Is Natural the New Organic?

Natural?  All natural?  Natural flavors?  The FTC and FDA have refused to define "natural", leaving marketers open to suits.

All you need to do is read the ingredient label and you will without a doubt find "natural flavors" lurking in some of your favorite products.

Click here to read more.

Diabetes. Are you at risk?

Today 100 million Americans are pre-diabetic.  90 million don’t know it.

Blood sugar is a huge issue with pre-diabetes as a modern day epidemic.

First, let me be clear:

It is best to minimize refined, processed sugar, but I do not recommend avoiding everything sweet.  Deprivation is the quickest way to sneak and crave processed sweets.  Some of the best types of natural sugars are found in fruit and vegetables.

Type 2 Diabetes vs. Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 aka juvenile - typically occurs before the age of 20 accounting for 10-15% of all diabetics in the country.

Type 2 diabetes aka adult onset - accounts for 85-90% of all diabetics in the country and can be reversed with a lifestyle change beginning with diet and exercise.

People don’t know better yet.  We’re beginning to get educated on how to live and eat with good nutrition and how that can impact how we feel and prevent chronic disease.  

Type 2 is associated with heart disease, blood pressure and cholesterol.  

You can get it at any age.

HOW TO TEST YOUR BLOOD SUGAR

Buy a glucometer at your local drugstore for $10-$15, learn how to use it.  Prick your finger every morning.  You can avoid your doctor’s message once a year, but you see this number every morning and it will change your life.

OPTIMAL LEVELS

70-85mg/dl in the a.m. 

lower than 125mg/dl after a meal

126mg/dl indicates diabetes

BLOOD SUGAR RANGES

If your blood sugar goes over 85mg/dl you have a 40% increased risk of dying of a heart attack or stroke.

If your level is lower than 85mg/dl you are healing arteries and your skin.  If you are above 85mg/dl it’s not good.

If your blood sugar level is over 100mg/dl there’s a good chance you are pre-diabetic. 

Good Vs. Bad Sugar - Effects

When unprocessed, sugar contains a variety of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and proteins.  When brown rice or other whole grains are cooked, chewed and digested, the natural carbs break down uniformly into separate glucose molecules.  These molecules enter the bloodstream, where they are burned smoothly and evenly, allowing your body to absorb all the good stuff.

Refined tables sugar, aka sucrose, is very different.  Extracted from either sugar cane or beets, it lacks vitamins, minerals and fiber, and thus requires extra effort from the body to digest.  The body must deplete its own store of minerals and enzymes to absorb sucrose properly.  Therefore, instead of providing the body with nutrition, it creates deficiency.  It enters the quickly into the bloodstream and wreaks havoc on the blood sugar level, first pushing it sky high causing excitability, nervous tension and hyperactivity - and then dropping it extremely low--causing fatigue, depression, weariness and exhaustion.  

Sugar qualifies as an addictive substance for two reasons:

1. Eating even a small amount creates a desire for more.
2. Suddenly quitting causes withdrawal symptoms such as headache, mood swings, cravings and fatigue.

The USDA recommends we get no more than 40 grams or 10 teaspoons of added sugar per day, yet most Americans eat about 30 teaspoons per day.

To calculate the tsp of sugar in a product, take the grams and divide by 4.

Is Your Lifestyle Sustainable?

What do you eat?   Does it control you or do you control it?  Do you have the will power to deprive your one body of healthy nutrients?  How long will it last?  

These are some of the questions I ask my clients.  

Did you know that you can cleanse your body naturally with food, while enjoying sustainable energy throughout the day and into the evening? 

With the work we will do together, we can create this lifestyle for you.  You will no longer worry about counting calories, points or depriving yourself.  You won't have to drink ingredients that you don't know how to pronounce.  You won't have to plug your nose and gulp down that disgusting looking swamp water.  You won't be tempted by unhealthy chocolate every hour to get you through.

If you have tried everything and nothing has worked, why not talk to me for one-hour so you can stop living a life of deprivation, fear, emotional eating and yo-yo dieting?  Let's get back to the basics of eating whole foods, fruits, vegetables, protein and water.  I can help you live your best life so you can stop craving, crashing and crying.  

What are you waiting for?

It's Creamy and It's Dreamy

I'm talking about Haagen-Dazs Vanilla - All Natural Ice Cream.  Yes, your Health Coach does eat ice cream in moderation and here's why.  

I searched high and low to find the best quality ingredients to serve my family ice cream this holiday.  The decision was easy when it came to avoiding these ingredients:

Some Ingredients to Avoid When Buying Ice Cream

• High Fructose Corn Syrup - turns to fat in your body and not the good kind.  Giving up products containing HFCS will benefit your health, help control your weight, and if enough people get the message, protect the planet as well.
• Carrageenan - food additive - can cause inflammation in the body and has no nutritional value
• Natural flavors - this is a man-made additive, and it makes processed food and fast food taste outstanding.

Some other ingredients to look for include alkalized cocoa, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, vanillin, maltodextrin and dextrose, all of which involve some type of chemical processing or are simply artificial.  Alkalized cocoa, for instance, involves a chemical process that changes cocoa's natural flavor, texture and chemical structure, as well as eliminates some of its acidity and healthy antioxidant content.  And vanillin is just an artificial version of vanilla.

Stick with ingredients you know like cream, skim milk, sugar, egg yolks and vanilla extract.  

I had 2 scoops - it was creamy and it was dreamy.  I'm definitely feeling the effects today and this is why I keep this treat for very special occasions.

Our Barriers to Change

1. We Have Our Comfort Zone

This is where things are good enough that we don’t want to spend the time or effort to change them. We can live with what we have.

2. We Have a Fear about the Unknown

We may prefer a less than ideal situation we understand than a new situation that we don’t know enough about. 

3. We May Not Be Aware of All the Changes Around Us and How They Might Affect Us in the Future

We can hold onto what we have for too long out of ignorance. Whatever we don’t know can hold us back and hurt us.

Prepare yourself to handle any change and turn it into something better for your life.

• Expand your knowledge about yourself, your life, and your world.
• Build new windows so you can see your world in a new way.
• Engage in new experiences that further expand your awareness.
• Keep taking in new information, ideas, and experiences.

All of this will give you perspective to help you see all of your options, move away from the past, and take new forks in the road with more confidence. It shows us why we can’t stay attached to the past or hold back out of fear of the unknown.

While we can’t know what will happen in the future, we do know that the world we are trying to hold onto is changing faster than we realize. Moving into the unknown may be safer than staying with the past.

When you change yourself, the world starts changing with you.

Don Shapiro is the author of the book in the making, Life Is a Fork in the Road, about how we make choices and use our inner wisdom to guide our life’s journey.  You can read the full article here:  http://www.positivelypositive.com/2013/03/21/change-happens-whether-you-want-it-to-or-not/

I Love You, But it's No Concern of Yours

What do you stand to lose if you can truly love?  Nothing.  Here's why: 

1. If your return on investment is to hope you can love someone and they will love you back, you will always risk being hurt.  
2. You are setting yourself up for dependency.  
3. When you are attached to an outcome, you're screwed.

When you create happiness from within, you can't go wrong.  You shine your light and let the petals of your spirit open for all the world to see.  If you operated this way, you would see that anything that makes you unhappy is an opportunity for you to rid of these patterns and remove the mental block to become happy.  This feeling you experience is otherwise known as the "love hormone".

When you continuously search for happiness outside yourself it never lasts.  Think of the last time you saw that really cute pair of shoes and thought, "I have to have those".  How long did the happiness last?      This feeling you experience here is known as "dopamine".  A quick rise only to crash.  

I challenge you to make a list of the things you love.  Are you doing them?  

Get back to happy and love yourself first!

Relationships - Going Along or Getting Along?

So many of my friends and family members are experiencing breakups at the moment.  I couldn't help but to write about the mystery of being in a relationship with someone.  Some think it will get better with time.  Will it or are you just fooling yourself?  Are you truly happy?  Are you living your truth?  

I've had my share of bad relationships.  I'm not judging.  I've stayed in relationships too long.  I tried to justify the red flags in my own head.  I lacked communication skills when I didn't feel heard or listened to.  I shut down.  There were times I had to have my mother make decisions for me because I literally could not think straight.

I'll never forget being yelled at for the last time as I lost my breakfast in the kitchen sink.  I'll never forget my best friend informing me that she and others found my boyfriend at the time on multiple dating websites.  I'll never forget what settling was like.  I'll never forget what lacking confidence felt like.  In a strange way, I feel grateful to have experienced these situations.  How would I know otherwise?  That said,  I've promised myself I will never succumb to or engage in any of these feelings or behaviors in a relationship again as long as I live.

It has taken many, many years of learning what works for me when it comes to relationships.  I'm still learning.  Relationships teach us so much.  We should be grateful when people come into our lives to teach us what feels good and well, sometimes not so good.  This is how we learn.  I faced my fear and started anew from the above mentioned times.  I retrained my brain with positive thoughts, daily intentions, supportive friends and family.  I let go of things that were not working for me.  I opened up and tried new things.  I had a vision.  I healed my body and my mind.  I acknowledged toxic relationships and rid of them.  I've grown tremendously.  Only then was I able and ready to enter into a relationship comfortably and excited.  I know who I am and where I stand at all times.  I engage in effective communication.  It's the best place I see to be.  I'm living my best life and I couldn't be happier.

Consider for a moment, the fear of starting over.  Can you face your fear and do it anyway?  What would it look like?  How would it feel to heal yourself and rediscover YOU.  Remember when you laughed, when you smiled, when the weight you felt in your chest was pure love for life and not the negative energy and dead weight of trying to make something work that isn't meant to be?  

You see as much as we would like to believe bypassing effective communication will work, it doesn't.  Going along just to get along is no way to live.  Is it?  Be open and honest with yourself and in your relationship and do what's necessary to get on the same page with your partner or take steps to start the next chapter of your life now!  I can tell you as difficult as it may seem now...it's all worth it in the end. I'm living proof.