Christmas is an indulgent time of year and qualified nutritionist, Amy Savage, has some tips to share with you for staying healthy over the festive season.

1. Hydration
Hydration is important year round, and with hot summer days and potentially some increased alcohol intake over the festive season, it’s becomes even more important. Water is an essential nutrient and is one that whilst being readily available at the tap, just isn’t consumed enough. Water plays a number of key roles in the body and if you think you want to ‘detox’, water is one of the best ways to do it. Water helps to remove toxins and waste and is fundamental to bladder health.

The best way to identify if you need to drink more water is as simple as checking the colour of your urine. You want a nice light/clear shade and the darker the colour, the better indicator that you need to drink more water. Two litres every day is the perfect number to aim for.

2. Detox
Amy’s not talking about a 3 day juice cleanse, she’s talking about fibre intake. Her second top tip to remove toxins from the body is to increase fibre intake. Fibre is a key nutrient to regulate bowel movements and like water, helps to remove toxins and waste from the body. It also helps to keep you feeling fuller for longer, so is also a really useful weight management tool.

Some easy ways to increase fibre over the festive season are to incorporate some veggies on the BBQ, add veg to meat/seafood skewers, add some roasted vegetables and whole grains to salads and make some batches of fresh fruit salad to keep you cool and your fibre high throughout summer.

3. Sleep
Sleep is one of the first things that can be impacted during the Christmas party season. Sleep is essential to allow your body time to rest and repair. If you’ve ever had a late night and find yourself craving more highly palatable foods such as chips or chocolate, scientific research shows that by not getting enough sleep, your food choices are impacted leaving you wanting more energy dense foods.

Sleep is also impacted by alcohol and caffeine intake too, and whilst a couple of wines might make you feel like you are getting a better night’s sleep, it can impact the quality of sleep. So how much sleep should you be aiming for? Recommendations are to aim for at least 7-9 hours per night to optimal sleep.

4. Balance
Last but not least, balance is really important. It’s really important to enjoy the foods you love, indulge and do so without guilt. To Amy, balance is about moderation. It’s about enjoying the foods you love but also balancing out the more highly processed and refined foods by incorporating plenty of wholefoods into the diet too.

If you would like more nutrition tips and information, you can follow Amy in Instagram at @amysavagenutrition and find more information on her website https://www.amysavagenutrition.com/.