Start adding healthy salads to your diet this month. Experiment with different salad and dressing recipes until you find ones you truly enjoy. Eating salad should not be a chore, but a wonderful addition to the menu. As an added tip, if you consume your salad before your main dish, you tend to consume fewer calories overall. And if you currenly don't consume any raw vegetables, begin with salad twice a week and increase to three times per week when your body gets more used to it. Incorporating raw vegetables into your diet is important, as heating food destroys some of its nutrients and natural enzymes—these enzymes boost digestion and fight chronic disease. And choosing an unpasteurized vinegar like Braggs® Apple Cider Vinegar for your dressing has added health benefits. When taken before a high-carb meal, vinegar slows the rate of stomach emptying and prevents large blood sugar spikes. It also helps to lower cholesterol, destroys many strains of harmful bacteria and improves heart health.
HEALTHY HABITS FOR DECEMBER
Start adding healthy salads to your diet this month. Experiment with different salad and dressing recipes until you find ones you truly enjoy. Eating salad should not be a chore, but a wonderful addition to the menu. As an added tip, if you consume your salad before your main dish, you tend to consume fewer calories overall. And if you currenly don't consume any raw vegetables, begin with salad twice a week and increase to three times per week when your body gets more used to it. Incorporating raw vegetables into your diet is important, as heating food destroys some of its nutrients and natural enzymes—these enzymes boost digestion and fight chronic disease. And choosing an unpasteurized vinegar like Braggs® Apple Cider Vinegar for your dressing has added health benefits. When taken before a high-carb meal, vinegar slows the rate of stomach emptying and prevents large blood sugar spikes. It also helps to lower cholesterol, destroys many strains of harmful bacteria and improves heart health.
Today is your first day toward better health and wellness. And by wellness, I am referring to the improvement of our physical, emotional, and mental health. So many of us, in our busy lives, don't stop often enough to assess our wellness and our lifestyle choices that affect our wellness. Sometimes it takes an unfortunate occurrence, such as an illness, to remind us that we need to reassess our lives with respect to our health.
On our journey to better health, it is best to move at a comfortable pace. If we try to rectify too many unhealthy habits at once, we may fail to achieve what we promised. It's an unrealistic goal to think we can erase all our unhealthy habits at once—many of which have taken years to become ingrained in our routines.
The best words of advice I can give you today is that we need to learn to have patience with ourselves and very gradually integrate healthier habits into our lives—one healthy habit at a time. As these healthy habits accumulate we feel a sense of wellness that grows from within at a pace we can handle. We allow ourselves the time to change and love ourselves enough to know that health is not instantaneous. It is a gradual accumulation of positive choices.
PRODUCT OF THE WEEK
This is my recommendation this week for my favorite product. This luxurious body wash by Shea Moisture is just simply wonderful, and full of all-natural goodness. Vitamin E, Coconut Oil, Hibiscus and so many other wholesome ingredients that nourish the skin.
And ladies as far as shaving goes, I love using this body wash as a shaving cream as well - it is THAT luxurious! Add a little coconut oil yourself to this body wash for those of you with dry skin for extra moisture. Certified Organic and Fair Trade Shea Butter and never tested on animals.
CLEANING WITHOUT HARSH CHEMICALS
I used to use products with ammonia in them and bleach, and I found that I often got severe headaches after cleaning. I chalked it up to something that I had to put up with to clean thoroughly.
It was only years later, after discovering the power of white vinegar, that I gave up most of those other harsh chemical cleaners in favor of nature's more powerful anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral vinegar.
White vinegar bought in the store contains a five per cent concentration of acetic acid. It kills about 80 per cent of germs.
NEW RECIPES THIS WEEK
These are a few delicious ones I made recently and that you might want to try out! Some GF Recipes are added as well!
RECIPE OF THE MONTH
For those of you who have gone gluten free and think your days of indulging in homemade Tiramisu are over, think again! This recipe combines gluten-free ladyfingers, decaf espresso, marscarpone, and homemade custard cream, to create a healthy, yummy GF desser
EXERCISE PRODUCT OF THE MONTH
If you are a runner, then you know what I mean when I say that my running shoes are very important to me. And for years, like many other runners, I was faithful to one brand of running shoes. I was afraid to try any other brand of shoes.