mindset

How To Encourage Children To Eat Vegetables

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Getting your kids to eat their vegetables can be one of the greatest daily struggles for parents.  Building healthy eating habits takes a lot of effort for parents to sometimes battle it out with their children.

Start Small & Tackle One Meal At A Time

First, start off with breakfast and work on getting sugary cereals, pastries, and dairy off the menu.  Substitute cereals for oatmeal and fruit.  Pastries for homemade muffins (recipe below), and dairy milk for almond or coconut milk to use in smoothies.

First and foremost, parents need to set the example to their children on how to eat properly.

Children easily pick up on the habits of their parents and will gravitate towards the eating style presented at home.  Take a minute and think about the kind of example you are setting for your children.  Ask yourself the following;

  • Do you make meal time a priority?  Preparing regular healthy meals as a family?  Or are you picking up takeout on the way home from work because you are exhausted?
  • What is your attitude towards food and your body image?
  • What messages are you consciously or unconsciously sending your children?
Encouraging your children to take care of their health is one of the greatest acts of love a parent can give their child.

Mindset around meals and snacks can easily be shifted to a more positive experience.  Involve the family in weekly meal planning and grocery shopping for the ingredients that will be needed for those meals.

Older children and teens can also take part in meal prep by washing vegetables and helping to prepare dinner.  Giving children a voice around their meal choices will help with encouraging healthier eating habits.  Provide your children with a choice of what vegetables they are going to eat each day.  In addition, add one wild card vegetable to the menu each week that they may not like, but are willing to try.

Click here to read, “Are You Eating Enough Colour?”

Tips & Tricks To Add Vegetables To Every Day Meals

  1.  Throw a handful of spinach or kale into smoothies.  Yes, the smoothie will be green, but the flavour and texture of the spinach is masked by all the fruit.

For a a fantastic green pineapple smoothie, click here to read, “Happy St. Patrick’s Day Recipes”.

cauliflower rice

2. Use the food processor to turn cauliflower into the texture of rice.  Sauté the cauliflower “rice” in a tablespoon of olive oil and season to taste.

zucchini noodles

3. Use a spiral slicing tool to turn zucchini into noodles.  It will resemble pasta and can be topped with your favourite sauce and veggies.

Grilled spaghetti squash

4. Use spaghetti squash instead of pasta to make traditional spaghetti with meatballs (remember to use grass fed beef for the meatballs).

Click here for “The Ultimate Guide For How to Cook Spaghetti Squash”.

fruit salad ideas

5. Rather than ice cream for dessert, serve a plate of fresh fruit.

Almond-Berry Muffin Recipe

As promised, below is a recipe for healthy muffins that freeze well and are easy to serve as part of a healthy breakfast.

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups raw almonds, ground
  • 2 free-range eggs
  • 1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
  • 1/4 cup pure maple syrup
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon sea salt (optional)
  • 1 cup fresh or frozen berries (raspberries, blueberries)
  • 1/4 cup chocolate chips
  • 12 muffin liners

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350F.
  2. Grind raw almonds until fine.
  3. Mix eggs, coconut oil maple syrup, vanilla and apple cider vinegar in a bowl. Add ground almonds and baking soda. Mix thoroughly.
  4. Fold in berries and sprinkle with chocolate chips.
  5. Evenly distribute batter between 12 muffin cups.
  6. Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes.
  7. ENJOY!!

Also, try this recipe breakfast muffins. It’s another great healthy breakfast idea that you can prepare in advance!

How Our Perceptions Affect Our Pain

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YOU must address all areas of your health for your body to heal.  This includes your mindset, nutrition, exercise, environment, and nervous system.  Many people make it all about one thing (i.e., Nutrition or exercise) and neglect the rest.  This alone will not give your body the opportunity it needs to heal.  Most conditions are due to a deficiency in any or all aspects of your health, so it’s important to address all of them.  This article will highlight how a problem in any one of the areas of health can be causing your symptoms.  Future articles will also teach you how to remove the underlying problem in any of these areas of health.  But by far, the most important component of your health begins with your mindset!  Let’s discuss pain and the brain.

It’s NOT All In Your Head

Some patients who repeatedly see doctors in search of an answer to their chronic pain with no clearly identified cause, have been told: “it’s all in your head.”  I disagree.  The pain is very real.  Pain is something you are feeling and experiencing.  However, what is in your head is the ability to re-wire how your brain perceives the world and your body, including pain.  This is an output from the brain, not an input from the body.  When you have chronic pain, the brain frequently perceives things like light touch as being painful.  But remember, you CAN control your brain’s perception.

Understanding Chronic Pain

When dealing with chronic pain, the key to removing one of the major and most common forms of interference is this.  Understanding and accepting that there is so much more involved than just the physical aspect that feels painful.  It’s easy to understand how things like massage therapy, eating better, taking supplements, and exercising are going to help you on this HEALing journey.  It’s not as easy to understand how our thought processes and experiences in the past and present have an impact on our physical being.  There are widespread neurological implications of emotions.  Examples such as anger, anxiety, fear, self-doubt, sense of failure and more.   Click here for further reading on A scientific validation of your emotions.

Outside therapies alone, although helpful, are limiting.  We all have subconscious and conscious negative thought patterns that were learned at a young age either from past mental or physical traumas that you have attached to an emotion.  If you avoid working on removing those thought patterns, you won’t reap the benefits of the unlimited potential for healing that is within you.

Pain And The Brain

Pain is an experience. Physical pain from an external stimulus will initiate a message to be sent from tissues, through neurons called nociceptors.  It alerts the brain of a potentially dangerous situation.  This message arrives at the brain, and its level of “danger” is determined by a response based on information your brain has gathered throughout your life.  Your brain and nervous system form memories of pain when we experience pain.  This helps us avoid perceived dangerous behavior that once resulted in pain such as touching a hot stove.  We also create pain memories from hearing or seeing someone else experience pain as a result of a behavior.

If you have ever been diagnosed or heard of someone being diagnosed with a “pinched nerve” you have already created a “pinched nerve” memory in your brain.  Your brain has a cognition or context of what a “pinched nerve” means.  This is based on any experience related to the diagnosis.  Brain cells in the “pinched nerve” memory bank will also belong to anything else you associated the pinched nerve diagnosis.  Neck pain, numbness, tingling, weakness, and sciatica are just a few of the examples.  This means IF you are told you have a “pinched nerve,” you activate the brain cells associated with a pinched nerve and experience its symptoms.  This occurs even if you don’t really have a pinched nerve.  This is one of the dangers of a misdiagnosis!

This inaccurate information we have gathered about how we imagine our body to work has contributed to our brain’s evaluation of how much danger we are in and your perception and experience of the external pain stimulus.

Mindset Exercises

Our positive and negative emotions associated with a diagnosis can have an impact on our degree of pain.  Now that you understand the connection between your beliefs and the pain you experience, we can dive into some relevant and applicable mindset concepts that you can start to apply right away.  I will provide you with paradigm-shifting exercises that accompany each concept.  I encourage you to dive in deep.  We are going to cover some of the time-tested, relevant concepts of emotional healing – gratitude, affirmations, and acknowledgment of your achievements.  The more energy and time you put into these mindset exercises, the more you will get out of them.  Your mind can’t tell the difference between reality and what you tell it!

I find that some patients are more prepared than others to tackle their state of mind during the healing process.  I provide guidance in the form of literature, counseling, and advanced workshops on developing a healthy mindset.  It’s not uncommon to see patients with very similar symptoms in our practice.  However, the patients who dedicate the time and energy to their mental health and creating a positive mindset tend to get better results with their care.  The positive mindset they create drastically decreases their healing time and ability to return to normal activities of daily living, pain-free!  To read more on How our perceptions affect our health, click here.

You’re one step closer!

The Mindset Game – Set yourself up to Win

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mindset

We’re almost 4 months into the year. How is it going so far? Are you accomplishing some of the tasks you had thought of around the new year that you would love to complete by now?

Do you even remember what your resolutions were? Or if you think resolutions are ridiculous because they only last 2 days, did you make goals instead? Or did you forget about your goals 2 weeks later?

Where is your mindset? What do you want? What are you doing every single day to move toward what it is that you want?

In the blink of an eye, it will be 6 months into the year and unless you start now to really decide what you want and begin implementing a plan to reach your goals, it will soon be December and you won’t have anything to show for it.

So what do you want?

Do you want to quit your corporate job that is sucking the life out of you to start your dream business? If so, have you taken a course in business? Or taken some online marketing classes? Or laid out your business plan? Started saving like it’s your full time job so that you can fund your project and your life while it gets going?

Every single day you need to take the next right step toward what you want to achieve. It is the accumulation of these small steps that will lead you toward brilliant success.

So think about it… what do YOU want?

Do you want to lose weight? Get your health back? Start buying more fruit and vegetables. And actually eat them before they go bad! Simply let fruit and vegetables crowd out everything else. And move that body! You are meant to enjoy movement, so find something you love to do and do it often. You don’t have to go to the gym and spend hours like a hamster on a treadmill. You can do high intensity interval training for just a few minutes per day – which allows your body to kick itself into a high-fat-burning-machine and burn fat for hours after you are finished exercising.

Are you still thinking about it…..what do you WANT???

Do you want a better relationship with your spouse? Carve out specific times during the week that are yours – that have no distractions, no phones, no tv, no computers. And just be together and enjoy each other’s company.

Marianne Williamson has an amazing book that will completely transform the way you stay in love – called Enchanted Love. Basically she says that as we’re falling in love, we see our new partner as perfection, through rose coloured glasses. Everything they do is absolutely perfect, and we are so smitten that it creates joyful expression throughout the other facets of our life. But over time, we begin to take the rose-coloured glasses off and begin to see your significant other as they are – imperfect, messy and usually late for dinner.

But Marianne says that the true state of someone is actually perfection – and it’s during the first moments of a relationship when you are wearing the rose-coloured glasses – that this is actually reality!! That is the truth of each person, and for a moment in time you are able to see their true soul perfection. But then society and our generational conditioning causes our true sight to become blurred – and the glasses fall off.

So let’s start to put those rose coloured glasses on more often and see our significant others for what they are – perfection! And make sure they have theirs on when they’re looking at you!!

Soooo… what do you want?

Make a list of the things you want to accomplish and create an action plan to start making them happen!! Create a vision board and this will also help to keep you on track, with the universe conspiring to help you make it happen!

Do You Want to Kill Your Stress Once and For All? Do This.

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Kill Stress Once and For All

Stress has become an epidemic in our society. When someone asks “How are you?” the majority of people now answer “stressed”.

This is now a normal, accepted answer to which the reply is a nod in understanding, “Yes, me too.” It’s like we’re keeping up with the Jones’ to see who can be busier and more stressed out.

This has got to stop!!!!

There are obviously major reasons why we would feel stress, and this is our body’s way to kick on our adrenaline processes and potentially our fight or flight so that we can get through a trauma, injury, major life change or passing of a loved one.

But the daily stresses that are climbing and adding up need to be seriously revised.

The first problem is not having enough time to get everything done that life demands. The answer is that you need to ask for help.

Your children can be a great source of your home stress, so ask them to help you. Depending on their ages, give them special tasks to complete to help out around the house.

There is no reason your teenagers should hit the couch when they get home from school. They can help to start dinner, get their lunches ready for the next day and help to care for their siblings.

This is not taking away their freedom and childhood, it is giving them life skills and responsibilities that I promise, they will thank you for in the future. (What student wants to get to college or university, away from home for the first time and have absolutely no idea how to feed themselves? Let’s give them a chance!)

The most important thing you can do is to live in the present moment.

Right here in this moment (the only moment we actually have) there is no stress. We are consciously present. We are just working on this one task. There is no worrying about getting it done in time, ohh I only have 2 more hours, etc. because that is not living in the present moment. The stress arrives when we think about the future and think about how something will affect us when it arrives. But if we try to stay just in the moment we have, your stress will diminish drastically.

The other important thing you need to do is to detach from outcomes.

Put no weight or importance on the outcome of any event. This is again, living in the present moment. For many things, we literally have no control over many situations and worrying about them can make us crazy. The outcome will unfold over time and we will deal with whatever happens at the time. Because we will be practicing being present in each moment and taking things minute by minute.

We must begin to consciously decide how our lives want to look and feel.

I’m sure that you are in agreement with me, we’ve all experienced enough stress for the rest of our lives just in the past few years. It’s time to let go of the panic of worrying about the future and fretting about the past and choose, decide today, to make every moment one of joy and contentment.

It’s so much nicer to live in a mindset that you actively choose, rather than to be sucked into the societal pressure of being stressed all the time. Your health will be so much better, and your personal and family life will be much happier. Share this new mindset with your family and friends to help them reduce their stress. Obviously it takes some time to train your mind to stay present but over time it will get easier and you will have a much more serene life.