NaturalCounselor Health and Wellness Blog For Women

Most of  people think that having cravings is a bad thing and that we have to do our best to get rid of them.

It’s not true!

Our cravings tell us that some brain chemicals are missing in our bodies. Having cravings is a unique way of our bodies communicate with us and a wonderful tool for finding which foods work best for us.

In general, we might have cravings if we:

• don’t drink enough water (dehydration is considered to be a mild hunger);
• are bored, stressed out, dissatisfied with our relationship, (emotional eating);
• eat too much sugar, salt, processed food;
• don’t eat enough seasonal foods;
• have hormonal changes;
• don’t eat some foods for a long period of time.

Tips to Beat Sugar and Chocolate Cravings

Whenever we have cravings, our body tries to tell us something, which means it’s time to learn how to listen to our body in order to understand its needs and imbalances.

• Feel like eating sweet foods?

It always means that your blood sugar is low and your body is asking for energy.

Try to eat more sweet potatoes, yams, winter squash, beets, carrots.

Whole foods such as grains, beans, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds will be very helpful because they contain complex carbohydrates – chains of three or more single sugar molecules linked together- and are digested slowly and steadily.

Studies show this helps control blood sugar, diabetes, and insulin levels. Because whole foods are rich in fiber, they can help with weight loss and detox of your body.

• Feel like eating chocolate?

Did you know that chocolate (dark, healthy for us) is very rich in Magnesium? People who crave chocolate may have a  low Magnesium level. They can also eat more whole foods, such as beans ((mung, aduki, black), whole grains (buckwheat, millet, barley), nuts and seeds (almonds, cashews, sesame seeds). A good source of Magnesium is spirulina, dried seaweeds, chlorella.

Learning how to listen to our bodies can be a rewarding process.

Let us be crave smart to feel and look fabulous, shall we?

Breathe, smile and be happy.

©Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health Coach and Nutrition Counselor

In February we celebrate National Wear Red Day to help promote prevention of heart disease in women.

Let us make healthier choices to beat heart disease. It can be prevented with the right lifestyle – the food you eat, the exercise you do, and the lifestyle you lead.

Let us celebrate Go Red for Women Day every day by adding red healthy heart-healing foods to our meals.

• Try to incorporate more beets into your diet to strengthen the heart, improve circulation, purify/detox the blood, lower blood pressure. Beet Salad Recipes
  
• Try to eat more pomegranates and water melons, and drink more tomato juice to lower your blood pressure. Watermelon and Strawberry ice Cream Recipe
  
• Try to eat half a red grapefruit before every meal, or at least in the morning, before breakfast to lower your cholesterol. Studies show that it helps to loose weight too. Grapefruit and Walnut Salad
  
• Try to add raw red onions (cook with white onions) to all your salads, spreads, side dishes, etc. to cut bad cholesterol. Roasted Vegetables Recipe
  
• Try to eat more red legumes, such as adzuki beans, red lentils and kidney beans rich in both tryptophan (to reduce stress and fight seasonal depression) and heart-healing fiber to reduce your blood pressure, detox your colon and give you more energy. Lentil Recipes
  
• Try to eat red (purple) cabbage to get rid of constipation, which ultimately canlower your blood pressure.
  
• Try to eat more red salmon and red apples (any color) -foods rich in Magnesium to reduce stress.
  

Let us be heart smart, shall we?

Breathe, smile and be happy.

© Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health and Nutrition Coach and Relationship Expert

To feel and look fabulous, we need learn to listen to our bodies.  Our body will always give us advance signals that something is wrong   But did you know that we can also talk to our body?  If you enjoyed our first visualization exercise – “Food Meditation as a Stress Relief Tool and Weight Loss Technique”, you will like this exercise.

I would like to share with you an excerpt from The Self-Healing Cook Book by Kristina Turner.

Here is a simple exercise you can use whenever your mind feels saturated with to much new information about dieting. It can help you tune-in to your own body’s innate wisdom…and help you get clear about  your next steps in self-healing.

• Begin by sitting quietly, in a comfortable chair.
• Relax…..let your body sink down into the chair…..giving your weight to the earth. Notice how you are breathing…and gradually let it get deeper and more even.
• Now, in your imagination, go inside your body.  Look for any place that feels uncomfortable, or in need of special, loving attention. Talk to it, like you would talk to a friend….

“Hi there, can I help? What do you need?”  Listen to an answer.

• Ask it to tell you or show you a picture of how it wants to feel.
• Now, get a sense of a particular food that would make your body feel both calm and energized.  Is there a new food it wants to try this week? Or a familiar food that would be especially vitalizing?
• When you have an answer, say thanks! Open your eyes, and decide how and when you want to cook your “healing food”.  Finally, savor it.  Just one food, eaten in a spirit of cooperating with your body’s intuitive needs, may be the most important first step to take towards gaining greater control of your health.

I hope you enjoyed this creative food visualization and meditation exercise and will share it with your friends a family.

Breathe, smile and be happy.

Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health, Nutrition and Relationship Expert

NaturalCounselor.com

The saying we are what we eat is more true than any of us realize.

What can some of your cause of headaches be?  To heal your headache you will need to find the headache trigger that originated it.  We all know hormonal headaches, menopause headaches, and menstrual headaches have headache triggers.  But do you know that your daily headaches may be caused by your food choices, or lack of of them.

But before trying home remedies for headaches based on food sensitivity to particular foods, make sure your are regularly drinking plenty of water -  simple dehydration can trigger headaches and migraines – drinking plenty of water is the most simple home headache remedy you can try.

But if drinking water does not help relieve your daily headaches, then you may want to see if you have a particular food sensitivity.  How many of you have had a sugar headache?  Well, your pulsating, throbbing, stabbing headaches may be caused by any of the below.

• - Alcohol, (especially red wine)
• - MSG=Monosodium glutamate =sodium glutamate = (hydrolyzed protein, glutamate, glutamic acid, sodium caseinate, calcium caseinate, yeast extract, autolyzed yeast, seasonings) sodium salt used as food preserver and flavor enhancer
• - Artificial sweeteners
• - Processed meats and fish
• - Caffeinated beverages
• - Dark chocolate (cocoa = caffeine content)
• - Cheese and other diary products
• - Nuts and Nut butters
• - Vinegars
• - Citrus fruits (sometimes bananas)
• - Dried fruits and sulfites
• - Onions
• - Sauerkraut
• - Lentils and beans

Every person is unique, so your food sensitivity triggered headache may be caused by a different food than you friend. You may need to eliminate all the foods above from your diet for a week and then add one by one before seeing any results. If your headaches and migraines are triggered by foods, you will eventually find the one (ones) that is making you miserable so that you can live life to its fullest again.

Related Articles:

Foods that Can Make Us Super Sick

Sugar Surprise – How Much Sugar Do You Think You Consume

Breathe, smile and be happy.

© Irina Wardas, HHC

Women’s Holistic Health, Nutrition and Relationship Expert