My Safety Net

I love fruits and vegetables.  I am blessed with a palate that truly enjoys pretty much any fruit or vegetable I try, although I’m pretty sure I haven’t always been like that since most of my memories from when I was younger include chicken fingers and french fries.  However, in my adult life, I am a huge fan.

Until I got pregnant.

Oh man, I had it bad.  I thought pregnancy was all about cravings and eating for two, but boy was I wrong.  For the first three months of growing a human being, I couldn’t stomach anything.  Nothing sounded good, ESPECIALLY anything remotely healthy.  I was freaking out, because I had this idea in my head that I would be even more conscious of what I was putting in my body in this delicate time, but unless it was some combination of bread and cheese, it wasn’t happening.  I crossed my fingers that my prenatal vitamins would make up for my lack of good nutrition while I made my third grilled cheese sandwich of the day – the only thing I had been able to eat – and tried not to imagine my baby being formed out of two slices of bread and some cheese.  For a health nerd like me, this was pretty devastating.  I missed green smoothies and crunchy salads.  I missed snacking on apples and blueberries and cucumbers.  I missed feeling good and healthy and strong!  I did not feel good, or healthy, or strong.

One day near the end of my first trimester I had coffee -well, peppermint tea in my case, thanks to the constant nausea – with a friend, and we met up with her other friend who she had been wanting me to meet for a while.  We chatted about our husbands and where we had grown up and where the military had moved us (and would be moving us), and our families.  We soon realized that we were both pretty nerdy when it came to health and wellness, and I told her about how my first trimester was such a struggle because I felt anything but healthy and well!  I told her how much I missed fruits and vegetables, and she whipped out a little package of gummies that were made from the juice of whole fruits and vegetables.  I gobbled them up, and demanded that she go through her entire Juice Plus+ Wellness Presentation right then and there in the coffee shop.  I needed to know everything about it and how I could get this product into my body yesterday.

Now, I am quick to jump on many wellness trends – CrossFit, paleo, barefoot running, green smoothies, etc, etc. . . . however, I’m not big on vitamins and supplements claiming to have magical healing powers.  I took fish oil half-heartedly for a while, but much preferred getting my omega 3’s from my mom’s grilled salmon or some flax seeds mixed into my morning oats or smoothie.  Even protein powder made me wary, due to so much other crap being on the ingredients list.  Some eggs, chicken, fish, or nuts seemed like a much better way to get protein into my body than drinking a chocolate flavored powder drink.  I learned in my college nutrition classes that you end up urinating out most of the stuff that comes in your supplements, because the body simply can’t absorb and use it in that form.  What a waste of money!  So, when I first heard about these capsules of fruits and vegetables, I was initially turned off and resumed my normal “just eat real food” thinking.  Thankfully, I kept listening.

By the end of our conversation, I not only wanted Juice Plus+ in my body, but I wanted to share it with everyone I knew, especially those who were sick, or had been sick, or might end up sick if they don’t start taking care of their health through proper nutrition.  Even those who strive to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, but are either stuck in a rut and lacking variety or maybe just go through periods of time where nutrition falls to the wayside – I’ve sure been there!  That’s all it is, a safety net.  It’s so you can consume the nutrients from kale and beets whether you eat them daily or not, or to make up for those times when you might be sick, or traveling, and fruits and vegetables are hard to come by.  It’s not a free pass to eat like crap as long as you take this magic pill, which is what I like about JP+ and the company.  It promotes healthy living all around.  We even have another product called the Tower Garden where you can grow your own fruits and vegetables so that there is no excuse NOT to eat them!  I’ve even noticed that I tend to WANT more fruits and vegetables when I’m taking my JP+, sort of like when you start eating junk food and all of a sudden you are craving more junk food, except the opposite.

I could go on and on about the research, and the way the product is made, and about how phytonutrients are so much better for you than the isolated vitamins and minerals from supplements, and how JP+ has been proven to be bioavailable and actually do what it claims to do in the body, but I would rather you come to a presentation yourself.  Mostly, because I am hosting two webinars coming up, and I don’t want it to just be me and my mom. . . . Kidding, kind of.  It’s because if you read this blog, you probably care about your health in one way or another, and I think that this information would be really interesting to you.  Everyone knows that fruits and vegetables are important for good health, but do you really know and understand why?  This presentation isn’t about selling a product, it’s about explaining the how’s and why’s of the preventative health and healing powers of fruits and vegetables.

So, if you’d like more information or would like to attend an event either in person or online (fancy, fancy!), please let me know.  The upcoming Wellness Webinars will be this Sunday afternoon and Tuesday, although the times are not yet set in stone.

Please “come”, I’d love to “see” you.

Be Well,

Namaste 🙂

Read Well/Live Well Book Club

All of these rainy mornings lately have made me want to do nothing but snuggle up with a good book.  The Fifty Shades trilogy is great and all (and by great I don’t mean the writing), but when you are a huge health nerd like I am, your Kindle Account is probably filled with books like Robb Wolf’s “The Paleo Diet Solution”, a couple Brian Tracy and Michael Pollen books, “Mind Body Mastery” by Dan Millman, possibly the Baghavad Gita and/or a variation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and the newest to the collection – “It Starts With Food”, by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig.  Oh, don’t worry, I have all three Fifty Shades books too.

I love reading books like these because they are inspiring.  The more I read, the more I know, and the more I get an idea about different points of view or different ideas about things.  If you only read one person’s blog about something like the Paleo diet, you are only getting one person’s experience and interpretation of it.  The same thing goes for yoga, or anything for that matter.  The best thing you can do is to maintain an open mind, and keep filling that open mind with new, interesting information so that you can process, analyze, and adapt all of these ideas into your own perspective.

It also helps to talk through some of these different ideas with other like-minded people.  I remember when I read the Baghavad Gita, and I would try to talk to Dave about bits and pieces of the book that struck my attention, or confused me, or made me question some things.  If you’ve ever read this book, you could only imagine how funny/frustrating it would be to try to have a conversation with someone who is not reading the book, nor even familiar with the general story.  It would have been helpful to be able to chat with someone else who was reading the book, and understood the meaning behind the story (sorry Dave!).

Now, I know my book choices are kind of all over the place between food, yoga, self-help-y books, and books about athletics, but if you read my blog, you might like these books, too!

ONLY ONE PROBLEM!!

I  have never been in a book club.  I know, how sad!  I like reading, I have friends who like reading. . .why have we never done this!?  So, I’m not really sure how it works.  Can we have a book club where some members are not local?  Sure!  We’ll figure it out.  Can we just pick and choose which books we want to hop in on?  Yes.  I know not everyone combines the love of Paleo and Yoga like I do, so I would totally understand if some of you wouldn’t want to read the Yoga Sutras or something about eating grass-fed beef.  I get that, and it’s cool if you want to just read those books that spark your interest and participate in those discussions and skip out on others.  Before I get too into the rules and regulations, I want to first make sure there are actually people out there who are interested!  Then, we’ll get down to business.

This is how it will work:

Step 1:  Choose a book.  This month, since it’s already on my Kindle, I choose “It Starts With Food” by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig.  Next month, your choice! (However, I have been promised an early edition of Diane Sanfilippo’s book “Practical Paleo: A Customized Approach to Health and a Whole-Foods Lifestyle”that’s due out in August for review, so that’s got to be on the list!)  In the future, I’d like to hear from YOU what you’d like to read.  Then, we’ll vote.  If you don’t tell me, I get to pick again!

Step 2:  Read book.  Think about things.  Take some notes.  Maybe I’ll make a Facebook page where we can post about things as we read them?  I’m just brainstorming here, but I’ll ask the book club experts what they think.

Step 3:  Meet virtually or in person, discuss book, possibly drink wine, then start brainstorming our next book to read! 

REPEAT.  My goal is to keep this going strong at least up until the holidays.  Can we do it?!  You bet.

If you are interested, leave me a comment here or on my Facebook page.  You can either say, “Sign me up! I ordered my book and I’m ready to read!”  or maybe, “I’ve already read it but would love to join in the discussion!” or, “I want to join your book club, but I don’t really want to read the first book you chose, so when you chose something I want to read, I’m in!”.  Also, feel free to suggest any books that you’d like to read in the health and wellness field, and I’ll add them to the list!  If you know me, you know how much I love lists. . .

Then, I’ll learn how to host a book club and get back to you.

Okay, let’s do this!