Adding more fruit to my life.

I started incorporating more fruit into my diet a few weeks ago. I was not used to eating mostly fruit so as a filler I would grab a raw bar or two to keep me full.  Thunderbird makes a very tasty bar!

Then at night I was enjoying a “Raw Till 4” high carb dinner that consisted of a large raw salad, (Hippocrates) soup and rice pasta with no salt or oil tomato sauce. I am using Raw till 4 to hopefully transition into a more raw diet.

I started realizing with the nifty “My Fitness Pal” App, that I needed to make sure get more calories in, so I upped the fruit count. I realized that my best bet for getting in easy calories was bananas & dates in smoothie form. A typical smoothie that I will make consists of 4 bananas and 10 dates blended with coconut water which = 1105 calories! Gets my belly full and keeps me totally satisfied until my next meal of fruit.

Banana Mylk-shake

3 frozen bananas

1 ripe banana

8 oz. coconut water

pinch of vanilla bean

10 dates

BLEND!

Another winner is banana nice cream for breakfast!  Frozen bananas blended with carob powder and a little water. Topped with chunks of dates.

I began introducing more and more fruits and less raw bars. I always keep my meals mono-fruit meals because its much easier to digest. I tend to graze all day rather then eat 3 seperate large meals. For example, I will have a melon breakfast, a few hours later snack on a few apricots, then an hour later graze on a bag of grapes, then wait a few hours until eating berries or dates.

A good rule of thumb: Melons should strictly be eaten alone and away from other foods (or with other melons) because they digest so quickly. Proper food combining is key!

After a few days of adjusting with high fruits, I started incorporating more melon and more black/red grapes. These fruits, along with berries and lemons are super astringent and really good lymph pullers. The whole basis behind the healing detox I am doing is to clear and move stagnant lymph/inflammation/acidosis. Fruit is what the body utilizes as it’s fuel to heal.

I am loving organic grapes!

Smoothies really help with smashing in lots of calories and fruit into one sitting. Again, keeping it more simple seems to be better for my digestion. It keeps the gut from working overtime when there are only a few items to sift through. My other favorite smoothie right now is Datorade. It tastes like liquid caramel. So Yummy!

DATORADE

10-20 dates, soaked

water that you soaked dates in

1 liter water

*optional: add banana, cinnamon, mint, carob or vanilla bean.

I added frozen strawberries above!

BLEND

You can even mix in frozen blueberries – my favorite are the frozen wild blueberries at Trader Joe’s!!

For dinner I love to eat soups. This is buckwheat noodles in a miso broth with bok choy and pickled ginger.

My favorite Lemony Lentil Soup. This time I didn’t add lentils and instead upped the vegetable content.

This pre-made raw sushi (jicama replaces rice) is AMAZING. I need to go buy my own sushi making kit so I can replicate this at home.

…and sometimes you just need the real thing. My honey and I LOVE our sushi date nights. My favorite is avocado, cucumber and mango roll!

Beyond Sushi in NYC has some of the best damn Vegan sushi you will ever eat. I salivate thinking about it.

Their salads are out of this world too! Those tube things are sauces. Each roll comes with its signature sauce or you can mix and match. The sauces really make the meal!

I have a ton of new raw dishes that I have been preparing and I will share more of those with you soon. The more I get into this detox, the more I want to eat raw foods. I love to indulge at times though, so I’m sure you will see some rice and soups thrown into the mix every now and then. 

Be back soon with yummy recipes! 

Vegan Mac & Cheezy Sauce

Vegan Mac & Cheezy Sauce

~dairy free, gluten free, salt-free, oil free~

This was pretty darn amazing for whipping it together on a whim. I never liked the end result of just cashew cheeze sauce over pasta so I thought it would be great to mix cauliflower puree into it, to thicken it up a bit and get in more nutritional content while I was at it. There’s so many things you can do with this recipe to spice it up. Use it as a base and make it your own!

CAULIFLOWER PUREE:

One small head of cauliflower (or approximately 2 cups)

1/4 cup vegetable broth

crank of pepper

1 teaspoon garlic powder

CASHEW CHEEZE

2 cups of soaked cashews (raw cashews soaked for 8 hours)

2 Tablespoon of lemon juice

2 tablespoons of coconut vinegar

A good crank of black pepper

1 tablespoon of nutritional yeast

1 tablespoon of miso (I used South River Hearty Brown Rice Miso)

1 teaspoon of garlic powder

1/4 cup coconut water

*optional – your favorite herbs-

I used:

2 sprigs of Rosemary

20 basil leaves

One box of your favorite pasta (or zoodles)

DIRECTIONS:

1.Start by steaming your cauliflower until fork tender.

2. Pulse or blend the steamed cauliflower with the garlic, pepper, and broth. You can add more broth if needed to get the consistency of mashed potatoes.

3. Next, blend (I used a Vitamix to get a creamy, smooth texture) all the Cashew Cheeze ingredients. Again, you can add more coconut water to get the creamy consistency you need. Season to taste.

4. Add in the pureed cauliflower into the cashew cheese and blend until incorporated.

ASSEMBLE:

Cook pasta according to the box. In a pot on medium heat, add cashew cheeze and hot pasta. It tends to thicken up easily, so you can add more vegetable broth or water to thin it out a bit. Stir until warm and serve hot!

NOTES: You can add salt if you like. (I am avoiding salt so thats why I omitted it) You could make a Cajun flavored sauce by using Cajun spice instead of fresh herbs or Mexican by adding cumin and hot pepper. Go italian and add tomatoes and broccoli. The options are endless! This recipe made just about 3 cups of sauce so you will definitely have some leftover for more pasta or a casserole. Or this can easily be halved!

My Current Protocol

Since last post, I have gone through quite a lot. With a lot of thought and research, I have decided to stop my antibiotics. I find that its counter-intuitve to be on toxic prescriptions while trying to cleanse. They didn’t seem to be helping anyways. I just don’t feel right taking pharmaceuticals! They were causing extreme nausea, stomach discomfort, swollen feet, sun sensitivity, fatigue, loss of appetite. Going through all this makes me even more a firm believer in natural healing all the way!!

In the 3.5 months I was taking antibiotics and lots of supplement, I’ve had a lot of die-off symptom.  It has been a bumpy roller coaster ride for sure. As you kill parasites and bacteria, they let off toxins into the blood which is the reason you feel so sick during treatment.  The body can only eliminate toxins at a certain pace so it is helpful to assist the body in releasing them faster.  There were a lot of methods I was using successfully to detox. I was detoxing through epsom salt detox baths, infrared sauna sessions to sweat out toxins & heavy metals, rebounding to oxygenate the blood and move the lymphatic system, zapping for parasite killing, drinking a lot of lemon water, taking milk thistle to assist liver, taking immune boosting supplements, turmeric, olive leaf, transfer factors, did a parasite cleanse, dry-brushing each day for lymphatic flow, & trying to sleep a lot.

As far as my diet goes, it has changed a few times. I was doing a strict Candida diet with no fruit, no sugar, no carbs/starches but that was so restrictive. I started craving eggs and more meat so I honored my cravings and introduced more of those things in. I started to get my energy back but it was killing my digestion. My stomach was blowing up like a balloon each night!  I was continuously hungry and felt it wasn’t helping my Candida or my immune system. Then I came across information about the renowned Dr. Robert Morse. If you haven’t heard of him, I advise you read up! Besides his book, he also has a You Tube channel with tons of informational videos. His view in a nutshell, is that dis-ease does not exist. It is simply a clogged lymph system. ANY illness can be healed through cleaning up the lymphatic system, supporting organ/glandular weakness with herbs and eating a diet of high fruit to allow the body to heal itself. He makes so much sense to me and he has helped to heal many, many patient’s at his Florida Clinic. The detox isn’t easy at first, but neither is chronic disease. I am at my wits end to feel better and think this could be my answer. I can positively say that within one week of light detoxing, I am seeing fantastic results already!!! I haven’t even read his book yet, but from the amazing support on a FB page filled with his fans, I have been able to start the process of detox. If I am seeing results already, I cannot wait to see what a deeper cleanse will bring! I am ready to heal once and for all.

Dr. Robert Morse is an avid believer in the healing powers of fruit. He directs most chronically ill patients to do 100% fruit fasts along with herbs to fully clean up the lymphatic system and repair glandular and organ functions. I am not ready to do 100% fruit yet so I am using the Raw Till 4 lifestyle to transition myself. This is when you eat all raw (I am doing just fruit) during day (no oil/salt and very low fat) and then have a high carb/starchy dinner (vegetables/salad accompanied by GF pasta, rice or potatoes). I feel great doing this, but I am not 100% convinced about all the highly processed Gluten-free pasta, corn, and rice Raw till 4 people eat. It is a perfect transition period for me though to get into more raw food. So far its working beautifully. I am not craving the old SAD (standard American Diet) cooked foods so much anymore and beginning to crave more raw. As I incorporate more raw, I will be able to hopefully one day do a fruit fast to really clean out my lymph system.

 

For those of you who don’t think you can get in enough calories or nutrients from fruit – do your research. You can!  I use the ‘My Fitness Pal‘ app to make sure I am getting in enough calories each day. Just to give an example of my typical breakfast  – a 4 banana smoothie with 10 dates is over 1100 calories! To all you “sugar-phobics” out there, do your research! Read Dr. Graham’s 80-10-10 book, the Starch Solution or watch Robert Morse videos….sugar is the enemy ONLY if your cells are gummed in excess fat. Clear the fat, oils and salt from your diet and your cells will thrive off the sugars you feed it. Fat causes blood sugar problems, not fruit. Bathing your cells in fruit is what they need to thrive!

 

So for now this is my current protocol:

–Sauna every a.m. (I used to do infrared but switched to a regular dry/steam sauna because I think its healthier)

-dry skin brushing

-rebounding at least 15 min each day

-epsom salt baths a few times a week

-deep breathing and lots of relaxing

-Lots and lots of lemon water

–Probiotics for re-establishing good bacteria

–IntestiNew for gut repair

-Vitamin D from the sun for at least 20 minute a day

– Fruits for breakfast & lunch

– Dinner: large raw salad or raw meal accompanied by rice/corn pasta or brown rice or potatoes or a vegetable soup.

-I am going to start using Dr. Morse’s herbs – Stomach & Bowel ll, GI Broom, Parasite M, Adrenals, Kidney/Bladder ll, Lymphatic Support ll, and Heal All Tea.

-I would like to eventually add in DoTerra essential oils too, as I hear these help tremendously.