My advice...

I’ve learnt the hard way, that part of being healthy is acceptance!

Part of my recovery from Cancer took me on a journey of researching various diets and ways of living healthier. However, this journey although educational and insightful never led me to any real true definitive answers or solutions. What I found was that the uncertainty in the news, in the literature and research meant that I just needed to accept that some things just weren’t ever going to be ‘proven’ and that the most important thing for my health was to STOP and just give it a go. For me, I was wowed by the appealing and attractive pictures and videos from healthy food blogs and authors but completely and utterly overwhelmed by turning vegetarian and how to actually do it!?

If anyone reading this know’s how I am, you’ll know that for me at the time it was an all or nothing kind of approach….which looking back was the start of a quite stressful journey. I would most definitely NOT recommend doing any of the following…

Throwing away absolutely everything that contained sugar in (which meant everything)
Turning vegetarian/Vegan over-night (I illuminated dairy out of my diet pretty much over night too)
Implementing an alkaline based diet over-night
Never eating out because the food wasn’t organic or dairy-free

Most of this at the time was a desperate measure to heal my body, to regain control from my Cancer. I now know through my experiences that although doing all this did work for me at the time, it was a desperate measure and one which I would NOT recommend in anyway as a sustainable, healthy way of life. Despite the fact that I did reduce my recovery time after my thyroidectomy and radio-iodine ablation and I also gained a new lease of energy and cured my silent reflux and infected eczema….it came with costs.

A year on, my learning curve has been steep, I am no longer chasing which diet I want to follow, but now a true advocate of and ambassador of encouraging a GREEN and CLEAN, mainly wholefoods lifestyle. Here, I want to share with you what I have learnt, tips and ideas I have tried, what has worked for my family and importantly how we now sustain a healthy green and clean way of life.

I receive a lot of comments and spend most of my time talking about juicing and smoothies, so I thought here would be a good opportunity to discuss this further and go into a bit more detail and how as a family we approach juicing and making smoothies.

Should you go Organic?

Ok, so there is essentially an abundance of views and debates on going Organic. Over the year we have gone from sourcing locally produced fruit and vegetables, from the allotments, from sourcing our organic fruit and vegetables from the supermarkets, albeit the choice can be restrictive and now to sourcing our fruit and vegetables from Riverfood.

The advice I always advocate and stand by, is you can’t do it all.

If you consuming fruit and vegetables this surely is the most important thing, right?! In my opinion if this is all you can achieve, then this is great. There are ways though of adding in a little more organic…from the allotments, farmers markets are generally worth while and if you ask the question about ‘is it organic’ most farmers will advocate that although there farm isn’t soil association certified organic, they are as good as.

Another option for those that simply don;t have the time to search round farmers markets and source locally, supermarkets are now producing their own organic ranges. Again there is plethora of debate on organic at the supermarket addressing the real quality of their ‘organic’ labelling. However, again if this is all that you can do for you and your family then this is great again.

I wanted to take this opportunity to go into a little detail about the snacks I either make, prepare or buy my kids. There is a plethora of snacks that can be bought, albeit consistently high in sugar.