Imagine for a moment if you will, a child running, in bare feet across the grass giggling, and trying to catch a balloon which continues to slip out of his or her tiny hands.

Finally able to catch it they stop, and a feeling of utter joy and happiness overcomes them.

Happiness is such a beautiful feeling, but it seems that as we get older we become less aware of its power and how to cultivate it.

Who doesn’t want more happiness? Having more happiness makes us want to have even more happiness. The end result is certainly a great thing!

I heard a great line the other day;

“If your happy tell your face”.

When we are happy others feel it too. It is contagious just like when we all explode into fits of laughter. Isn’t it true that everything we are striving for in life can be boiled down to the pursuit of happiness?

I want to share some things you can implement into your life immediately to help you be happier.

H – Help others.

When we serve others it makes us feel so good. Performing a random act of kindness can often makes us feel better than the person we performed the act for. Aim to add more random acts of kindness into your life. You’ll likely get addicted pretty quick, and the effect it can have you on your day to day life is remarkable.

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
– Dalai Lama

 

A – Appreciate all in life.

Give thanks for everything, crawl into bed at night and ponder what your grateful for. You’ll go to bed and wake up on a positive note and you’ll carry the joy throughout your day.

P – Play an active role in your health choices.

Plan your meals. Plan your social life.

P – Participate in physical activity.

There is nothing like a good work out to make us feel strong, energetic, confident and happy. Some sort of movement and exercise every day is ideal! We were born to move.

Y – Why…

Why would you want to be happy anyway besides the obvious? Happiness lowers your risk of illness, heart disease, cortisol levels and heart rate. Energetically happy people are also drawn towards you which builds on your own happiness. Happy people are more likely to live longer, healthier lives.

Food for thought:

You can be right or you can be happy.

Ships don’t have to come in, you have to swim to them.

Happiness is something you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.

 

What makes you happy and grateful? Use the comments below!

I’ve been making this Caesar Salad for years! I’ve had a lot of fun entering it in friendly competitions with friends and family, and it has become a staple at our big family get togethers. I love this recipe for so many reasons; it’s easy to make, full of health, tastes fresh, and you can make a batch of it and use it for up to a week.

This dressing recipe should feed 10-15 people.

What You’ll need:

• One whole bunch of parsley, ideally organic
• 3 tbsp fresh Parmesan Cheese
• 1 whole cracked egg
• 2 tbsp Red Wine Vinegar
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
• Juice of 1 whole lemon
• 1 can of Anchovies, including the oil with it
• Fresh garlic 2 to 5 cloves
• 3/4 Cup of Olive Oil
• Salt and Pepper to taste

When making the salad, mix the dressing with cut up Romaine Lettuce, and feel free to add croutons. You can keep the dressing in an air-tight container for up to a week. Happy eating!

 

As a Nutritionist I I have heard it all. I cannot lose weight, I have tried everything, I don’t understand this, I eat healthy, I exercise a lot and now I just feel depressed. You are not alone.

We live in a world where burger is the King and Dairy is the Queen where the five new food groups dress our tables. Is it any wonder why people are having a hard time losing weight?

In this article I would like to explore Three Real Reasons why people cannot lose weight.

 

The Four types of fat and the problem one

Metabolic Syndrome and the solution

How does insulin play a role?

 

The Four types of Fat and the Problem one

There is fat and then there is fat. We have basically four types of fat in the body. Brown fat, White fat, subcutaneous fat and Visceral fat (the one that makes it difficult to lose weight). Brown fat is the natural fat babies have plenty of to help keep them warm. If you jumped into a lake and got chilled your brown fat will be called on to keep you warm.

White fat stores energy and produces vital hormones, think of it as a necessary and needed part of us! Subcutaneous fat is the one we dread as it the fat we can grab around our mid sections and drives a lot of people crazy. This is due to us simply eating too much of the wrong food than our body can utilize, so it has to go somewhere. The most harmful fat is visceral fat.

Visceral fat runs deep and wraps around your organs and spells trouble increasing your chance of developing metabolic syndrome and affects your hormones.  This fat is stored there because of what we are eating, and low exercise levels.

This is the fat that can be managed well with a unique program for you taking in consideration all of your blood values.

 

Metabolic Syndrome and the Solution

Most people believe that counting calories is the answer but it does not cover the full story.  I never counted a calorie in my whole life but I watched plenty of others attempt it. We have to look at the whole person. Our waist size is the indicator of Metabolic Syndrome. If you are female and your waist size is greater than 35 inches and 40 inches for a male you are at a risk of developing Metabolic Syndrome which often leads to heart disease, blood lipid disorders, high cholesterol and diabetes. The problem here is that many of these people have too much of the visceral fat, and the hormone insulin is behind it all. This also raises our CRP levels which stand for C-Reactive Protein –  a protein that increases in response to inflammation. Recent evidence has suggested that our CRP levels are useful in predicting heart attacks and strokes!

 

Does Insulin have anything to do with it??

Insulin is a fat storage hormone. Eating often and snacking between meals will keep your levels of insulin constantly elevated. This encourages your body to make more fat as opposed to building muscle mass. Also, a consistently elevated level of insulin can block the production of many hormones that protect the body from inflammation and aging.

I cannot tell you how many people still believe it is best to have 5 or 6 small meals a day… Science is always advancing. Waiting between 5 to 7 hours between meals allows insulin levels to drop very low so that fat can be burned easily. Drinking only water between meals is the best thing you can do. Starting each meal with 2 bites of protein will have a long lasting effect on insulin. When your stomach receives protein first your pancreas will secrete the hormone glucagon which is an antagonist of insulin and blocks insulin production. This lowers insulin levels, stimulates fat burning and prevents hunger.

Remember food can burn like straw or coal…. A diet with great quality protein, the rights fats and high fibre is step one. Avoiding the five new food groups is a great step two. Fast, frozen, fried junk and processed are typically foods low in fibre, water, protein and miners all of which makes our body create more insulin. The fat storage hormone.

Here’s a tip, if you have a morning smoothie or yogurt, add some cinnamon to it! Cinnamon has been shown to improve our insulin sensitivity, not to mention it tastes great!

So get started!

In conclusion seeing a Nutritionist and taking a good hard look at your diet and lifestyle can help you figure out if you have Metabolic syndrome, lower your visceral fat, reduce the CRP levels and create a customized plan for you based on your personal blood values, so that you can finally shed those unwanted pounds and zip to your life, increase your  energy and get back into all of those beautiful clothes sitting in your closet!

As a Nutritionist, I like to explain to my clients how we can compare our bodies to a house. In your house, there are rooms and each room has its own function. Just like each organ and system in our bodies. In order to keep the house clean and fresh many of us hire professional cleaners.

Cleansing our bodies is much the same to having a house professionally cleaned. A good cleaning professional needs to have an understanding of the property, the homeowner’s unique preferences and tastes, and what products we can and can’t use on certain areas of the house. It’s all about knowing our house and finding out what will give us the best results.

While standing in the aisle at a local Health Food store, I overheard two women speaking about doing a cleanse. They scanned the shelves, seeming confused as to what they were really looking at, and wondering what all the differences were. The deciding factor on what to buy? Price. They picked the cheapest product, seemed happy with their product and went to the cashier. If only it were that easy!

Often, people make purchases based on what their close friends or someone they trust has told them, or we go with something that is familiar to us, perhaps because we’ve seen the brand in a commercial or an ad in a magazine.

With cleansing, people automatically assume they are doing their body a favour. However, often the opposite is the case. The users complain about headaches, nausea, diarrhea and a whole list of other un-fun symptoms.

We need to be careful and look at a few key factors when choosing the right cleanse for our body. If you buy a cleanse that claims to  detox the liver, kidneys, pancreas, etc… then you are most likely going to stir up the pot! First and foremost, you need to ensure that the bowel is strong and in good working order so that the toxins you stirred up from cleansing can be removed. Think about it this way; what is the first thing you remove when cleaning your house? The “garbage” – well it is the same with cleansing, you need to first get rid of all the garbage and clear out our bowels.

So if you do want to cleanse, do some research on what you’re putting into your body. Starting off slowly is key and concentrating on cleaning our body inside and out with proper steps is critical.

Happy Spring Cleaning!

Three young men walked out of a convenience store the other day, all drinking a soft drink and eating a bag of chips. Something really struck me about them. At first, I assumed this group of youth were well into their twenties, but I overheard them discussing their current highschool classes.

Ever notice that people of the same age as you look much older than you or much younger? Why is that? How is that?

I recently heard an interview on the radio titled “How to Live to Be 100,” the concepts stuck with me and I decided to do some more research. There is plenty of evidence on the internet discussing some of the world’s cultures with the longest life expectancies, the commonalities boil down to three major and tremendously important aspects.

1. Their diets are high in vegetables and involve locally grown foods
2. They move their bodies
3. They’re socially engaged and community driven people

Let’s take a minute to break these down.

Eating Your Vegetables

What is it about vegetables? What is so surprising to me today is how few vegetables people eat.

They are loaded with fiber, vitamins and minerals, phytonutrients, and they make you feel good. Most of them grow towards the sunshine, giving you abundant energy as they are alive – a bagel is not alive. The best part is they contain antioxidants, protecting your cells from oxidative stress (which can harm our DNA and destabilise the cells in our body) and ultimately can slow the aging process down. Eating spinach, for example, has been shown to prevent aggressive stages of prostate cancer in men, along with having anti-inflammatory properties and contributing to our bone health.

In our evolutionary terms, sugars were a treat and rare to come across. We’re programmed to gorge as much sugar as possible due to the high calories. This goes back to our hunter gatherer years when calories were hard to come by, so if we came across a fig tree, we’d eat it up! The problem today is that these sugars are readily available to us everywhere, we’re simply programmed to consume more of them then we can handle.

The Okinawans of Japan have some of longest life expectancies in the world, and are five times more likely to reach 100 years of age than the rest of the country. A long time researcher of the diet of the Okinawans, and co-author of The Okinawan Program, Dr. Craig Wilcox indicates that “The Okinawans have a low risk of arteriosclerosis and stomach cancer, a very low risk of hormone-dependent cancers, such as breast and prostate cancer. They eat three servings of fish a week, on average … plenty of whole grains, vegetables and soy products too, more tofu and more konbu seaweed than anyone else in the world, as well as squid and octopus, which are rich in taurine – that could lower cholesterol and blood pressure.”

How much do we need? Five to seven servings of vegetables a day will go a very long way. While that may sound like a lot, it is easy to do once you get into the habit of it. Plus the radical changes in your energy will keep you coming back for more. 1 cup is a serving. To make this simple, have a large salad with your lunch and have 2 or 3 more at dinner. I travel a lot and I can assure you that vegetables are low on people’s radar in our western world.

Get Your Body Moving

The inhabitants of the towns with the longest life expectancies all share the trait that they’re always moving. They live low stress lives, are relaxed, and are always using their bodies. Whether it’s walking across the town to their friends or relatives, doing light physical chores, or moving for work, they’re all moving their muscles.

We are meant to move, all of the time. Would you agree with me that many people sit in their cars from 1 to 3 hours a day and then sit at their desk for 8 hours? All this sitting affects our organs, hormones, lymphatic system and slows down our digestion. We have only recently as a species began to live sedentary lives, and only now are we seeing the damage it can cause.

Get a pedometer and walk a minimum of 10,000 steps a day. We are so used to jumping in the car, taking the elevator when we can walk. If you don’t move it you lose it. I am a big believer in working out every day! The best part is I feel amazing, and so can you. Ask yourself; how do you feel from one to ten each day?

Community is Key

One trait that is evident in all of the world’s longest living cultures is that they are community driven and social people. They cook and clean with their families and friends on a regular basis, they walk over and spend days with their peers, and they come together as a community when people are in need. Perhaps knowing that you have such a support system provides a backbone to your well-being.

All of us want to feel connected. To be able to love and be loved. To feel that we belong to have our finger on the pulse of life. To be engaged in our family lives and they be engaged in ours.

This doesn’t mean you need to go out and find more friends. It just means you can do everything in your power to seek the best out of the people you do have in your life. Feel grateful for their presence, cherish the moments you have with them and work to support them and you’ll in turn receive the same.

I spent many years running back and forth to a nursing home. Only to observe a lot of lonely people. My parents are currently 87 and 86 years old and as a family we stay engaged all the time. My father always asking about kids and grandkids and taking a proactive role to stay connected, and I’ve observed the vitality running through his heart and veins for years.

Take it Easy

Find ways to relax in your life. Sure your career may be important, but if you are stressing every day it may slowly be wearing you down. So many people in our culture work hard all day every day though their school years, jump right into stressful careers, and work even hard to try moving their way up the corporate ladder. They justify it by saying “one day this will all pay off and I’ll have the freedom to do what I want.”

Once we reach that point of supposed “freedom,” many of us find the stress has caused so many health problems and ailments that joy is a long ways away. Why not craft your life to feel gratitude and to enjoy every single moment we have on this planet from day one? Your health is vitally important. You can make simple changes to help yourself get the most out of this life.