28 Day Action Plan - Day One - Cleanse and Simplify

I've taken the pledge to do the Whole Living 28 Day Challenge and today is day one, cleanse and simplify.

Yesterday was prep day so I got cleaned out by kitchen cabinets and did some grocery shopping for the challenge this week.

This week's tasks include eating 5 small meals a day of detoxing foods, eating less foods which often cause allergies, like wheat and dairy, avoiding caffeine, alcohol and sugar and simplifying life by spending less time on TV and the Internet.

Since my husband is gluten intolerant, we pretty much avoid wheat products anyway, instead using other grains like rice, quinoa, millet and gluten free oats. If you're doing the challenge, there are lots of gluten free recipes on the Whole Living Website too. We don't eat a lot of dairy either but we do use milk in our coffee (which I cut down to one cup this morning).

Today, one part of the challenge is to slow down and eat mindfully and savor food. Living more mindfully is good for digestion and stress both. It feels great to take a deep breath, slow down and enjoy a meal or a walk.

This morning, I actually got out of bed 45 minutes early so I could do my qigong self healing workout. I go to a tai chi class once a week and always promise myself I'll do a work out during the day but the day gets away and I don't do it. I thought if I could force myself to get up early and do it, then I'd feel more energetic and balanced all day.

For my qigong work out I used Qi Gong for Health and Healing: A Complete Training Course to Unleash the Power of Your Life-Force Energy by Lee Holden. This program was a little expensive but I there are 5 DVD's and 5 CD's of workouts, meditations and other great tools. I put the CD's on my Ipod and listen to them daily.

I started my day with a green smoothie made with:
Calli tea,
1/2 banana
1/2 cup blueberries
1/3 cup yogurt
2 cups spinach
1 tablespoon of flax seeds
1 tablespoon of chia seeds
a handful of walnuts
1/2 tsp of cinnamon

For dinner tonight, we're trying the Millet Bowl with Black Beans and Rice. I love black beans and keep cans of them around to add to various dishes I make.

My goal, as usual too, is to drink more water. I can manage to get about 4 eight oz cups down but it's difficult to get 8 of them. Monday is my yoga class too so lots to work on.

If you're doing the 28 day challenge, I'd love to hear from you!

Raw Food Diet - Read Labels to Avoid MSG

If you've been reading my posts about the raw food diet and green smoothies, you know that one advantage of these natural styles of eating is that you avoid chemicals like MSG, which can be toxic to the body and cause health problems down the road. For healthy living now and for healthy aging in the future, it's best to eat a natural diet and avoid chemicals as much as possible.

MSG or monosodium glutamate is a very difficult chemical to keep from your diet. MSG enhances flavors and is often associated with Chinese food. However, in some form, MSG is in almost all processed or packaged foods and is also in most restaurant foods.

How Do You Know if there is MSG in the foods you buy?

Check labels. Since the food industry knows that people are sensitive to the words monosodium glutamate or MSG, so there are other ingredients which contain MSG but aren't labeled the Battling the MSG Myth at way. Check your food labels for these ingredients. You'll probably be very shocked to find some of them even in organic packaged foods:

• Calcium Caseinate
• Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP)
• Textured Protein
• Monopotassium glutamate
• Hydrolyzed Plant Protein (HPP)
• Yeast Extract 
• Glutamate
• Autolyzed Plant Protein
• Yeast food or nutrient 
• Glutamic Acid
• Sodium Caseinate
• Autolyzed Yeast 
• Vegetable Protein Extract
• Senomyx (wheat extract labeled as artificial flavor)

Other ingredients contain varying amounts of MSG but many packaged foods contain more than one of these so the actual amount of MSG on a food label can be considerable. Here are just a few common ingredients which contain MSG:

• Soy Sauce
• Caramel flavoring
• broth
• bouillon
• gluten
• lecithin
• whey protein
• low fat or no fat items
• milk powder
• modified food starch
• dextrose, maltodextrose

There are many more on the list as well.

How do you know if you have MSG Sensitivity or Allergy?

Do you suffer from any of these ailments?:

• Tingling numbness on face, ears, arms, legs, or feet (which I have and no doctor has been able to diagnose)
• fibromyalgia
• fluctuations in blood pressure
• tendonitis, joint pain, TMJ
• shortness of breath, tightness in chest
• difficulty breathing
• depression, mood swings
• Migraines
• neurological disorders
• sleep disorders
• tinnitis
• dry mouth
• do your children or you have ADD

And many, many more symptoms could be caused by MSG allergy. If you do suffer from any of these symptoms, it's important to get checked out by a doctor as you may have a disease unrelated to an MSG sensitivity. However, if a doctor can find no cause of your symptoms, consider the No MSG Diet. Try it for  one week and see if you feel better or your symptoms are lessened.

How can you avoid MSG?

The only way to totally avoid MSG is to eat a natural diet of fresh fruits and veggies, preferably organic. Rice, fresh chicken and turkey, eggs and other whole foods are also acceptable. Stay away from packaged foods and processed foods, including anything in a can - unless you check the label and find no MSG containing products.


Read more about the whole food diet

For more information on MSG on line, see Battling the MSG Myth

Raw Food Recipes - It's Easier Than You Think

When we started drinking green smoothies a few months ago, I decided we should follow a raw food diet more often. My husband won't give up meat, but that doesn't mean we can't have bigger salads and raw food snacks. Once you collect your ingredients, making raw food snack recipes is very easy. You can even make up your own.

I started out with the book Raw Energy: 124 Raw Food Recipes for Energy Bars, Smoothies, and Other Snacks to Supercharge Your Body by Stephanie Tourles, who also wrote Organic Body Care Recipes: 175 Homemade Herbal Formulas In Raw Energy, Stephanie has a great chapter on "raw food basics" which offers great info on digestive enzymes, organic food, the value of snacking and how you can make snacks a part of your day to increase energy.

The next chapter covers all the "how to" of the raw food diet. What foods you should have on hand and what equipment you need, such as a dehydrator and a food processor, which is also a must for green smoothies. After much research I decided to purchase a Vitamix but there are several good ones out there.

For many raw snack recipes you only need a bowl, a spoon and the ingredients, which includes nuts, dried fruit and something like raw peanut butter or almond butter to hold everything together in a ball. Refrigerate your raw snack for 24 hours and they keep in the frig for about 2 weeks - if they last that long.

Once I made a few of the raw snack recipes in the book, I was able to make up my own recipes, using various ingredients like oatmeal and flax seed.

As the name implies, though, Raw Energy: 124 Raw Food Recipes for Energy Bars, Smoothies, and Other Snacks also has recipes for delicious raw food smoothies made of fruits and veggies, juice blends, raw food bars and granola. Your kids will love these healthy snacks and recipes. They make nutritious additions to your kid's school lunches too.

The Vitamix website offers great recipes and information on green smoothies and the raw food diet. If you find a Vitamix is a good purchase for your family, you can also get free shipping with this link - a $25 value!

Find more information on beginning a raw food diet.

Green Smoothie Life - Sprouting Seeds at Home

As I wait for my Vitamix to arrive so I can start making Green Smoothies, I've been researching the best way to have a constant supply of green ingredients. One easy way is sprouting various types of seeds, even broccoli, to blend into my smoothie recipes.

Sprouting takes little time and effort and you don't need garden space to grow sprouts. I haven't done any sprouting in years and back then, my only equipment was glass jars with sprouting lids. Today there is a vast array of sprouters out there to make it easier. Plus it's easy to find a huge variety of seeds to include in your sprouting mix.

I spent a couple of days researching sprouters and decided on the Easy Sprout Sprouter - 1 set,(Frontier). I looked into other, more expensive sprouting systems and the Frontier got the best ratings on Amazon for being easy to use and for living up to its name.

The Frontier sprouter is less expensive than others too. I paid a little less than $14 for mine (I ended up ordering two of them so I'd have a good supply of sprouts).

I got quite a few different sprouting seeds on Amazon too. I chose these, which are all organic varieties:

Certified Organic Wheatgrass Sprouting Seed - 5 lbs

Organic Sprouting Seeds Salad Mix 1 Pound Alfalfa, Clover, Radish, Broccoli

Organic Sprouting Seeds Hard Wheat for Wheatgrass 5 Pounds

Embracing the Green Smoothie Life is going to include quite a few changes but I am happy about growing more of my own food. Sprouts got a bad rap several years ago with the e-coli scare but if you grow your own sprouts, you don't need to worry about food-born illnesses.

I've decided to blog about my green smoothie experience and right now I'm just at the stage of assembling everything I will need to make the change. After a great deal of research and asking friends who drink green smoothies, I settled on the Vitamix and I've been very happy with their customer service and with the many features offered.

You can visit the Vitamix website and learn more about green smoothies, and find some recipes there. If you order through this link, you also receive free shipping - a $25 value!

Raw Food Diet - Free Green Smoothie Recipes

I've been researching the Green Smoothie diet using greens and raw foods in blended smoothies and just ordered my Vitamix 5200 today. After a lot of research, I decided to order it from the Vitamix website
and I've been really happy with their great customer service.

My Vitamix will arrive in about 12 days so in the meantime, I'm collecting as many free green smoothie recipes as I can find and thought I'd share them with you. Once I've begun my own Green Smoothie journey, I'll share the recipes I've used and you can give them a try too.

Free Green Smoothie Recipes

The VitaMix website offers a free 12 page recipe ebook for signing up for their newsletters. Just visit their website and click on "recipes." There you'll find not only green smoothie recipes but dozens of other healthy ways to use a Vitamix.

Here is a link to the Vitamix Green Smoothie Page

Here are some other websites with free green smoothie recipes:

From Sad to Raw - Dozens of tasty-looking raw food recipes and under beverages, there are several juices and green smoothie type recipes.

Best of Raw Foods - 5 Green smoothie recipes, plus a free ebook with 50 raw food recipes for signing up for their email newsletter - which includes more recipes!

Got Greens Revolution offers some free green smoothie recipes, plus a forum where readers have shared some of their favorite recipes.

The BlendTec website offers recipes of various types for free and there are some fruit smoothie on the list which look delicious.

Raw Food and Smoothie Recipes from Amazon:

Super Smoothies: 50 Recipes for Health and Energy

Raw Energy: 124 Raw Food Recipes for Energy Bars, Smoothies, and Other Snacks to Supercharge Your Body

Green Smoothies Diet: The Natural Program for Extraordinary Health

Stay tuned for my posts on my Green Smoothie experience. Once my Vitamix arrives, I will blog day by day on Green Smoothies, offering recipes, tips and telling you what, if any, changes Green Smoothies have made in my own life and my husband's.

Health Benefits of Kale with Kale Recipes

Kale offers great nutritional value but it isn't a veggie many people think of eating routinely. The health benefits of kale include lots of Vitamin K, C and A, plus fiber, manganese and many other trace elements. A big bonus is that it is low in calories too.

The best time to get Kale in season, for sweeter taste is winter through early spring.

There are 10-15 different glucosinolates in Kale. These are phytonutrients which research has show to lessen the instance of various kinds of cancer, including breast and ovarian cancer. Other health benefits of Kale include protecting your eyes from cataracts and helping your body detoxify and cleanse. It also promotes lung health.

How to prepare Kale?

Kale is like spinach in the preparation. Simply rinse all dirt off with cold water and shake excess water out. Trip off stems.

So what are some good kale recipes? If you like green smoothies, kale is a terrific ingredient!To use in a smoothie, you can leave the stems on so there is less waste.

One simple kale recipe is simply to sautee it lightly with grapeseed or walnut oil and season with a pinch of salt and pepper, plus a little garlic powder or fresh garlic. Add some sliced mushrooms too. Drizzle with a little lemon juice before serving.

Make a simple pasta dish by adding one cup chopped kale, pine nuts and feta cheese to 3 cups whole grain pasta. Drizzle with olive oil and serve.

Add Kale as a pizza topping for your homemade pizza.

For more healthy kale recipes go to AllRecipes.com and type in "Kale."

It's easy to enjoy the health benefits of kale in various recipes. Once you get in the habit of adding it to your diet, or in your green smoothies, it might just become one of your favorite greens.

Join the Green Smoothie Revolution

I recently joined the Green Smoothie Revolution. My diet is pretty healthy but after reading about making smoothies from whole, raw fruits and veggies, and all the health benefits, I decided to take my lifestyle program to the next level.

What Are Green Smoothies?

Green Smoothies are made of nutritious and delicious fruits and vegetables.
In green smoothies, you break down these veggies into liquid, which releases all the wonderful nutrients and enzymes for use by your body. Cooking often destroys many of these so by eating them raw, you're getting the full benefit.Once these whole foods are broken down to smoothie form, the nutrients are more usable by the body and users report more energy, weight loss and a decrease in health issues.

When blended into a delicious smoothie, you can use veggies like kale, spinach, Swiss chard and mustard greens - all wonderful foods that we don't eat enough of.

Moms report that even kids love them! I plan to try this concept on my three grandchildren, who are all under age 5, and test it out for myself. I'll keep you posted on the results.

I've loved healthy smoothies for years and always start my day with a fruit smoothie made with banana and blueberries. However, I wanted to start incorporating more whole foods into my daily diet by adding some green smoothie recipes as well.

Plus, green smoothies are convenient. Whip them up the night before and they are ready to grab on the way out the door in the morning. You can keep your green smoothies for up to 48 hours in the frig so if you whip up a large batch, it will save time.

What Do You Need to Make Green Smoothies?

1. Lots of fruits and veggies, fresh and preferably organic.
2. A powerful blender - a regular blender just won't cut up spinach and kale, or whole lemons!

That's really all you need. I researched blenders through Consumer reports and asked the folks on my organic foods forum for recommendations. The most recommended blender was the Vitamix. It the power and features you need to make Green Smoothie Recipes easy. Plus you can lots of other things with it as well.

Check out the Vitamix website and if you order through this link, you'll receive free shipping - a $25 value! The Vitamix website also offers a Green Smoothie section with recipes.

Stay tuned for future blog postings about my Green Smoothie journey. I'll be posting recipes, tips for saving money, like growing your own sprouts, and giving my honest opinion of the value of green smoothies on the Path to Healthy Living.