Preventing and Curing the Holiday Hangover

As we head into the holiday season, many of us will be hosting and/or attending multiple parties with free-flowing alcohol. And what's the inevitable consequence? Hangovers.

Yuck.

Here at the ranch, Cocktail hour is 5:00pm every single day. If the weather is nice, my wife and I will sit outside on the patio, sometimes with the fire pit set ablaze, and discuss our dinner strategy over cocktails while we gaze at the mountains...or at each other. Of course, the latter may result in a cocktail hour delay (*wink*), but I digress.

While my wife and I do drink regularly, we don't drink excessively unless friends and family come to stay with us, especially when the evening's activities include Wii Bowling for tequila shots! We have lots of bedrooms, which means no one is going anywhere at the end of the evening, so people generally don't worry about over-imbibing. At those times, our place is referred to as "The Party Ranch", and it often lives up to the name.

Anyway, it's safe to say we have some experience with preventing and treating hangovers, and here are a few things we've learned. I'll just assume everyone out there plans to do their drinking responsibly.

FIVE PREVENTATIVE MEASURES

1. Drink Lots of Water Throughout the Evening. Alcohol is a diuretic, so it's important to rehydrate while you drink. My rule is a full glass of water or more to offset each cocktail or glass of wine. Hangover headaches are primarily a result of dehydration, so this is a great preventative measure.

2. Replenish Your Electrolytes. In addition to rehydrating with water, you need to replace your electrolytes at the end of the evening. Fruit juice or a sports drink like Gatorade is fine, but the best choice is coconut water, which is rich in electrolytes and minerals, especially potassium. If you don't have coconut water, eat a banana along with your choice of hydrating drink.

3. Take 2 or 3 Ibuprofen or Aspirin at Bedtime. While both aspirin and ibuprofen add to the blood-thinning effects of alcohol, the assumption is you'll be sound asleep for the rest of the night, not running around with a pair of scissors or a chain saw. Tylenol (acetaminophen) mixed with alcohol can cause liver damage, so don't go there. And constant use of alcohol with ibuprofen or aspirin can cause damage to your stomach lining, so if you habitually overdrink, be careful.

4. Take Vitamins. Alcohol depletes anti-oxidants and vitamins, particularly the B's. Preloading with vitamin supplements can help with the ultimate hangover, but keep in mind that it may take more alcohol to make you feel buzzed, therefore causing you to overdrink that much more. Nevertheless, whether you preload or not, definitely take a B-Complex supplement along with your aspirin or ibuprofen at bedtime.

5. Drink on a full stomach. Food reduces the amount of alcohol that enters your bloodstream, and fatty foods slow down the absorption of alcohol, so splurge on that juicy burger or cheese platter. The reason bars offer free snacks is because they enable you to drink more. And of course, salty snacks make you more thirsty. Clever.

FIVE REMEDIES

You followed all the preventative measures, but they didn't work because you drank like an elephant. So now we're stuck with treating your pain. Try some of these recommendations:

1. Drink Another Coconut Water in the Morning. As I mentioned earlier, the dehydration and loss of electrolytes is hurting you the most, so keep loading up on coconut water, fruit juice, sports drinks and/or regular water.

2. Don't Drink Lots of Coffee. I know. This goes against everything we've been taught, but coffee is also a diuretic. In addition, it constricts your blood vessels and increases blood pressure, all of which will exacerbate a headache. One cup in the morning is probably fine, especially to avoid caffeine withdrawal on top of the hangover, but several cups will probably do more harm than good.

3. Take a Steam. Okay, we don't all have access to a steam room, so try a long hot shower instead. The point is to increase sweating in order to secrete more alcohol through the sweat glands, thereby speeding up the process and reducing the load on your liver. However, all that sweating will require you to hydrate a lot more, and not doing so could be life-threatening. So drink lots and lots of water. Think of it like a radiator flush for your endocrine system.

4. Exercise. I know what you're thinking - are you crazy? I can barely stand up, and you expect me to aerobicize? Well, uh, yes. But only if you can comfortably manage it. Sweating from exercise is even better than the steam room. On top of that, exercising speeds up your metabolism and significantly ramps up the process of getting it out of your system. As Nike says, "Just Do It!"

5. Sleep. The more sleep you can get before you're up and around, the better, as it concentrates all your energy on metabolizing the alcohol. If you wake up and find yourself too miserable to sleep, get up just to rehydrate and replace those electrolytes and vitamins, then go back to bed.

Happy holidays, be safe, and have fun out there.