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5 Hacks to Upgrade Your Paleo Diet

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5 Hacks to Upgrade Your Paleo DIet

There are so many diet plans that you can choose from to follow, but it really comes down to how your body functions best. You know your body and how you function, and how your body feels after eating certain foods.

That’s not to say that you can proclaim “my body feels best on bread and chips” just because your taste buds like it.

This is a real observation about how your body feels after eating meat, or dairy or starches.

It’s time to listen to your body because it’s easier to hear it when it whispers, than when it has to start shouting.

So if you have listened to your body and chosen to follow a Paleo diet, there are a few ways to make it even better.

But first of all, let’s break the Paleo diet down.

A Paleo diet consists of foods that mimic what our pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer ancestors may have hunted, gathered or foraged for in the wild. Such as a variety of meats and vegetables and a small amount of fruits and nuts. No grains or processed sugar.

Hacks to Upgrade Your Diet:

1. Buy Organic!

Organic foods that are not treated with pesticides and heavy metal toxins contain more accessible vitamins and minerals that conventionally grown produce. They may cost a bit more, but they are definitely worth it. To learn more about the value of organic, check out our previous blog on The Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 here.

2. What Meat are You Eating?

Think back a few million years. Were there abundant sources or added growth hormones, antibiotics or vaccines added to the animals’ feed? I doubt it. So steer clear now!! Choose organic, grass-fed beef, buffalo, free-range chicken, wild caught salmon, elk, venison, etc.

3. Focus on Veggies

Choose a variety of leafy and cruciferous veggies to go with every meal! That means kale, lettuce, spinach, Bok Choy, Celery, Brocoli, Cauliflower, and Brussels Sprouts. Also add in low-sugar fruit, like raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries and Granny Smith apples. These fruits will not spike your blood sugar. Raw nuts and seeds and avocados are great sources of healthy fats.

4. What else are you eating?

Food marketing companies are very tricky – they can put Paleo on just about anything and get away with it! I don’t think that cookies, bread and chips were available in the wild a million years ago, but somehow they have found their way to the Paleo aisle at the grocer. They tend to have excessive amounts of sugar, sweeteners, preservatives and varying degrees of unhealthy additives but fly off the shelves because they are “Paleo”.

I also don’t think that our ancestors had a deli they strolled up to and ordered salami, pastrami or any other nitrate-filled preserved deli meat. Eat real food!!

5. Mix it Up

Who says you have to be purely Paleo every day? Agricultural developments and transportation advancements have allowed for nutrient, vitamin and fibre-rich foods to come along. If your body likes legumes as they are significantly lighter to digest than meat, give it legumes! Or if you like freshly squeezed orange juice in the morning, have at it! Listen to your body and hear what it has to say.

Could Your Boy Belly Cause a Heart Attack?

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Could Your Boy Belly Cause a Heart Attack?

Do you carry extra weight around your abdominal area? Research is telling us that people of normal weight who have extra central body fat are at an elevated risk of dying of heart disease.

Central obesity it extra fat around your midsection, and there is an easy way to calculate if you may fall into this category.

1. Measure your waist at your belly button.
2. Measure your hips at the widest part of your buttocks.
3. Divide the first number by the second number.

For men, your waist-to-hip ratio should be no greater than 1.0 and for women it should be no greater than 0.9.

If your numbers are higher than the suggested ratio, there are simple changes that you can implement to reduce your ratio and improve your health.

The first thing that you need to do is to add more fresh fruit and vegetables to your diet. It’s very difficult to make a massive diet and lifestyle change all at once and be able to sustain it long term. So the most important thing you can do is eat more fruit and veggies and these foods will begin to crowd out the bad foods.

I also want you to moderate your meat intake. A serving of meat is the size of a card deck. Which does not mean 8 decks stacked on top of each other!! When was the last time you ate a steak that fit in your hand? I bet it’s been awhile.

Over the years, our portion sizes have grown and grown into rather ridiculous quantities of food. Our bodies don’t need that much food and literally can not digest that much protein in one sitting. This extra protein ends up being stored as fat and can contribute to central obesity, putting you at risk for heart disease.

Avoid fast food, processed food and packaged food.

Eat real food!! Learn to make a few delicious recipes that you enjoy. Check out our blog of recipe ideas here.

And of course, move your body more often. Add some gentle cardio to your routine, go for a power walk at lunch, hit the gym and sweat it out.

The very first sign of heart disease is erectile dysfunction. Your arteries and capillaries are very active and sensitive in that area, and can be the first to indicate that there is hardening of the arteries or plaque building up in your blood vessels.

Obviously not a topic that you want on your radar, but heading to the doctor for a prescription to help in this area is one of the worst things you can do. It puts added stress on your cardiovascular system and masks an important symptom that is telling you that your body is in distress.

This is the time to make healthy diet and lifestyle changes to let your body naturally heal and return to abundant health.

With Sources from:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/research-were-watching-belly-fat-boosts-risk-of-dying-of-heart-disease

5 Tips You Must Know to Destroy Stress Today!

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What are you doing to manage your stress? It seems like every day we are inundated by more and more triggers, and the world just seems to be speeding up.

If you can’t keep up, what if you just stopped? What if you just turned off the pace of the rest of the world and went inside for a bit?

The thing is, most of the daily stresses in our lives will not matter in five years. Maybe not even in 5 days! But they are serious triggers in a moment-by-moment day.

Obviously, there are the major stresses, such as the passing of a loved one, major life decisions, new career opportunities, relationships ending and children arriving into your life, but for the daily stresses, how can we manage that better?

Most of us are on the clock.

The majority of stress is because we have way too many things to complete in a day, than the clock gives us time to do!

It’s always speeding up and the to-do list tends to continue to grow.

Between responsibilities at home, at work, at your children’s school, caring for aging parents, creating healthy meals, working on your relationships and squeezing in a little social time, it is really hard to balance everything that life demands of us.

Here are some tips that will sound crazy, and your stressed-out brain will say “ABSOLUTELY NOT! I HAVE NO MORE TIME IN THE DAY FOR ANYTHING!”

But I promise you, that after just a couple weeks, (and in some cases just a couple of days) your life will feel more put together than you could ever imagine in this moment.

1. Quit Sugar, Quit Caffeine, Quit Smoking, Quit Drinking (Yes, you read that right!)

All of these substances wreak havoc on your adrenals and your stress response system. Your body does not need any other external stresses to deal with, and sugar, caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are all very serious triggers for your body. It sends your body out of equilibrium by introducing external substances that are meant to excite or depress you. Your body must fight to expel these substances and adds an extra burden to your health.

Stop the sugary foods – pasta, breads, rice, muffins, cereal, and focus on consuming a colourful plant based diet. Limit your caffeine intake to one coffee per day, no more soda and no more energy drinks! Even switching to herbal tea would make a huge impact! Get off the cigarettes and curb your evening wine or drinks. It all interferes with your entire system.

2. Begin a Daily Stress Reduction Practice

Even for 5 minutes a day, sit in a relaxed position and let you mind focus on gratitude. Focus on your breath, the easiest thing you can be grateful for. Follow your breath and feel its powerful rhythm. Enjoy the moment between inhalation and exhalation – the pause – as there is power in the stillness. This little bit of time will help to centre you for your day.

3. Move that Body!

Seriously, for even 15 minutes a day. Turn the music up and dance! Or speed walk around the neighbourhood with your family. Be silly, take turns seeing who can walk the fastest! Get your heart rate up and have fun! Try a class at the gym, do a yoga video on YouTube, or try a high intensity interval training session. Just move it more often and your body will reward you by feeling energized and more alive.

4. Master Your Mind

Decide what demands your attention and what can wait. Prioritize your to-do list and understand that you can only do what you can do. Try to stop focusing on staying ahead of the clock. What are you rushing against anyway? We all end up in the same place, so why rush through life so quickly?

5. Get Adjusted!

Your spine needs to be in alignment to let you function at 100%! Get adjusted regularly and know that the interferences that find their way into your spine via stress, injuries, repetition and toxins are being removed by your Doctor of Chiropractic.

I Can’t Believe I’m Sick AGAIN. 5 Things You Need to Do to Stop the Cycle

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Annndddd…. you’re sick again. How many times has it been this winter? Oh? You’ve lost count.

Well, between your children bringing who-knows-what kind of germs home from school, your colleague sneezing down the hall and your mother in law stopping in on her way home from the mall, you’ve caught something again. Or it’s just continually circulated through your home for the last 2 weeks.

Either way, it’s time to boost up your immune system and arm yourself with some seriously powerful natural remedies to help heal your cold / flu / sore throat / as-of-yet unidentified virus.

Here are the basics:

Your body wants to be 100% healthy all the time!! You just need to provide it with the means to do so.

1. What are you eating?

Put down the bagel with cream cheese and reach for some fruit and vegetables. Specifically, oranges, grapefruit, apples, clementines, kiwi, cantaloupe and strawberries. And reach for dark leafy greens, bell peppers and and tomatoes!

For example, 1 medium orange has 70mg of Vitamin C, or 116% of your daily recommended intake. So load up. Every day!! Especially considering that the “daily recommended intake” suggestions for vitamin C tend to be just high enough to keep you from getting scurvy!

According to Dr. Andrew Saul, editor of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, if everyone were to take 500 mg of vitamin C per day — the dose required to reach a healthy level of 80 µmol/L — an estimated 216,000 lives could be spared of heart failure each year.

So, eat more fruits and vegetables high in Vitamin C – and protect your heart while preventing another cold from circling back to you!

2. What are you popping?

Put down the antibiotics. Antibiotics are scientifically unable to help at all with killing viruses.
Put down the Robitussin. Put down the Advil Cold & Sinus.

Antibiotics destroy the very fragile bacterial ecosystem living in your gut, that actually functions as 90% of your immune system. So while you think you’re killing the virus, you are actually damaging your entire system for many years to come. Just one round of antibiotics kills many of your beneficial bacteria living in your intestines and makes you much more susceptible to getting sick more often.

Every time you take a pharmaceutical, you do damage to your body. Your body must first heal from the illness and then it must heal from the pharmaceutical you ingested.

(Yes there is a time and place for life-saving interventions that require pharmaceuticals, but that time and place, for the great majority of the population, is not from a cold or flu).

3. What should you pop instead?

Nature has created many natural anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal agents that we can use with much less side effects, if any at all. Colloidal silver can be sprayed under the tongue a few times a day and literally wipes out nasty germs in record time. Oregano oil can be taken as a capsule to kill bacteria and viruses. And you should also supplement with probiotics that have a count into the high billions to help rebalance the immune system promoting bacteria in your gut.

4. I need a miracle remedy now!

Essential oils are that miracle. Get your hands on some therapeutic grade peppermint oil, and mix a couple of drops with a carrier oil (coconut oil) and massage it into your throat, over your sinuses, your chest and under your nose. You will be breathing clearly in seconds!!

5. Sleep, tea and time

Yep, you’ve heard it before. Stay rested and drink a lot of warm liquids to stay hydrated. It takes time for your body to kick the virus and bounce back, but it will be much quicker if you follow these natural steps.

BONUS – Stay healthy!

What are you doing to stay healthy and prevent future illness? Try these tips:
1 – Eat a whole-foods, plant based diet with a great variety of colourful fruits and vegetables.
2 – Exercise every day. Even a little bit of joyful movement – your body was made to move!
3 – Drink lots of water. Stay hydrated and enjoy some fresh lemon in your water.
4 – Get enough sleep.
5 – Take a high quality probiotic every day.
6 – Get adjusted regularly! Your spine needs to be free of interference so that your body can heal and function at 100%!

With Sources From:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/09/21/vitamin-c-heart-health.aspx