The Ultimate Holiday Survival Guide

For many people, the holidays are the opposite of a restful break from work and responsibilities.

Ironically, the holidays often bring more stress than your normal day-to-day.

….buying gifts, travel, added expenses, planning parties, hosting, prepping food, weird late night conversations with your estranged uncle at the dive bar….

And in the midst of all the festivities, your health becomes an afterthought.

Routines? Out the window.

Sleep? Hard when you’re stuck with an ancient air mattress in the living room.

Good nutrition? “You mean I can’t live off of sugar cookies?”

By the time January 1st rolls around, most people are already desperate for a new gym membership and a detox.

**But here’s the thing—**health isn’t about being perfect. Life doesn’t stop, and you can’t always maintain your routines.

Plus, celebrating traditions is good for the soul, even if it’s not great for your liver.

True health is about staying balanced through the ups and downs of life, and having a tight feedback loop to course correct if things get thrown off balance. #80/20rule

You don’t have to crawl into 2025 feeling like garbage. With a little strategy, you can enjoy the season without sacrificing your health.

Here’s our Four Step Strategy:

1. Regulate your circadian rhythm
2. Classy alcohol consumption
3. Guard your gut
4. Traveling detox

(Spoiler Alert: these steps are based on the same principles we always teach, because the laws of nature are timeless and unchanging.)

Even if you only nail one or two, you’ll feel better.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Regulate Your Circadian Rhythm

Nothing throws off your health more quickly than disrupted sleep.

You can go 3 days without food, but 3 nights without sleep? Good luck.

Many health experts actually believe that sleep is more important than nutrition for that reason.

To maintain your health, you have to prioritize sleep, regardless of travel plans and festivities.

Let’s be honest… there is a diminishing return the later you go into the evening. (Do you really need to start watching The Santa Clause 3 at 12:30am?)

Try these tips to keep your circadian rhythm dialed in:

• Call it Quits Early: We are all for living it up during the holidays. Better to go hard and pull an early Irish goodbye then slowly fade away into the wee hours.

Ideally, you want to go to bed within an hour of your typical bedtime. (Rule of thumb: 1 hour of sleep before midnight is equal to 2 hours after.)

• Morning Sunshine: Good sleep hygiene actually starts in the morning with AM sunshine. Seeing the sun upon waking regulates your sleep-wake cycle.

So make yourself a thermos of coffee and get outside for a morning walk.

• No Late Night Munching: Your sleep and circadian rhythm is deeply impacted by your blood sugar. And nothing throws off your blood sugar like snacks and alcohol right before bed.

Land the plane early and move to water.

PRO-TIP: bring an eye mask, earplugs, and liposomal melatonin for knocking out hard, wherever you are. (See 🎅🏻 Santa’s Supplement Stack below for more.)

Step 2: Classy Alcohol Consumption

Besides sleep, booze can throw off your health real fast.

On it’s own, alcohol puts a lot of pressure on your digestive tract, blood sugar, and liver.

But alcohol is usually just step one in a multi-stage health degrading feedback loop of dehydration, hangovers, poor sleep, and bad food choices.

We aren’t here to ruin your fun. There is a time and a place for everything, and sometimes getting tipsy with cousin Billy is just what the doctor ordered.

Here’s how to navigate the holiday boozin’:

• Separate Alcohol from Meals: Your liver is not a multi-tasker. Enjoy your dinner first with minimal alcohol, then close the book on food for the night, take a break, and move to drink.

Your liver will be able to process the booze better without a belly full of food.

• Keep it Classy: When it’s time to indulge, keep it classy and simple. Opt for dry wine or distilled liquor. (Dirty martinis anyone??)

Peppermint-egg-nog-tinis are not recommended. #instanthangover

• The Good Ol’ Adrenal Cocktail: Hangovers are a combination of dehydration, nutrient depletion, and oxidative damage. Combat all of these with an Adrenal Cocktail the morning after.

Here’s the recipe (just blend and drink):

• 1 cup Orange Juice
• 2 Tbls collagen powder
• Pinch of sea salt
• Additional electrolytes like magnesium, potassium, or calcium powder.

PRO-TIP: For a more robust strategy for dealing with alcohol, check out 🎅🏻 Santa’s Supplement Stack below. For traveling with pills, pick yourself up a three-day pill organizer.

Step 3: Guard Your Gut

The holidays can wreck havoc on your gut, which you want to mitigate at all costs.

Your gut is the center of your entire metabolism, mediating both nutrient absorption and toxin elimination.

That’s why the old school naturopaths used to say “heal the hole in the middle.”

If your gut doesn’t work right, nothing else works right.

And when you are feasting on foods that are outside of your typical diet while hitting the booze, it’s easy for things to quickly go south in the digestive department.

Here are our top gut supporting strategies:

• Avoid the Digestive Destroyers: Holidays are the time to indulge, but Aunt Betty’s seven layer dip with cheez-whiz? Gross. Indulge smart while avoiding landmines.

That means seed oils, refined flour and sugar, and processed garbage of all kinds. (Of course, don’t forget about avoiding your food intolerance.)

PRO-TIP: avoiding seed oils can be difficult when eating other people’s food and dining out. Vitamin E will help protect the body from damaging effects of seed oils.

• Make a Grocery Pit Stop: Within 24 hours of landing in a new destination, I always make a grocery run for some essentials.

That includes a box of glass Mountain Valley spring water bottles (so I am not stuck with tap water) and nutrient-dense, minimal prep foods like:

• Eggs
• Meat sticks
• Canned oysters
• Orange juice
• Fruit
• Dark chocolate

That way I am prepared no matter what the holiday itinerary looks like.

• Bring in the Reinforcements: When you are eating high volumes of food off your typical diet, your gut is working overtime. Bring in reinforcements by taking digestive support. (See 🎅🏻 Santa’s Supplement Stack below for more.)

Don’t forget to breath, eat slowly, and chew your food to the consistency of applesauce for optimal digestion.

Step 4: Traveling Detox

One of the reasons why you feel so puffy and groggy after a holiday bender is because you’re toxic.

Overeating, processed foods, drinking, lack of sleep, dehydration, lack of movement, stress—all of these culminate into a generalized toxic state.

Detoxification is one of the four fundamental pillars of health, as important as nutrition.

Forget about the 20 days celery juice cleanses.

Detox is way simpler than that—just keep the blood and the lymph moving, and open the channels of elimination.

Even when you are traveling and out of your routines, there are simple strategies to maintain good detoxification:

Here’s how to do it:

• Deploy Detox Routines: There are many ways to detox, even when away from home, like a sauna session at a local gym, an epsom salt bath in your mom’s clawfoot tub, or even a cold shower.

Castor oil packs and coffee enema kits are highly effective for liver detox and can pack in your suitcase. Great idea to bring one of these kits if traveling for an extended period.

• Mop it Up with Binders: Binders absorb many times their own weight to grab toxins in the gut. This prevents toxins, alcohol metabolites, and mal-digested food from being reabsorbed into your bloodstream.

Binders are an incredible hangover cure, while also mitigating side effects of eating off your diet. (See🎅🏻 Santa’s Supplement Stack below.)

• Keep Your Bowels Moving: Constipation is all too common for many people when traveling and out of routine. When the bowels are shut off, detoxification can’t happen effectively, creating a vicious cycle.

Long walks, hydration, magnesium, and eating 1 raw carrot daily are tried and true tools.

And if you need to call in the big guns, Cascara sagrada is the absolute best herbal laxative, moving the bowels reliably without causing any laxative dependency.

…and when all else fails…

The Famous “Sandwich Method”!!

(WARNING: only recommended for professionals.)

You might be reading this, saying to yourself, “Sounds nice, but I am still going to party hard on Christmas.”

Fair enough. You do you.

(Sometimes, the traditions just run too deep and you can’t say no…)

That’s when you employ the Sandwich Method: you basically sandwich your party between all the methods above, done before and after.

1. Leading up to the party—get great sleep, hydrate, pound nutrient-dense foods and supplements, and detox.
2. Party your little heart out.
3. Get right back on the horse with the same healthy routines.

It’s not pretty, but it works in a jam.

🎅🏻 Santa’s Supplement Stack

The following supplement stack is not designed to be taken in full, but used to give you ideas that you can plug’n’play for your particular needs.

Sleep Stack:

• Liposomal melatonin
• Magnesium
• Chamomile tea + glycine

Boozer Stack:

(Take separately or blend into an Adrenal Cocktail.)

• Nutrients: Magnesium, B vitamins, electrolytes (ie sodium/potassium)
• Liver and Detox support: glycine, taurine/TUDCA, NAC
• Gut healing: colostrum, collagen
• Binders: activated charcoal, Takesumi Supreme

Seed Oil Buster: Vitamin E

Digestive Stack:

• Stomach acid stimulators: Zypan, Hydro-zyme, bitters, apple cider vinegar
• Digestive enzymes
• Liver support: Betafood, taurine
• Binders
• Cascara sagrada (reliable laxative if needed)

PRO-TIP: my favorite digestive support while traveling is Bad-ass Bitters. Comes in a spray bottle that is easy to carry with me and use consistently.

We hope this guide helps you to stay dialed with your health through the holidays!