What to eat after the New Year to cut the grease?
Light food paired with coarse grains
After several days of rich meat dishes, it's time to eat more light foods to let your digestive system slowly return to normal.
Experts suggest that for a few days after the holiday, your staple food should mainly consist of coarse grains. You can moderately add ingredients like corn and oats, and pay attention to increasing the proportion of dark green vegetables. At the same time, drink more congee and soup, such as fresh leafy greens, millet congee, noodle soup, or dough drop soup. You can even pair them with some pickles. These soups and broths have a good "fire-clearing" effect, allowing your overburdened gastrointestinal tract to rest and recover.
Eating only coarse grains can indeed leave you feeling hungry. Why not have something delicious that also aids digestion? As the saying goes, "nothing tastes better than dumplings." The dumpling wrappers made from wheat flour are rich in fiber, and the filling contains a variety of vegetables. Plus, with cooking methods like steaming or boiling, you don't have to worry about oil—a win-win situation.
Drink more water to cut the grease
During the holidays, every meal is rich in oil, so most people end up with an excessive intake of fat. Use the next two or three days to reduce your intake of refined rice, noodles, candy, and sweet pastries. Force yourself to drink more water, especially plain boiled water. This can speed up the metabolism of your gastrointestinal tract and reduce the harm caused by large amounts of meat and alcohol to your liver. If you find plain water tasteless, you can also drink tea to clear the grease from your digestive system and help it return to normal more quickly.
Eat fruit to balance digestion
Many of the delicious foods eaten during the holidays are fried or desserts, and eating too much of them can be hard on your stomach. Fried foods can easily cause heat stagnation in the spleen and stomach, leading to constipation or bloating; eating too many desserts can also lead to a deficiency in the spleen, causing dampness accumulation, which results in diarrhea. To regulate the imbalanced digestive function from the holidays, fruit is quite effective.
Orange juice and papaya can both help regulate digestion. They have the effect of removing heat and stagnation. You might want to drink a few more glasses of orange juice or eat some papaya these couple of days, but wait 1-2 hours after your meal. Drinking it immediately after eating will only increase the burden on your stomach. Additionally, you can buy some honeysuckle, chrysanthemum, and cottonwood flowers, boil them with some honey dates for a drink. It's not only sweet and delicious but can also balance your digestive function.
Too many sweets can easily cause symptoms like chest tightness, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and cold hands and feet. The tongue coating can also easily become white. Eating more apples and guavas can gradually alleviate these symptoms. Eating a moderate amount of guava or drinking half a cup of guava juice can effectively control diarrhea, and eating apples with their skins on also has an anti-diarrheal effect.
Green vegetables to supplement fiber
Overeating every day and feeling very full might make you think you've supplemented your body with all the necessary nutrients. But that's not the case; a lot of dietary fiber is lost in all the rich meat dishes.
Experts say that for the next few days, you should pay special attention to supplementing dietary fiber. The reason for the insufficient fiber intake is the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables consumed, combined with reduced physical activity during the holiday, which can lead to constipation or difficulty in excretion. Therefore, you should eat more fresh vegetables and less meat to supplement enough fiber.
It's best to gradually adjust your diet with vegetarian meals for your three daily meals. You must eat vegetables for breakfast. Fresh vegetables like lettuce, mustard greens, carrots, and celery are best eaten as staples. These vegetables, rich in chlorophyll, carotene, vitamins, and fiber, can achieve a nutritional balance with large amounts of meat, fish, and eggs, and also have the effect of regulating the stomach and intestines.
It's important not to cut the greens too finely. You must chew them thoroughly before swallowing so that saliva can be secreted naturally to aid digestion.