How many of you woke up today and poured sugar in your gas tank? I think of your body like you do your car where to get the best life and performance out of

Think of your body like you do your car, where to get the best life and performance out of it,  you have to feed it with clean fuel at the right octane levels,  and perform ongoing maintenance.

Few folks are going to do a 180 in their diet, but I am here to help if you are.  Most folks will want to dip a toe in, test the waters and, over time, incorporate a healthier lifestyle, from home and skincare products to vitamins and food.  I am here for those people too!  We can work together to assess your goals and how best to reduce toxic exposures and add nutrition to your life.

Living a plant-based lifestyle becomes like peeling the layers of an onion.   When you begin to care deeply about your health, you end up carving out time to learn about it.  Then you begin to care more about your family’s health and your friends, your pets and finally the state of our planet.

Learning this lifestyle may very well take you down the rabbit hole, as it did me.  But the truth is always far more refreshing than living a lie, particularly when it is quietly killing you or making you chronically sick.

Whether you eat meat today with every meal as many of my friends do, or you have already reduced dairy and meat consumption, or have gone completely vegan, there are so many surprising things to learn that can shift your health even further to the best that it can be.

The body is an amazing healer, but whatever you feel in the moments, know that it takes the body a full 7 years to completely regenerate.  This means that if you go clean with your diet, your household cleaners, eschew garden chemicals and put only food grade organic products in your bath and on your skin, you will have a long period of detoxing that takes place in waves, as you become healthier and made brand new again.  The outcome is worth the effort.  🙂

The bible talks quite a bit about what to eat.  In Genesis, (1:29) we learn about the garden of Eden and are advised to eat the plants and herbs, nd the fruit of the trees and bushes;  “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.  They will be your food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground – everything that hs the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food.” Then the fall happened and there were thorns, thistles, chaos and meat eating.

People have all different faiths, but the common threads are kindness, compassion and our maker pointing us to a plant-based diet, to live kindly and in harmony.

The very first thing I want to do is turn you on to this book by Dr Rabbi Gabriel Cousens, who has lectured throughout my latest Hippocrates Health Institute training.  The book is Conscious Eating, by Gabriel Cousens.   For ease, I have included a link, so just click on the coloured ink to get more info or purchase.  Hearing his lectures has been one of the things I greatly look forward to in my Hipp studies.  I find him engaging, charming, approachable, enlightening, coming from a place of great kindness and so educational.  I was vegetarian for several years in my youth and began 2015 getting back to that and now being primarily vegan.

You can eat junk food and still be vegan.  The point of eating this way, other than being kind to animals and the planet that is far over-taxed, is to get the nutritional, the vitamin, enzyme and mineral deficit most of us have mitigated. We want to be filled up with things that bring us abundant health and resilience.

In my studies this week, it suddenly hit me how deep this goes and it was right after another lecture from Gabriel noting Genesis as a baseline for how we are directed to eat.  Today we live in a very polluted world.  Back when the bible was writ, everything had just been newly formed, pristine.  We Humans hadn’t had any time yet to screw it all up with greed, corruption, factory farming, with Monsanto and Big Farma and Big Business controlling the Government that We The People voted in to take care of US.  Go back in your mind to the beginning, envision everything pure, newly minted.  Think just how powerful a statement this is, to be told by our maker to eat a plant-based diet!

This week I had someone exclaim ‘I am NOT subsisting on twigs and berries!  I must have nutrition and protein!’   So I want to talk about this.  Other than the fact Gods original plan was that we dine in this manner (and who else would know better than God?)  the fact is that today’s food supply is treacherous.  Wheat is vastly weakened, no longer the ‘Staff of Life’.  Our farm animals are over-crowded and living miserable lives in miserable conditions.  What do you think that does to the milk, the cheese, the meat?  Who wants to eat unhappiness?  I don’t.  And I learned recently that many processed snack foods contain opiates to further addict us to the product!

Ownership to take control of your lifestyle, your menu, falls upon you.  The way the world runs today, the focus is on profit above all else.  The FDA, the USDA, do not care one jot about the public at large.  The government doesn’t care if you live or die, just please pay your taxes first. ☺

We are continuously being controlled and conditioned to live fast, eat fast, look for the quick fix and over-work ourselves to an earlier grave and be just too busy to think about all of this too much. I got laid off last February as a Project Manager where I was in a great time famine. Suddenly I have time to think about things more.  And so I share.

In creating juices for a small seminar on juicing, someone asked ‘Are you going to create a juice and bottle it?  This could be a great product and business opportunity for you!’  I explained that, while there are bottled juices out there and that, yes, they are convenient, the issue is that 1) product that sits for anything longer than 15 minutes oxidises and loses vast nutrition.  2) Unless you have another access point, the grocery store shelves are stocked with product that has been pasteurised, which uses high heat to neuter all natural enzymes and vitamins.  This is why so many products are labeled with ‘Added Vitamins’.

If you are just starting out, start small.  Read my blog posts, because I have done the research on best practices for sprouting, making nut milks, there are some recipes and, after my latest school work is completed, I will be adding a lot more content!  What helped me is books like this one.  I have several vegan books (and you can find some groovy recipes online too) that helped me figure out what to make now that I am not eating meat and what do I use to replace such things as milk or cheese or butter.

Begin by taking baby steps.  And I am here if you need help with this, it’s what I do as a consultant.  In a pinch, of course you can buy the already prepared stuff at the store, but let me tell you, the difference between making your own nut milk (almond, Brazil) are lightyears tastier and healthier than anything you buy pre-made.

Because we’ve been conditioned to ‘fast’ food, fast ways, know that there is a process of re-learning and acceptance of some pre-planning as well as time consumption needed for this lifestyle.  For example, I grow my own greens in the spring/summer.  It takes me extra time to work my garden.

If you forgo a garden, but want to sprout, the products I recommend will absolutely save you time, but there will still be a bit of time and preparation involved to soak your seeds the night before, to check water levels and harvest.  I find all this calming and meditative now.  And I am now in a groove with all of it.  At first, like anything you are new too, it took extra time as I tried to figure all of it out.  This is exactly what hit me on the idea to be a Plant-Based Lifestyle Consultant.  I believe a lot of folks need a 2 hour session with me to not only perhaps learn about why sprouts are vital to this diet, but how to set up their kitchens for success and time savings.

It’s a new year.  Your body has carried you all this way.  Give yourself the gift of love, respect, abundant health and resilience!

Peace.

There are some things I hear repeatedly by people when I tell them I am mostly vegan, a bit vegetarian (no milk but some cheese) and focused on raw food. Because we’ve all been taught that for protein, we need dairy and meat, and most of us were brought up primarily on cooked and processed foods, we don’t think about the bioavailability of the vitamins, the minerals, the protein or that cooking anything above 118 Fahrenheit, cooks the enzymes out as well as much of the vitamins. This doesn’t always mean for you, that you must never eat cooked food again, or ever touch meat. What I am encouraging is for you to try segueing into a more plant-centric diet, and reduce the cooked foods so that at least 1/2 of your meals are raw. Buy only organic or wild produce, grow your own wherever possible and grow a variety of sprouts and eat them daily. Below is a link with great information and links to purchase some tested and reviewed by me sprouting options. Now, about protein – typical 4oz chicken breast has 28 grams of protein. Sprouted Lentils (4oz) have 25g. We are not living in the same world we had in the 1950’s. Our world is entirely polluted. It needs our help to reduce meat consumption because the land used causes soil erosion and the water used is wasteful. The feces, chemicals and all else utilised by factory farming methods is destroying our planet. Even if you do not care that the animals are mistreated, abused, sick, and very unhappy living unnaturally in cramped quarters, not allowed to be themselves at all, think about the unhappiness you are ingesting along with the chemicals and other crap given to the poor creature. It is not a healthy way for any and all concerned. So if you eat meat, go organic, do your level best to buy meat from more humane sources and reduce consumption to 2 days per week or one day. My husband and I had ‘meat friday’ a few years back where that was our one day each week to enjoy a nice steak etc. Now I let him eat the steak knowing I am causing less harm to others and myself. I have been on this track since February, reducing/eliminating sugars, meat, dairy, growing my own sprouts and I fit far better in my clothes and people keep telling me my skin tone is fabulous and that I have lost weight. But I can tell you that I have gotten healthier, stronger, more resilient.

This morning I padded down to my office and found an email advertising a link for IT Cosmetics.  Clicking on the link, they had a before and after picture of a lady with and without the makeup and a very easy to navigate way to add product to your cart and check out.  Not one place explained how the ingredients worked or what the ingredients were.  Of course I wrote them personally.  I find our bombardment of toxic stew, with more chemicals created annually, and the cosmetic industry (as well as Government oversight etc) an embarrassment to our intelligence.  We are the only species that actively destroys itself, lies about it, pretends to be a friend when really we have an end game not in your best interest and all for the feeling we have somehow gotten the upper hand, we have reached into your wallet!  How ridiculous and how mean.

Everybody wants your money.  In fact, I also want some of your money; I write this blog, I rep for a certified organic skin, home and body care line  https://www.miessence.com/puretemple/en/category/1/skincare
and what I do here in this blog is review products where I include helpful links for you, but also, when you purchase from one of my links, I get a tiny commission.  You don’t pay more, but I get rewarded for providing you impetus to purchase something.    I began this blog, this mission, along with my own personal journey toward detox.  There was so much I didn’t know and as I learned, I wanted a place to share knowledge.  There are ways to get glowing and gorgeous, to beautify your home, polish the floor or table-tops, wash your clothes and avoid toxins in the process.  Much of my learning came by trial and error, observation and finally by sinking thousands into official training.  My aim is to help us all detox by learning and understanding how and what to avoid and look for, as well as provide products I know work well and are free of as much crap as possible.

Going clean is a process.  Don’t beat yourself up about this, just take your baby steps and keep going, keep getting better at it.  Believe me, I have purchased what I thought was an ‘organic’ eye or hand cream, only to find it had PEG or Triclosan or some shit in it that’s bad for you.

What I write about and review here, I have vetted. The Miessence products are all certified organic and are terrific products with yummy planty smells.  I personally am a cosmetic whore, I am not entirely true to any one line.  I like to try new stuff and have my old stand-bys.  So assuming you are the same way, I encourage you to search for things where you get full disclosure on ingredients.  Don’t buy anything that doesn’t provide this, that is a red flag.

And I learned very recently that while I have always preferred natural fibre clothing, it is really far more important than I ever knew before.  The skin absorbs 60% of what it comes into contact with. The finishes and toxins are all over the place.  Polyester is made from the petroleum industry and is toxic.  Synthetic fibers over heat the body which can lead to tumors.  For conventionally grown cotton, One third of a pound of pesticides and chemical fertilizers go into growing just one non-organic T-shirt.  Then there are bleaches, dyes and finishes. Sadly, most of the chemicals remain throughout the life of the garment, wash after wash and end up in a landfill later.

If you find you have alot of bad stuff in your life, clear your closets, and medicine cabinets and start fresh.  Post comments on how your life has changed, any progress your health makes, I’d love to hear about it.  I am also here for any questions you have too.

Peace.

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TV ads make us want to eat all of the time.  The system is really out to get us.  But it is important to understand that the ‘Full’ feeling actually means we have overshot and dined on too much at once. We should, instead, be looking to feel pleasantly satisfied.

But another culprit to our culture here in America, is eating too often.  The body has a process it goes through in order to render the food (fuel) we take in, into usable energy.

But my tummy feels empty!  An empty stomach only signals you that the first stage of digestion has been completed.  Whenever you eat, a significant portion of the body’s energy, switches over from whatever it was working on, to now digesting your meal.

Your body goes through 3 stages: Digestion, assimilation, and Elimination.  Although some assimilation and elimination might have happened by the time your belly feels empty, a large portion of the processes behind that meal, have not yet occurred.

Per Hippocrates Health Institute, when you eat a new meal when your body has not yet fully processed the prior one, you unduly stress and compromise your body because it has not yet finished its task on the last meal and you have just added another job that requires immediate commencement.

Your body must now deal with both meals which cause the processes for both to be incomplete.  Eating too soon creates added waste and stress and decomposed food the body never had the time to complete, creating a favorable environment for bacteria, viruses, parasites, unhealthy cells, etc.

It is important to remain mindful of true hunger pains, of when your body is really calling out for fuel.  In this way, you honor the cycles of your body and encourage the very best health.