Find Your Peace of Mind

At the top of the Ross-Aid Stadium stairs at Purdue University with some Krishna Das pandora, is where I found my zen state this lovely morning. 🙂

It doesn’t matter where, and it really doesn’t matter for how long.  Just give yourself some time in the day to breathe and reset.  Balance out the power and demand of your busy lifestyle. Find a place to set an intention for yourself and for the day. Today I decide to be happy where I am, and to be excellent ★ Give yourself credit for all that you are and all that you do ♥ Namaste

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Drop It Like A Squat

Oh ya.  100 squats a day.  Barbell squats are amazing for toning the largest muscle groups: quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes.  Get low, get low get low get low get low!! Now DROP DROP DROP DROP DROP IT TO THE FLOOR YO DROP IT TO THE FLOOR YO. Drop it like a squat ❤

See how many you can do in a minute, take a 10 second break, and try another minute on for size.  Do 3 minutes worth with 10 second breaks in-between.  LET’S GOO!

Like Your Bananas Hard? Or Soft?

Contrary to what you might think, soft is the way to go.  To get all of the readily available energy from the carbohydrates mixed with insanely amazing amounts of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, your banana should be spotted like a cheetah, slightly soft, and taste sweetly delicious.  You peel me?

To name a few benefits, bananas, when ripe:

• Are high in potassium and carbohydrates, perfect pre- and post-workout
• Act as a prebiotic- stimulating growth of friendly bacteria in the bowel
• Help overcome depression due to high levels of the essential amino acid tryptophan, which is converted into serotonin- the happy-mood neurotransmitter in the brain
• Have the natural sugars to replenish glycogen stores, preventing muscle cramps and have a speedy recovery from a work out
• Are a natural antacid, providing relief from acid reflux, heartburn, and GERD
• Have been shown to improve mood and reduce PMS symptoms

It’s not as easy to stash in your drink carrier, but according to Women’s Health Magazine, a banana is effective workout fuel.  “Researchers had cyclists either drink a cup of a sports drink or eat half a banana and a cup of water every 15 minutes during a 46-mile ride.  Both groups finished in the same amount of time and had about the same levels of glucose (an energy source).  Study authors say bananas seem to have a near-perfect natural mix of carbohydrates, potassium, vitamins, and antioxidants.”

Scared of the sweet simplicity of their sugary carbohydrates? Don’t be.  Carbohydrates are the main source of energy among the three macronutrients: carbohydrates, fat, and protein.  The Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges (AMDR) for adults states that carbohydrates should be 45-65% of total calories, fat should be 20-35% and protein should be only 10-35%.  All of the macronutrients (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) may be used as energy, but the body uses carbohydrates the most easily and quickly.  Your body was made to burn carbs as fuel!  It would much rather burn sugars than have the burden of converting fatty acids and proteins into sugary energy.  Don’t make it more difficult for your body than it has to be.  At 4 calories per gram, carbohydrates are not the culprits of weight gain; they should not be cut out of the diet to lose weight.  Overall energy balance of calories in and calories expended are what lead to weight loss and weight gain.

There are so many fun ways to handle your banana:

Banana Milk

• Bananas
• Chilled Water

Blend.

This is a staple for my favorite breakfast here at kappa:

Orange Banana Cream Cereal

• 2 oranges chopped
• 1 apple chopped
• Banana Milk

Place chopped oranges and apple in bowl and pour banana milk over.  Enjoy in good health!  Feel free to use any kind of fruit you can get your hands on!

Banana Ice Cream

• 6-8 ripe bananas, peeled, broken up into thirds or quarters, and frozen for at least 7 hours (until solid)

Process with S blade in food processor until creamy.  This is delicious! Add other fresh fruits like mango, blueberry, or even try adding some walnuts or cinnamon!  Simply divine.

The carbohydrates I justify being scared of?

The refined ones that get nutrients enriched back into them, like white rice or Lucky Charms.  Whole-grain foods are made from the entire grain kernel: the fiber-rich bran and germ, and the endosperm.  The bran and the germ are sources of iron, magnesium, selenium, B vitamins, and fiber.  Refined grains contain mostly just the endosperm.  Remember: Whole foods first for good nutrition.  Not supplements, fortified, or enriched refined and processed foods. So at the line at Chipotle, don’t be an idiot.  Get the brown rice.

Eating more nutrient dense foods should be a goal for everybody.  No comprehendo? Eat an apple instead of apple pie, or lean ham instead of bacon.  Less empty calories from added refined sugars and saturated fats.  All the calories from fresh fruits and vegetables…and bananas…are full of antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, fiber, the benefits are endless.  From the potassium and party in your tummy, to peace of mind and peace on Earth.  Don’t have a cow, go bananas!

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Find Your Strength, and Don’t Lose It

Tomorrow is the first day of classes.  Another battle between confidence and conforming.  Do you have the confidence to stay true to your values?  This is my prayer; this is how I stay true to mine.

To my healthy parents

To preventing and reversing disease

To vegetarian cultures around the world

To the Organic Garden

To FullyRaw Kristina

To Christine Lucas and Holistic Health Counselors

To Good Karma Café

To Revitalive Cafe

To my energy and health

To the planet

To the animals

To people healing themselves

To natural beauty

To thriving not surviving

To natural health

To being free of medication

To my father’s patients who could have prevented their diseases

To self sufficiency

To being spiritually healthy

To natural confidence and self-assurance

To focus and drive

To “you are what you eat”

To staying true to yourself

To the Raw Vegan hype in California

To Pure Food and Wine

To natural nutrients

To our future

To the fact that I feel amazing – I know I am healthy!

Dumbing down the population is not against the law.  I study adequate intakes and recommended daily allowances and I do not follow them, yet I feel healthy and happy.  I choose to take the potential risk of suboptimal nutrition to stay true to my values as an individual.

I feel organized and productive. I eliminate negative beliefs and attitudes from my consciousness.  I clear out all junk foods from my cupboard and I eat only items that come from nature.  I love my body and take excellent care of it.  I am healthy, beautiful, and filled with energy.

Shine Like The SUN

Training with the elite staff of the Cordova Recreational Center today has got me beyond inspired!  Now it’s your turn:Character

1. Vince Lombardi – Character is formed by a series of decisions / choices made – seeking truth, finding and keeping faith, practicing humility, and showing respect for others are all important.
2. John Wooden – Character – doing the right thing. The habits of our daily behavior that reveal who and what we are. We are what we repeatedly do.

Confidence

1. John Wooden – You must earn the right to be confident, the kind of confidence that comes from proper preparation. It is earned not given – self-belief is the knowledge that your preparation is complete, that you have done all things possible to ready yourself and your organization for the competition or whatever form it arrives.
2. Bill Walsh – Leadership is expertise. People will follow a person who organizes and manages others, because he or she has credibility and expertise – a knowledge of the profession – and demonstrates an understanding of human nature.

Commitment

1. Vince Lombardi – Be completely committed – commitment is one of the most important characteristics of your character. Give 100% effort, 100% of the time. When leaders go the extra mile, their troops will follow.
2. John Wooden – A leader must be very astute in using time productively and teaching those in the organization to do the same. You will notice that successful leaders do not disrespect time. “Be on time.” Being late shows disrespect (for time). Don’t think you can make up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, I want you to do it right now.

Visionary

1. Walt Disney – There are two words that make operations work around here… quality and pride. If you design, build, operate, and maintain quality, people will take pride in what they do – great deal of importance is seeing the “big picture” or coming up with the grand idea; seldom understood is the fact that details give the big picture depth.
2. John Wooden – Competitive greatness exists in the journey and culminates in the tough competitive fight in which you and your organization are at your best because you’ve prepared to the full extent of your abilities. Success is peace of mind that a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best you are capable of becoming.

Belief

1. Colin Powell – A good leader demonstrates a gung-ho attitude that says “we change things here, we can achieve awesome results, we can be the best!”
2. John Wooden – There are no small opportunities. Every opportunity is big. Each member of your team has the potential for personal greatness; the leader’s job is to help them achieve it – personal greatness is measured against one’s own potential, not that of someone else; likewise, a team’s greatness is measured against itself and no other – “ give me the best you’ve got, that’s all I ask for.

Inspiring

1. Bill Walsh – You must be able to inspire and motivate through teaching people how to execute their jobs at the highest level. You must care about people and help those people care about one another and the team’s goals. And you must never second-guess yourself on decisions you make with integrity, intelligence, and a team-first attitude.
2. Vince Lombardi – Chase perfection – a good leader encourages his team to reach beyond what they believe is possible. Leaders must choose how their organization will pursue excellence. Excellence is a byproduct of striving for perfection.

Trusting

1. Colin Powell – Trust comes from exhibiting many key traits, including competence, character, courage, loyalty, confidence, selflessness, sacrifice, and empathy.
2. Walt Disney – To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; and to be credible, we must be truthful.

Loyalty

1. John Wooden – You must have the courage to be loyal to those you lead – loyalty to yourself – your standards, your system, your values – give loyalty and loyalty will be returned in abundance.
2. Vince Lombardi – Teams depend on an extraordinary cohesiveness. Encouraging all members of an organization to support and aid other members in the pursuit of shared goals will strengthen this bond.

Detail-Oriented and Organized

1. Bill Walsh – Be detail-oriented – organizational excellence evolves from the perfection of details relevant to performance and production. Address all aspects of your teams efforts to prepare mentally, physically, fundamentally, and strategically as thorough a manner as humanly possible.
2. John Wooden – Little things make big things happen. Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details. High performance is achieved only through the identification and perfection of small but relevant details.

Problem Solver

1. Colin Powell – Take care to tell people that sharing a problem won’t be seen as a weakness or failure, but as a sign of mutual confidence.
2. Colin Powell – Problem-solving is the core of leadership – practice, action-oriented, problem-solving rely on other people’s brains and initiatives, as well as their own, they understand that part of good leadership is the ability to employ the most effective tool for the situation at hand.

Elevated Lunge Press

What works your glutes, core, shoulders.. all your muscles from your toes to your finger tips?One of my favorites^ The elevated lunge press.

Try 2 sets of 30 each leg, or until failure on each leg to really build muscle. Then try to do more next time 🙂

Safety Tip:  Be sure to really engage your core for balance and lower straight down from your hips, not foreword over your toes.  Try not to let your knee go past your toe.  Get low enough to really feel your booty though 🙂

Options: On the lower lunge, try twisting to really work your core!  This exercise can be done using your bed, the stairs, a bench, a curb, you name it!  This is actually the first time I did it in a gym setting 😉 !

Pale Pasta

Moving into Kappa, realizing they threw away all of the belongings I left there, including my blender, food processor, strainer, knifes, bowls, and everything in the kitchenette, I was still able to make a simply divine dish 😛Luckily I brought the spiralizer home and back 🙂 so that’s all you’d need! Oh, and a plastic knife 😉 All ingredients are fresh, local, organic, non-GMO from my front yard (that I picked yesterday morning before my venture to IN), Sunspot <3, and Payless!  Necessity is the mother of invention!  Just put something together with what looked good that I could find:

Serves One:

• 2 zucchinis, spiralized
• 2 ears of corn, de-corned
• 1 fun organic eggplant, chopped
• 1 sweetest organic apple ever, chopped
• 2-4 leaves of kale, ripped up
• 4-7 leaves of mint, ripped up
• 1 juicy orange, squeezed!

mush together with clean hands and savor the divine simplicity of your creation!

                      

Food Combining

Bth. Bttthhhthh.

Haha, no that wasn’t me who farted. Besides inhaling your food like a mad man when your starving, gas is created from the carbon dioxide of fermenting foods.  Your digestive tract is a long journey for your food, beginning with your chompers in your kisser, and ending with your butt hole in your behind.  Combing what foods you eat correctly is important for proper digestion, minimizing cramping, gas, bloating, and any other indigestion symptoms.  Melons get digested the quickest, they can go through in like what, 15 minutes!?  So say you ate a nice chipotle bowl with brown rice and black beans and had some honey dew for dessert.  Those starches and proteins will take like 4 hours to digest, and the honey dew will be waiting behind, fermenting, creating discomfort and bloat.

My Advice: eat juicy fruits like melon, oranges, grapes, etc. for breakfast.  They are perfect hydration and fuel to wake you up and get you going for a beautiful day here on Earth ❤ As your day goes on, eat heavier.  Optimally, I save the fats and proteins for the last meal.

The Hippocrates Approach to Optimum Health suggests:

In order to successfully practice food combining, it is necessary to understand which foods belong in each of the groups listed.  The following list will explain in detail the foods belonging to starch, proteins, sweet fruits, starchy vegetables, and acid fruits.

Protein foods; which digest in four hours include: nuts and seeds

Starch foods; which digest in three hours include: potatoes, corn, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips, bean (lima), beets, carrots, Hubbard squash, peas, pumpkin and yams, sprouted grains such as amaranth, millet, quinoa, rye, and teff, sprouted legumes such as chickpeas, lentils, and peas

Low Starch Vegetables; which digest in two and a half hours include:

• Leafy greens: arugula, asparagus, broccoli, brussel sprouts, romaine lettuce, cabbage (all varieties), cauliflower, celery, Swiss chard, collard greens, kale, mustard greens, scallions, spinach, watercress
• Fruit vegetables: cucumber, red bell pepper, summer squash, zucchini
• Low starch root vegetables: beets, burdock, carrots, parsnips, radishes, turnips
• Sprouted greens: alfalfa, arugula, buckwheat, cabbage, clover, garlic, kale, mustard, radish

Fruits; which digest on an average in two hours except for melon which is 15 minutes!

• Sweet fruits: banana, date, fig, prune, raisins, dried fruit, mango, persimmons, and papaya
• Sub Acid Fruits: sweet apples, apricot, blackberry, cherries, nectarine, peach, pear, plum, and raspberry
• Acid Fruits: grapefruit, guava, kumquat, lemon, lime, orange, pineapple, pomegranate, sour apples, sour grapes, strawberry, tangerine, and tomatoes

Dr. Herbert M Shelton’s principles of food combining:

• Do not combine starch foods and acids at the same meal
• Do not combine proteins and carbohydrates at the same meal
• Do not combine acids and proteins at the same meal
• Do not combine fats and proteins at the same meal
• Do not combine sweet fruits and proteins at the same meal
• Always eat melons alone

Avocados, onion, and garlic are the only exception to the fruit/vegetable guideline.  They are easily combined with either fruits or vegetables, making them a truly versatile and important food.

Running Raw

Out of breath?
Never!  I am honestly amazed at my calm slow breathing while running these days!  I ran the Beverly Homecoming 5K race at Lynch Park on August 1, 2013: did my first mile in 6:23 and finished with a time of 22:22.  I felt fine and went hard rock climbing right after!  Maybe I didn’t push myself hard enough? I would certainly not consider myself a runner… and I came in 6th out of the 33 girls in my age group!  All of the oxygenating raw nutrients that I consume must make it a lot easier for me to perform at my peak!  Can’t wait for my next 5K!