Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Tuesday Recipe, Coffee Scrub

Today's recipe is not so much one to eat, it is for your skin! I, like any other woman, like smooth, soft skin, as well as my Hublet! One day I came across doing coffee scrubs for your skin. I thought it a a little odd, but why waste those precious coffee grounds and hey, if it can help my poor dried out skin from the dry winter, it is worth a shot. LOVED it!!!!! So, in my style, I had to do something else along with it, besides just coffee grounds.

What you need:
Coffee grounds, they can be used or fresh, if you are not a coffee drinker
Cinnamon ~ I put cinnamon in my coffee grounds when I am brewing it. This helps with the acidity and I really             enjoy the taste of cinnamon, just ask my Hublet! As well as the health benefits.
Lemon or lime ~ Vit. C is great for your skin. It will help to give it a very healthy glow.

Mix coffee grounds, cinnamon, if you have not already, and freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice all together. When you are in the shower, scrub the coffee ground mixture all over your body and then rinse off. It is really that easy. Pat yourself dry. Enjoy amazingly soft skin and the hint of coffee all day!

Notes: Your shower will be very dirty. I take this time to clean my shower and rinse it well.
This coffee scrub is abrasive. Due to this, only do this once a week. Doing so more often can actually harm your skin instead of the benefits of an exfoliation. 
Coffee has a natural oil to it. This is why you will want to pat yourself dry so you do not take off all of the oil. This does not mean your clothes are going to be oily, they wont. I found I do not need any lotions or coconut oil on my skin after this, other than on my face.

Saving the world one stick of butter at a time!
Here's to amazing, glowing skin,
God bless,
Jenn

Thursday, February 23, 2012

How Many Times Do You Eat?

I know I used to buy into the whole, you need to eat five to six small meals a day life style. As I did this, I was very hypoglycemic. If I did not eat every three to four hours, watch out world because I would drop hard and be very sick and could not function. I would always think something seemed weird with this. I ate so called healthy, loads of grain, sugar, but why was my blood sugar so off? If I was this healthy person, why could I not maintain my blood sugar levels? Something in the back of my head would tell me something was messed up and wrong with this picture.

Then I found the Primal Blue Print from Mark Sission, over at Marks Daily Apple. I realized my problem was eating to much sugar and not enough fat and protein. After I began to change this and eating better, the way we should be eating, my hypoglycemia went away. I have control of my blood sugar, not my blood sugar having control over me. A very nice feeling. I can do a 24 hour fast and not think I am going to die. Instead of eating many small meals throughout the day, I eat two sometimes threes meals a day and feel better than I ever have. What I have also accomplished, is making my body a very efficient fat burning machine! Who does not want that?! Instead of always needing sugar and food to eat, my body has learned to go to its fat reserves and use this extremely stable energy source. Fat is what our bodies really want to burn. It means we are not in a fight or flight state either. We are calm, just being. The way we should be living the largest majority of our daily lives. It was not every hour or half hour our ancestors came across a bear or mountain lion, something of grave danger that they needed to run away from.

This is when we go into the adrenaline rush, we stop burning fat, we store fat and begin burning sugar. The problem today, is most people live in this state of adrenaline rush, going 150 mph. Their body constantly thinks it is needing to run from a bear, so they are burning sugar and storing fat. As a side note, for woman this can cause infertility. Progesterone is made from fat. What your body will do when you are constantly going 150 mph, is stop making progesterone and instead make hormones for fight or flight. They both use the same precursor, fat. We are not in a baby making state, too much stress, therefor we do not need progesterone, we need flight or fight hormones, adrenaline or epinephrine. Our bodies will always out smart us.
Back to the point, we need to learn to stabilize our blood sugar levels. Eating five to six small meals a day is not the way to do this. We also need to learn to make our bodies the fat burning machines they are designed to be. The way to doing this is eating the right things and not eating more than three meals a day. Decreasing the amount of sugar we eat, this includes grains. Most grains, even those labeled "whole grain" are not really whole grains at all. One of the first ingredients is going to be white flour or one of it's derivatives. White flour to our bodes is sugar. Whole sprouted grains should be at the bottom of our food consumption list instead of the top. Even true whole grains will cause a sugar spike in our bodies. Grains should be consumed in moderation, if at all. The other foods which we need more of is fat and protein. Eating fat does not make you fat. This is a beautifully constructed lie from the powers that be. Eating fat will help you lose fat. It does this by keeping us full for longer periods of time and is an excellent source of energy, stable energy. Fat does not spike our insulin levels. It helps to keep them stable, just like we want them to be, in a fat burning zone. Protein does the same thing. Along with giving us the building blocks we need for life and very important vitamins and minerals we need, namely Vit. B 12. Animal protein is the only place we can naturally ingest B 12. The other food group to eat is vegetables and here.

Here is a great video and article about only eating three meals a day and the benefits of doing so. Both talk about how important it is to stabilize blood sugar and how to do this. Along with the tips I have given. Of course there are always going to be exceptions to the norm, but this is very few and far between. Not the norm like they would like us to believe.

Saving the World One Stick of Butter at a Time!
God bless,
Jenn 










Thursday, February 16, 2012

New Year Resolutions

So, how are those New Year Resolutions going for you? You know, the one you make every year about losing weight, getting healthy, building muscle. I think it is more of a tradition than anything real. Every one makes it, so I will join the band wagon.

If you are looking for a lasting change of health, try a different approach. Remember the definition of insanity to doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. Weight lose and health are no different. If every year you make this resolution, but have not been able to stick with it and actually accomplish your resolution, lets trying something different!

First things first. Instead of doing a diet, which never works, you need a life style change. A way of eating you can continue for the rest of your life at least 80% of the time. Crash diets do not work very well and can be in fact very dangerous. Looking into the primal way of life, paleo or caveman are all great lifestyle ways of eating. They are easy, satisfying and highly nutritious. Most of what I talk about here on my blog follow these, with the exception of what I follow from Dr. Price. Eliminating sources of sugar, including grains, increasing your fat and protein intake as well as your veggies is basically it. Eating real food.

Another thing to incorporate is movement, lifting heavy things. This does not mean you need a gym membership or have to have heavy weight at home. This can be going for a walk every day, walk 15 minutes in one direction and then walk back, a half hour appears to be the magic number for maxim benefits.  Heaving lifting can be your body weight. Doing exercises such as squats, lunges, push up, planks, and hundreds of variations of these. Pick five different exercises, mixing up and lower body, do 10-20 of each in a circuit or HIIT style workout, do two to three sets. Once in awhile sprint train and watch your body morph into the body of your dreams or at least losing the weight you want to lose, getting into great shape and being healthy!

I think we all know changing our eating habit and moving more are part of becoming healthy, but there is another important competent. This is your emotional ties to food. What emotions, feelings or fears are you trying to ignore, push aside and not deal with by eating? Until you can identify your emotional ties to food, it is going to be very difficult to change your eating habits. Go through the hard processes of figuring this out and you will find it much easier to let go of those trigger foods and become healthy.

Different ways of doing this are talking with someone, like a counselor, health coach or a spiritual leader. Gather photos from your life, before you began having food problems, weight issues, until the present time and talk through these pictures. See where you began gaining all of the weight or losing it and address what that trigger is and deal with it. Stop pushing it aside. Journaling, as we have discussed, can be very useful as well. Figure out what will work best for you and take the plunge.

Your better health and body are out there waiting for you to come and find them!
Saving the World one stick of butter at a time!
Jenn