Zest & Spice: 7 Surprising Wellness Benefits of Lemon & Ginger Tea You’ll Love
The spring time is a perfect time to awaken our sluggish lymphatic system. With how much work my lymphatic system has to do, I love finding ways where I can lighten my lumpy load. It’s like giving your body a hand, climbing that steep hill. Spring time is natures time for renewal and to lighten up. We can mimic nature’s energetic with a lemon, ginger tea. Lemon and Ginger both stimulate the liver and our lymphatic pathways in the body, helping move fluids along. For us lymphies, it’s a really good time to add lemon to your water, sip lemon tea, and give your lymphatic system a boost, helps it flush toxins, swelling, as we shift from winter to spring.
Lemon peel has beneficial flavonoids, which help with inflammation, so slice your lemon, give it a squeeze, and place the whole slice in your mug to reap the benefits of the alkalinizing juice as well as the essential oils and flavonoids in the peel. Look for organic lemons if you plan on putting the slices in your tea.
Liquid Sunshine in a cup!
Energetically lemon is warming, which is perfect for this time of year. It is beneficial to warm up our digestion, our Agni in early spring and get it moving to help stimulate the body to detoxify and get rid of wastes. With lymphedema, ur digestive fire can get dampened due to chronic inflammation. Drinking warm lemon water is part of the daily routine of Aryurveda called a Dinarchrya, especially in you have swelling, sluggish digestion, or at the seasonal shifts of late winter and early Spring for these reasons. It’s time to renew our inner ocean, forests, and plains. Food is medicine. Lets give our bodies a boost and lighten our lymphatic load.
HOT TIP: Take a spoon, turn it over and scrape off the peel on the ginger. You will be surprised how easy it is to remove!
Ginger is an amplifying herb. It’s a helper to other herbs. So whatever it gets blended with, it amplifies the effect of that herb. I like to think of it as the herbal cheerleader! That whatever herb it is paired up with, it cheers them on. Like that ever so supportive friend. The hype girl. Ginger is warming and a lymphatic mover too. So it is lovely to include in your tea.
For a stronger taste and effect, chop up the ginger and place a couple chunks in a garlic press and press the pieces into your mug. It takes a strong hand to squeeze out the juice, so a bit of a lymphie workout, or ask a partner or if you have a juicer, go ahead and juice the ginger. Alternatively, you can add slices to your mug. At the end of your tea, give the ginger a little nibble to get more of the beneficial nutrients.
7 Benefits of drinking Lemon Tea
Lemons alkalizing effects may lower uric acid levels by promoting hydration and supporting the kidneys to excrete uric acid.
Lemon works with the liver to enhance its production of bile. Bile we need to digest fats in our diet, and make nice creamy lymph.
The sour taste of fruits like lemons balance vata energy, which is made up of the elements space and wind. The sour taste helps balance and calm our nervous system. It’s part of the Ayurvedic Daily Routine, Dinacharya, especially for late winter and early springtime
Get part of your daily dose of Vitamin C
Can help relieve heartburn.
High in mineral salts our boy needs: Calcium, Potassium, and Magnesium.
When consumed with starches, consuming lemon can slow the uptake of starches to the bloodstream, supporting healthy blood sugar levels.
The citric and ascorbic acids in Vitamin C has been shown to support the absorption of more plant-based iron in your diet than without.
LEVEL UP YOUR TEA INTO AN ELECTROLYTE BALANCING DRINK!
Add a pinch of a mineral salt such as Himalayan pink salt or sea salt, a spoon of honey, and you are all set. It’s that simple. No powders, fancy tablets. Just pure natural goodness. Excellent for detoxing, replenishing minerals, and firing up your Agni or digestive fire.
Lemon juice from squeezed lemon
Lemon slice,
Fresh ginger, scraped and pressed/juiced
Spoon of honey
1-2 c. freshly boiled water (let it cool to around 70 degrees Celsius
Pinch of mineral salt
Combine all ingredients into a mug and enjoy.
Sipping a warm cup of tea is a wonderful way to offer yourself some love, and calm to your daily routine. When we dial down our stress and include more moments of calm, our parasympathetic nervous system gets activated, which helps our lymph flow better too.
GINGER & LEMON HONEY
Want a stronger ginger flavour to your tea?
Liquid honey is the easiest to use for an infusion. If you have solid honey, melt it on the stove at a very low temperature to keep all the antioxidants and beneficial nutrients intact.
GINGER HONEY INFUSION:
Take a mason jar (500ml/pint) size, and fill it half full with freshly chopped ginger. Ask some freshly peeled lemon zest (1/2 to 1tsp)
Add honey until the jar is full.
That’s it, it’s that easy! You can make honey infusions with almost anything! Garlic is another good one for coughs/colds. cinnamon is lovely too!
Next, put on a mason jar lid and let it marinate for a couple hours and give a taste. It will already have a gentle ginger lemon honey taste. You might notice one flavour more than the other. The longer it sits, the more infused it gets. Taste it every so often over the next week or so until you are happy with the flavour. Enjoy this gift to yourself of making medicine like our ancestors did. Every couple days, give the jar a stir, or turn upside down (make sure your lid is secure first), to mix the infused honey.
When it’s ready, no need to strain it. Enjoy it as it is! Honey is a natural sweetener that is so delicious and wonderful for delivery herbs to your body. Energetically honey is heavy and it thought by traditional medicine folks to help the plant medicine sink deeper into the tissues of the body! Take a spoonful and add it to your tea, to sauces, to toast, and enjoy the benefits of herbs that hep a sore throat as well as your lymphatic system!
Hope these ideas inspired you on ways you can include honey & lemon in your diet & the benefits you can enjoy:
Drink lemon in your water
Make lemon & ginger tea
Make ginger & lemon juice infused honey
Natural Electrolyte balancing drink
