Easy & Delicious Collard Greens Recipe

This week we are sharing one of our favorite recipes. Jared has been making us a big pot of collard greens every week for the last few months. Leafy greens such as collards, kale, turnip greens, spinach, romaine lettuce, and swiss chard are nutrient power houses! According to the website Worlds Healthiest Foods , Collard Greens help with high LDL cholesterol, cancer prevention, and acute bowel disorder. They are also anti-inflammatory and are great for bone health and brain health! 

How many greens should you eat in a day? I love Dr. Terry Wahls' take on this matter. She is a medical doctor that healed her own multiple sclerosis by changing her diet. She recommends 9 cups of vegetables per day, 3 of which are leafy greens. She believes this is necessary to heal MS, heal other autoimmune diseases, and provide all the nutrition that your body needs. You can eat them raw or cooked, but I recommend cooked, especially if you have digestive issues.

Here is the recipe!

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Weekly Wellness Challenge #21: Manage Your Stress

How Do You Handle Stress?

There is nothing that I can do directly to change the stressors in your life, but I can help you to re-frame the way you think about these stresses to make your experience completely different. 

These days most of my patients feel stressed. While I understand that it is a fast paced and demanding world that we live in, our bodies are not meant to be in a constant state of stress. We have mechanisms in place to deal with short term intense events (fight or flight), but if we are constantly feeling stressed, this is very hard on the body and can wreak havoc on organ systems such as our adrenals, thyroid, digestive systems and beyond. 

• Novelty of an event (newer event -> more stress)
• Unpredictable nature of an event (more unpredictable -> more stress)
• Threat to our body or ego (higher threat ->higher stress)
• Sense of Loss of control (loss of control -> higher stress)

Healthy Grocery Shopping On a Budget

How We Grocery Shop Without Breaking the Bank

If you say that eating healthy food is too expensive, I beg to differ! Here I'll show you in detail, with examples, how my family shops each week. I also want to share a testimonial with you. After one month in the program, a participant in Dr. Jamie's Wellness Warriors Nutrition Bootcamp shared the following with me:

"I love this Program, and don't look at it like a diet. It's more of a health plan. In the past month not only are my clothes getting looser but my foot pain is gone! Have I mentioned the savings in our grocery bill from not buying processed foods!?  I can't wait to continue on this 'health plan' and see what other positive changes are to come!" L.M.

Earlier this year, Joelle wrote a blog called 5 tips to Eat Real Food on a Budget. Those tips included using local farmer's markets, which is difficult in the winter. Today I'll give you more tips, assuming that we want to to keep the costs down while shopping at a grocery store!

Here is how we eat real, nutritious food on a budget!

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10 Foods I Used Think Were Healthy, But Not Anymore! Read Why

I used to be a calorie counter. I figured if I ate less calories than I burned, I’d lose weight! When it didn’t work, I was confused.

Many seminars later, I now understand that our food is MUCH more than just a source of calories! Our bodies are not simple scales, balancing calories in and calories out. Rather, the body has many complex chemical systems that break down the food we eat and process each ingredient in a different way!

I took a walk down memory lane at the grocery store yesterday, taking photos of foods I used to buy because I thought they were healthy.  Keep reading to see these photos, along with the reasons that I no longer buy them. Note that my concern is with the entire categories or types of food, and I am not trying to single out the particular brand pictured. 

Food Marketing Is Tricky

An important point to keep in mind is that food marketers can be really tricky. The food marketers do a fantastic job of making foods look and sound healthy to the consumer. They throw in buzz words like “gluten free”, “low fat”, “heart healthy”, “all natural”, etc. to make us believe the foods are good for us. What do these words really mean? I’ll point out examples as I go!

Also realize that their bottom line is the main concern of companies that make these products.  What helps their bottom line?

• Making the food as cheaply as possible.
• Making the food's shelf life as long as possible.
• Making the food addictive so we want to keep eating it and buying it. They test combinations of sugar, salt, fat, and chemicals that taste good, AND keep up coming back for more.

These corporate motivations are NOT in our best interest! I don’t want the cheapest ingredients in my body. I want my food to go bad! This sounds weird, but if it will last on a shelf forever without bacteria consuming it, it must be full of chemicals to keep the bacteria away. Why should I eat it? Finally, I don’t want to be addicted to my food. Everyone knows that it’s hard to eat just one chip or cookie, but you don’t notice the same addictive behavior when it comes to broccoli or an apple!

Let's get started with the foods. They are in no particular order. It's  hard to read the labels. To see them better, click on the picture, and a bigger image will pop up in a new window on your computer.

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