Healthy is the new Black

I can’t believe there was a Kickstarter campaign for “Anti-Thigh-Gap” jeans; all I can say is HALLELUJAH!!!
http://youtu.be/DoFrpZ4QXwo

This video gives me confidence that the lunatics who still push the very unhealthy Kate Moss definition of beauty are FINALLY fading into obscurity!!!

Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate people who have a naturally small frame like Kate Moss or Keira Knightly. With that said, I’m fed up with that cookie-cutter stereotype still existing. Mindy Kaling is a great example!

Look at these Elle covers:

Granted, this happened in March, but it shouldn’t be happening at all!

I’m so excited to help women be mad scientists; I’ll give them as many tools to help them be successful in their life-long experiments with food, exercise routines, menus (I’m officially banning the word diet because it says “die” for crying out loud!!! — menu is intended to reveal your “New Me!”), makeup and fashion that will solidify their Aphrodite Attitudes!

Much Love!

Aphrodite Attitude Redefined

Embracing your inner goddess means honestly contemplating whether all three parts of you (mind, body and spirit) are truly in harmony on a regular basis.

A few days ago I had a webinar from one of my business mentors playing while I was cooking my lunch and at the time I didn’t fully understand why. Then, just as I was starting to tune the audio out, she mentioned how she almost lost the rights to use one of her tag lines in a legal proceeding. The slogan she referred to reads as follows: “Remove your blocks so your business rocks!”

Unbeknownst to me, playing that webinar was the best thing I could have done for myself and for y’all. I’ve been pondering why the tag line resonated with me as much as it did, and I realized why: I’m ignoring a major block of my own!

While I absolutely LOVE helping y’all learn about the amazing healing properties of food, I understand now that that is not my only mission. To serve y’all to the best of my ability, I know that I have to stay true to myself and embrace EVERY aspect of a complete Aphrodite Attitude, especially the mental component! I could give you advice on infinite external tools you can use to improve your self-esteem, but if I continue to be negligent in acknowledging that we need to discuss the mental component as well, I am not fully honoring my mission.

From this point forward, I want to use this blog to help you embrace, develop and maintain your Aphrodite Attitude. In order to do that, you have to want to examine the following:

1. Your willingness to acknowledge that a HEALTHY state of mind allows you to admit you’re flawed (and that your flaws are just as beautiful as your strengths, just like Aphrodite),
2. Examples of strong, confident women who have the the courage to break down and eradicate the societal compulsion to force every aspect of your life into a perfect box, and
3. External tools that will reinforce our stronger senses of self-worth, including (but not limited to) balancing your psyche, proper nutrition (weight loss/gain is a bonus!!) & skin care/makeup.

Why I Want the NutriBullet

An easy way to harness the power of raw foods!

Over the past week, I’ve seen the infomercial for the NutriBullet System at least twice and I’ve seen it being presented on HSN. This product’s statements have always resonated with me for some reason (I guess it’s because I can hear my mom telling me to eat my vegetables) and today I realized why: it’s called bioavailability.

I know that that term sounds complicated, but it’s really very simple. Think about how many times you’ve needed a sponge to clean something up. When it’s just spilled milk, it takes very little effort to get the sponge to soak up the milk; dried ketchup, on the other hand, takes considerably more effort to scrub and wipe up. That’s exactly how our digestive system works. If you drink a glass of pulp-free orange juice, your body can soak up the nutrients like a sponge, whereas whole foods, like broccoli, spinach or blueberries or spinach, your body has to scrub the foods (break them down) before it can absorb those nutrients.

In the infomercials, longevity expert and master nutritionist, David Wolfe (who also appear in “Simply Raw”) explains that when we prepare our vegetables, fruits and nuts in the NutriBullet, they are are turned into super foods they call nutriblasts. Here’s a video of how the NutriBullet makes the foods we eat super foods.

One nutriblast each day is the perfect way to incorporate the raw foods diet lauded in “Simply Raw,” especially if you have an extremely hectic schedule.

Is Your Weight Loss Program Foundationally Sound?

I’ve been trying to find a way to verbalize how important your mindset is when you’re determined to be healthier, but Ellie said it better than I ever could!

Enjoy!

New Creations Ministries

It’s the end of January and once-determined dieters are falling by the wayside every day. Why? Discouragement, boredom, distractions . . . all influence decisions. The most important reason for failure however, is that their program wasn’t built on a firm foundation to begin with!

Until one asks “Why do I want to do this?” it’s like slathering paint over moldy dry wall. The underlying problem always returns. It’s important to unmask the emotional and psychological reasons why one uncontrollably eats in the first place. It’s painful facing up to the truth.  It is so much easier to procrastinate and hide from it than to rip away the revealing scars in our memory.

One of my patients had been horribly abused as a child and theorized that if she hid her body under layers of fat, no man would find her attractive. God lifted her out of her despair when she realized that she had value in His eyes…

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Disheartened? Disregard Your Scale!

I couldn’t agree more with Ellie’s sentiment. I threw away my scale 2 years ago and made my focus how I feel and it’s an incredible feeling to get that anxiety about the scale out of my life!

New Creations Ministries

Okay, you have been on your weight loss plan for five weeks now, how are you holding up? Still resolving to lose weight or are you a trifle discouraged?  Ready to give up? Then I’d recommend you throw away that scale.  A scale is not a great indicator as to how healthy one is and you have probably been checking it every day now, hopeful you have lost a pound or two.

Healthy living is the objective, not thinness. Weight means very little but bone structure means a lot. If you are large-boned, you will never comfortably be able to fit into a size 2.  If you are small boned, even a weight gain of 5 lbs. will make you look a little pudgy. Good news – God created each of us uniquely but wants all to be healthy.

In regards to  weight: a pint equals a pound. If you drink a couple of cups of water, coffee, tea or eat breakfast and then step…

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My New Hamburger is a Salmon Burger

I loved hamburgers when I was a kid and I’ve been craving to have a burger for a couple weeks now. Knowing how bad red meat is for me, I saw something called salmon burgers in the grocery store and decided to give them a try. It’s a great way for  me to get my protein and omega-3 fatty acids.

I wasn’t sure what spices and/or herbs I should use, so I looked in my cabinet and found some garlic powder, ginger, black pepper and rosemary. After I mixed my herbs and spices together, I sprinkled it all over the salmon burger and put in a frying pan on medium heat for 4 minutes each side and this is what I had made:

As I was cooking the salmon burger, I remembered that I’d also bought some feta cheese, so I crumbled a few piece and made a nice little protein-packed salad. This was DELICIOUS!

A salmon burger flaked apart with some crumbled feta cheese.

I can’t wait to see how it’ll taste when I can get back to the grocery store and pick up some spinach, berries and quinoa.

The Natural Cure for Diabetes

Y’all know I love to give you the scoop on the incredible foods nature has to offer us, and I’ll continue to do so, but I think I’ll start finding other sources of evidence besides articles on the web.

Over the weekend, I went to a screening of a documentary called “Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days,” and to say was good is the understatement of the millennium! For the film, they found 5 subjects with Type 2 diabetes and 1 subject with Type 1.

All of the subjects met with a Dr. Cousens who introduced them to the raw food lifestyle and had them eat only raw for 30 days. As I’m sure you know, it wasn’t an easy thing to do because of all the sugar we Americans have in our diets: the average American consumes approximately 150 pounds of sugar per year!

One man’s story really made me want to break down in tears. Kirt was a 26-year-old African American man from Baltimore, Maryland. He shared a story about how one time he went to the emergency room and the doctors told him his blood sugar level was at 1200; the normal range for blood sugar is between 80-100!!

Kirt impressed me further when he adhered the most to the diet – he gave those 30 days 110% because he knew that that was what was required if he truly wanted to cure his diabetes.

On day one of the program, his blood sugar was about 346 and he was taking 4 to 6 insulin shots a day. By day 30, not only was he able to STOP his insulin, his blood sugar was down to 73! At the end of the movie, Kirt went to his doctor to get the results of some blood work and he was surprised to find that his doctor had reread his file and was going to rediagnose him as a type 1 diabetic and had plans to give him an insulin pump! I’m sure you all know that people with type 1 diabetes produce very little or no insulin – but after a strict 30-day diet of raw foods, his body was totally healed and started making its own insulin!

My moral of the story is, although many doctors mean well, they are definitely undereducated about the power of the food we have available to us. Granted, they take the Hippocratic Oath upon graduating from medical school, but the better musing from Hippocrates is “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.”

Awesome Oatmeal

From time to time I get into a food rut. Basically, this is when I’ve found healthy food options that I enjoy (and I’m pretty picky because I have a little bit of a sweet tooth) and I buy them on autopilot, I guess.

Lately, I’ve been having just French toast, pancakes and egg whites for breakfast. Then one day I remembered how my mom would make old-fashioned oatmeal (I thought instant oatmeal was all that and a bag of chips!). So I went to the grocery store and bought a big container of store-brand whole oats.

It could be the middle of the summer and my mom would still make oatmeal for breakfast. After doing a little research I completely understand why. According to Mother Earth Living, oatmeal can do incredible things such as lower cholesterol, stabilize blood sugar and lower the risk of you developing diabetes. These three attributes alone are worth all the diamonds in the world to me because both heart disease and diabetes run in my family.

It’s surprisingly easy to make, but what astonishes me even more is how I can add the most seemingly random ingredients and it always tastes incredible. At first, I only added spices like ginger and cinnamon; then I’d add honey. I can’t wait to go to the grocery store and get a bunch of raspberries, blueberries, cashews, pecan and almonds and see how they can make the oatmeal even better than it always is!

Good thing I listened to my gut and gave the old-fashioned oats a try 🙂

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is an incredible spice that not only brings zesty flavor to your favorite foods, it’s also believed to be a powerful antidote against multiple ailments, including arthritis, diabetes, headaches/migraines, and LDL (bad cholesterol).

Western medicine has yet to commission detailed studies on how this ancient Chinese herb can improve your health, but there are fabulous resources, such as GreenMedInfo, that focus on alternative medicinal therapies like spices and herbs. GreenMedInfo does a fantastic job of differentiating between the two main variants of cinnamon, Cassia and Ceylon.

Most cinnamon available in the United States is Cassia (milled mainly in China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Vietnam); this is the weaker of the two but is still an awesome source of manganese. Manganese helps to build healthy bones and increase your carbohydrate and fat metabolisms. Cassia cinnamon should be avoided if you are taking blood thinners like Coumadin because it contains higher traces of coumarin, a natural blood thinner.

Ceylon comes from India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Brazil and the Caribbean. This variant is considered the “true cinnamon” because it is sweeter, lighter and more refined than cassia.

Long story short, both kinds of cinnamon will adequately flavor the dishes you use it on, but it’s important to heed the warning about cassia consumption.

Sleep and Weight Loss

We all know how important it is to get a good night’s sleep to let our bodies heal itself from the wear and tear from that day. What we eat impacts how well we sleep.

I’m sure there have been several studies on this, but I like to try things out for myself before I back anything… and those studies are TRUE!!

When I ate junk like soda, Kraft macaroni & cheese, hamburgers, hot dogs, candy, and the like regularly I always had problems falling asleep for more than an hour at a time. Now, that I use simple ingredients in my recipes, I sleep like a baby and I can count on falling asleep at a specific time every night!

I’ve done a little research and apparently all of the sugar and chemicals from the boxed crap we eat keeps us from falling into what science calls “Delta sleep.” WebMD defines “delta sleep” (link here) as a stage in the NREM (non-rapid eye movement) cycle where the body can repair/regenerate tissue, build bones/muscles and strengthen your immune system!

So the next time you feel a little sleepy, listen to your body and take a quick nap!