Summer Wellness Vibes
Can’t beat summer spritzers and sunsets in Texas.
For some, summer is an effortless time of lightness in the body. Any protective layers against the cold have long been shed, and it feels natural to eat a little less and move a little more. But for others, summer is a trap of indulgent foods and heat-induced laziness, resulting in heaviness, bloat, and discomfort. Here are my favorite tips for those in this second camp:
sugar sucks
My nutrition advice pretty much always starts with sugar because it's the easiest way (no, really) to keep yourself together in terms of food and cravings. Cutting sugar calms blood sugar swings and appetite and reduces calorie excesses and emotional eating. Summer is tough because many delicious (and cooling) temptations are total sugar bombs, from the obvious ones like ice cream and frozen margaritas to more insidious offenders like that refreshing glass of lemonade, certain smoothies, or barbecue sauce. My advice is to choose one sugary thing per day, remove it from literally everything else you consume, and occasionally, like no more than once a week, enjoy a few extras if you feel like (sometimes cake just needs eating).
Some easy ways to do this are to avoid eating things from packages (hello, energy bars), read your labels (I'm looking at you, flavored yogurt), and don't drink sugar and alcohol together (sorry, but agave nectar counts as sugar). This way, when you do indulge, you'll not only really enjoy it, but, you won't see any unwanted effects or a need to feel guilty.
Photo courtesy of @nutritionstutorial
consume watery things in whole form
Like, you know, actual fruits and vegetables? Juice fasts are trendy, and they might totally work for you in isolated time frames, but it's better not to rely on the processed (yes, juice is technically processed) versions of things exclusively. Your appetite and your bod will be so much more satisfied by slurping real hunks of watermelon or biting into blueberries than chugging the juice — and you'll find joy in eating simple and refreshing things, like Persian cucumbers or really good tomatoes. These foods are hydrating, cooling, and have fiber, which you just need for a lot of reasons. I always say to eat a plant, or two, every time you eat something and soon you won't even have to think about whether you're getting enough. Get a spiralizer and make zucchini noodles in place of pasta. Or try carrots and celery in dip. Or pretend, like I do, that zucchini and yellow squash slices are chips and get to dipping in guacamole.
I also like to make big salads to store in the fridge for a few days so the easiest thing to eat in the house is pretty much a pile of vegetables. Recent favorites include Greek salad with romaine, red onion, grape tomatoes, cucumbers, feta, and kalamata olives; corn salad with fresh or canned corn, grape tomatoes, red onion, cucumbers, cilantro, lime juice, a little olive oil and rice vinegar, and sometimes hot sauce.
don't overdo it
This means avoiding extreme cold as well as extreme heat and extreme intensity as well as extreme slothfulness. Eat cooked things alongside the salads mentioned above, enjoy cool showers but be chill about ice and frozen stuff, and bring a light sweater for your freezing office and subway cars. Turn your own AC to 76 or 78 (if you can help it) and drink a few glasses of room temperature water. Adjusting your workouts for the weather is better than doing nothing or too much. So unless you're training for a marathon in Hawaii, try not to exercise outside in the heat of the day and be gentle with yourself if you're feeling tired or weak. Intensity is like hot sauce, lord knows I love it when added to almost everything, but on its own, eaten like soup? Naw, no good.
Diego just can’t say no to tacos in the summer (fall, spring, or winter).
Other summer gottas:
- Rose water. Spritz it on your face, literally whenever. It’s good for the complexion as well as your mood.
- Red lipstick and no eye makeup looks simple, fresh, and rad — even on a sweaty face. Hot pink is pretty good, too.
- Wearing leggings on the beach once the sun goes down: feels soooo good when it gets windy and cools down out there!
- Wash feet in cool water in the evenings, especially after dance class.
- A swipe of deodorant, preferably of the natural variety, to prevent shaving bumps or chafing you know where.
- Coconut water: it cools and rules.
- Workout shorts with littler shorts built in (but for class, they should be just long enough to, uh, mind the gap so to speak).
- Drink spritzers because they're a foolproof way to have both water and wine at the same time.
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Annie
