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A guide to make the most without compromising on your health this festive season
Every year, Diwali always arrives with its full force: sweets in every corner, late nights out that drape the streets like fairy lights, firecracker smoke that lingers longer than conversations, and stress that compounds faster than your credit card bill. Most of us are used to riding it out and crashing soon as the festivities end. Waking up bloated and foggy, followed by a vowing to "get back on track" after the bender is so normalised that it becomes a sorry afterthought.
What if we told you that there is a way for you to enjoy your Diwali without giving your health an undue vacation? All you have to do is build conditions that let your body handle the load while you show up fully for the celebration: Here's how we do Diwali, The Resolute Way.
1. Amp Up Your Detox Routine
Firecrackers light up the sky while flooding the air with particulate matter your lungs absorb and your liver processes. Add fried food, irregular sleep, and emotional stress. Your detoxification pathways get overwhelmed fast.
The casualties? Glutathione and B vitamins, your body's frontline detox agents. When these run low, you wake up with brain fog, inflammation, that dull heaviness no amount of coffee fixes.
The intervention: Take 600 mg of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) or liposomal glutathione daily, paired with a B-complex in the morning. This keeps your detox engines running smoothly when the external load is high. You'll notice clearer mornings, less puffiness, energy that doesn't crash by noon.
2. Support Your Gut, Don't Suppress It
Antacids shut down stomach acid, the very thing you need to break down food and signal proper digestion downstream. When you block that process, you slow motility, trap endotoxins, set yourself up for that bloated, sluggish "festival belly" that lingers for days. Instead, focus on stimulating bile flow.
The intervention: A glass of lemon-ginger water with a pinch of salt or a few drops of digestive bitters before bed restarts the digestive rhythm. Follow it up the next morning with a probiotic and soluble fiber. Psyllium husk or banana flour work well. This combination neutralises endotoxin buildup, restores gut transit, gives your microbiome the substrate it needs to recalibrate.
3. Celebrate With Healthy Doses Of Movement
Most people treat movement as penance; a guilt-driven run to "burn off" the sweet calories. But your body doesn't respond to intermittent punishment. It demands consistency. Movement after eating shifts glucose from your bloodstream into your muscles, where it's stored or used. It also stimulates your lymphatic system, which lacks a pump like your heart. It needs movement to function.
The intervention: After a carb-heavy meal, your muscles are primed to uptake glucose. A 10-minute walk, a few sets of squats, or dancing to a few jams sends a metabolic signal that clears circulating glucose, opens lymphatic drainage, and prevents the post-meal insulin spike that leads to crashes.
4. Give Your Nervous System A Breather
The real stress of Diwali isn't the sweets. It's the mental load. Having to meet too many relatives. Traffic snarls. The too-frequent change of plans. Last-minute shopping. All of it spikes cortisol, and cortisol dysregulates everything downstream. It disrupts sleep, impairs digestion, blunts insulin sensitivity, keeps inflammation simmering.
Your nervous system needs an off-switch. When your nervous system is calm, your gut heals better. Your sleep deepens. Your glucose regulation improves. A calm gut creates a clear mind. A clear mind enables better metabolic health.
The intervention: Try 10 minutes of box breathing (inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4). Or a 5-minute cold shower to activate your vagus nerve and reset your stress response. Both are free, require no equipment, and work faster than most supplements.
5. Buffer The Glucose Spike Before It Happens
To (almost) all of us, sweets are simply non-negotiable during Diwali. Trying to avoid them entirely sets you up for failure and resentment. The smarter play? Buffer the impact before the spike happens.
The intervention: Before a carb-heavy meal, take a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar or lemon water with a pinch of salt. This slows gastric emptying, meaning glucose enters your bloodstream more gradually. It also improves insulin sensitivity, which helps your cells uptake glucose more efficiently instead of leaving it to wreak havoc in your blood.
We recently used a CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor) to test Aubree’s low-GI cookies and see how they actually affect blood sugar.
Check it out here.
It’s a simple experiment, and a powerful way to learn how your body responds to different foods.
You can try it too 😊
Context Is Key
We underestimate how much of ourselves is shaped by surroundings. It's easy to write off the clarity we find on vacation as temporary novelty. But we become different people in different contexts. Our attention, our metabolism, even our capabilities aren't fixed traits. They're relational, constructed.
So this Diwali, celebrate fully. Light the diyas, share the sweets, stay up late with family. Follow this guide and you'll surely build the internal conditions needed to handle it all.
May your Diwali be full of light, joy, and a body that keeps up with both!
