Spinach Heaven

Yeah, you read right. I've begun to like spinach again-or rather, spinach salads :)

I found this particular recipe handy:

1 package of spinach (in leaf form)

1 jar of mandarin oranges

1 package of Cranraisins.

1 package of almonds.

any dressing as desired


This recipe gives out a fabulous salad which can be eaten without any dressing at all.
I love having it every day now.

Another recipe you can use is this one:


1 banana
1 cup of soy milk/Rice Dream milk

Mmmm. 'Tis FABULOUS. It tastes like a vanilla milkshake (if you happen to get the vanilla flavoured milks.)

I suppose you could even try it with chocolate milks. The banana is really good for calming me down of I get too anxious. Ironically, I'll only eat a banana if I can barely see it. So any banana flavoured muffins or milkshakes are fine, but if I see one raw, I'll always try going for something else.

Gillian McKeith's Food Bible

Gillian McKeith's latest book is called "Gillian McKeith's Food Bible" and is subtitled "The Complete A-Z Guide to a Healthy Life." It covers all kinds of ailments including asthma and athletes foot, and what to do about them from a nutritional standpoint.


I've flipped through it, noting there are hints and tips to cure a lot of ills, none of which I really have (at the moment anyway). It's more text heavy than maybe her other books, and while I'm sure it's a great read, I'm too lazy to read more than a few chapters on it. But it's indeed going to be the book I go to if any of those ailments sneak up on me.

A Raw Perspective on The Raw Food Diet

Ok, so I haven't been 100% raw ever since the first post when I said going raw was the end all be all to obtaining ultimate health.

Well maybe it is. But actually, even the best experts on raw food don't seem to be all raw about it.

They don't eat whole agave fruits from Mexico-they rely on people to draw out agave nectar so they can use it in drinks. All of us wouldn't have access to spirulina or algae either if it weren't for modern day un-natural advances in technologies to have it distributed to us. Just the other day I heard that "manna" bread, seemingly touted as a raw bread, isn't actually that raw because it's cooked well over 130 degrees. And depending on where we're located, some of us wouldn't even have access to goji berries or coconuts if we were really living in the cave man days when they ate conceivably "raw" foods.

So I've come to conclude that this "raw food diet" is in essence, so named because most of the foods eaten are not ever cooked. But that's not to say that they aren't manipulated to suit our modern day tastes and preferences. Heck, if God meant us to juice all our fruits and veggies, he woulda attached the appliances to the roots of the vegetables. Not that I don't like juicing them, I'm just saying it's not exactly the 100% raw way of eating something as some raw foodists claim it is. And for all the juice that 1 bag of carrots produces, I'm probably better off just eating the carrots (unless I wanted to use the juice for a topical treatment of my skin).

Nowadays, I am not 100% raw. But I'm ok with that. This diet has taught me too much stuff about nutrition to abandon the entire concept completely. I still love raw chocolate syrup and I love sunflower seeds. I even like goji berries. I like being vegetarian on some days and I am more weary of eating animal products. And without the venture into this diet, I probably wouldn't have thought Triphala was such a good product. But I did. And it is.

And so, it's all good.

Honey Sabotage

Well as it turns out, honey really is NOT good for my skin.

Since having that peanut butter and honey on toast, I've broken out all over my body.

So it's back to green tea, veggies and sunflower seeds.

I'm still keeping in my chocolate. Raw chocolate or otherwise, it's just nice to have.

And I'm back to taking the milk thistle and evening primrose oil. It seemed to work the best out of everything.

Cutting Out the Sugar

Well, so much for chocolate syrup. I must have had 20 tablespoons of it today. And with the honey on toast and chocolate banana sundae, I just started becoming irritable and cranky again.

So I guess it's time to cut it out for a while. I had a veggie burger with ketchup for dinner followed by some nuts and seeds, and that seemed to calm me down.

As much as I like to think how wonderful raw chocolate syrup is, it's still a form of sugar, so I'll have to stay away from it for a day or so.

Two Days Off Triphala

This week has been rather less than stellar week for me. I started getting cramps and I was out of triphala. The cramps I seemed to be able to handle with raspberry juice and goji berries, and an easy-to-digest diet of juices and nuts. I even have some of my raw chocolate syrup left, although the taste gets a little boring if eaten every day. I found out that the honey I was having seemed to make me break out, so I'm not having that for a while. So between that and the chocolate and the triphala, I'm sort of running out of natural highs. I suppose drinking raspberry juice is nice enough, as is taking evening primrose oil, but it doesn't seem to be the same.

I'll see if I can find some more triphala here. Not that I'm hooked on it, but it seems to give me more vitamins in 3 pills than I can get drinking 3 glasses of fruit juice.

An hour later: Woohoo! I actually found more of this stuff. (The company that sells it is running out in Canada, so it's been rather hard to find.) I found this health food store that I've never gone to before, and they had 4 bottles left (not that I bought all 4, I just bought the one-they were $30 Canadian each.)

As soon as I took it I could feel an instant lift. And then I decided to have some toast with honey and peanut butter (I figured there was a chance the breakouts I had were due to something else and not the honey after all :) )

Life is good again :D