Week 2 March Makeover 28-Day Challenge

Welcome to Week Two (March 7 - March 14)

Did you have fun throwing out all that bad food. I would not even use the word "food" to describe anything with artificial ingredients that interfere with your body's metabolism and function plus cause inflammation and weight gain. 

Now that you've cleaned out your pantry, time to shop. Here is a list of items to restock it:

Stocking a Healthy Pantry

Buy organic, no sulfites, non-gmo’s as much as possible.

Artichoke hearts (jarred or frozen)

Beans (dried and canned) black beans, chickpeas/garbanzo beans, kidney beans, navy beans, black-eyed peas, pinto beans, lentils, split peas, and cannellini beans (When buying canned beans look for products without preservatives, such as calcium disodium EDTA, use low-sodium, and without added sugar)

Chipotle chilies in adobo (if you like spicy)

Cocoa powder/cacao (unsweetened)

Dried fruits: dates, raisins, apricots, goji berries, figs, papaya

Flour: chickpea, coconut, almond, sprouted wheat, spelt

Grains: red, brown, or black rice, red or black quinoa, old-fashioned rolled oats/steel cut, millet, barley, bulgar

Miso paste (white)

Nut butters and tahini

Nutritional yeast

Nuts and seeds: raw almonds, cashews, pecans, pistachios, walnuts, flaxseeds, sesame seeds, hulled hemp seeds (hemp hearts), pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds 

Organic veggie broth (low sodium)

Pasta and noodles: 100% whole-grain or bean-based spaghetti, linguine, lasagna, soba

Roasted red peppers (jarred)

Spices and dried herbs

Sauces and Condiments: hot sauce, coconut aminos, tamari, mustard, olives, pickles, sauerkraut

Sweeteners: Pure maple syrup, dates, raw honey

Tomato products: salt-free jarred, BPA-free canned, or Tetra Pak tomato products (diced, whole, puree’, paste, marinara sauce)

Tortillas: 100% whole-grain and corn, sprouted wheat

Vanilla beans/vanilla

Vinegars (apple cider, balsamic, rice)

Superfoods: hemp seeds, maca powder, flax seeds, chia seeds, spirulina

Stock your refrigerator with plant-based food:

• Use Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides and Produce from EWG to pick healthy produce.
• If you eat meat (I recommend that you go 100% plant-based for at least a month), buy meats that are 100% organic and grass-fed. Buy fish that is wild-caught (not farm-raised).
• Buy ingredients for basic juice: 
• Carrots
• Kale, Cabbage or Broccoli
• Celery
• Apple
• Ginger (optional)
• Buy veggies for making healthy, chunky salad:
• Cucumber
• Zucchini
• Beans (black or garbanzo)
• Red onion
• Cilantro

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Healthy Chunky Salad

Ingredients:

Carrot

Cucumber

Celery

Kale

Cabbage

Onion

Black or garbanzo beans (rinsed and drained)

Prep:

Cut veggies into bite-size pieces. Add beans. Dress with Apple Cider Vinegar and Olive Oil and your choice of spices—optional: add lemon juice and/or Balsamic Vinegar. Mix together and ENJOY!

Add walnuts, quinoa, pumpkin seeds, apple or pear chunks for variation. BE CREATIVE!

Make a healthy Super Food Green Smoothie. Click here for the recipe.

Prepare juice drinks, big veggie (Healthy Chunky) salad and Super Food Green Smoothie to eat/drink as you adjust to a plant-based, clean eating routine. Note: do not juice fruit—it concentrates the sugars. Juice vegetables then add to blender and add fruit if you find the taste too green. This will help you adjust your palate as you eat more veggies.

There are plenty of recipes to explore on this site for your new healthy lifestyle. So start exploring.

Continue your healthy makeover and see you here next week.

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Give Yourself a Shot of Health

Instead of medications or getting a flu shot, boost your health with a daily shot of health. Taking two shots a day (even one shot a day) of this health drink—one in the morning and one in the evening—will give your immune system a kick. But don't expect it to make-up for an unhealthy diet of processed foods and sugar. Nope!

Shot of Health

from Ancestral Nutrition

yield ~14 shots

category Drink

cuisine Vegan

ingredients

1.5 C filtered water

7 Tbsp apple cider vinegar (ACV)

Juice of 1 lemon or 1 drop lemon essential oil

1 Tbsp raw honey

5 Tbsp of collagen (if you have it)

directions

1. Combine in glass jar and shake until blended.

2. Store in fridge.

3. Take 1 to 2 shots (one morning, one evening) daily

I just took my shot for today and, I should add, it blows your hair back. Woo!

BTW if you use Bragg's ACV (which I highly encourage), you'll be getting a dose of prebiotics as well. Prebiotics is food for the good bacteria in your gut. For more information on pro and pre-biotics, read What's the Scoop on Probiotics and Prebiotics.

What healthy habits do you use to boost your immunity?

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Green Tea ~ 6 Ways It Fights Cancer

I LOVE coffee. I mean I like the taste—never ruined it with sugar (yeah, even me a former sugar addict). So when I found I needed to eliminate coffee from my diet, I was devastated—kind of describes how I felt about many things I needed to stop eating/drinking.

Reading the book Nature's Cancer-Fighting Foods by Verne Varona started me on my healing diet, which I attribute to the cure for my hereditary curse. Green tea was one of several things I added to fight cancer, which tended to grow in my colon.

Most are familiar with the addictive properties of caffeinated coffee—just try a day without it and get smacked with a whopper caffeine withdrawal headache. But did you know that coffee, regular and decaf, is very acid in the body? When the body becomes acidic due to a bad diet (consumption of processed foods with artificial ingredients and sugar), it becomes a cancer-producing, inflammatory environment.

Green Tea: A Better Beverage
Even though green tea contains some caffeine, it averages 30 to 40 mg compared to 75 to 155 mg for an equal amount of coffee. But the real issue is acid vs alkaline. Coffee is acidic in the body while green tea is overall alkaline. Acid/alkaline balance is critical to cancer prevention and achieving optimum wellness. Just remember these two things: cancer thrives in an acid environment and cannot exist in an alkaline environment.

Cancer thrives in acid environment.

Cancer cannot exist in alkaline environment.

Aside from the alkalizing benefits of green tea, here are more plusses to consider:

1. Contains EGCG one of the few substances that kill cancer stem cells, which contribute to metastatic cancer.
2. Suppresses the protein urokinase that contributes to the growth and spread of cancer.
3. Studies show it offers help against breast cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer and prostate cancer.
4. Contains other catechins—powerful anti-oxidants effective at inhibiting the growth of cancer cells, lowering cholesterol, improving lipid (fat) metabolism and fighting bacterial infections.
5. Inhibits the abnormal formation of blood clots.
6. Fights the cause of allergies in your body.

Seriously, if you want to be cancer-free—effectively help your immune system rid your body of cancer, you should drink green tea as part of a daily regimen.

I drink about 20 oz. of green tea each morning. We infuse the loose leaf green tea in a ceramic tea pot. With no tea bag you get the full flavor of the tea. Otherwise, I find I can taste the bag—even 100% unbleached cotton bags or silk.

Here are detailed brewing instructions for loose leaf tea. We buy our loose leaf tea in bulk quantities from Mighty Leaf. They offer a number of wonderful green tea blends and have regular sales. My favorites include Green Tea Tropical and Citron Green. Remember you can re-use high quality tea 2-3 times before the flavor and benefits are depleted.

I consider green tea an important ingredient in my cancer-fighting regimen. Maybe you should too.

What's your preferred morning beverage? Scroll down and leave a comment.

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Super Foods Green Smoothie Recipe

I'm proud of my hubby who is training for a half-marathon in April. It will be his third. He's decided that having a half-marathon to train for keeps him motivated to get out and exercise. I say, whatever it takes to get a person to exercise is good.

He really gets into it. Carries a water bottle on his training runs. Marks up the calendar with the distances he needs to run on which days to get his body ready for the 13.1 miles on the day of the race. Studies about the right energy supplements to feed the muscles. Works on having an efficient running form. And looks for nutritious smoothie recipes that will build his body.

Here's one he found in the March Outside magazine that starts with his favorite drink—coconut water. It's a great drink for breakfast. Packs a wallop with protein and immune booster foods like maca powder and hemp seeds.

Super Foods Green Smoothie

from Outside Magazine

yield 2 servings

category Drink

cuisine Vegan

ingredients

16 oz coconut water

3 Tbsp plant-based protein powder

1 Tbsp hemp seeds

1 Tbsp chai seeds

1 Tbsp maca powder

1/2 C frozen mixed berries

2 celery stalks

2 kale leaves

1/2 frozen banana

directions

1. Blend until smooth.

2. Pour into a cup, add a flex straw and enjoy!

notes: • Use handful of spinach or 1/2 C peas to replace protein powder if desired.

If you don't have protein powder on hand, use a handful of spinach or 1/2 cup of peas (frozen is good) to replace.

You don't need to be a runner in training to enjoy the benefits of this green smoothie. Add it to your morning rotation of healthy foods to get your day started on the right foot.

Try it for a fine St Paddy's Day drink to get the luck of the Irish.

Have you discovered your favorite super food?

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How to Make Kombucha Tea

I had a scoby in my fridge for some time, plus had all the ingredients and supplies needed, before I finally decided to just do it. Had I known how easy it would be, I wouldn't have waited so long.

What are you waiting for? Scoby's are readily available. If you're making Kombucha, the scoby naturally replicates. Ask someone brewing the fermented tea—if they don't have a scoby baby at the moment, they will soon have one they can pass on to you.

What is a SCOBY?

SCOBY is an acronym for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria & Yeast. It's similar to the mother that makes  vinegar. Kombucha begins as a sugary tea—the scoby infuses bacteria which devours most of the sugar during the fermenting process. The tea is transformed into a refreshing, fizzy, slightly sour fermented beverage.

After a few brewings using the scoby, you'll begin to feel like you have a new household pet. It is alive after all. So the first time you have something go wrong with a batch and you have to discard it, you might feel a bit weird about how to do that—discard the scoby. Should I give it a proper burial? Some say you grind it up in your next smoothie. What? You decide what to do, but tell me if you don't develop a weird feeling about this organism. Okay… maybe that's just me. Moving along now.

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Pumpkin Spice Smoothie

I know there are many of you who LOVE when fall arrives because it means Starbucks offers there enormously popular Pumpkin Spice Latte for the season. Well… I dare you to get out your blender and give this version a whirl. I'm guessing you'll be saving your $5.95 and go the DIY route from now on.

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Pumpkin Pie Smoothie

For some Christmas holiday cheer, replace your pumpkin spice latte with this yummy smoothie and you'll never go back.

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Red Genius Juice Recipe

Here's a treat for your body. No tricks here. Just a simple healthy recipe for vegetable juice. The recipe comes from Sandy Halliday, detox specialist. I interviewed Sandy recently about her ebook The Definitive Detox Diet.

With a name like Red Genius, who doesn't want to get some of this nutrition in their bodies? Beets are rich in phytonutrients called betalains that provide antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and detoxification support for the body.

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Green Coconut Smoothie Recipe

This delicious and healthy green smoothie will keep you going all afternoon. Besides the wealth of nutrients in the veggies, the 1/4 cup of raw unsweetened coconut flakes is packed with minerals and fiber. Coconut is also rich in medium-chain triglycerides, a type of dietary fat that encourages weight loss by boosting your metabolism and curbing your appetite. Other substances in raw coconut bolster your immune function and destroys pathogens.

Are you ready for a boost? Get out your Vita Mix and start blending.

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Eating Weeds and Loving It!?

I blame it all on Kalyn Denny @ Kalyn's Kitchen. She posted this beautiful and delicious Mediterranean Lettuce Salad with purslane in it. I read purslane and thought, Where have I heard of that before? Kalyn went on to say it was the healthiest food in the world... really? Turns out its rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, a fat we need to survive. Reading more I realized I heard of this plant in reference to gardening. It's one of many pesky weeds that tend to invade our gardens and landscape. Seems to grow everywhere uninvited.

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How to Brew Loose Leaf Tea

My post on the benefits of green tea prompted a question about the details of brewing. Especially if you're making the switch from coffee to tea.

First, get yourself a ceramic teapot with a stainless steel infuser. Peet's has some nice ones if you have a store close by.

Add 1 Tbsp. of loose tea per 8-12 oz. of water. You may need more (or less) depending on the "fluffiness" of the tea. Some teas are rolled tightly into beads that unfold as the tea steeps.

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Making a Green Veggie Shake

The healthiest food we can eat are greens: arugula, collard greens, mustard greens, beets greens, spinach, chard, dandelion greens, kale, sorrel, turnip greens, mizuna, etc. You may have never heard of some of these green gems, but they are a powerhouse of nutrients. They are rich in vitamins (including K, C, E and many of the B vitamins), minerals (including iron, calcium, magnesium and potassium) and phytonutrients (including lutein, beta-carotene and zeaxanthin). Oh and lets not forget fiber—lots of it. Eating greens can be part of an arsenal to combat cancer, diabetes, inflammation and heart disease.

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