Tag Archive for: green smoothie

5 Things You can do to Start Your New Year RIGHT!

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It’s that time again! The new year is a GREAT opportunity to take advantage of the collective consciousness or universal wave of energy in making change. Think of “riding the mental wave” with the millions of other people in the world who have decided to improve their health. It’s a powerful and exciting time for a real reboot. What are your resolutions for the year? Do you want to get healthy, give up sugar or alcohol, lose weight, exercise more, travel, start a new relationship, change jobs, drink a green smoothie every day, do a detox (finally), eat a more alkaline diet or even start eating more vegan or raw foods? Any of those is achievable. Isn’t it time to live the life you really want? I say YES!

Your Mental Focus is Key to Your Success

Your Mental Focus is Key to Your Success

How to achieve Your Goals

I’ve created the following tips based on working with thousands of clients over the new year holiday and observing which ones succeeded and which ones didn’t. I want you to be on the success side this year. My goal is to see you reach your highest potential, because life is SO much better when you feel good on the inside, knowing that you are achieving your goals!

1. Let yourself be 100% Human!

What that means is: It’s OKAY to make mistakes; It’s OKAY to get angry; It’s OKAY to feel frustrated; It’s OKAY to make mistakes; It’s OKAY to get scared; It’s OKAY to feel nervous; It’s OKAY to not know everything and once again It’s OKAY to make mistakes!! 

The biggest reason WHY people fail is because they put too much pressure on themselves to be 100% perfect.

Look around you. Do you see ANYONE who is 100% PERFECT? Here’s a major secret for you: 100% perfect doesn’t exist! Ok, now that we got that out of the way, you can take a nice big inhale and then a huge exhale, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Now, turn your attention on being 100% HUMAN. In the human world, there’s this special thing called “good enough.” Running 1K a day, for example, is good enough if that’s all the time you have. Having one raw food meal per day is good enough if that’s where you feel comfortable. Bringing one new food into your diet per week is good enough if you feel too overwhelmed to change all of your diet at once. You are NOT a raw food failure if you are eating 99.9% raw food diet and you eat 0.01% cooked food. Same for vegan, paleo, helio or otherwise. Do you get it? Do you see where trying to be 100% perfect can stop you dead in your tracks before you even get on the field? Let go of that! When you love and accept yourself, life already feels better!

You have to start somewhere! The sooner you get comfortable with good enough, the sooner you’ll start.

It’s all about self-value, self-worth, self-love! All of your motivation and inspiration blossoms from there.

On the issue of anger, frustration and fear: Feeling a negative emotion is normal. The more you get in touch with your feelings, the more you can release negative emotions and make more room for forgiveness, acceptance, and unconditional love.

2. Every day, do a minimum of ONE thing

Loving yourself is just one part of success. You still have to do the work if you want to start seeing real change. Every day, you’ve gotta do something. If you think you don’t have time, you have to make the time.

What’s your list of goals? Is exercise on the list? Don’t trick yourself into thinking you need 2 hours at the gym on high cardio and anything less is a waste of time. (If you’re still thinking that, please re-read Step #1!) Are weekdays completely packed for you schedule-wise? Look deeper. Take the stairs to your Monday meeting. Make your Tuesday lunch date a one-hour walking session.On Wednesday, get up 15 minutes earlier and roll out the yoga mat for a quick stretch. On Thursday, bring a green smoothie and go for a 30-minute walk at lunch instead of eating out. Think of something new and different to do on Friday. Doing something is always better than doing nothing! 10 minutes is always better than 0 minutes, every single time!

A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. – Confucius

Once you make even a small amount of time for preparing food at home, exercising, taking a new class or starting a new project, you’ll be surprised how much easier it becomes to continue. Doing one small task every day is the key!

3. Stop comparing yourself to the person next to you

Watch out for the comparison danger zone! It’s all too easy to scroll through social media pics of everyone else’s awesome, picture-perfect life and start feeling less and less capable, motivated or courageous. Realize that what see will merely be a reflection of where you feel less confident in your own life, whether it’s your weight, your hair, your house, your partner or something else.  Remember this: what you see and what someone else sees are two different things. So in reality, it’s all an illusion and just a thought or opinion that you’ve created in your mind. That means you can change this thought to a better thought, one that is loving and supportive of YOU!

Spending your time comparing yourself to someone else is only going to do 2 things: 1) it wastes energy that you could be using on yourself right now and 2) it’s an never-ending road of not feeling good enough that will never make you feel good. Choose healthy role models for inspiration and motivation but steer clear of the comparison game.

4. Stop trying to please everyone

You want the quickest, fastest, surest way to have absolutely zero energy left for yourself? Just give all your time and energy freely to everyone and anyone! Word will get out fast, and before you know it, you’ll have a line around the corner and more on the way. I guarantee that in no time, you’ll feel completely overwhelmed and exhausted. You may even start to feel resentful. After all, with all that pleasing, you didn’t have 5 minutes for yourself all year! How dare they! Wait…… they? or you?

Here’s an example: Imagine driving to see your friends. You stop to pick up a hitch-hiker, then another one, and then another one (in reality, you don’t need to pick up strangers, this is just an example!). The first one wants to go left, and the other one wants to go right. It’s not that far and you feel bad so you go over there and then back again and over there and you take everyone exactly where they want to go. They are thrilled of course! But, you lost track of time and now you’re late for dinner. Not only are your friends disappointed because you missed the meal, but all the food is gone and you’re left feeling hungry. Perhaps you could have helped one person and made it on time, and that would have been totally OKAY and not selfish in any way! Or, you could have simply said NO.

Learning How to Say No is probably one of the hardest things for a lot of people to do (and not feel guilty about it either!). You can help people of course, but you cannot help everyone all the time; otherwise there’s no time left for you. This is all about honoring yourself!

5. Stay Focused on YOUR goals

Remember, if you do 10 things halfway, you’ve still done nothing! Whatever your goal, stay focused on it. Don’t fall into the trap of doing this and that and then jumping over there to give that a go too. If you’ve got limited time in your day (which everyone I know does), then you don’t have time to waste. Discipline and time management are the keys to success in any realm.

Write your goals for the year on a piece of paper and put it in a place where you see it every day. Check in with yourself every week – are you still on track or did you start to veer into an entirely different place? You entered your goals into your virtual GPS, now you’ve gotta drive the route to get there and it’s up to you to stay on course!

For more on how to achieve your health goals and actually start feeling great, book a private health consult with me via Skype.

Self-value, self-worth & self-love

Self-value, self-worth & self-love

How to Book Your Health & Nutritional Coaching Session:

1. Take photos of your eyes with a digital camera.
2. Email the photos to me for approval.
3. We schedule a time to meet via phone or Skype!

More on Manifestation and Motivation:

More on Spiritual Health:

5 Things You can do to Start Your New Year RIGHT!

by

It’s that time again! The new year is a GREAT opportunity to take advantage of the collective consciousness or universal wave of energy in making change. Think of “riding the mental wave” with the millions of other people in the world who have decided to improve their health. It’s a powerful and exciting time for a real reboot. What are your resolutions for the year? Do you want to get healthy, give up sugar or alcohol, lose weight, exercise more, travel, start a new relationship, change jobs, drink a green smoothie every day, do a detox (finally), eat a more alkaline diet or even start eating more vegan or raw foods? Any of those is achievable. Isn’t it time to live the life you really want? I say YES!

Your Mental Focus is Key to Your Success

Your Mental Focus is Key to Your Success

How to achieve Your Goals

I’ve created the following tips based on working with thousands of clients over the new year holiday and observing which ones succeeded and which ones didn’t. I want you to be on the success side this year. My goal is to see you reach your highest potential, because life is SO much better when you feel good on the inside, knowing that you are achieving your goals!

1. Let yourself be 100% Human!

What that means is: It’s OKAY to make mistakes; It’s OKAY to get angry; It’s OKAY to feel frustrated; It’s OKAY to make mistakes; It’s OKAY to get scared; It’s OKAY to feel nervous; It’s OKAY to not know everything and once again It’s OKAY to make mistakes!! 

The biggest reason WHY people fail is because they put too much pressure on themselves to be 100% perfect.

Look around you. Do you see ANYONE who is 100% PERFECT? Here’s a major secret for you: 100% perfect doesn’t exist! Ok, now that we got that out of the way, you can take a nice big inhale and then a huge exhale, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Now, turn your attention on being 100% HUMAN. In the human world, there’s this special thing called “good enough.” Running 1K a day, for example, is good enough if that’s all the time you have. Having one raw food meal per day is good enough if that’s where you feel comfortable. Bringing one new food into your diet per week is good enough if you feel too overwhelmed to change all of your diet at once. You are NOT a raw food failure if you are eating 99.9% raw food diet and you eat 0.01% cooked food. Same for vegan, paleo, helio or otherwise. Do you get it? Do you see where trying to be 100% perfect can stop you dead in your tracks before you even get on the field? Let go of that! When you love and accept yourself, life already feels better!

You have to start somewhere! The sooner you get comfortable with good enough, the sooner you’ll start.

It’s all about self-value, self-worth, self-love! All of your motivation and inspiration blossoms from there.

On the issue of anger, frustration and fear: Feeling a negative emotion is normal. The more you get in touch with your feelings, the more you can release negative emotions and make more room for forgiveness, acceptance, and unconditional love.

2. Every day, do a minimum of ONE thing

Loving yourself is just one part of success. You still have to do the work if you want to start seeing real change. Every day, you’ve gotta do something. If you think you don’t have time, you have to make the time.

What’s your list of goals? Is exercise on the list? Don’t trick yourself into thinking you need 2 hours at the gym on high cardio and anything less is a waste of time. (If you’re still thinking that, please re-read Step #1!) Are weekdays completely packed for you schedule-wise? Look deeper. Take the stairs to your Monday meeting. Make your Tuesday lunch date a one-hour walking session.On Wednesday, get up 15 minutes earlier and roll out the yoga mat for a quick stretch. On Thursday, bring a green smoothie and go for a 30-minute walk at lunch instead of eating out. Think of something new and different to do on Friday. Doing something is always better than doing nothing! 10 minutes is always better than 0 minutes, every single time!

A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. – Confucius

Once you make even a small amount of time for preparing food at home, exercising, taking a new class or starting a new project, you’ll be surprised how much easier it becomes to continue. Doing one small task every day is the key!

3. Stop comparing yourself to the person next to you

Watch out for the comparison danger zone! It’s all too easy to scroll through social media pics of everyone else’s awesome, picture-perfect life and start feeling less and less capable, motivated or courageous. Realize that what see will merely be a reflection of where you feel less confident in your own life, whether it’s your weight, your hair, your house, your partner or something else.  Remember this: what you see and what someone else sees are two different things. So in reality, it’s all an illusion and just a thought or opinion that you’ve created in your mind. That means you can change this thought to a better thought, one that is loving and supportive of YOU!

Spending your time comparing yourself to someone else is only going to do 2 things: 1) it wastes energy that you could be using on yourself right now and 2) it’s an never-ending road of not feeling good enough that will never make you feel good. Choose healthy role models for inspiration and motivation but steer clear of the comparison game.

4. Stop trying to please everyone

You want the quickest, fastest, surest way to have absolutely zero energy left for yourself? Just give all your time and energy freely to everyone and anyone! Word will get out fast, and before you know it, you’ll have a line around the corner and more on the way. I guarantee that in no time, you’ll feel completely overwhelmed and exhausted. You may even start to feel resentful. After all, with all that pleasing, you didn’t have 5 minutes for yourself all year! How dare they! Wait…… they? or you?

Here’s an example: Imagine driving to see your friends. You stop to pick up a hitch-hiker, then another one, and then another one (in reality, you don’t need to pick up strangers, this is just an example!). The first one wants to go left, and the other one wants to go right. It’s not that far and you feel bad so you go over there and then back again and over there and you take everyone exactly where they want to go. They are thrilled of course! But, you lost track of time and now you’re late for dinner. Not only are your friends disappointed because you missed the meal, but all the food is gone and you’re left feeling hungry. Perhaps you could have helped one person and made it on time, and that would have been totally OKAY and not selfish in any way! Or, you could have simply said NO.

Learning How to Say No is probably one of the hardest things for a lot of people to do (and not feel guilty about it either!). You can help people of course, but you cannot help everyone all the time; otherwise there’s no time left for you. This is all about honoring yourself!

5. Stay Focused on YOUR goals

Remember, if you do 10 things halfway, you’ve still done nothing! Whatever your goal, stay focused on it. Don’t fall into the trap of doing this and that and then jumping over there to give that a go too. If you’ve got limited time in your day (which everyone I know does), then you don’t have time to waste. Discipline and time management are the keys to success in any realm.

Write your goals for the year on a piece of paper and put it in a place where you see it every day. Check in with yourself every week – are you still on track or did you start to veer into an entirely different place? You entered your goals into your virtual GPS, now you’ve gotta drive the route to get there and it’s up to you to stay on course!

For more on how to achieve your health goals and actually start feeling great, book a private health consult with me via Skype.

Self-value, self-worth & self-love

Self-value, self-worth & self-love

How to Book Your Health & Nutritional Coaching Session:

1. Take photos of your eyes with a digital camera.
2. Email the photos to me for approval.
3. We schedule a time to meet via phone or Skype!

More on Manifestation and Motivation:

More on Spiritual Health:

Is there too much sugar and too many calories in fruit?

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The most common response I hear from people about fruit is this: ‘I don’t eat fruit because there is too much sugar and I don’t want to gain weight’ or ‘I heard there is too much sugar and too many calories in fruit so I don’t eat it.’ Such unfounded theories have stopped many people from eating fruit for 10 years or more (and they are still overweight!). Take some time to understand what is really happening, and hopefully you’ll get back to the idea of adding even more fruit back into your healthy routine and better yet, into your daily Green Smoothie!

All information in this article is for educational purposes only.
It is not for the diagnosis, treatment, prescription or cure of any disease or health condition.
Do fruit sugars make you gain weight?

Do fruit sugars make you gain weight?

Not all sugars are created equal.

David Wolfe explains one of the main problems with sugar. He states, “Because the term is used so loosely, sugar has become an ambiguous word. When one states the word “sugar” it could mean one of a dozen things such as high fructose corn syrup, refined cane sugar, white sugar, brown sugar, maple sugar, beet sugar, fruit juice, dried fruit, etc.” He goes on to explain, “Sugar is defined as a natural hydrocarbon compound (such as honey, agave, fruits, dried fruits, etc.) and Refined Sugar is an unnatural hydrocarbon product (such as high fructose corn syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, etc.) made through human engineering, plant breeding, and heat processing.”

First, I do think it’s important to be honest with yourself if you are saying that you don’t eat fruit because it has too much ‘sugar’. More than 95% of the time that someone tells me this, in the same conversation I discover that they eat chocolate every afternoon, a cookie every night or a glass of wine with dinner every day. And I feel so sad that the high-nutrient dense, high-enzyme, high-fiber, naturally healing food didn’t make the cut while all the other favorite Refined Sugar foods remain. If you stop eating chocolate, cakes, ice-cream, Greek Yogurt (yes…full of refined sugar!), gluten-free cookies (often containing 35g of refined sugar per cookie!), alcohol, bread (with a higher GI index than a Mars Bar!), then you have plenty of room in your diet to add some fresh raw fruits every day! If you convince yourself otherwise, you are only do a disservice to yourself.

The difference between Refined Sugar and Natural Sugar.

Refined Sugar, with no fiber, goes into the blood stream very quickly, disrupting sugar levels, leading to weight gain and increased risk of Type 2 Diabetes. Refined Sugar should be avoided as much as possible!

The FIBER in fruit is really the key to making it a healthy food and differentiates fruit from other refined sugar foods. Fiber slows down the body’s intake of natural sugars, and allows the body to regulate the absorption of fructose sugars at a healthy pace. When you make a Green Smoothie, you are blending the fruit and greens together, keeping all fiber intact (unlike a juice which separates the fiber from the liquid, leaving only the liquid). Read here for more info on juices vs. smoothies.

Fiber is key!

As Arnold Ehret once stated, “Modern Life is the tragedy of nutrition.” It’s important to remember that fruit has been on this planet for 2,000 years and it is a healing food from the Gods. What a shame to think that modern fad diets and industrialized foods have pushed out the idea of eating natural, whole and pure fruits. It doesn’t matter how modernized and industrialized we have become, our bodies are still organic beings and they need organic whole foods in order to be well. The obesity epidemic we face today was not caused from eating too much fruit! It’s that simple.

Fruit is also alkalizing and naturally high in enzymes.

I’m sure you can’t say that about your blueberry scone and Frappuccino! Most people are suffering from chronic acidosis, meaning they are eating too many acid-forming foods in their diet and not enough alkaline-forming foods. Fresh fruits (and greens) are the best alkalizing foods there are and are excellent for pH health, another great reason to add them to your diet! William Davis, the author of the book Wheat Belly, states, “Vegetables and fruits are the dominant alkaline foods in the diet. Virtually everything in your produce department will drive pH towards the alkaline direction. From kale to kohlrabi, generous consumption of vegetables and fruits serve to neutralize the acidic burden from animal products.” High-enzyme foods allow the digestive system to work better and long-term that sets you up for normalized weight and normalized blood sugars.

Eating greens and fruits together is really the perfect way to ingest fruits. The greens help to balance out the natural fructose in fruits and the fiber from the combination slows down absorption to a healthy pace. Greens, being naturally high in magnesium, help to replenish the body’s natural reserve and often stop cravings for junk foods (did you know that a lot of food cravings are actually due to low magnesium levels?).

I didn’t mention the other most common question that I get asked and that it ‘What’s the best alternative to sugar…is it Sweet’N Low (Saccharin), NutraSweet or Equal (Aspartame), Truvia, Agave Nectar or something else? Do you see the irony that in one moment, people are afraid to eat fruit and on the other they are looking for a sweetener for their food? Why would you ever turn your back on fruit, a gift from the Gods and choose chemical alternatives (and even known carcinogens) with dangerous side effects (such as destroying of brain cells)??

In my opinion, the whole calorie-counting mentality is a distraction and a waste of time.

Animals eat fruit in nature, they don’t count calories, and they’re not fat!

The more you spend your time and energy getting away from processed and chemical-laden foods, the more you will naturally eat the correct amount of calories for your energy output daily.

The bottom line: Fruit is high in fiber, enzymes, alkalinity, healing powers, anti-oxidants, minerals, vitamins and phyto-nutrients. Remember, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Add that apple to a Green Smoothie with banana and water, blend it up with ground flax seed, hemp seed, acai powder and spirulina and you are off to an amazing start to a healthy day…and a healthy weight for life!

Looking for Green Smoothie recipes to eat more fruit and greens?

Green Smoothie for DummiesCheck out my NEW book Green Smoothies for Dummies – I’ve got a whole section on Bulking up to Slim down where I feature 5 amazing Green Smoothies for Weight Loss.

As I mention in the book, “When your body gets the nutrients it needs, you no longer feel hungry or think about food as much, and that alone can help you lose weight. With so much health to gain and potential weight to lose, fruits are actually the perfect addition to a green smoothie.”

Remember: Experimenting with different fruits is a great way to keep variety in your diet and to ensure getting a wide spectrum of different minerals, vitamins and antioxidants. So, if you see a fruit that you’ve never had before, search for it in your local supermarket and give it a try!

Find the book Green Smoothies for Dummies on iTunes or amazon.com!

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