cheat meal cheat day. So doing like 10 minutes of all out exercise, where you do 20 seconds of something intense, and then wait to recover for some people, they do 30 seconds on 30 seconds off, some people do 30 seconds on a needle, whole minute off something that gets your heart rate up and your blood flowing.
It will be more intense. So that way you’re using more of that glucose storage. Now, other research shows that just any type of exercise will help. I do believe that it comes down to of course, your cortisol and your adrenal levels. So if your have great adrenals and you’re a type a person I’m probably going to be okay, doing these high intensity exercises, I talk a lot about how people who have PCO S or autoimmune conditions or unhealthy adrenals high-intensity exercise might actually cause more harm. So see what type here are. I dropped the link to my exercise protocols. One of my videos. So you can check that out as well. And that way you can see what type of body do you have and what type of exercise would be best for you. If you already have a routine, just go into it and keep going on the next day, like nothing ever happened.
If you think maybe I need to start a routine, start low and slow, go for a quick walk around the neighborhood, maybe do some yoga, some stretching, get your body moving. And that way is going to help your brain because you’re going to increase your dopamine and your serotonin. You’re going to feel good about yourself. And it’s going to keep you motivated to keep going instead of dwelling on whatever you went through, whatever happened emotionally, or maybe you feel guilt about eating, don’t worry. Don’t feel guilty. Get your body moving, feel good again. And then the next thing would be focusing on getting some good rest and some good sleep the next night, because we want to have healthier levels of cortisol. Things like stress activity. Staying out late, lots of sugar will spike your cortisol, increase the stress response in your body, increase that fight or flight motion and your nervous system.
So we want you to be able to calm down. I love the sleep patches from patch MD. That’s a great way to get some healthy melatonin, five HTP, all of these things that help create all the tone in your body. So we use those at night and really focus on getting your body to calm down, turning off your phone, turning off the TV, getting to bed at a good time. Don’t stay up late and really get to sleep. Because when we get to sleep, cortisol is going to be healthier. We’re going to feel better. And lastly, it doesn’t matter if you cheated or had a fun meal or a sabotage meal, whatever you call it, you can restart. You can jump back in at any moment. So if you went out for breakfast and you thought I’m just going to have eggs and bacon, and then before you knew it, you had a stack of pancakes in front of you.
Don’t worry. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t think that the day is ruined because you can do your plan at lunch or your next, your next snack or dinner. And if you had a rough weekend, don’t worry, Monday is the next day. Tuesday’s the next day. Anything can change at any moment. You’re not a bad person because you chose something one way, one day. It doesn’t matter. So get back to your plan because you know what feels good for your body? You know how to eat, to feel good. You know what? You shouldn’t eat to avoid feeling bad, right? So stick with your program, really get it worked out and enjoy yourself. Have a little bit of freedom and really take this time to as well to notice. What did you eat? How did you feel? Did you eat too much? Did you eat too little?
Do you have too much of things that made you really sick or were you surprised that, Hey, I went out and I had all of this different types of food and I didn’t get sick. So maybe my body’s changing. And that way you can start to rework your plan of what’s working and what isn’t working. And if you’re looking for personalized help with food, with diet, with weight loss, with any of these things, I would love to help you. I always offer a free health assessment. That’s about 30 minutes just to get to know each other. See what’s going on with you. Talk about your options and how to move forward with testing and food and supplements, all of those good things. So make sure you click the link below, schedule a free health consultation with me and make sure you like and subscribe so that we get to stay tuned with all of our upcoming videos. Thanks for being here. And we’ll see you soon.
