Staying Healthy During the Holidays

It’s not easy to maintain your health during the topsy-turvy holiday season, but it’s just as important to make the effort then as it is any other time of the year. Here are a few steps you can take to keep your health in the forefront.

• Stock up on your medications: Make sure you have enough medications to get through the season. It can be easy to forget medications when your routine is out of whack. And having to go to the store to pick up refills during the busy shopping season is something you might want to avoid.

• Organize your medications: It’s easy to lose track of whether you’ve taken your medications on a daily basis when you have visitors in town and unusual events to attend. Separating your medications out into a container marked with slots for each day of the week will allow you to better track whether you’ve taken them or not.

• Watch what you eat: If you’re supposed to watch your salt, fat, sugar and overall calorie intake during the non-holidays, then you should be watching it during the holidays as well. Talk to your doctor about how much over your normal daily limits you can safely go and then work to keep track of what you’re actually consuming to ensure you’re staying within those limits.

• Continue to block out time for exercise: It’s not unusual to get tired thanks to all the activity of the holiday season and assume that means you’re getting enough exercise. But your holiday exhaustion could be due to getting less sleep, staying out later than you’re used to, getting up earlier, having more people around and so on. Because aerobic exercise is important to heart health, and stretching and weight training is important to flexibility, balance and stamina, you still need to make sure you’re working those regular workouts in.

• Listen to your body: No matter how much your brain wants to do during the holidays, your body may have certain limits that you need to appreciate. Pay attention to your body during the holidays and listen to any tiredness, aches, pains or soreness. Give yourself the gift of being treated healthy and take time out to rest and recover.