Posts Tagged ‘minerals’

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Eating For Energy Green Juice Recipe

October 14th, 2010

Eating green and juicing green are two of Pierrette & I’s favorite things. Juicing is easy on the digestive system and helps to lower your heart rate and improve the use of your oxygen levels in your blood stream.

Slowing your body metabolism down by juicing is a great way to energize your day without all the stomach problems involved in digesting whole foods.

Here is a recipe Pierrette invented that satisfies the sweet needs of people that are just starting to green juice. Adding apples and carrots to all your green juices will take some of the “bland” out of  the green taste.

The benefits of juicing green are so important to your health. You have no idea how great you will feel. Enough said, here is the secret drink Pierrette wants to share with you:

Serves 2

Ingredients:

3 medium size carrots

2 medium apples(choose the variety you love most) We buy the ones on special at the time.

1 medium beet (yes uncooked,red secret ingredient)

3 celery stalks17beaae153660e6a_beet-juice

1/2 cucumber

1/4 head of cauliflower

2 tablespoon of ground flax seed

Juice all the ingredients  in your juicer and serve.(add ground flax seed after)

The benefits of juicing are that you get all the nutritional value into your blood stream without all the fiber. Notice all the pulp left over in your Juicer?

Just look at the pulp as part of the price of being healthy. Ask yourself, what would of all that pulp done inside my body and how hard would my digestive system have to work to process all of it?

Pierre & Pierrette from: http://www.theequest.com

Thee Quest For Perfect Health

Buy Eating For Energy today.Start your juicing career now.

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Posted in Client Journeys, Raw Food Recipes

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5 Ways to Boost Your Energy

June 21st, 2010

Energy is a precious thing, something to conserve, save, and try not to waste; we are forever searching for new ways to boost our ever-dwindling supplies. But I’m not talking about turning off the lights when you leave a room, or switching to solar power. I am talking about your own personal energy, something much harder to boost and even harder to conserve. Here are five ways that you can boost your energy reserves, while staying within the boundaries of a healthy lifestyle.

The first thing you can do to boost your energy is to start eating more raw foods. Of course, a raw food diet will help with more than just energy, but it is certainly an important reason to switch from a cooked and processed foods way of eating.

Many foods lose vital minerals during the cooking process – minerals that can help to give you the energy you need during the day. Raw foods also contain living enzymes that allow your body to work cleaner and easier, conserving the energy in your food for the work you choose to do, rather than the digestive work you need to simply keep going.

Another way to gain more personal energy is to plan to get more sleep. We all know that a good night’s sleep should be around eight hours, but few of us actually manage to get that much rest. Continued lack of sleep can result in a buildup of “sleep debt”, which can increasingly effect your concentration and ability to perform at your peak. A well rested body is an energized and recharged body, able to use the energy in your raw food diet more efficiently and effectively.

Another important factor in preserving your personal energy levels is the amount of water that you drink. You may think you are properly hydrating yourself, but if your liquids come flavored or altered, you may not be getting enough pure water. Hydration is key to staying in the zone – if your body becomes dehydrated, you run the risk of wearing yourself out prematurely. Make sure to drink a few glasses of water every day, and try to never wait until you are thirsty to have a drink. Thirst is your body’s way of telling you that you are already low in liquids.

Another way to get more energy is to quit the coffee. If you are a caffeine user, the idea of having less to get more energy might sound wrong, but many studies have shown that long-term caffeine users actually gain no energy or alertness from their morning coffee; they are simply fighting the effects of overnight withdrawal symptoms. Go cold turkey, and soon enough, you won’t need the coffee anymore.

Last but not least, get your daily required amounts of vitamins to maintain and gain energy throughout the day. With a properly calibrated raw food diet, you should not have to resort to pills and capsules to supplement your food; everything you need for great energy can be found within a raw food eating plan.

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How Raw Food Diet Increases Your Energy

May 15th, 2010

Energy is one of those buzz words that can have everyone talking. It seems that no one ever has enough energy, and people are always looking for new and innovative ways to gain more energy. People do strange things to get more energy, things that they occasionally strongly dislike doing in order to get a few steps ahead of the competition. People eat foods that they do not like, drinks fluids that they can barely choke down, and pop pills like there is no tomorrow.

But if you are reading this blog post, of course you know that you can eat for energy, without all the mystery and the misery. Eating a raw food diet is an excellent way to increase your energy levels without having to suffer for the strength.

But you might wonder, how does a high energy diet give you the power that a diet of cooked foods simply cannot provide? There are a lot of important factors in raw foods that contribute to giving you more than simply a belly full of food.

For one thing, eating for energy with raw foods gives you a massive supply of natural vitamins and nutrients that are incredibly helpful for an active body. Certainly, you can get a decent amount of vitamins in a more traditional, cooked diet, but so many of the vitamins in fruits and vegetables are often leached out of them in the cooking process, lost to pots of boiling water and sizzling pans of fat.

So raw foods offer a higher level of vitamins – so what? Well, a massive amount of vitamins means that your body is fully stocked with the tools it needs in order to keep you in peak physical condition. A strong body needs to be a healthy body, so a good source of vitamins is one of the basic building blocks of being more active, and having more energy.

Raw foods also contain energy in the form of those much-talked about living food enzymes. These little wonders often get killed off in the cooking process, as a result of the high temperatures. Without them, your body has to rely on its own sources of enzymes for digestion, absorption and elimination. These might be incredibly normal processes that your body goes through every single day, but that is not to say that they are easy on your body. Precious energy can be wasted when your body has to work harder to grab those nutrients from your foods.

And of course, within the area of raw foods, there are a number of food items that contain huge amounts of energy giving ingredients. From the natural sugars in your favorite fruits to healthy fats, natural fibers and other wonderful additions, the raw foods that you eat can have a huge impact on your energy levels – and the best part is, they deliver that energy without resorting to terrible food choices, unnatural supplement pills and other unpleasant options. Energy is important, but you have to enjoy how you gather it.

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Eating Raw Foods for Health

May 14th, 2010

People will try almost anything to stay healthy, and it’s not a new phenomenon. Throughout the ages, people have eaten a wide and varied array of foods that they believed helped to keep them younger, healthier and more vigorous. From the highly localized and recently re-popularized diet of the Palaeolithic times that focused on low amounts of carbohydrates and eating what was readily available; to the more modern but still outdated ideas presented to schoolchildren in the health food “pyramid”, people have always been looking for proven guidelines to eat healthier.

For many people starting a raw food diet, maintaining or improving their overall health is a primary reason for the switch from cooked foods. Recent studies have shown that a diet high or completely comprised of raw, uncooked and under-processed foods can have a dramatic impact on the way that your body operates. That includes providing increased energy and mental alertness, and improving the ability to stay healthy and ward off illness. But what about a raw food diet is so beneficial to your health?

When you first learn how to eat a raw diet, you are going to notice that your intake of fruits and vegetables will probably skyrocket, as compared to your old eating habits. Fruits and vegetables are staples of the raw diet, due in no small part to their versatility, their great taste, and of course, their benefits for your body. Raw fruits and vegetables contain tons of vitamins and minerals that, for many non-raw eaters, are in desperately short supply in their regular daily meals. Vitamin A, found in abundance in tomatoes, has been shown to help build a healthy immune system. Vitamin B1 (avocados), B3 (bananas) and B9 (strawberries) can help support a healthy cardiovascular system, grow new muscle, and create antibodies in the blood. Vitamin C, found all over the raw spectrum, provides your body with antioxidants that help to preserve your good health and strong body. These vitamins can be found in cooked foods, but never as abundantly as in their raw hosts.

How else can raw food help you to stay healthy? Raw foods give you energy that you can use to keep your body in tip-top shape. A healthy and fit body is one that is more prepared to fight off illness. Good fitness helps to push back some of the issues and health problems that we might face as we age, especially heart and circulatory concerns. A raw food diet can help to propel you through more frequent workouts, which will in turn lead to an overall healthier body, and fewer required trips to see the local physician.

Raw foods can also keep your digestive tract healthier. The living food enzymes that you consume as part of a raw diet are used to aid the body in digestion of foods, absorption of vitamins, minerals and energy, and the elimination of waste products. The less of your body’s natural stores of energy that need to be used for these processes, the more raw power is available to your body for other purposes – like keeping you in the peak of healthiness.

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Mineral Spotlight: Magnesium

November 26th, 2009

Magnesium is an important essential mineral for the body. It is involved in hundreds of enzymatic reactions, including those that contribute to production of energy and cardiovascular function.

Considering its immense importance to our health, it is a sad to report that magnesium intake has been on the decline since the earl 1990s. For instance, the greatest decreases in dietary magnesium have been seen in the American diet (what a surprise!) as a result of supplemental vitamin D and calcium supplements, increased phosphorus, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar intake, and constant consumption of refined and processed foods.

And let’s not forget that the average American is only getting 1.5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Considering that magnesium is abundantly found in these foods it’s no wonder we a have a problem.

What Does it Do?

Magnesium is known as the “anti-stress” mineral. It is a natural tranquilizer as it functions to relax skeletal muscle as well as the smooth muscles of blood vessels and the GI tract.

Research has indicated that decreased blood and tissue levels of magnesium are correlated with high blood pressure, kidney stones, and heart attacks.

But it’s no surprise that we would see such issues since magnesium has a relaxing effect on the body. Therefore, low levels of this vital mineral means that many contraction (calcium-stimulated)-relaxation (magnesium-stimulated) relationships are disrupted tipping the scales toward a state of “constriction” or “contraction”.

For instance, studies have shown that a decreased concentration of magnesium is found in the heart and blood of heart attack victims.

Because of its influence on the heart (which in turn in the greatest reservoir of magnesium), it is considered important in preventing coronary artery spasm, a significant cause of heart attacks. Spasms of the blood vessels lead to insufficient oxygen supply, which results in pain, injury, or death of the muscle tissue that they nourish.

To function optimally, magnesium must be balanced in the body with calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium chloride. For instance, too little magnesium leads to more calcium flowing into the vascular muscle cells, causing them to contract – leading to tighter vessels and higher blood pressure.

For women, magnesium’s relaxing effects has implications for helping to alleviate  PMS.

It also a big role to play in allowing the body to eliminate properly. Adequate magnesium allows your bowels to relax and thus allow the passage of waste from the colon.

These are just a few of the many vital functions that magnesium performs in our body. Needless to say, it is an important which we need to get from our diet and possibly supplementation.

Where is it Found?

Almost all of our magnesium supplies come from vegetables. As a component of chlorophyll, magnesium is to the plants what iron is to the hemoglobin of our red blood vessels. In fact, chlorophyll and hemoglobin have the EXACT same molecular structure differing only in their main mineral – magnesium and iron, respectively.

This molecular identity is one of the reasons that green vegetables are so amazing for the human body. Chlorophyll is the pigment that gives plants their green colour. It also important to plant photosynthesis – the process of converting sunlight, CO2, and water into carbohydrates and oxygen. As a result, when we ingest green foods we essentially infuse the sun’s energy right into our blood stream. Pretty powerful if you ask me!

Therefore, best sources of magnesium are definitely dark green vegetables. Think kale, swiss chard, spinach, arugula, watercress, and anything else that is green.

Most nuts, seeds, and legumes also have high amounts of magnesium.

Here are some magnesium-rich foods and their respective levels of magnesium:

Spinach (1 cup, boiled) –  156 mg

Swiss chard (1 cup, boiled) – 150 mg

Pumpkin seeds (1/4 cup, raw) – 185 mg

Sesame seeds (1/4 cup, raw) – 126 mg

Black beans (1 cup, cooked) – 120 mg

Cashews (1/4 cup, raw) – 89 mg

Kale (1 cup, boiled) – 24 mg

How Much Do I Need?

The minimum required intake of magnesium can be expressed as about 6 mg/kg of body weight. For example, a 150-pound person would need about 410 mg per day.

In general, for men over 19 years of age, the recommendation is 400 mg of magnesium per day, while for women of the same age it’s about 360 mg per day.

However, the problem is that the average American diet only supplies about 120 mg of magnesium per 1,000 calories. Which means that we need enhance the nutrient density of our food intake without over-doing the calories!

book_cover_webSo what’s the take home message from this information?

Eat more plant-based foods! Especially dark green leafy vegetables. All you need to do is add one more cup of spinach or swiss chard to your meals and you will most likely have doubled the average American diet intake!

In fact, if you haven’t already read my ebook, Eating for Energy, then I would highly recommend you do so. Apply just 10% of what I recommend in the book and your magnesium levels will soar and you healthier than you ever thought possible!

Got any questions? Feel free to ask me in the comments.

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