When you wake up from a night of drinking with a pounding headache and your head in the toilet, the last thing you are thinking about is what's for breakfast. Chances are, you would rather stay in bed with the covers pulled over you rather than risk putting something on your stomach only to have it make a return visit. However, since many of the side effects of a hangover are due to dehydration, lack of essential vitamins and nutrients, and low blood sugar, having something to eat may be a vital part of your hangover cure that you are missing out on.

Now, this does not mean that you should take advantage of the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at your local greasy diner. Instead, you should eat something light and healthy to see how your stomach reacts. You should avoid carbohydrates and fatty foods since these are only going to make you feel worse.

To drink, you can start out with a simple cocktail of tomato juice, Tabasco sauce, lemon juice, and a shot of vodka. This works well for a variety of reasons as a hangover cure. First of all, the tomato juice is packed with vitamins and antioxidants that will help your body to cleanse your blood from any leftover alcohol and impurities that are still lurking around.

Another reason that you feel terrible the next morning is the fact that you essentially overdosed on alcohol the night before and now your body is going through withdrawal. Having the shot of vodka in your juice will help put some alcohol back into your system, and allow you to start some of your other hangover remedies before the hangover comes back. However, keep it to only a shot. Any more and you are setting yourself on the road to alcoholism.

Once you have gotten the juice down, and are hopefully starting to feel a little better, you can make yourself a protein-packed breakfast. Try 3 pieces of back bacon, 3 canned tomatoes, 2 scrambled eggs, and an orange to start out with. The eggs have protein that will help build your strength back up, as well as a chemical that is known to fight some of the toxins that are still left in your system. Canned tomatoes, like the tomato juice, also have the vitamins and antioxidants that you need to revitalize your system. The bacon has fat that helps bind to the alcohol left in your blood, and the orange has citric acid to make that fat easier to digest, not to mention vitamin C, one of the essential vitamins that you lost through dehydration.

For best results, you should have a second breakfast with more of the same foods within four hours of your first one, and try to stay awake in between them instead of going back to bed, since going to sleep slows down your metabolism. If you need help staying awake, try taking a nice hot shower, followed by a cold rinse, to help wake you up.

Time is the best cure for a hangover but since you can't hurry that up, a good healthy meal is the perfect alternative.