Dr. Hotze’s 5 Tips to Avoid Holiday Stress
The holidays are here! For some people, hectic holiday schedules can be stressful. Find out how to get through the hustle and bustle of the holiday season with less stress and more energy to enjoy time with friends and family. Dr. Hotze discusses 5 tips to avoid holiday stress during the holiday season!
Podcast Transcription:
Dr. Hotze: Hello. I’m Dr. Steve Hotze, and welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. We’re going to talk today and visit about holiday stress. We have the holidays coming up, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that always brings a lot of stress. Now remember, I believe that you and every individual needs to have a doctor and a staff of professionals who’ll coach them onto the path of health and wellness, naturally, so as you mature, you have energy. You have get up and go, you have vim and vigor, you have enthusiasm for life without pharmaceutical drugs.
So that’s the plan that we put our guests on. We do natural approaches to health so that you can enjoy a better quality of life as you mature. And we really stress four key things. We stress good healthy eating lifestyle, replenishment of hormones, vitamin and mineral supplementation, exercise program, and when individuals have allergies, allergy treatment.
Today, I want to talk about holiday stress. We have the holidays coming up. We have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, we have families getting together, traveling, we have to purchase gifts, we have to write our Christmas cards, we have to meet with friends, we have to go to parties, we have to prepare for parties, throwing parties. It’s just a stressful time. We have relatives coming in town, and you know, you can pick your friends, you can’t pick your relatives. So sometimes that can be a stressful situation. So what can you do? I’m going to talk about several key points, some specific things that you can do to help prepare you for the holidays, and help you overcome the stress, and have energy during the holidays.
1. Eat a Healthy Diet
First and foremost, the most important thing you can do is eat correctly. You have to learn to eat to live rather than live to eat. And the food that really causes the most problems in individuals, leads to the most of the health problems, is an eating program that really focuses on simple carbohydrates. When you eat lot of pizza, pasta, cakes, breads, cookies, a lot of sugar products, that leads to a host of health problems because all those simple carbohydrates, all the grain products are simply starches, and starches are sugar molecules hooked together, when they break down in your system, they turn into sugar, and that can lead to a host of problems. You get high sugar levels, and your pancreas produces high levels of insulin trying to get rid of the sugar and drive it into the cells, and you get insulin resistance, and now the insulin has to turn the sugar into, guess what, fat. The next thing, you’re gaining weight, and then that leads to host of health problems with high blood pressure and heart disease, and strokes, and all that over time.
So you have to learn to eat healthy, and that’s the most important thing you can do over the holidays, is eat healthy. And that means eat a bunch of greens, a little bit of meat. Make sure you have good oils in your system, eggs, olive oil, coconut oil, avocado, cheeses. Those sort of things. They’ll slow burn. They’re not like sugar. They’ll burn slowly in your body. They’ll satisfy you, and you find that if you have an eating program that really focuses on good healthy oils, greens, and a minimum amount of meat products, and cut out the simple carbs, you’ll lose a lot of weight. You just cut out your bread, you’ll lose a lot of weight. So that’s the most important thing you can do.
2. Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Second thing, get a good night’s sleep. At least eight hours of sleep. I have a sleep formula, Dr. Hotze’s Sleep Formula, that contains melatonin, valerian root, 5-HTP, and some other key nutrients that will help you sleep. You may just try melatonin on your own. One or two milligrams at night may be very helpful to you. So get a good night sleep. They say for every hour you get to bed before midnight is worth two hours after midnight.
3. Exercise Regularly
Thirdly, do some exercise. You don’t have to run a marathon. You don’t even have to lift weights. I would recommend get out and walk a mile or two every day, 15, 20, 30 minutes, get out and power walk. Get yourself moving. You may want to jump rope. You may have a cycle. You may bicycle, or you may swim in your pool, but do some form of exercising that will give you some aerobic exercise, and keep yourself fit.
4. Replenish Natural Hormones
Now, another thing you need to do is make sure that you replenish your natural hormones. As we age, our hormone levels go down, whether you’re male, or female, the sex hormones decline. That adversely affect thyroid hormones. The adrenal hormones can become, when you’re under stress, you can get adrenal fatigue, and just as you age, the adrenal glands get fatigued, and you don’t produce as much natural cortisol as you normally would. So the replenishment of your hormones with natural thyroid, natural sex hormones, adrenal hormones can really be a benefit to you over the holidays, and every day. Make sure you take a good quality vitamin and mineral supplementation.
5. Supplement with Vitamins and Minerals
Vitamins and minerals are essential to help your body detox. They’re also essential to help the power plants within your cells create and produce energy, and the power plants you have within your cells are called mitochondria, and they are what produces, within ourselves, electrical energy, which drives chemical processes within the cells. So you want to make sure you have good nutrients coming in the form of food, good hormones. Thyroid hormone catalyzes the production of energy within the mitochondria, within your power plants, and you have good vitamins and minerals to help you detox because when you’re toxic within your cells, that then regulates the production of energy. You can be a low energy producer. We want you to be high energy. A high voltage individual. A live wire. And that’s when you produce a lot of energy within your cell. So you have to eat correctly, replenish your hormones, take your vitamins and minerals and nutrients, as well as exercise.
Now vitamin C is really key. Vitamin C not only helps lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, it helps prevent the development of coronary artery disease, but it’s also important for the production of your natural steroid hormones within the adrenal gland. Those are your stress hormones, and you want to have plenty of vitamin C. Vitamin C concentrates in the adrenal gland, your stress hormone, a hundred times more than it does in any area of your body. Be sure to drink plenty of water. Keep yourself hydrated. And I always recommend drinking water that has been filtered so you don’t get fluoride in your system. Fluoride poisons the thyroid gland, and it poisons the enzyme within your cells that converts your inactive thyroid hormone T4 to the active thyroid hormone T3. So you don’t want any fluoride in your toothpaste, or in your water. So get filtered water, and drink plenty of water, 4 to 8, 12 ounces of glasses a day. You know when you’re hydrated because when you drink a glass of water, within an hour, you’re going to have to pass it. So that’s when you get well hydrated.
And when you eat protein, you don’t want to eat a lot of protein. Four ounces a day is more than adequate. Protein, when you cut out your simple carbohydrates, and you cut out your sugars, your body is going to have a choice. It can either turn the protein that you eat, and if you eat a lot of protein, it will convert that protein into sugar. It’s called gluconeogenesis. New glucose made from protein. So you want to minimize your protein, and so you want to eat good healthy oils so your body burns fat, converts fat into ketones, and you burn that, and that burns real slow in your bodies. So you don’t have sugar highs and lows, when you’re in ketosis and when you burn ketones. So when you eat meat, it’s important to eat meat, but you don’t want to eat high doses of meat because it will convert into sugar.
Vitamin B12 is important for energy production in your body, and you can take that either injectable, or you can take that sublingually with drops. And inositol is a nutrient that is important for proper calming of your nerves. It relieves stress, and it promotes a good night sleep. And I recommend taking 500 to 1,000 mg, and working up on that to help relieve stress and anxiety.
Another key mineral to help relieve anxiety, and help you sleep well is magnesium. Most individuals are low in magnesium, so I recommend magnesium citrate, or glycinate, 600 to 1,000 mg a day. If you got cramping, you don’t sleep well, if you have high blood pressure, very likely you have a magnesium deficiency. So I’d recommend that.
Now, if you have any questions that you like answered, if you’d like to get yourself on a path to health and wellness naturally, and have a group of professionals who can coach on that path, then don’t hesitate to give us a call here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. Our phone number is (281) 698-8698. That’s (281) 698-8698. Have a great holiday season, stress-free, enjoy your family. God bless you.
