My 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 List of Inclusion!

An amiga of mine sent me a message on Facebook asking me how she can detoxify her body. My answer was simple—it makes all the sense in the world to me. I told her about how I detoxified my body. And I want to tell you about what I eat on a daily basis that makes me feel energized, wonderful and beautiful inside and out! 

I have a balanced diet that consists on plants only, that is: unlimited vegetables, fruit, legumes, seeds, nuts and whole grains. If it originated from something that had a face, had a mommy and daddy and had feelings once-- I don’t eat it.

I profoundly believe that eating mainly plants you can detoxify your body. Various, consistent and current research studies show that a plant-based diet healthy weight-loss can be achieved and even disease can be reversed.

Going back to my amiga's question....I understand, however, that to her (and to many other people too) eating a plant-based diet does not sound simple or even realistic. But let me tell you it is as simple as it sounds and realistic! :D You just need to try it. Make some adjustments to the way you currently eat, develop healthier habits and you'll be on your way!

Let me stress that it’s all about what (quality) you eat —not so much about how much (quantity) you eat. By eating quality foods you can begin to worry less about how much you actually eat." It is easier said than done" you might be thinking, so let me explain further...

In trying to answer my friend’s question, I immediately I came up with a list of six things* to include in life. This list will help anyone start making the change to a healthier lifestyle. I called it my...

6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 List of Inclusion: 

 

Six.         Drink at least 6 glasses of water  (but you can always drink more!)

1 glass is equal to 8 ounces

Five.      Eat 5 servings of whole grains

One serving is…

   o   1 slice of whole wheat bread

   o   ½ cup uncooked oatmeal, brown rice (1 cup cooked)

   o   ¼ cup quinoa (1/2 cup cooked)

   o   2 -  6” corn tortillas

Four.     Eat 4 servings of legumes, seeds, and nuts

One serving of beans is 1/2 cup cooked beans, lentils, garbanzo beans, peas

• One serving of seeds: 1 tablespoon (tbsp.) sunflower, pumpkin, flax, chia, sesame
• One serving of nuts: ¼ cup (just enough to fit on your palm, flat) almonds, walnuts, cashews

  

Three.   Eat 3 healthy meals a day

·       You already know this: eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day! Not skipping meals keep your body fueled and energized at all times.

If hungry between meals, eat 2 snacks in between. Your snacks should be whole pieces of fruit (easy to carry in your purse) or crunchy veggies, like carrots, celery, peppers, and cucumbers.

Two.      Eat 2 kinds of dark leafy greens

• Spinach
•  Kale
• Green or red leaf lettuce (iceberg lettuce doesn’t count because it has minimal nutritional value)
• Collard greens
• Dandelion greens

One.      Do one 1 of physical activity.

•       Our bodies were made to move! The point is to break a sweat by getting your heart pumping, increasing blood flow to your organs and brain. Move those muscles and joints!

Anything counts: dancing, walking, jogging, hiking calisthenics, resistance/weight training, stretching, yoga, you name it!

• You don't need a gym to add more physical  activity in your day:   
• Park farther and walk to your destination
•  Speed walk to the supermarket/farmer’s market
•  Ditch the elevator and go up the stairs
•  Do push-ups, crunches, etc.  during  commercials
• Stand up every 15 to 20 minutes (if sitting in front of a desk) and/or stretch

You must be thinking, “What about vegetables and fruits?” We've all heard how beneficial they are with all the vitamins, mineral, phytochemicals, fiber, water, antioxidants, protein, essential fats, and other awesome properties they have. We know that we MUST eat  vegetables and fruits if we want to get healthy.

Eat unlimited amounts of vegetables in all colors of the rainbow! Also, eat as many fruits as you’d like, but please don’t be afraid of them. The sugar in fruits is all natural, as natural as it could be. No one ever gained weight from eating fruit alone—come on! Include vegetables and fruits in your diet every day! If I could eat nothing else in life, but only one thing I would definitely go for fruit. 

However, if you have diabetes, gestational diabetes or pre-diabetes then do limit eating fruit to only 2-4 servings a day. (1 serving is about the size of your palm, cupped). If you think you might have diabetes please go get screened. There are millions of people  living with diabetes yet they don’t know they have it because symptoms often go unrecognized! (You can learn about the symptoms of diabetes here).

When we think of getting healthy we often think of things we should not be doing. We already know we should not eat refined carbohydrates or fried foods, no candy or drink soda, yet we do it anyway. By thinking of inclusion, as opposed to “exclude this and that” you will be adding not good, but GREAT stuff to your diet leaving little or no room for the bad stuff. The important thing here is start eating healthier and making better choices. Feel free to have as much of the things on the list as you'd like, but the 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 List of Inclusion should be the minimum!

This is a journey and it takes time to adapt to a new lifestyle. It doesn’t happen magically from one day to the next. That is just not how change occurs. We need to work at it each time, every  day. It's crucial to be persistent and patient with ourselves to see those desired results.

Know that some days will not be perfect; you will go a day or two (or even a week) when you make a poor choice(s), but don’t beat yourself up. Learn from that experience, figure out how you will tackle it next time and move forward. Keep on trying, keep going. Being persistent is key!

Let me reiterate that we should think of  inclusion (of healthy  food), and not exclusion (of the bad stuff). This is a way of living, or as we’ve all heard before, “It’s not a diet; it’s a lifestyle.”

Love, Joy, Peace and Health,

Bea 

*Disclaimer: I am not a registered dietitian or a fitness expert. The purpose of my blog is to share my experiences about the food and fitness that have given me the best results ever! I’ve done great amounts of research on living a healthy and fit lifestyle. When it comes to your own health and fitness, do your research, be selective of the sources you choose, be critical and do what works best for you! :)

Sources: 

http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/6-reasons-to-drink-water?page=2 

http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/pplate/power-plate

http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/prevention/pre-diabetes/pre-diabetes-faqs.html

http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthy-kitchen-11/leafy-greens-rated

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/staying-active/physical-activity-guidelines/index.html

It's the Last Day of September 2012!

Today is the last day of September! For many, September was like the "new January" as some people on Facebook had said. I couldn't quite get it to be the "new January" for me. Why couldn't September be the real or newer September?

I wanted to start new again this September. I wanted to start fresh on a clean slate and get in tip-top shape, clean up my diet and finish 2012 with a bang! But as much as I tried for this month to be my "IT" month I wasn't successful...

In October I will try this again....This is the month for me. I am starting a new fitness regimen, the LiveFit 12-Week Trainer I got from Jamie Eason, my fitness role-model. It consists of 3 phases of 12 weeks. This new way of training will shock my body because I won't be following my ordinary fitness plan, but follow Jamie's plan instead.

As far as my diet, I 'll continue to have my plant-based nutrition! :D But I have a few things that I will actually change/ improve on. I intend to limit processed foods as much as possible! For instance, I will not drink soy milk anymore, no bread or tortillas--not even Ezekiel, nothing that comes in a package. If I do have processed soy products I will eat as little as possible. Living with a husband who enjoys eating processed soy foods (more than occasionally) will make it  challenging for me to say no. However, Bret is incredibly supportive of my goals and has said to me that he will not cook processed if I don't want to. He also said that he'll buy very little processed food so that we don't have it around the house and prevent me from getting tempted to eat it.

Another type of food that I will limit--and actually have not eaten much of for the past 4 or even 5 months--is nuts. For me, eating nuts every day (like I used to) is not conducive to my goals. My #1 goal is to be healthy, but I also like being lean. In order to achieve that desired  leanness I should limit my fat intake. So I've decided to eat nuts very sparingly. I actually try to not cook with oil either because oil "is not a whole food – it is a processed food, consisting of 100% fat."

For the next 12 weeks I will document my progress with blogs, pictures and videos. I really want to show  that you can be healthy and fit, gain muscle and lose fat on a plant-based diet! Follow my journey as I finish this year with a BANG!!!

Love,

BeaHealthy.BeaFit.

Lesson of the Day: Do Not Eat at Non-Vegan Restaurants!

Tonight Bret and I realized that we didn't have the right ingredients to prepare any kind of dinner. The truth is that we could have eaten anything we wanted (I thank God we have all this food in the fridge and pantry!) and it didn't necessarily have to go together, but it was me who wanted to eat out...again. We decided to go to Nathalee Thai's (the closest restaurant to our house) because I was craving noodles! We know that Nathalee Thai’s is not vegetarian, much less vegan, but we still went because "we're pretty good at picking out anything from the menu and ask for it to be vegan." 

We ordered the papaya salad—the only vegan thing on the menu! When the salad arrived, to our surprise, we saw little pieces of dried shrimp all over! We got scared to see so many tiny little carcasses! “Ahhh! It has shrimp!!” -- we almost sounded panicked. Yuck, it made my stomach turn….In no way would we eat that!

“Oh, I thought you knew…” the waitress said.

“No, we didn’t,” I told her. “I was happy to find at least one vegan salad; I didn’t know it had shrimp.” She nicely offered to take it back and prepare a new salad without shrimp, phew!

I just could not eat animal meat, not even if it touches my food—when I go to a restaurant, that is. If someone cooks for me, I can easily and discreetly take out the meat, but at restaurants I just cannot and will not eat meat. We also Pad See Ew as a second dish; we had to ask for this dish without egg and when it arrived at our table we had to look at it closely to make sure no egg snuck in there. Since I already had the image of the little dried shrimp in the salad, my taste buds were not all messed up now. Soon we realized that the food just wasn’t appetizing anymore, but we were so hungry we ate—but to be honest, the food did not taste good to us…

What Bret and I learned from this experience is to not go to non-vegan restaurants. We usually never do and now I know why. If the restaurant is not vegan, somehow little animal carcasses and/or animal products seem to creep in the food! Nasty. So we both decided we will not go back to Nathalee Thai’s. Not only was the service not good, the food was not filling and I distrusted where it came from. Right now my stomach feels gross…So from now on, we'll definitely stick to eating only at vegan or vegan friendly restaurants!

 

Good night!

Bea

Fall is Now Here and I'm on a Mission to Be My Best Self!

 

We are now in the autumn season! The first day of fall was yesterday and I am ready to fall into the best health and fitness of my life! I try to often remember to use each day as opportunity to better myself, inside and out. By using the Whole Person framework: Body, Mind, Heart and Spirit, I have a clearer vision of my purpose and goals and how to better approach them. 

For my Body- I am always on a mission to improve my nutrition, be more adventurous with new vegetables, fruits (seeds, legumes, and grains), try new recipes and cook more, eat a balanced and varied diet, get my fitness on (build more muscle, burn fat, get stronger and run faster). Making sure I get plenty of sleep each night is not only beneficial for my mental health, mental sharpness and sustained energy throughout the day, but it is awesome medicine for beautiful eyes, skin, total rejuvenation of my organs and muscle repair! 

Move it or you lose it!

For my Mind- Another mission of mine is to master my own mind. So as I've stated before, I am on this journey to improve my focus by prioritizing, improving my memory and attention span, staying focused, minimizing distractions, being more productive, etc. It's about Mind over Matter. Anything that the mind says, the body does. The mind is like muscle: it needs to be fed well so it supplied with nutrients, it needs to be built like a muscle and challenged.

For my Heart- Strengthening my relationship with my loved ones (my family) is the fuel that fires my heart. I need to further cultivate and nurture my relationships if I want to be happier and make my loved ones happy too. I treat my relationships like a bank account by constantly and making deposits to my relationships by treating then with care, respect, and honesty each time. I also try to focus practicing gratitude and loving kindness. 

On the contrary, by making withdrawals, i.e., breaking promises, lying and being disrespectful will only put me in the red in my relationships. What I must remember is that making a deposit needs to feel like one to the other person, if not, then it won't matter. In other words, I need to do things that are meaningful other person. I can do whatever I feel is meaningful, but if they don't see it as such, the relationship won't grow. 


For my Spirit- I want to contribute more to my community, causes I believe in and to our beautiful planet. Getting outside of myself and thinking about doing things for the greater good of others (in the present and future), the environment and humanity is descriptive of this mission I have to make this world a better place; this is why I am an activist. 

By fighting for social justice, speaking up and defending the oppressed or absent, using less resources and by even eating a plant-based (vegan) diet, I believe I am being the change I wish to see in the world. Doing simple little things as signing a petition, helping translate a message into Spanish or to even recycling, reducing and reusing is considered keeping my spirit fit, in my book.  

It is always a process to become the best self one can be. Life is too short, so I try to be my best because if I die tomorrow, I want people to remember me as a loving and kind woman who always tried to be the best she could be. 

So for the next 3 months until 2012 is over I am determined to continue making positive modifications to all areas of my life. I am so excited what this season will bring in store for me and the people I love! 






Love, Joy, Peace and Health,

Bea