For 12 years I have eaten an 80% wheat free diet but decided to really commit to being 100% wheat free about 3 months ago.  I chose to do this because I want to be as healthy as I can be without living life in the “no fun zone” and this I knew would probably be a very easy shift for me. Wheat creates inflammation in the body and an inflamed body wreaks havoc on the immune system, in ways that people may not realize – think Rheumatoid Arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis and Asthma to name a few. I also decided that I was drinking too much wine, so I have reduced that by a lot.  I subscribe to the theory that most things are okay in moderation so I like wine and haven’t completely given it up but I have switched to soda water which I have always liked.  I am still unclear on whether soda water leaches calcium from the bones as I have seen mixed information on that but I figure it is better than wine and again, if my main drink is plain water then I am doing okay.

So… the slide.  After doing really well and finding my new changes quite easy, I started to back slide.  It started with a wine tasting on a Thursday, then friends coming over for wine and cheese on Friday.  Then on Sunday, my boyfriend brought home some cookies from the French bakery (I also skipped my work out this day and went golfing, which by the way, unless you out of shape and are humping your clubs all over the course on your back, is NOT a work out), then I was too tired after being in the hot sun on the course to want to make dinner so he served wine and cheese.  The next morning I woke up and decided that I had a craving for a bagel and cream cheese.  I could see the slide happening.  I did a quick check in to remind myself of my commitment to my health.  Instead of giving in to the craving, I went to a kettle ball fitness class, had a protein shake after and the rest of the day went smoothly and I was back on track.  How did I not let myself go down that route that so often happens when people make a healthy change? I checked in to my commitment. I checked in to what I really want for my health.  A vision statement can be a very powerful tool.  You can do this for any area of your life.

How to do this: Think about what you want.  Imagine how you are going to feel once you reach your goal.  How do you feel now? What do you want to be different?  Where do you want to be? Create a statement around that in the positive and stated in the present. Create a vibration in your body as you say your statement, feel the excitement, visualize yourself there in that moment, what are you seeing, smelling, hearing and touching. For e.g.  I am visualizing myself at a summer party wearing a sleeveless silk dress, I am with friends, we are laughing, the air is warm and breezy.  My statement is: “I feel so amazing and so happy that every day I wake with energy and can handle the activities of the day with ease.  My muscles are toned, I look fab and I feel strong!”  If this were your vision statement you would say this with an energy that made you believe it has happened. A good idea is to have this statement posted at the ready around your home and office so you see it regularly. Knowing your WHY for getting healthy is a key ingredient in keeping yourself healthy. If you would like to explore this more, please feel free to be in touch.

This article is hopefully going to clear up some misinformation about various protein shakes out there.  These days it is becoming increasingly important to know what we are putting into our bodies.  Our environment is becoming more toxic and thus so is our food. Food manufacturers are putting things into our foods that really should not be there even if the FDA and the CFIA approve them.  These manufacturers are allowed to indulge in tricky advertising practices that leave the average person who doesn’t want to make a career out of nutrition wondering if they are making the best choices.  Those who are interested in being healthy want it simple.  They want a protein shake that is going to give their body the fuel it needs to operate best. I am going to compare the Body by Vi shakes to the Isagenix Isalean shake but you could sub any of the popular shake brands in for Body by Vi, including Boost, Ensure, Slim Fast and Carnation and I will tell you what to look for.

Here are some important and significant differences between these two shakes:

• Body by Vi uses Sucralose (an artificial sweetener) and artificial flavorings. The Isalean shake has none of this and is sweetened with fructose (different from high fructose corn syrup) from organic beets and pears.
• Body by Vi is not a complete meal replacement, it is more like a snack. The IsaLean Shake is a low-glycemic, complete meal replacement that contains balanced nutrients including fats, carbohydrates and proteins.
• The first ingredient in the Vi-shape Shake label is soy protein, which is inferior to whey protein. Whey protein is the first ingredient in the IsaLean Shake and it boosts the immune system by up to 300%.
• The organic difference. The Isalean shakes contain organic whey protein from New Zealand. The Body by Vi shake is soy based which is an allergen for many people.
• The Isalean shakes contain many more vitamins and minerals than the Body by Vi by a long shot.  A quick snapshot shows the following:

A few weeks ago I posted a delicious curry pasta recipe  based on what I had available to me. Tonight I am remaking this pasta but in a bit of a different method as I have more ingredients.  I think it will be delicious, so before I even make it, I am posting it here.  If you make it, let me know your thoughts and your adjustments.

Rice pasta
Curry
Onion
Garlic
Olive oil
Nutritional Yeast
Miso
Red Pepper
Cauliflower
Organic low sodium vegetable boullion
Toasted pumpkin seeds, raw would be healthier but I feel like toasting them.
Sea salt

Sautee chopped onion in water with vegetable boullion.  Add 9 cloves of garlic.  Once cooked, add 1-2 TBSP organic miso paste in some water and whisk, add, 1/2 cup nutritional yeast  & 1 TBSP curry and salt to taste , mix with onions.  Add more water if necessary. Separately, steam cauliflower and chopped red pepper until tender and still slightly crisp.  Add veggies to the onions and mix.  Add more water if necessary. Add cooked pasta, mix and coat pasta with sauce.
Top with fresh ground pepper and pumpkin seeds.  If necessary add some olive oil to the dish – this is optional.

I am going to serve this with a spinach salad.

Leave a comment if you made this and let me know what you thought or how you changed it for the better.

I travel a lot… this means that I am emptying my fridge and cupboards all the time. This last trip had me in limbo for about two weeks enroute from Canada to the US, so I took some needed items with me to my temporary location. I didn’t want to be without my favorite items of organic miso and nutritional yeast which is easy to find in most Vancouver stores but not so easy to find in Scottsdale stores, so I packed them as well as a few other items.  I arrived on Dec 23rd late in the evening and was hungry.  The ingredients I had were few and far between:

Butter, miso, curry, garlic, nutritional yeast, almonds, cashews, white wine & rice pasta. I love a challenge and figured I could make something tasty with what I had. Here is what I threw together and it was delicious!  This isn’t the healthiest or lowest fat meal but you could sub the butter for veggie broth and omit the wine.

7-9 cloves of garlic
1TBSP curry powder
2 TBSP butter
3-4 TBSP nutritional yeast
1/2-1 TBSP miso
Splash of wine
2 TSBP crushed cashews

Sautee garlic in butter, whisk in the miso, add curry and some water to make it still thick but not too thick, a splash of white wine.  Blend in nutritional yeast.  Add cooked pasta and mix.  Top with crushed cashews.  This was amazingly good.  If I had planned this meal I would have added onions and fresh steamed veggies like broccoli.

Normally I would have a salad and a protein with something like this and as as such we were still hungry.  I looked around at the remaining ingredients and figured that Spiced Nuts were next on the menu.

1- 1 1/2 cup of mixed nuts, I used cashews and almonds but you could also add pecans or filberts.
In pan heat the nuts until toasted about 4 mins.
In a saucepan mix 1-2 TBSP butter, add something sweet, I had maple syrup on hand but you could use brown sugar and water or agave syrup.  I used about 2 TBSP of syrup.
1 TBSP curry powder
2 TBSP nutritional yeast
salt as needed

Add nuts to the liquid and mix.  Put on a plate to cool and enjoy.

Nuts like this don’t have to be just a holiday treat.  Keep in mind though that nuts have more nutrition when they are eaten raw, rather than cooked.

Ringing in 2011 with new friends in AZ

Usually every year around this time I do major goal setting and plan my year.  This year, I am not chomping at the bit to do the goal setting, which I think is probably a good thing for me.  I have a few goals that I am still working on so I don’t want to put anything more on my plate and become unfocused. What I do want to look at are the goals and accomplishments that I achieved over the past year.  Often we forget to give ourselves accolades for the things we accomplished.   It is important to celebrate our successes, this is one of the reasons why having an accountability partner or support group can be so helpful.  Many of these goals are the ones I had written down last year and some were just fun things that happened a long the way.

I can’t believe that the year is already over and I am looking back.  Last year I spent New Year’s Eve with new friends in Arizona at the resort where in 2010 I bought my first vacation home (one of my goals in 2010).  We rang the new year in at 10 pm which I thought was really strange. Yeah, it was midnight in New York but it wasn’t for us, maybe it was some Arizona thing, it seems that everyone there is from somewhere else.

Hiking in Arizona with Roxanne

For most of the winter I was in Arizona and one of my best friends spent Christmas and my birthday with me.  I thought I would have more visitors but my next ones didn’t come until June.

My dear friend Marion and her boyfriend Julien came from France to visit.  They loved the US and embraced everything about it.  It was so cool to see it from the eyes of someone in their early 20′s from France.  They rented a fun muscle car and did a road trip from Las Vegas to California.

Wine party at my place, me & Marion.

I saw my first rattle snake and king snake. Unbeknownst to me the 6 foot king snake had a nest in the large rosemary bush outside the house.  The night before we discovered this snake and his nest, I had asked my sweetie to get me some rosemary for dinner.  He went out in the dark and started trimming rosemary.  As the Brits say, I was gobsmacked the next day when I discovered the snake that was living there.  Thank goodness they are not poisonous.  In early January, I did a quick two week stint at a gorgeous resort on the Mayan Riviera where I did yoga every day and relaxed and met some really fun people from Edmonton – they know how to party! This past year was the year that I learned to golf and to play tennis – I actually took lessons and was gifted with more for my birthday this past week!

Firing up the balloon

I went on my first hot air balloon ride over the desert, this was a birthday gift for my sweetie, one I thought he would enjoy.  WRONG! All I kept hearing was “I was a mile in the air in a wicker basket with a flame over my head”.  Once on the ground at 9 am, the champagne was popped and we had a nice breakfast in the dessert, so he was fine.  It makes for a good story anyway and he seems to enjoy telling it. This year I played it safe and got him a golf related gift.

Champagne breakfast in the desert.

Speaking of telling stories, one of the best trips I did was to Greece two years ago to go sailing.  I had no idea how to sail, I am afraid of the water, as in, I won’t swim in an ocean or a lake and it was just two of us on a 38 foot sailboat.  On our trip the waves got to 10 feet high with winds of 40 knots, the boat was heeled over so much that the sail was in the water by 2 feet and we broke a sail.

Sailing the Greek Islands

My boyfriend the experienced sailor said he had never been in a storm like that – it is the Meltemi that blows only every 5 years in June.  So, as scary as it was, it was also exhilarating and in early fall, I booked another sailing trip for May.  Hopefully the weather will co-operate and I will have many more fun adventures and stories to tell.

This past August I went to San Diego with a group of girlfriends.  We mixed business and pleasure and plan to do it again this week but this time to Phoenix.

Once I was back in Vancouver, I rollerbladed the seawall almost every day from June to October.  In July I took a 3 week road trip to the Okanagan and the Kootenays and spent time visiting with my parents.  In mid October I did a 10 day real estate research trip to Hawaii, 5 days in Honolulu and 5 days in Maui. Even though I have been to Hawaii many times I really fell in love with it this last time.  I also expanded my business into Hawaii and Australia and reached the ranks of the top 100 in Isagenix, the company for whom I am distributor, which totally surprised me.

At the end of October, I closed on a real estate purchase of a vacation home in Whistler.  This is exciting because it means new adventures and skiing – a return to my youth.  I also saw my first black bear up close, eye to eye, I am sure this will be NO big deal to me by next year as they seem to be everywhere, even when I think they should be hibernating.  One of my biggest rewards was helping a lot of people have better health.  I saw people reach goals that they didn’t think would ever happen. The success stories are so heart warming and really keep me going.  I was also fortunate enough to pick up the phone one day and call someone who I knew could really benefit from the business end of what I do.  I showed her how to integrate Isagenix into what she is currently doing and within a few months, this mother of two, with a husband still in school was able to generate an extra $1000 a month.  I find it so rewarding to be a part of helping others to fulfill their dreams.

I have a few tricks up my sleeves for 2012 and most of those are already in motion so it is just a matter of time.  Have you had a chance to reflect on your life this past year?  Getting to where you want to go is much easier with a road map to help you.  There are a few other posts here on goal setting that might be of interest. All the best to you in 2012 and remember to take good care of your health.  Without it, all the money in the world means nothing.  My motto for years has been: Your health is your wealth.  Recently when I say this, I think of the late Steve Jobs.  What he wouldn’t have done to have had his health back and to spend many more years with his family.  His money couldn’t help him extend his life.  Blessings to you all!  If you feel inclined to share your wins of 2011 or your goals for 2012, please leave a comment.

My friend Leanne gave me this recipe which I am yet to try. They sound delicious and they are very easy.  I didn’t want to make everyone else wait for them so here it is.  Now is the time of year when you will want to have extra goodies around for those guests who pop in but even after the holidays these are nice bite size treats to bring to a dinner party when you are on dessert duty.  You could serve 3 or 4 in a bowl with fresh fruit and whipped cream.

Step 1: Bake a chocolate cake (add allspice and almond extract if you like before baking) Allow to cool completely.  If you want to make this even easier, buy a pre-made cake from your local grocery store.  You may also make this gluten free. The agave and the liqueur will make it stick together easily.
Step 2: Process cake in a food processor until a fine meal forms.
Step 3: Place cake meal in a large bowl.
Step 4: Pour in enough rum (or Kahlua or whatever liqueur you like) and agave nectar to form a mixture that sticks together when rolled into a ball. Keep rolling balls until all the mixture is used up.
Step 5: Cover and allow to “cure” overnight.
Step 6: Use the best dark chocolate you can find,  such as fair trade 70% organic that can be found in most natural grocery stores and some white chocolate chips – melt separately in bowls immersed in boiling water on the stove. Dip and allow to chill in the fridge until chocolate is hardened. These freeze well too.

I am noticing this a lot recently.  It seems to always be in my face. I see it on Facebook, I hear people mention it in conversations, it is everywhere. To a certain degree and in some situations we can control when it happens and how it happens. I am talking about death.

I usually don’t come across a more talkative person as I do when someone is telling me a story about their poor health or the bad luck they have.  Their story becomes a part of who they are and they tell it with great detail.  This story forms a part of their identity.  Often they are reluctant to change their “story” and give many reasons as to why it can’t change.  For many people, they believe that it can’t change and so they choose to be stuck where they are. Somehow they are waiting for an external force to create the change for them. Sadly most people wait and wait and decline into worse and worse health and then the burden falls not only to their family but to the health care system. My birthday wish this year is that somehow, these people who are sick, see the light.  That maybe they meet someone, read something, watch something or hear something that will spark in them a willingness to make a change.

It always starts with us.  It starts with each individual person making a commitment to do something a little better than it was done the day before.  To take a step that hasn’t been taken before.  If you don’t believe, borrow belief, your belief will come with time. Commit to a 90 day path of change, invite a supportive friend to join you.

Work not only on your body but also on your brain.  What do you believe?  What are you putting into your brain?  Who are you surrounded by?  Are you surrounded by people who are empowering you in your negative beliefs?  There is someone I am acquainted with who always has drama around her. She creates chaos and bad things always seem to happen.  She falls back on excuses, one of the popular excuses is to blame the disease she was diagnosed with years ago. Her close friends and family also lean on that excuse to explain the majority of the ills that befall her, often it is a real stretch to see the connection.  Over the years through poor relations, she has lost many of her friends and has learned to surround herself with people who will not call her on her behaviour. She won’t see that it starts with her.  That it starts with letting go of the excuses and taking action.  Setting those disempowering friends & beliefs free and changing herself.

Real change happens when we break out of our comfort zones.  We all get stuck, we all have bad things happen, we all have challenges, it is how we deal with those challenges that count.

A few good books that I have read over the years:  Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You by Dr. Don Colbert, The Detox Solution by Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey. Please share this with someone for whom it might make a difference.

I recently posted on Facebook that I had made some delicious borscht and I had a few requests for the recipe, so here it goes.  I am always amazed about how good it tastes when really all it is, is a bunch of root vegetables cooked together.

Ideally when cooking use all organic as much as possible. What you will need:

Large cooking onion
4 medium to large beets
4 medium potatoes
Dill – ideally fresh
3 large carrots
3 celery stalks
Half a head of cabbage
Soup stock – I use veggie, you could use chicken broth.
1-2 TBSP of White vinegar or lemon juice
5-7 cloves of garlic
Salt & pepper to taste

Chop all veggies into bite size pieces.  For beets, steam or bake first then dunk into cold water to remove the skins easily. I steam mine so they are halfway cooked, then I chop and add to the soup to cook for the rest of the time.

Put onions and small amount of soup broth just to cover the onions into the pot to cook. Once tender, add dill, 1 TBSP of vinegar, chopped garlic and celery. Cook with a bit more soup broth.  Cook for about 10 minutes.  Add carrots and more broth – cook for 10 minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients and soup broth, bring to just below boiling and let cook until veggies are tender.  Flavor as necessary with salt, pepper, dill and maybe a little more vinegar or lemon juice.  Top with organic sour cream and fresh dill.  Serve with a salad.  I like the Vegan Ceasar Salad- click the link for the recipe.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends.  There is so much to be grateful for every day.  For the next month and a bit, I am participating in a special promotion to keep people healthy and to give back to the community.  For those who want to participate in the Maintain don’t Gain program, I will be donating $25 from each person’s program to Child Help.

When I think of things to be grateful for, they are many.  When I think back to how I was raised, I was lucky.  I didn’t have to worry about food on the table, or whether I could take the dance classes and the extra curricular activities at school.  I had a warm bed, my parents were nice to each other and to us and I never felt unsafe.  Sadly, the reality is that there are many children who do not have this experience.  91 cents from every dollar collected by Child Help goes directly to the children.  If you don’t want to get on a wellness program, you can still donate and help someone who needs it.  To donate directly visit www.childhelp.com   To get on a program, please give me a call at 604 800 8300.

This program is specially designed for you and we will work within your frame work of your goals and needs.  Many people wait for the best time of year, the best day, the all or nothing mentality, to make a change.  Why not get a kick start on the New Year’s resolutions and resolve to stop making NYR’s and to live a healthier life as a daily habit.  I would love to help. www.cleanseenergy.com for more information about why this is important to your health.

Last night after a not so stellar dinner, I wanted to treat myself with something yummy.  The fridge was bare, hence the not so stellar dinner, so I was at a bit of a loss.  Here is what I saw: 2 bananas, pineapple liqueur (that is never used), pecans, coconut & Isadelights. So naturally I made baked bananas.  I have no idea the calorie count but I am guessing it was pretty low.

Just multiply the recipe by the number of people being served.

1 banana cut lengthwise and placed in a buttered pyrex dish
Pour 2 tsp of liqueur poured over each half  - you may also use fruit juice if you have it on hand.
Add one Isadelight or other chocolate if you choose.  I like the Isadelight because it has the same amount of calories and sugar as an 1/8th of an apple and it is all natural.  Click the above link for more information on this tasty treat.
Bake at 400 for 10 minutes
Top with 2 tsp of chopped nuts, 1 tsp of coconut – pecans or almonds or whatever you have and bake for another 5 minutes
Optional toppings –  chocolate sauce, dried fruits.
You may also add nutmeg or cinnamon to this if you like.

Eat this on its own or top it off with plain no fat organic greek yoghurt and drizzle with agave or whatever you choose.  Of course, the more sugar and fat the less healthy it becomes.

Enjoy!