A Very Potent Love Potion
My Happy V-Day to you ~ Very Potent Love Raw Chocolate Potion Mayan Style.
(Psst... Recipe is at the end ;-)
Enjoy!
(Psst... Recipe is at the end ;-)
Enjoy!
Bring Joy and Peace Into the World this Holiday Season  Sugars are essential to life. We need glucose from whole food sources like fruit, whole grains, and starchy vegetables for vital body functions like fueling our brain cells. However, sugar in its refined and processed form, can cause us to feel down, gain weight and is harmful to the planet. During the holiday season, when we celebrate peace and joy - there is no better time than now to enjoy delicious alternatives to sugar that are good for you and the planet. Above: Julie's Healthy Raw Vegan Cheezecake with Chocolate Hemp Sauce  Free Radicals are molecules with unstable electrons. Whoaaaat? While this may sound scary to those who are allergic to science ~ hang in there! This is a fairly simple concept AND important one to understand. I promise :-)  Eating Seasonally for Wellness By consuming food that’s in season, it becomes healing for Mother Earth and for our bodies. In-season produce can often be sourced locally, thus helping to reduce our carbon footprint. Since it is available in abundance during its peak season, it is rich in nutrients and natural occurring flavours. Another advantage is, that it’s often less expensive or on sale :-) Seasonal foods also help provide the right type of fuel for our bodies to maintain balance, like grounding warming foods in the winter and lighter cooling foods in the summer. So what do our bodies need in the spring during the in-between time from the transition of cold to warm? ‘Tis the Season for Greens and Cleansing. YUM! In holistic health philosophies, like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, it is said that spring is when the snow melts and the grounds de-thaws, much like the fluids in our bodies as they undergo a similar process of movement for detoxification. Conveniently, Mother Nature provides us with an abundance of detoxifying foods in the spring to support our liver, one of our main detoxifying organs. Bitter foods (a taste our liver loves) such as dandelion, mustard greens and kale, are plentiful in the spring as well as other liver loving foods like asparagus, spinach, beets, radishes, spring onions and Swiss chard to name a few. Being Good to our Liver is well Worth It This Spring Our liver is responsible for hundreds of functions, including the neutralizing of toxins, like free-radicals, and the recycling of hormones. The liver, however, can only work so hard. When the liver gets overloaded with detoxification duties, toxins spill over from the liver into our blood and cause havoc in our body. Toxins can be anything that we ingest from processed foods, pesticides, additives, herbicides, pollutants, prescription drugs, alcohol and smoke, to even stress. The effects toxins have can result to symptoms of lethargy, low immunity, acne, premature aging and more. Liver duties, like recycling hormones, get put on hold because detoxification is priority, and as a result our hormones fall out of balance. Hormones are responsible for regulating many systems in our body including our metabolism (aka our weight), sexual vitality, mood, digestion and more. When we are unable to recycle hormones we can experience a wide range of symptoms like PMS, difficulty losing weight (this is very common), mood swings and more. A toxic liver means it is more difficult to ignite our GLOW inside and out.  julie@loveoffood.ca ~ Find Julie Beyer's For the Love of Food on Facebook and Twitter for regular tips on healthy eating, nutrition, recipes and more.  The Sunshine Vitamin: A Key to Life Vitamin D is is more than just vitamin. This vitamin created by our skin when exposed to sunshine is also a pleiotripic (=multiple effects), repair & maintenance steroid based hormone. Traditionally, vitamin D has been known to help your body absorb and calcium and allows this mineral to build up in your bones. Recent studies are now finding that the sunshine vitamin does much much more: vitamin D regulates and activates over 2,000 genes in your body!!  Potent Love Potion: An Ode to the Mayans A Food Worthy of the God or Goddess In You Cacao originates from Central America and has been consumed as medicine and for spiritual purposes for centuries by the indigenous people of the area. Traces of Theobromine, an alkaloid found in raw cacao that gives this blissful substance it's superfood quality, have been found in bowls dating as far back as 1900 -1500 BC in Chiapas Mexico. The Greek prefix, "Theo" refers to the "study of God" and "Bromine" originates from the Greek word "broma". According to my archeologist friend Jay, author of the blog Not the Discovery Channel, who loves research more than anyone I have met and has taken on to researching food topics for me ;-), broma means "oats". But I prefer, the Natural News' article translation of broma: "food". Because this means that, theobromine, can translate to Food of the Gods, instead of Oats of the Gods. Actually...come to think of it, I like the idea that the divine equivalent of morning oatmeal would be chocolate ;-)  Life's too short to count calories! Have you ever started eating a bag of potato chips or a box of cookies and not been able to stop eating? And still felt hungry afterward? Even though you were physically full, you still felt hungry. So why would you feel hungry when you are full? | Julie Beyer's
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