The Red “Green” Smoothie

Alright, here is a delicious red “green” smoothie inspired by the beets in my fridge that were soon going to perish. I had originally purchased them to make a beet-nut dip but time has been tight and I needed to eat (drink) them straight away! I had tried berry beet smoothies before, but I decided to experiment with a different, less orthodox mixture, and it turned out great!

2 beets, peeled
3-4 kale leafs (mine were frozen)
1 banana (frozen again)
1/3 pineapple
scoop of green powder (any will do, but this one was Barlean’s)
1 cup of water
I would add ice if you don’t use frozen ingredients

Blend in a high power blender until smooth and enjoy the beautiful colour this delivers! This really turned out better than I expected. Very rich in beet flavour, so if this is not your thing, you could reduce to 1 beet.

My Super Awesome 7-day Detox Cleanse

I recently carried out a modified juice cleanse and have had much interest in what my exact meal plan was. So it went something like this:

Breakfast

- wheat grass
- giant glass of lemon water + chlorella

Mid-day snack

- Udo’s oil with pineapple chaser
- Green drink (greens or chlorella + water)

Lunch

- Small smoothie (fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds)

Mid-afternoon snack

- Udo’s oil + pineapple chaser
- Green drink

Dinner

- Hot vegetable broth or fresh miso soup. I added some kelp powder, dulse and nori for extra minerals, yum!

I’ll update notes on the reasoning behind these choices and specific smoothie recipes soon! As well as my resulting experience…Needless to say I am blogging again and making new recipes for the first time in a year LOL

Plant-Based Chocolate Banana Pancakes

I LOVE eating healthy versions of old favourites! I actually find that healthier variations are sooo much more delicious and satisfying! And so, here is my recipe for banana chocolates pancakes yum! This recipe was adapted from the VEGA breakfast challenge, with ingredients I actually had in my kitchen.

2 bananas
2 fresh dates
1 cup chocolate hemp milk*
1 cup water
1 cup buckwheat flour**
1/2 cup ground flaxseed
1/4 cup hemp protein
2 tbsp roasted carob powder
sea salt to taste

Process all ingredients together in a food processor and fry in coconut oil over medium heat, as you would regular pancakes!

This makes a lot of pancakes! Good for 2-4 people

*I made the chocolate hemp milk just to make these pancakes, with the following:

1 cup hemp seeds
5 cups water
3 tbsp raw cacao powder
agave nectar to taste

Blended in a high power blender. So delish, I finished the batch by the end of the day! heheh

Notes:
**I also ground the buckwheat flour for this recipe. I found that if you take the buckwheat groats and freeze them, you can easily grind them into flour in a coffee grinder (ideally) or a food processor. Pretty sure I’m never buying the flour again!

Tonic Herb source

I just checked out http://www.hyperionherbs.com — it’s a pretty sweet site that has the highest quality tonic herbs at amazing prices. You should totally check it out. They have some of the most revered herbs of all time like Reishi Mushroom, Cordyceps, Ho Shou Wu, Goji, Eleuthero, Chaga, and Mucuna.

Drug-free relief for those flare-ups (celiac, crohns, colitis, IBS)

As a potential celiac/gluten-intolerant (undiagnosed out of the requirement to eat gluten for 2-3 weeks, an event that would certainly render me ill for probably 6 months), I have sought different forms of relief for contamination-induced flare ups. In the beginning pepto bismol was my best friend…especially when I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I carried it around with me in liquid and pill form and took a dose every 30 minutes to get through the pain. Flare-ups are just the worst thing to live with, when they can come at any time. One minute you’re fine, the next you’re hunched over in the fetal position. It is extremely inconvenient! So I do my best to avoid the later-discovered culprit: gluten (and now casein, which has a similar protein structure, found in milk products). However, the flare-ups sneak in and after taking so much medication all the time I finally made a decision that I would NOT take any more unless it was absolutely necessary. So I would hunch over in the fetal position (wherever I happen to be) for 2-3 hrs and cry, waiting for it to pass. My life would go back to normal for a few weeks or months, and I would forget about how awful the pain was. It would hit again…back to the fetal position…NO drugs.

Well, I’m happy to say, those days are over for me and I’m here to share what I have been using for relief. As someone who began my healing by searching the internet and reading peoples stories, I am here to pass along my own to help others as they helped me.

The first form of drug-free relief from my flare-ups came with the combination I learned from someone I met at the Calgary Body, Spirit and Soul expo. They were selling these “barefoot revolution” grounding sheets. I actually had a flare-up at the show, so they connected me to this grounding pad, which allowed a natural flow of energy (electrons) to connect me to the healing earth. I had never in a million years would have considered that the daily disconnect from the earth would contribute to (or worsen) inflammation. But it totally makes sense now…especially since it worked!!! Within 15 minutes (not 2-3 hrs of agony) the pain was finally gone. Now I bought a sheet for my bed, which connects to the ground through an electrical outlet, and whenever I had a flare-up I would wrap the sheet around me and wait 15 minutes. Oh, and I would also have a cup of chamomile tea and some aloe vera juice to soothe the stomach. (I had no idea chamomile tea could actually help too…apparently that’s what it’s known for…)

[Note: I bought this sheet at a trade show, so I'm really sure where to get it otherwise...trying googling "Barefoot revolution"]

The second form of relief came within 30 seconds, from a device more portable than this giant sheet (which I still keep on my bed to keep me grounded at night). I was having one of the WORST flare-ups of my life, I was wrapped up in the sheet, sipping my chamomile tea and just dying in agony. Nothing was working. It’s funny, in-between the flare-ups I really forget how bad it is, then during them all I can think about is how I’m ALWAYS in pain and how I just can’t live like this anymore. I was soooooo sick and tired of being stuck in the damn fetal position!! So I got up and I ripped off the sheet and I declared out loud “that’s it, NO MORE PAIN!!” I decided it was going to be mind over matter, that I could beat this, that I wasn’t going to allow my intestines to be inflamed anymore, or ever again.

I wish I could say all that was needed was a powerful mantra like that. It wasn’t, but what happened in that moment (right before I collapsed again in real pain) was that my mind opened to a solution I’ve had available to me all this time and just did not think of it!!! I use Lifewave “Icewave” patches on my back and neck for muscle pain as part of my own therapy for subluxations and back pain. I had already posted a link to these in the recommended products section when I first started this blog. My dad had introduced them to me years ago when they just had the energy patch, and I’ve been using them ever since. It did not occur to me until that moment that I could try out the Icewave patches on my stomach to relieve the pain of intestinal inflammation.

Well, this one worked, and AMAZINGLY-so. I am soooooo blown away. I mean I knew they worked for my back pain, but these flare-ups are a severe inflammation I thought would burden me forever. And with the personal oath to never use drugs to treat the symptoms, I thought it was always going to be the routine 2-3 hrs in the fetal position scene. Well I’m so happy to say that I now have a solution that I can use anytime and anywhere. The patches go with me in my purse. When a flare-up starts I can put one patch in the center of the pain, and one patch on my sternum, wait 30 seconds and feel relief. I went from a 10 to a 2 in 30 seconds and down to 0 in a few minutes. I didn’t even stick the patch on my skin!!

Okay, so how do they work? Well, first of all nothing enters the body, I know that. The technology at the absolute scientific level is kept secret, to avoid mimicry, but as a chemist (with quantum chemistry being my favourite subject), I have come up with some theories. I’m not going into that detail here. I can say on a basic level, that these patches provide a subtle vibrational energy which signals the body to reduce inflammation. Those hard-core molecular biologists would probably have a problem with this, but those open to the concept of energy medicine do appreciate this technology. Me, I’m open to ANYTHING THAT HEALS MY PAIN!! I’ve said many times on this site, that my evidence is reality, scientific explanations come AFTER the observation of reality. And in reality, my flare-ups are relieved seconds after applying the Lifewave patches.

If you are suffering from flare-ups as I was, and want immediate relief without the use of drugs, you can try the IceWave patches by ordering here:

http://www.lifewave.com/icewave.asp

I am proud to be a distributor of this technology, so that I can help others as they have helped me

Teaching children about food

Watching this compelling ‘Ted Talk’ featuring Jamie Oliver, I am experiencing some strong feelings. For one I am sooo unbelievably grateful that I learned about food as a child. Firstly, my dad taught me how to read labels. Anything that was considered bad, whether it had enough evidence or not, was banned. Hydrogenated oil was one of the biggest. And he knew not to eat this processed oil decades before there was substantial proof. High fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, MSG (and ALL the different names it hides under), taste enhancers, colourants, preservatives. These were just simply items that were banned. And I never wanted to rebel. I somehow understood the difference between real and artificial food. Eventually it just came down to one simple rule: don’t eat processed foods. If a food item HAS an ingredient list, more often than not, it is CRAP. I became a ‘perimeter’ shopper. Secondly, I grew up eating meals that were prepared every night from scratch by my step-dad the amazing chef! I watched and learned that amazing food could be prepared quickly and easily using whole ingredients. Sometimes I would look in the fridge and think we had no food, until less than an hour later we would have an incredible feast on the dinner table. I understood the concept of preparing food – it was really all I knew. Thirdly, I wasn’t given any lunch money from my wonderfully cheap mom (love you!) so eating at the cafeteria would only happen when I could mooch enough quarters to buy a chicken burger once in a blue moon. So I learned to prepare my own lunches and we didn’t have any processed foods in the house to throw into a bag. I actually had to MAKE a sandwich. I look back on all of this and I am so happy I was programmed this way. (More to this story came when I couldn’t eat gluten anymore – forcing me to really raise my standards of eating).

The flipside to my feelings of gratitude are confusion. It’s hard when you know something inside and out, and you live it your whole life, to understand anything different. I sometimes walk down the grocery store processed food aisles and wonder in awe: ‘Is this crap really being purchased? Is all this crap going to end up in the bodies of my friends, family and neighbours?’ And I realize in parallel to myself, it’s all that is known.  I wasn’t born understanding food in this age – and I certainly have not mastered the standard I will one day reach – but what I learned to do is think about what is going into my body. I have also found that there is much to learn – but it’s the most amazing thing to learn about. The right foods, at the right time, and in the right amounts directly relate to everything I want: happiness, energy and love. I hope that we can all learn about food – and from the right sources of information. Not from the industry selling the food and not from the government who is leveraged by the industry and not from the faulty “health checks” that are purchased from the industry. I hope we can learn from the people who care, who set an example in themselves, and who are promoting messages that are common sense. When someone tells you to eat whole, water-based, living foods from the earth, they are not likely misleading – this used to be our only option! When industry tells you to eat processed crap because this version is the low-fat processed crap version with only 100 calories of processed crap, you are probably being mislead. Everything that goes into your body becomes a part of who you are, not only nutritionally, but energetically. The vibrational energy of a living whole food can be measured. The food you put into your body carries the story of where it’s been, what’s been done to it, and how it was cared for. What kind of story do you want to build your life on?

My dairy-free chocolate fix!

MMMMMmmmmm….sometimes I just really need chocolate, forget that, all the time I need chocolate! So I decided I would mix some things together in the kitchen and come up with my own dairy-free chocolate that I can make in minutes using my kitchen staples. (That is, until I go to a raw chocolate class and learn how to do it better). Now I’m aware that my kitchen staples may not be staples in everyone’s home. But I always have the four following items and this is why:

1) Coconut oil: This is the oil I cook with and the only oil that I heat. This oil can be heated safely without causing oxidative damage – mainly because it’s fully saturated. But don’t let that scare you – that fear was a thing of the 80′s when everything went “low-fat”. We’re getting over that ridicules phase aren’t we? This is a good fat and I promise you I can eat as much good fat as I want!

2) Agave nectar: I use agave nectar (maple syrup too) as a natural, unrefined sweetener in many recipes so this is on hand at all times. I recently started buying it raw from a local raw food store – it’s pretty much clear and minimally processed. However, there is some controversy about the high fructose content so I may have to reevaluate this staple. If you’re not vegan, try honey! And I wonder what maple syrup would taste like in chocolate…

3) Himalayan Mountain Salts: Having over 84 minerals, this is my new salt of choice. It is pink, delicious and essential. I use it in cooking and I also add it to water (a pinch!) the boost the mineral content.

4) Cocoa powder: Well a chocolate lover would not have a kitchen lacking cocoa powder. However, this will soon be upgraded to Cacao, the raw form. I can’t wait to learn how to make raw chocolate – it will be soooo tasty and soooo amazing good for me – with high levels of antioxidants and raw- powered goodness. For now, these ingredient will do the trick.

The amounts for a few bites of a yummy treat: (What did you think this was a chocolate binge?!)

1 tbsp coconut oil
1.5 tbsp agave nectar
3-4 tbsp cocoa powder
pinch of Himalayan Mountain Salts

The plan of action:

Heat the coconut oil over a very, very low flame in a glass dish for less than a minute until it’s a pure liquid. Add the salt, agave nectar and then stir in the cocoa powder a little at a time until the chocolate has reached it’s desired consistency…and cocoa level (I like mine 60% or more).

Now, this isn’t the perfect chocolate, this is an emergency fix. But I’ve found it to be useful straight out of the bowl with a spoon (classic Chanelle style), or refrigerated until hard for a small bar, or spread on-top of almond coconut cookies (1 batch will coat about 8 cookies).

Hmmm….I think I’ll go toss some together right now!

Eating for an amazing life!

How do I stay healthy and alkaline? It’s super easy! As long as I eat 70-80% (by volume) fresh raw veggies, fruit and water-based live foods everyday I will:

1. Get all the nutrients I need without having to do any fanatical planning.

2. Ensure that my body has a large reserve of minerals in order to buffer (balance) acid exposure from “dead” food, proteins, exercise, and stress.

3. Be safe from degenerative disease: obesity, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimers, and diabetes.

Without becoming obsessive about it, I simply ensure that at every meal I have a HUGE salad and fresh raw green veggies. I always ate vegetables, but now I make the effort to ensure I have a ton more than anything else I eat! I also eat them first before my “side dish” to ensure that they all get eaten.

Here are some examples of what I eat everyday:
(ps – it’s all organic)

Breakfast

1-2 large glasses of filtered (by Santevia) water – mineralized with lemon, Himalayan salts and magnetized with a stir-wand for maximum absorption – immediately upon awakening!

1 large glass of Greens+ drink (this is my favourite, but there are many green drinks out there)

1 bowl of gluten-free cereal (hot or cold) with added hemp seeds, and ground pumpkin seeds (I just keep this stuff ready in the fridge, it takes 2 secs to throw on top of cereal) topped with hemp, soy or almond milk.

Lunch

1 giant salad: ready mixed and washed spring mix or spinach (just throw it in a container!) topped with any combination of dried cranberries, fresh fruit, sliced almonds, and walnuts. If I don’t have time for the yummy fix-ins it’s not an excuse to skimp on the salad – it will go into container bare. For a simple alkaline dressing I throw olive oil and lemon juice together and if I have time I’ll add garlic, salt, and pepper.

1 side dish, any of the following examples: (gluten-free) sandwich containing nut pate and romaine lettuce, celery and hummus, corn chips and beatnut pate, vegetarian chili, leftovers from dinner.

Dinner

1 giant salad! Again – no food is eaten without balancing vegetables: 70-80% by volume. If I don’t feel like a salad I’ll eat chopped celery, carrots, and broccoli.

Side dish: sweet potato quinoa burgers, vegan Shepherds pie, vegetarian chili, rice pasta with vegetables and tomato sauce, roasted potatoes, rice wraps containing walnut meat, guacamole, and salsa.

Water & Oxygen

When you are feeling hungry, you are very probably hungry for one of these two things! Treat yourself with water and oxygen before reaching for a high-sugar snack.

I continuously drink water throughout the day, but NOT during my meals. Only up to 30 minutes before, or 30 minutes after. Drinking water with food interferes with digestion in a major way! (Luckily, my body has known this my whole life and now I can explain to my mom why I could never order drinks with dinner, haha!)

I also continuously breathe deeply with my diaphragm throughout the day – doing 10 power breaths 3x/day to increase my lung capacity. See my post on oxygen for more information. Not surprisingly this post is the least popular! Breathing is the FIRST thing that we need and the LAST thing on people’s minds. What more can I say?

Snacks

I always make sure to have snacks handy – for example cut up vegetables or salad ready in the fridge, corn chips and veggie-nut pate, hummus, etc. This way I always have healthy and convenient snacks ready!

TIPS:

- Chop up celery and carrots and keep them in a bowl filled with water – they will stay crisp for days!!

- Buy a coffee grinder ($10) and keep ground seeds (such as Iron-packed pumpkin seeds) ready in the fridge to add to cereal, veggie-nut pates, and power protein drinks.

- Buy a salad spinner ($10) and keep romaine lettuce shredded (and soaked in water if you wish) in the fridge. When you’re ready to eat it, dump the water and spin it down for a fresh salad in 2 seconds! [If you eat organic salad, you can save the water for your plants/animals.]

- Buy a rotating vegetable grater ($40) and use it to very quickly grate vegetables in your kitchen to add to recipes such as quinoa burgers, sushi, vietnamese rice rolls, pates, casseroles, even in baking: carrot cakes, zucchini brownies, etc. (Thanks dad for my veggie grater – it makes eating veggies extremely easy…and fun!)

- Buy a food processor or VITA-MIX (preferred) so that you can blend ingredients to make yummy dips, veggie-nut pates, energy bars, and in the case of the vita-mix: smoothies, fruit/vegetable juices, protein drinks, herbal elixers, and an endless list of ideas – including vegan cakes and pies!! (Thanks again dad for introducing me to the world of VITA-MIX!)

A note on starvation

You may be reading this thinking I must be really hungry eating this way. Well I’m not. The truth is I was hungry for the first 2 days switching over while my body was getting used to not eating “filling”, but dead foods. But what ended up happening with this change is that my body started using (assimilating) the new foods I was eating so they began to fill me up in a different way. Before, I was clogged with food that was not digesting optimally – and this is the state of many people – so it didn’t matter how much food I ate before, it wasn’t being used, and was devoid of real nutrients. And trust me, I thought I ate healthy before – but nothing was raw – I just ate what I thought had X, Y, or Z nutrient in it. I didn’t realize that eating mostly dead and cooked foods did not result in optimal assimilation and was adding a major acid toll to my body. In the eyes of my peers it may appear that I’m eating less, but I know that I am actually eating much more – because the food is actually digesting and assimilating now, and it’s full of nutrients, living waters, and living enzymes. And yes I still eat warm, yummy, cooked food, on the side.

A note on limitations

You may have also noticed that I have not included the following foods in my eating: meat, diary, sugar and processed foods. But I don’t view my eating habits as limited – I view it as providing myself with the most AMAZING food on this planet, and I have found ways of doing so in the most DELICIOUS manner (keep coming back for recipes).

So long as I have a large alkaline-store in my body I can have a “treat” once in a while and eat these ‘other’ foods if I’m so inclined.

For me, that’s usually chocolate or Reese’s peanut butter cups. If I EVER eat meat it would only be from certified humanely raised and organic sources, but that’s the topic for another post. The main thing is – you can train your body to crave WHATEVER it eats. I actually crave salad and vegetables now and hardly think about sugars and processed foods. I just don’t even look at them, think about them or miss them! This is not deprivation at all, but a complete change in my bodies biochemistry such that it only wants healthy foods in the first place.

Things I always have in my kitchen

- fresh organic vegetables/fruit: salads, spinach, leeks, kale, fennel, celery, carrots, broccoli, tomatoes, lemons, limes, avacados, potatoes, bell peppers, onions, garlic, ginger, bananas, avocado, berries

- herbs: cumin, chili powder, cayenne pepper, paprika, ground coriander, fennel seed, and all other standard spices

- nuts/seeds: walnuts, sliced almonds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, cashews

- non-refined-sugar sweeteners: maple syrup, honey, agave nectar

- milks: I rotate soy, hemp, and almond milk

- oils: olive oil (for dressings), coconut oil (for cooking and baking), Udo’s oil (or similar, for omegas and DHA, daily)

- for gluten-free baking: almond meal, coconut flour, quinoa flour, amaranth flour, brown rice flour, tapioca flour, potato starch, potato flour, xanthan gum, guar gum, arrowroot powder, egg-replacer

- cereals/grains: gluten-free oatmeal, teff, millet, quinoa, flax-corn-amaranth flakes (Nature’s path)

Look how much YUMMY food I still eat!!!

Other health benefits

- I have the most unbelievable energy of my entire life with no burn-out (I have actually not had a single coffee or energy drink since this change)

- Stress and the effects of stress are reduced

- I am NOT worried about aging and will never buy toxic anti-aging products

- I go to the bathroom 3x/day (so I don’t have a toxic ‘load’ sitting in me for days)

- I have NO PMS, mood swings, energy crashes, or irritability

Please leave a comment if you have any specific questions and I would be happy to share more!

Chocolate Coconut Cookies (yes vegan, gluten-free)

Okay okay, so these have sugar in them. What can you do? At least they are made with coconut flour and almond flour so the glycemic effects are minimized here. Coconut flour is super high in soluble fibre and almond flour is full of protein – both will not spike your blood sugar like regular flours (starches) do. So, I’ve allowed myself a bit of sugar. Let’s have a treat!

This recipe makes a small batch of 8-10 cookies, so scale it up as needed!

Also – all my ingredients are always organic – they taste sooooo much better, I eat less because they actually have nutrients in them, and they aren’t doused in chemicals. All of these ingredients should be available at the local organic or whole foods specialty store. The flours can also be ordered in bulk online for a ton cheaper, if you’re going to use them often. I definitely do!

1/3 cup almond meal
1/3 cup coconut flour
2 1/2 tbsp cocoa powder
<1 tsp baking powder (certified gluten-free)
1/3 cup cane sugar
1/4 tsp salt (Himalayan mountain salts are the yummiest!)
1 tsp arrowroot powder
1/4 cup soy or almond milk
1 1/2 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp coconut oil

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl and wet in another. Add wet to dry and mix thoroughly. Roll into balls and flatten onto a greased (with coconut oil!!) cookie sheet. Bake at 375F for 15-20 minutes depending on your desired chewiness.

As a gluten-free baker I tend to undercook everything so it remains chewy, if that’s not your style you may want to bake these up to 25 minutes. I also only let the cookies sit for a few minutes out of the oven before I pack them (whatever’s left after eating them!) in a sealed container. If I keep these in the fridge then they stay chewy a long time as well.

Last note: these cookies are so heavy and satisfying, I can actually have a few and then stop (that is not normal)! They don’t tend to start an addictive eating cycle, even with the sugar in them. So I have quite a few left over to pack in the fridge for another day. Sweet!

Power Oatmeal

I just made this for breakfast and it’s delish!!!

Oatmeal + water (I used gluten-free organic oatmeal from planet organic)
2 tbsp raw pumpkin seeds (a great source of iron)
2 tbsp flax seeds (source of omega 3′s to balance out that ratio!)
1 tbsp agave nectar (available at health food stores – sugar free naturally delicious sweetener!)
handful of raisins
dash of soy milk (or non-cow milk of your choosing)

Cook oatmeal in the volume of your choosing (I probably made about 2 cups). Grind up pumpkin seeds and flax seeds in a coffee grinder (or whatever will grind them – sometimes I just throw in whole, but better to grind). Throw them in about 1 minute before your oatmeal is done cooking, add agave nectar, raisins, and milk and get ready for a power breakfast!