What's all this 'ping' malarkey about then?

EASY ways to be healthier in 2010...

So its now 2010, and I wonder how many people have resolved to go on diets, get fit and be healthier? My take on all of those? Brilliant, obviously. But how many people may also end up giving up on these resolutions because its too hard? Being healthy shouldn't be hard, its what is natural to us, modern life just gets in the way very easily if we let it! And we don't all have to start living on vegetable juice and doing yoga every day to enjoy the fruits of a healthier lifestyle. Do what you can, and be happy with it! That way you'll keep on doing it, and won't end up slumped on the sofa feeling a failure because you ate a lot of icecream and haven't been to the gym all week!

So as much as I love my juices (as seen below), I know that they're not always going to be sufficient to fill the gap, and keep bigger apetites at bay! Not to mention the fact that you have to be invested enough in the idea to actually, well, invest in a juicer. So, another great option is the Green Smoothie...

A quick insert here, I'm writing specifically about Green Smoothies here, because they are especially good for you, there's nothing wrong with all fruit smoothies per se, its just that you can really really up the vitamin and general 'so damn good for you its unseemly'-ness of them by chucking in greens.

Its really easy when starting to include something like smoothies in your diet to feel restricted by recipes. Especially if you're introducing something new like the idea of putting-gasp-greens into them too, recipes suddenly seem like a necessary-they really aren't. So as well as putting up a couple of recipes, I'm going to give a general idea on proportions to use in the smoothies, and encourage you to experiment-worst case scenario is that you use greens which are too strong (see the note on Watercress below...eurgh...)and have to throw in extra fruit to even out the taste!

The benefits of Green Smoothies are approximately the same as juices, you're semi-digesting (aka as blending!) all those fruit and veg into a form that not only is more easily digested, but is also portable! This is one of the main reasons that I love smoothies, when I have a whole day of running around travelling, I know that rather than having to spend money on snacks/lunch that I wouldn't choose to eat anyway I can simply throw all the ingredients(except water) into the blender jug the night before, ready to be whizzed up and put in a flask first thing in the morning. Blending leaves much more of the fibre content of the ingredients too, so a smoothie is much more filling and sustaining than a juice. If I make up a flask full of smoothie that will easily keep me going for 6 hours or so.

So first, proportions for your Green Smoothie:

One and a half handfuls of fruit-my current favorites are mango, orange or pineapple.

Two handfuls of leafy greens-curly kale is cheap and extremely nutritious, spinach is great too, also romaine lettuce and rocket. I WOULDN'T recommend watercress-its very strong!

Half a handful of an 'emulsifier' - a term that I may have made up for a thickener, I tend to use frozen banana, or avocado, both give a really lovely smooth thickness to the drink. Avocado is particularly useful because it provides some dietary fat, needed to help the body absorb all the vitamins from the leafy greens.

Enough water to get the fruits and vegetables to a drinkable consistency...

The instructions, very simple indeed:

• Peel/ wash fruit, cut into chunks that you think your blender can deal with, and place in the blender jug.
• Wash greens, place on top of the fruit in the jug.
• Pour in a little water, approx a quarter of a pint should get you started.
• Blend until smooth-ish.
• Put in emulsifier, if its frozen banana make sure your blenders blades are tough enough for them. If its NOT frozen banana you may want to put in some ice at this stage so that the blender doesn't end up semi-cooking your smoothie! Blend again until smooth.
• Add more water if desired. Blend.
• Drink and enjoy!

These are not hard and fast rules, there are many recipes that are totally different (one to come below!), they're just a rough idea to help you get started. Proportions will vary according to personal taste, and what exact ingredients you're using. For those with sensitive digestion, its easiest to mix just one fruit and one vegetable at a time...

So just to get you started, here are a couple of recipes.

Mango and Kale Smoothie

1 Mango (peeled and cut into chunks,if you struggle peeling it with a knife a potato peeler can actually work quite well).

1 and a half to 2 handfuls of Kale (depending on how strong you want the smoothie to be!).

quarter of a pint of water.

1 Small/Medium frozen Banana .

Just follow the instructions as above!

This recipe makes a really filling and sustaining smoothie, I can have this as my breakfast and not get hungry until lunchtime, especially if I chuck in half an avocado too...I like using frozen bananas because they give it a texture almost like you've put in icecream, plus it means that you don't have to worry about using up all your bananas before they get too ripe, just freeze them once they're ripe when you can, they'll keep a few weeks. It also means you don't have to worry about putting in ice too.

Pear and Parsley Smoothie

2 Pears

30g/handful of Parsley-majority of stalks removed

Third of a pint of water

Ice

This one's quite different. I know it looks like an odd combination, but please try it, it really works. I enjoyed this one instead of dinner a fair bit over the festive season, after lots of big lunches! It tastes very cleansing, and is surprisingly satisfying. As I mentioned in the last post, Parsley is a quite the unsung hero in terms of nutrition, its really worth getting more than the odd sprinkle as a garnish into your diet!

So I think that's all for now. Yoga with Laura is a constantly evolving project, and its taking me in loads of new and exciting directions, I can't wait to let you in on them in the future....A sneak peek? The joys of raw chocolate (even Green & Blacks doesn't come close!), and exploring how you can try out yoga in London on the cheap ....

Much love to you all, and happy 2010!

Treating yourself in 2010

I promised recipes on this blog, and so today I'm going to follow through on that. I've been vegetarian for some time now, and so the recipes that I post will always mirror that. However in recent months I've also been introduced to the joys of raw food. Raw food is a pretty self explanatory term, for those of you who are wondering, its generally classed as uncooked, unprocessed and if at all possible, organic foods. One of the easiest ways to get more raw food into your diet is through juicing, and smoothies.

Fresh vegetable/fruit juices contain masses of vitamins and minerals, but in a 'predigested' form, this means that the body has to perform almost no digestion in order to assimilate those nutrients. Digestion requires a huge amount of energy, and juicing gives it a huge boost of nutrients, without asking the body to do a lot to get at them.

The first recipe is one that is perfect as part of your breakfast, or anytime you feel low on energy:

Carrot, apple and ginger juice

1 Apple

2 Large Carrots/ 3 Medium

0.5-1 cm chunk fresh ginger

Juice the carrots on the highest setting, then followed by apple and ginger. Juices like this can either be enjoyed 'neat', or diluted with 1 part water to 1 part juice. The above will be enough juice for one person.

Carrots, ginger and apples are all great cleansers, and are stimulants too, both in terms of energy, and also to the digestive organs, especially the liver and intestines. My brother (a 22 year old student, not your typical juice advocate! I dedicate this post to him, hopefully the first of many converts...) now swears by this juice every morning, he genuinely feels more sluggish in the morning if he doesn't have one.

There are a LOT of variations on the above, as seen below:

Carrot, orange and ginger juice

1 Orange

2 Large / 3 Medium carrots

0.5-1 cm Fresh Ginger

The orange should be peeled before putting in the juicer, but try to leave the white pith on, its really high in calcium! Using an orange instead of the apple ups the amount of Vitamin C in the juice, so this is great if you feel your immune system is struggling.

For any vegetarians who struggle getting enough iron into their diet, there are two recipes below, using parsley or raw beetroot, both of which are really high in iron, and both very inexpensive too.

Carrot, apple and parsley juice

2 Large / 3 Medium Carrots

1 Apple

1 Handful of Parsley

The high vitamin C content of the juice aids the body in assimilating the rich iron content too.

Carrot, apple and beetroot

2 Large / 3 Medium Carrots

1 small whole, including stalks and leaves (weighing approximately 100-200g) beetroot

1 apple

I hardly ever find anything other than that cooked/pickled beetroot in the supermarket, but you can normally find them uncooked and with all their beautiful greens still attached in a greengrocers or farm store. The greens can be juiced, or are really delicious in salads too.

The last juice recipe I'm going to include is a green juice, I used to enjoy it after returning from work in the evening, its very cooling and soothing, stimulates the digestion gently and takes the edge off hunger before dinner too.

Cucumber and mint juice

Half a cucumber

Half an apple

Half a pear

2 sprigs of fresh mint

If you'd like an even greener juice, add a handful of spinach, watercress or kale.

A general tip on juicing, I've found that adding anything fibrous (such as ginger) or leafy, is best done last, since material from them tends to fur up the juicing blade, making the process less efficient, and leaving you with less juice!

Hopefully after reading the above, you will consider juicing as a supplement to your diet in 2010.

I realise that a lot of people won't have juicers as a standard bit of kit in their kitchen. However, they are now actually pretty cheap, you can easily get a decent model for upwards of £50. I got my Breville JE27 from Amazon over a year ago, I've used it daily (often more than that if I'm fasting), and it's still going strong. When shopping for a juicer two less obvious, but more important things to look for are

• How many removable parts are there? How easy do they look to clean?
• How large the entry chute is, juicing will take a lot longer if you have to cut up everything you're going to put in!

Juicing really is a great addition to the diet, all those vitamins, and you can juice just about anything you fancy.

I'll be writing again very soon, with some smoothie recipes, for these you'll only need a blender, something which more people have as standard in their kitchen!

I'm including a link to a great article below, explaining some of the benefits of fresh juicing in general, and green juices specifically, for those of you who are interested its a great starting point.

http://www.naturalnews.com/024708_juicing_disease_health.html

Wishing you all a wonderful New Year's Eve, and looking forward to 2010...

Happiness...

Is a really really really deep backbend, aided by a fellow yogi, whilst doing acro-yoga! I've just got back from a FABULOUS afternoon workshop in London. Acroyoga is a combination of acrobatics, hatha yoga and thai massage.

There are SO many joyous things about yoga, in all its forms, and Acroyoga is something that really is about that joy. Its a physical practice that is as far from slaving away in the gym, plugged into your headphones and the treadmill as is physically possible. This is about remembering what it was like to be a child, when physical playing, rolling around, trying to do handstands and cartwheels and moving instinctively without fear or insecurity was natural.

So I spent the afternoon 'playing' with about 7 other students, led by two wonderful teachers, Jaqui and Jesse. Because acro-yoga is all about working together (in pairs at least, often more) there's a big emphasis on not only warming up the body before you do anything, but also warming up to one another, plenty of icebreaking and general silliness (and for those of you who know me, you'll know that silliness is something that comes pretty easily to me!). You then basically try out lots of different acrobatic feats, most based either around traditional yoga postures, or around thai yoga massage postures. There are several roles to play in each exercise:

1) Basing - Supporting and controlling the movement, physically taking and balancing the weight of the flyer.

2) Flying - Trusting the base, allowing them to manipulate you whilst keeping control of your body and mental faculties (you'd be amazed how much they can go out of the window when you're upside down balancing on somebody else's feet!)

3) Spotting - Keeping an eye on the other two, aiding communication and being sure both base and flyer are safe.

As someone who practises a lot of yoga, it was a real revelation to work so intensively with other people. Yoga is often about being solitary, about not being distracted by the person next to you in class and comparing your seated forward bend to theirs. But working with other people in these roles teaches a whole new set of lessons, most notably about trust, surrendering yourself to another (balancing is almost impossible if the flyer tenses up and tries to control their own movements too much) and compassion too (that's where the thai massage comes in!). It also brings a lightness to the practice, falling out of a handstand scorpion doesn't seem nearly as frightening or embarrassing when you're doing it not only with other people, but being supported by them too. In terms of furthering your own practice that's a boon, fear in these sorts of postures holds us back from practising them in the first place, and really committing to them when we do. Experiencing postures from each role gives a far greater understanding of the mechanics of the postures too.

Its very easy to end up taking something you're really passionate about very seriously. Yoga especially, perhaps because of the philosophical and meditative components, is easily seen as a pretty serious practice, whether it's the astanga yogi scowling at anyone jumping forward heavily, or a fellow student eyeing you crossly as you make your way into class late, laying out your mat as quietly as you can in vain...And there are plenty of elements of yoga which ARE worth taking and considering seriously. But if yoga has taught me anything, its that a happy and conscious life is about balance. Is that sense of seriousness actually just stress and strain?Chronic seriousness seems to me akin to tension, it's a rigidity and inability to see anything in another light. Rigidity is not a word I associate with yoga. So next time you sense yourself getting really serious about almost anything, perhaps its worth asking yourself if that particular attitude is helping you in your endeavours? Or whether you might get further by relaxing a little?

For those who'd like to give an acro-yoga class a go I'm including a link to the London crew's schedule and website, I can't recommend them enough, and really look forward to learning more with them...Much love to you all, and hoping you have a seriously playful Christmas! xxxx

www.AcroYoga.org or London@AcroYoga.org

Firsts

Welcome to my first blog post!

While we approach the beginning of a New Year, it seems a fitting time to deal with yet another 'first'. I never ever tire of them, which is just as well, as since I resigned from the world of Corporate Headhunting merely 3 months ago, life has been fuller of them than ever before. Lets have a quick look at a select few of them:

• My first Yoga teacher training came to an end a month ago. I say my first, because as a teacher, I make a lifelong commitment to being a good student too, recognising that this was just a first step (a large one mind!). It was utterly eyeopening, in so very many ways, and I am so grateful to every single one of my teachers (another topic ripe for discussion, though I think that will have to be tackled another time).
• My first trip to the beautiful land of Bali. Staying most specifically near Ubud.
• My first time being utterly selfemployed. Its a big leap of faith, now is a time when a lot of people think that leaving a secure job and salary is eccentric to say the least. But I've learnt over the last few years that life could be short, and even if it isn't, I feel it should be as full as possible of joy, love, challenge, stimulation and a million things as yet undiscovered, Mark Twain said it better than I can: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

So-firsts, they're exciting (well some of them anyway), but life, and the real good that comes with it is how we follow through after that initial excitement. Its a lot less glamorous, but generally its the 30th and the 300th time we do something that makes us who we are. Perhaps that's worth bearing in mind when we think of New Year's Resolutions. Make it something that you can bear committing to, whilst resting safe in the knowledge that we can ALL do anything that we set our mind to, if not now, then later, after practice! And this brings me neatly (phew! I hadn't planned it!) to one of the more fabulous things about yoga. Its designed for everybody, quite literally every body. One doesn't need to be agile, or fast, or even flexible. For all of us, yoga will almost certainly help us towards these things. One of the most powerful things that yoga has done for me, is reveal how futile most of our selfdoubt is. Something about adult life teaches us to doubt our own capabilities, and strength. Yoga has revealed time and again that-acutally, I AM able to stand on my head, to bend my leg that way, and to hold myself in Warrior 2 for just 5 more breaths. And so are you.

I'll be posting much more on this and many other subjects, but for now, let me give you a quick view of the sorts of things I plan on posting through this in the future:

• Recipes (always Vegetarian, and sometimes vegan too).
• Details of other great classes and events which I think you might enjoy.
• Details of other websites and resources which I've really enjoyed.
• Inspiring quotes, and potentially less inspiring ramblings of my own.

The internet is a fantastic opportunity to open dialogue with those whom we might otherwise never have met, so please do leave any comments that come up for you.