Bring out the sparkly dress, put on your dancing shoes and get ready to celebrate New Year’s! Just remember that no celebration is worth a bad hangover—so you’ll want to party smartly. Check out these tips to prevent a hangover and ring in the New Year happy and feeling great.
1. Be a nibbler
As you go from one holiday party to another—and one champagne glass to another—make sure you take advantage of the hors d’oeuvres. Eating while you drink is one of the easiest hangover prevention tricks you can use. Not sure you’ll like the party food? Eat before you go out. Your best bets contain healthy fats, like walnuts or avocados, which can help to slow or delay the absorption of the alcohol. Honey and tomato juice can help, too, by allowing your body to metabolize alcohol more effectively.
2. Pace yourself
Being at a party can make it easy to lose track of how much you’ve had to drink. Between dancing and celebrating, one martini can become two or three pretty quickly. To keep from paying the price of too many drinks, limit yourself to one per hour. Drinking one cocktail or beer an hour gives your body the chance to metabolize the alcohol more slowly, which helps you avoid hangovers.
3. Skip the fizzy mixers
There’s something festive about fizzy holiday cocktails, but if you want to prevent a hangover, it's best to avoid carbonated mixers. The carbonation in sodas speeds up your body’s alcohol absorption, making you feel tipsy more quickly, which can affect your judgment and lead you to drink more. Instead, choose mixed drinks made with fruit juice—or, even better, no-sugar-added juice. Just go easy on the club soda and tonic water.
4. Hydrate with H20
Dehydration is the culprit for your most unpleasant hangover symptoms. That’s why when you’re drinking, you should alternate every beer, cocktail or glass of wine with a glass of water. Alcohol causes your body to release all the water and electrolytes it needs to stay hydrated. Drinking water in between your drinks is an easy, surefire way to replace the water that you’re losing and stave off a New Year’s hangover.
5. Stay in the clear
To help avoid the headaches, dizziness and nausea of a New Year’s hangover, choose clear liquors like vodka and gin over darker ones like whiskey or bourbon. Dark-colored liquors (and even red wine) contain congeners, which can increase your changes of feeling not-so-good come New Year’s Day. Also, hangovers from light-colored alcohol are likely to be less severe than ones from darker alcohol.