Tag Archives: nutrition

Food Forests Are Fun- And Good For You!

Posted on August 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

cartoon-bugFor those of us in the southern hemisphere who are experiencing winter, you might be feeling those bugs dancing around you, waiting for an opportunity to make you sick. I’ve gone for whole winters without getting sick but nothing wrong with a bit of a workout for the immune system every now and then. And when you do need a bit of extra help you may look no further than nature where all kinds of fruits abound.

Juicy orange

I am feeling particularly grateful to the citrus fruits at the moment, lemon and orange juice brewed up with honey, cinnamon, nutmeg, garlic and ginger. Add a good helping of some fine single malt whiskey once you have taken your slowly simmered medicine off the stove and the alchemy is complete! That’s my recipe for a hot toddy, I don’t remember who I got it from but I do know that it is wonderful for colds and flu. And the fine brew we made came from fruit on the trees here at our latest house sit, abundance comes in many forms and this is certainly bounteous nature at her best!

hot-toddy

I’m not sure about some of the garlic but the ginger came from a lovely lady at my Sunday market who sells strawberries, avocados and other yummy things. The honey comes from my local co-op and is raw, so my medicine for my cough was made with very fine ingredients! And when I sent my Beloved out for the whiskey I was happy when he came back with a good bottle, nice and smooth. It’s a funny thing but the only time I ever really want whiskey is when I’m sick with a cold or bug of some description. For me it really is medicine, does a wonderful job of healing and in winter it’s nice to be so hot, but you wouldn’t want to be drinking it all the time.

winter fruit

So if you are in winter at the moment consider whether your immune system might need a boost, when there is a lot of fruit on the trees sometimes even organic can be quite cheap, certainly no more than the commercial fruit. In fact whatever season you are currently inhabiting may well be rich with all the nutrition you need. Nature does seem to balance supply and demand quite well if treated with respect, if you have the opportunity plant a food forest where you live!

I like the sound of that!

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Coming Out Of The Fog.

Posted on August 16, 2013 | Leave a comment

What with being sick there hasn’t been a lot of thought process going on in this head of mine, maybe I’m getting better because I’m beginning to have some thoughts on what being sick has been all about. There are layers to this but to start with lets look at the physical body, this is something I’ve been pushing pretty hard even though I do my best to give it good nutrition, exercise and rest. I don’t enjoy being ill, but there has been a part of me that has enjoyed the fact that I haven’t been able to do anything much for the last four days.

I love pretty much everything that I do, but it’s a lot to juggle and only some of it brings in money to support me, which is then challenging in terms of saving up for things like holidays! So there is a fundamental change still on its way, but in the meantime I am determined to continue to refine the way that I support my physical body. My intuition has led me to mucuna pruriens, a medicinal herb that has a huge range of healing properties. If you require empirical evidence then better stop reading now, this is an intuitive journey for me as I feel into what’s right for my body.

Mucuna Pruriens.

Mucuna Pruriens.

The beans.

The beans.

You can hear what David Wolfe says about this herb at the end of this post, the part that got my attention was that it is a natural source of L-dopa which turns into dopamine, a neurotransmitter that buffers us against stress. It can also help to improve eyesight and with my schedule I really don’t have time to do my natural vision improvement exercises. So I found a source on e-bay that feels like it’s the right one for me but the seller is away, I will wait till they come back and then I will embark on a journey with this herb and see where it takes me.

There is some huge movement occurring on spiritual, emotional and psychological levels of my being at this time, and I will be talking about this in future posts. But for now, baby steps as I come out of the fog of illness, with any luck some therapeutic dancing tomorrow night if I am well enough, dance the last of the cold germs out into the night!

In this video, Superfoods Nutritionist David Wolfe passionately explains why he considers Mucuna Pruriens to be one of the most impressive, healing herbs on planet earth.
It is the highest (known) natural source of L-Dopa, which enhances dopamine, which makes us feel stable, happy, and confident. It has healed people from long-term stimulant abuse, repairs poor eyesight, improves hearing, enhances reproduction and hormone balancing in women, along with many other benefits. We only wish we’d heard of it sooner!

Video (5:50)

http://www.nextworldtv.com/page/24235.html

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Food For All.

Posted on August 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

I am reflecting on my recent posts about listening to my body and getting the right nutrition happening, something that I am able to do even though I am very much in the lower socio-economic group as far as income goes. After watching this short video about a community food system in India, I am feeling wealthy by comparison to these people, many of whom live on less than  dollar a day. I still manage to go out to dinner and to lots of amazing events, it takes a bit of juggling and lateral thinking at times but I manage to do it.

poorpeopleindia

I confess to a keen sense of injustice when I look at the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and it’s getting worse not better. What really baffles me is how the super wealthy can sleep at night, knowing that there are so many starving people without access to clean water.  How can our politicians accept the ridiculous amounts of money that they receive when so many of the people they are meant to be serving are struggling to manage the basics of living.

I know that population growth is a serious issue but surely if we distributed what we do have a bit more evenly everyone would be well cared for. And with all those resources in the form of people, new ways of thinking and creating, surely we can come up with ideas that will serve not only humanity, but this planet and the other beings we share it with. If you would like an example about innovative ideas, in this case its education, check out “The School In The Clouds”, posted on the 4th July 2013.

How to supply food to everyone inexpensively and
consistently, around the world?

Imagine the convenience of take-out food every day,
but for less money that you would pay to COOK at home,
let alone order from a restaurant.

Here is a brilliant solution: members pay in to a
collective community kitchen, and meals for households
are distributed daily by the kitchen run by employed chefs.

Video: (2:26)

http://www.nextworldtv.com/page/11549.html

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The Body Speaks.

Posted on August 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

To stay on an even keel and not to be overwhelmed, a constant challenge in this busy life I have created!  I didn’t have to stay longer at the club tonight but in doing so I created stronger connections with my community, as well as having a bucket load of fun. Then home to write posts with so much less time than I had planned, and I have a really sore throat, oh Goddess please don’t let me get sick. It will make my night out at the theatre tomorrow night so much less enjoyable, I will have to have a chat with my body and see if there is some other way for it to release whatever it is trying to let go of.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I don’t get sick very often, genetics plays a part in this, I have a particularly tough constitution. But I also communicate with my body all the time, when I can feel sickness coming on I always ask my body if there is some other way that it can clear whatever it is needing to get out of my system. This is why I am not a believer in taking medication for colds, the body is busy getting rid of toxins and all you are doing is pushing it all back into the system. So at the end of the day I will surrender to the cold if I have to, but a lot of the time it dances around my edges and then goes away.

Of course you need to keep your immune system nice and strong, good nutrition is an important part of that as well as supplements. Listen to your body, I’ve been starting every day with a green smoothie since the New Year, but a few days ago my smoothie didn’t taste so good, always a sign that something needs to change. So I’m having them every second day and lo and behold, my smoothie tastes good again!

green smoothie

Good health is kind of simple in some ways, but we have strayed such a long way from basic nutrition and self-care in this culture, people have largely forgotten those basics. Time to return to the past, and add in the amazing new information that is coming in from the new paradigm!

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B3 May Set You Free.

Posted on July 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

I speak a lot about nutritional approaches to health practices, generally they tend to provide healing without huge costs and support our ability to tap into our own capacity for self-healing. Therfore they have been somewhat suppressed, but it seems that more and more people are finding out about this stuff, I would like every person on the planet who suffers from depression to know about niacin or B3. According to Beyondblue 3 million Australians are currently living with depression or anxiety, I have spoken to many people who were depressed or anxious,panic attacks too.

http://www.beyondblue.org.au/

B3

I don’t know if it would work for every single person but it surely has worked well for many who have tried this remedy, after all Valium is a copy of the chemical structure of niacin, the pharmaceutical industry recognises its potential. Of course there is no money in it for the industry that has done its best to keep out alternative therapies, but it can’t stay that way forever. So if you know someone who is struggling with depression tell them about vitamin B3, they need to do it with a doctor who understands orthomolecular medicine, as the doses are much higher than anyone would usually have. But don’t worry, no-one has ever been killed by vitamins, the same cannot be said of pharmaceutical drugs however.

It makes sense to me that there are remedies in our own internal pharmacopeia that can help with mental health issues, so much of what creates our worldly identity is chemical/emotional. There is so much less nutrition in the western diet these days, there are a lot of toxic drugs with dubious benefits that people start taking in their lives, and as they get older the list gets longer. Could the rise in dementia have anything to do with that toxic cocktail that many of us end up on as we get older.

Of course for me the rise is in organic fruits and vegetables, certified organic pro-biotic, chia seeds, kale, less or no refined sugar, I don’t take the drugs that doctors like to write prescriptions for, don’t go to doctors much at all!

Even severe, chronic depressions have been lifted with high dose Niacin.
Most if not all psychiatric disorders are rooted in some mineral and/or nutritional deficiency. The good news is, they can easily be corrected, with no drugs, and no chemical dependency!
Also no money for the pharmaceutical industry but that’s OK, they have enough money.

Learn more here:
Video (4:34)

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Veggies With Zing!

Posted on July 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

People in the mainstream think of healthy eating as having plenty of fruit and veggies, good in theory but how much nutrition are they actually getting from the food that they eat. Well if it isn’t organic then it’s full of nasty chemicals that are toxic to your body, but even if it’s one of those hardy plants that doesn’t need much in the way of pesticides, chances are it offers much less nutrition than it would have 100 years ago. Soils in most parts of the world have become depleted in minerals, which has had a direct effect on the quality of the food that we eat.

fruits-and-veggies

If you buy organic then you are generally getting a higher mineral content, but if you grow your own and add generous quantities of rock dust to the soil, you end up with the best possible quality, add in love as you work the garden and the food you eat from it is going to make your body zing! I am so looking forward to settling down and having a veggie garden, by the time that happens I will have so much wonderful information I will be able to create a garden that supports me to live to at least 120, maybe even longer. There are places in the world where people routinely live to 100 or more, and one of the things they have in common is that the soil is highly mineralised.

There are many different ingredients to having a long life in good health, mental, emotional, spiritual and physical are all important, and need to be in the right balance with each other. When it comes to the physical the food that we eat is high on the list of priorities, and while I do believe our minds are powerful enough to transform the effects of eating low quality food, why not make less work and just give your body the right stuff in the first place!

Check out this interview with Don Weaver who is talking about the remineralisation of the soil using rock dust, a web site that he recommends for more information is remineralize.org

Do you know about the movement to remineralize the earth?
The mineral content of our food has gone down drastically since 1910, but the solution for your personal garden is very simple: you just add rock dust.
See more about the amazing benefits of remineralization and where to get rock dust here!
 

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Lets Eat.

Posted on December 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Food can be a great challenge and a great delight, it’s been love/hate for me over the years but the concept of food as medicine has helped me a lot in shifting old patterns. The really deep ingrained ones tend to come back but never totally back to how it was, so always progress in the longer term.

I am currently in that phase where I keep slipping and feel like I am falling back just a wee tad further than would be wise. My weight is scaring me and that can’t be good, christmas is the wrong time of year to be steadily losing will power, the thin end of the wedge will not, on this occasion, result in me being thin! Indeed we are looking at a polar opposite here, hence the rising scent of fear!

So I am seeking the next stage in the journey towards optimum health and it will be both weight loss and detoxification. I feel a resistance to doing the HCG protocol again but I do know that it is a path that does work to lose the weight quickly. That which calls me also is the notion of shifting towards a total raw food diet, I know my body would thrive on that regime but I don’t know how it will affect my weight. One tends to assume weight loss, certainly detox particularly if I am eating organic food, but you never know until you do it.

romainesandwiches

I keep thinking GREEN SMOOTHIES and then promptly doing absolutely nothing about it. If I translate my passion for kale in salads and stir frys into a GREEN SMOOTHIE there’s no telling where I may end up, there are no limits for Goddesses powered by green super food. Actually purple is supposed to be pretty good also and not just for burning off the dross with its searing flame, think eggplant and acai, blueberries, grapes and purple cabbage.

But first I need to get through Christmas…………I know I can do it the question is how big will I be at the end of that tinselled, flashing tunnel leading to the North Pole? Will I be the size of a house or even mansion, generously overflowing my fabulous wardrobe, or will I merely be the size of a truck or perhaps a small moving van. Keep watching this space, you are all my witnesses Goddess help me, I WILL SURVIVE the season of Sugar and Starch!

christmas-spice-cakes-with-chocolate

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