Pasta Salad
Pasta salads are delicious. Great for light easy, summer cooking. To maximize their flavour make sure you dress the pasta as soon as it is cooked while it is still hot. Try substituting fresh basil if it isn’t available, with dill, mint, oregano, or parsley.
For 8-10 servings:
Pasta:
2 pkts of brown rice pasta and vegetable pasta
Dressing:
2 large cloves garlic
1 tsp coarse mustard
2 Tbsp parmesan cheese
8-10 leaves fresh basil (or other fresh herbs)
1 tsp salt and pepper to taste
½ cup light Best Food mayonnaise
2 Tbsp pineapple juice with touch of cinnamon
Salad:
2 stalks celery, finely diced
1 red pepper finely diced
2 spring onions finely diced
½ cup toasted sesame seeds
Tinned pineapple pieces 125 g (unsweetened)
Boil the pasta as per the packet directions, until tender. ***
While the pasta is cooking make the dressing by pureeing the ingredients until smooth.
Drain the cooked pasta and put in a salad bowl and immediately toss the dressing through the pasta while it is still hot.
Allow to cool then toss the rest of the salad ingredients with the pasta.
*** Tip: Cook the pasta until just al dente; brown rice pasta will disintegrate if over-cooked.

To eat more healthily start by substituting healthier ingredients in your cooking, but keeping to tried and true recipes your family love. If they are particularly fussy eaters they may complain at first. Persevere though and before you know it they will eating it up, just as they did before.

In the recipe above I’ve exchanged plain old white wheat pasta with brown rice pasta, for two reasons. First, whole grains provide better nutritional value than processed grains. Second wheat based foods so predominate in the western diet that we miss out on the nutrients present in other grains, and many people have allergies to wheat and other gluten containing foods, so it’s a good idea to find creative ways of getting other grains into our diet. As we age too our bodies lose their ability to metabolise processed gluten containing grains well and this can cause a host of health challenges from easy weight gain to a tendency towards diabetes. Take home message, use whole grains, and vary them.

To reduce the number of calories in a recipe you can substitute ‘lite’ varieties of dressings as I’ve done here and help your cause of weight loss if that’s an issue for you or your family. If using canned fruit in a recipe go for an unsweetened variety for the same reason.

Using fresh herbs in your cooking as I’ve done here will increase flavour and nutritional value, because of the enzymes present in fresh produce verses cooked, canned or dried, all helping us toward our goal of optimum nutrition for better living.

The recipe above is contained in our nutrition book for more information on our products, go to www.flexibilityplus.com

Bon Appetite,
Yours in Health,
Nancy

We’re not talking recycling, composting, and gardening are we?

Yup!

Organic food protects us and the planet- no pesticides, herbicides, GMO, hormones and antibiotics. It provides the basis for optimal nutrition.

Start with the foods you use most of and if you have infants and elderly in the household start with the foods they eat the most of, since they are the most vulnerable to the effects of toxins

The foods to begin with would be dairy, meat, chicken, vegetables, fruit and grains. Of the plant foods rice, corn, wheat, oats, peanuts, grapes, potatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, peppers are among the most heavily sprayed.

If organics are unavailable or are too pricey here is a recipe for a spray you can use on your produce to neutralize the toxic residue of herbicides. Mix together in a spray bottle: 1 cup water; 1cup white vinegar, 1 Tablespoon baking soda and 20 drops of citricidal or grapefruit seed extract.

Spray on your fruit and vegetables, leave on for 10 minutes and then rinse off.

Avoid plastic water bottles, they take one thousand years to degrade, clog land fills, and leech hormone disrupting poisons into the water they contain. Buy a reusable eco friendly bottle instead. The stainless steel ones are great because you can fill them with warm liquids in winter to take off the chill and they come in a variety of sizes including infant ones with sipper tops.

Avoid waste and produce your own beautiful health giving vegetables by composting. To make compost, use a large rubber drum or wooden bin and place in alternating layers of brown matter from your garden, such as lawn and garden clippings and sawdust, with green matter such as food scraps from your kitchen. These can include stale bread, coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, fruit, vegetable peelings, and shredded paper. Avoid putting in anything that might attract flies and rodents such as meat, chicken, dairy and other animal produce. Each week aerate your compost, by turning it well. Add earth worms and in six months you will have sweet smelling nutrient rich compost to fertilise your vegetable and fruit trees with.

Take care in your choice of skin care and beauty products as many contains known carcinogens and hormone disrupting chemicals. What you are after are products that are parabens, artificial fragrance, colour and sodium lauryl sulphate free . Here again organic is best. Become a diligent label reader.

Protecting ourselves through healthy food choices will pay dividends to our selves, our planet our pocket and ultimately future generations!

Yours in health,

Nancy

In my last post I talked about how stoked I was to have gotten back into surfing after surfing so little last year, and how fortunate I am to have a good level of health and fitness that allows me to enjoy surfing after more than forty years of enjoying this fantastic sport.
I ended by mentioning how many people end up living a life that is far from what they had ever imagined living. It is very sad when you see people becoming ill with their quality of life hugely lowered from diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses.
None of us can be 100% certain that we won’t suffer some serious health problem, but we can all increase the chances of our living vibrant and energetic lives through the choices we make.
If you regularly eat fatty takeaways, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, your chances of developing serious health problems are so much greater than if you regularly eat wholesome foods, exercise regularly and have a positive outlook.
It takes effort to do the right thing, but the effort is so worth it!
So, I encourage whoever may read this to fully consider how their present actions will influence their future lives.
Nancy and I have developed www.flexibilityplus.com to assist anyone who wants an effective training and nutritional system that considerably increases your chances of living a full healthy and vibrant life. Check it out and let us know what you think.
All the best
Jonathan

Set Your Self Up For Success

You have appointments with everyone else, even people you’ve never met face to face, whom you do business with over the net, who live on the other side of the globe and you barely even know.
But when did you last schedule an appointment with yourself? Now you might be thinking that’s a bit indulgent isn’t it? And besides I can’t afford the time!

Well let’s examine that for a moment. If you give to everyone else, even if you’re being paid for it, but you don’t but give time to your self what’s gonna happen? Well you’ll cope for awhile, but eventually you’ll dry up, you’ll get tired, and sick. How effective will you then be in your business, in your relationships with the people you care about.

No you’ve got to take the time for healthy living, for holistic exercise, for healthy food and drink, for breathing right, for being still and for playing!
You might be looking at your to do list and see that you’ve dutifully scheduled a half hour walk between lunch and picking up the dry cleaning before you head back to work, and the next twenty things on your list.

Then you get a phone call from your best friend, they’re in dire straights and they need you. You decide you can’t wait another day you MUST SEE THEM TODAY. You take out your to do list and you go oh shoot, if I do all this stuff I won’t have time to visit. I really wanted to start my exercise programme today, I’ve got all these other deadlines, and I can’t let my friend down, I guess the exercise will have to wait  until tomorrow. Before you decide to put the exercise off, THINK AGAIN!

This is the mañana  syndrome isn’t it . We all know mañana never comes, because tomorrow there will be some other unscheduled crisis we suddenly have to deal with. So how do we get around the distractions that inevitably show up to derail our best plans. We get creative. So for example what if we told our best friend our exercise goal and said: “I also really wanna spend some time with you, how would you feel if we walked while we visited?

Chances are assuming they can walk and even if they can’t you could maybe push a wheelchair, right? Whatever their crisis walking and talking together would do not only you a world of good but them as well. No this is definitely a better plan than commiserating over that keg of beer or the box of bonbons you had planned to bring and share with them.

See the minute we commit to something our brain will figure a way of helping us get where we wanna go.

Yours in health
Nancy