You want to be healthy, but don’t know where to start.

You sort of know what’s important, but not actually how do make any changes.

You know how to make changes, but your family is very definitely NOT on board.

It’s too overwhelming.  Help!

You can follow instructions, if only someone would just tell you what to do and how to do it……

Do any of these statements describe you in your quest for health?

I’m going to introduce you to the

10  Simple Steps to TRANSFORM Your Family’s Health

These are what I believe to be the ten most important (first) actions you can take to take charge of your own health.

I don’t know about you, but I am easily overwhelmed if I try to make too many changes at once. Since health is something that comes over time from lifestyle changes that are maintained, the best way to get the benefit from this list is to pick ONE*** thing to work on, and do it for a week, or even an entire month, before moving on to the next one.

It is better to make small changes over time then to try to do too much and crash and burn. That won’t help you at all!

Over the coming weeks, I will elaborate on these 10 steps and give more details about each one, including why it’s important and practical steps for implementation. I’m even working on my very first Ebook, on this same topic, which will be available FREE to anyone who signs up for the FamilyNatural Newsletter.

(So if you haven’t registered for our newsletter, do so RIGHT NOW on the left sidebar)

For now, just read over the list and evaluate where you are now, and think about which one/s would be the easiest to start with.

By the way, the steps are SIMPLE. That does not mean that they are EASY. If you look at the list and feel overwhelmed, just remember that I will show you how to take babysteps to get there.

10  Simple Steps to TRANSFORM Your Family’s Health

1. Drink Water, Only Water, and Enough Water
   
2. Get Vitamin D (through sunshine and inexpensive supplements)
   
3. Eat Fresh Fruits & Veggies (I’ll tell you the 2 easy ways to get them into your diet)
   
4. Get Enough Sleep + pray/meditate/relax. (Down time is necessary for a positive mental attitude, which is necessary for health! And if I can find time for it with 5 kids, so can you!)
5. Exercise (you don’t need to join a gym. As little as 15 minutes a day can make a big difference!)
6. Switch to Whole Grain
   
7. Limit Sugar and other sweeteners
   
8. Limit Dairy & Meat (however much you eat these, eat them less frequently and in smaller portions)
9. Avoid Eating Chemicals  such as MSG,corn syrup, or anything with a long name (if you don’t know what it is….don’t eat it!)
10. Get Chiropractic Care for Wellness (It’s not just for a sore back or neck…I’ll explain why)

I was invited to be a guest on WellWithU’s weekly radio show yesterday on BlogTalkRadio. We had a lot of fun, I presented the 10 steps, explaining just a little about each one. (I also answered questions about managing my crazy life and more….) If you missed the live show, you can listen to the archived show here:

*** If you or anyone in your family has any health issues or serious concerns, you need to cover more ground in a shorter time. You do not have the luxury of moving slowly; your body needs changes NOW so that it can heal. In this case, do as much as you can as soon as you can.

Are you one of them?

My good friends, Drs. Jeff and Andrea Hazim are teaching a free online seminar this Monday night, 8:30-9:30 ET.

Jeff and Andrea are excellent teachers and I’ve learned a great deal from them. WellWithU.com is “Your trusted online resource for professional health education and products that are inspired by enduring Biblical principals”

Entitled:

“Natural Health on a Budget: Practical Wellness Advice for Tight Times”

In it, you’ll learn:

* How to lower your shopping bill by buying high nutritional value foods

* Easy cooking tips for making delicious healthy meals

* How to lower both your medical and life insurance bills

* Which oils are both healthy and a great deal

* Exercise programs you can do at home without expensive equipment

* Diets that lose your fat while they save your money

* The cheapest way to get organic vegetables

Reserve your FREE Webinar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/774915904

disclosure: I was not asked to promote this webinar, and only do so with good intentions. However, my husband is a founder of WellWithU.com, and I will therefore benefit financially from that company’s business.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

We’re doing a family-wide 21 day detox beginning Monday, August 15th.

Here’s Our Plan:

The 3 older children (ages 7,6, &4) and I will use the Basic Kit Daily “Detox Coctail” available from WellWithU. They are supplements that boost our available and active antioxidants and supports the liver (which is our body’s natural detoxifying organ).  It is safe,  natural,  and easy. My husband will be using different supplements for a more intense detox, lasting 21 days.  The two younger children (ages 2 1/2 and 12 months) will share the almost completely raw diet, but not take the supplements.

All of us will eat an extremely clean diet  for the same 21 days (three weeks), consisting of mostly live foods. Our meals will look something like this (I’ll post a more specific meal plan soon):

Breakfast: Fruit & nut smoothies with some greens thrown in

Lunch: Fresh vegetable juice, mostly green. Raw nuts, etc for the kids for added fat and protein, added calories

Dinner: Salad plus some kind of cooked whole grain/beans/soup. My husband will continue with raw, mostly juicing.

Snacks: any kind of fresh fruit, nuts, seeds.Possibly dried fruit, but limited due to high sugar content. I’ll be experimenting with my dehydrator, making “chips” and granola bars, etc.

Drinks: WATER. Lots of it.

Absolutely NO processed sugar, caffeine, meat, dairy, alcohol, or white, bleached grain.

Why are we doing this again? Well, read Our Poisoned Planet is Poisoning US for the why and A Different Kind of Body Clutter for the challenge. YOU can join us on any level!

Upcoming: Meet our family and know our health struggles. Read how I hope our health is impacted by this detox.

Depressing, yes. But the reality is that even if we eat perfectly healthful diets  (which I don’t), our bodies get toxic. Toxic, as in, poisoned…to a degree. That’s because lots of the stuff that goes into us (like from plastics, for example) our bodies can’t get rid of. They just were not created to deal with these unnatural things. So, our bodies store them, locked away. But they’re not truly locked away, no. They cause our bodies to develop dis-ease.  To not function right. To not feel well.

Do you feel well? Do you have as much energy as you should?

I have an electric teapot. It boils water very quickly. Comes in handy. I also have very hard mineral containing tap water. (It’s less when I use my filtered water, but it’s still there. And I’m making a point here so don’t get on me for advising folks to drink tap water! ) After several days of use, the teapot gets a hard white film on the bottom of it. I can swish some of it away, but if I don’t do anything about it, it will continue to grow. Until one day I heat up water for some herbal tea, pour it in my cup, and see gross flakes of white stuff floating around. Yuck.

So, I need to clean that stuff off. Break it up, dissolve it. I pour some white vinegar on it and let it sit for an hour and presto! It’s gone. Just like that. Of course, it will build up again, but I know how to clean it.

The same idea goes for many things. Decluttering your house, cleaning your kitchen, detoxifying your body.  If you want to have a house you enjoy, a kitchen without bugs, and a body that feels good and works well, you must clean them up and maintain them.

My body needs to be decluttered. In other words, it’s time for a detox. Our whole family, in fact, could use one, and it’s time. I mentioned this in my post: Sick And Tired of Feeling Sick And Tired, written quite a while ago. Now we’re getting serious. In fact, we will begin our family detox program next Monday, August 15. Would you like to join us?

If you would like to know more about why and how to detox, WellWithU has a wonderful 5 part webinar series on Environmental Detox available on their website.

So, I’m making a plan for our family to detox. I’ll include details in an upcoming post of what exactly we will do.

And if you’re interested in joining in, in decluttering your body of toxins, we’d love to have you join us. I’ll give you some ideas of things you can do, some babysteps you can take toward a healthier you.

Think about it….

If it is…..you’d better keep reading!

Did you know that it’s not just what you eat, but what you eat together? Even really healthy food, when combined improperly with other really healthy food, can cause indigestion, heartburn, gas, bloating, cramps, general malaise, fatigue, and more. Alternatively, proper food combining causes you to digest and assimilate the most nutrition out of what you eat.

Who Should Worry About Food Combining?

* Anyone who is sick or in recovery
* Anyone trying to detox their bodies
* Anyone with signs of indigestion
* Anyone in need of an immediate energy boost

Food combining is eating the proper combinations and quantities of foods at a meal as to contribute to easy and proper digestion of all the nutrients in the food you have eaten. Remember, digestion doesn’t just mean that you put it in your mouth and swallowed it. Digestion means also that it must be assimilated–converted into living tissue.

Proper food combining helps avoid all the symptoms of not doing so, which most would be classified under the heading: “INDIGESTION.”

There are 3 basic categories of macronutrients. They are

* Carbohydrate (fruits, potatoes/squash, and grains/breads/pasta/beans)
* Protein (meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy, nuts/seeds)
* Fat (nuts/oils, butter, avocados, coconut)

Non-starchy vegetables (like green leafy type) don’t fall under any of these categories. They have few calories and are eaten for their mineral & vitamin content.

The easiest digestion comes when you eat foods that contain most of their calories from one macronutrient source (carbs, protein, or fat).

Combine any of these three with a nice green salad, and you are good to go. HOWEVER, if you combine 2 or more of these 3 together, you are asking for trouble!

Example: Baked Potato (carbohydrate) and salad, GOOD.
Baked Potato (carbohydrate) and Steak (protein), BAD.

That’s right. Meat plus potatoes is NOT a good food combination.
The same can be said for meat plus grains (that Big Mac)

The reason these things need to be divided into categories is:

The chemistry of your body, because you have one stomach, does not let you digest efficiently when you create a contrasting environment in that one stomach. Protein digests in an acid environment, and carbs digest in an alkaline environment. Remember chemistry? If you mix an acid and a base together, you get salt and water. You cannot digest food anything in salt and water! The food will pass through the body undigested, never broken down, not assimilated. It becomes food for bacteria which have a good ole’ time. Of course those produce gas, etc.

The quantity of the food matters, too. If you eat a baked potato and feel good, that does not mean that you can eat 3 baked potatoes and still feel fine. That is because your body only has a certain amount of digestive enzymes available at any given time. You eat too much of one thing, even if it’s a good thing (and properly combined), and you will get indigestion.

So it’s best to not mix multiple sources of the same macronutrient you are eating at a single meal. Example: Don’t eat bread AND potato AND dessert in one meal.

Practical Plan to Institute Good Food Combining In Your Diet

* Stop eating proteins and carbohydrates in the same meal.
* Do eat concentrated protein meals and concentrated carbohydrate meals with a big veggie salad.
* Stop eating 2 or more types of carbohydrates or protein in the same meal
* eat grains and foods derived from grains no more than 3 times per week (unless gluten intolerant)
* Eat animal proteins no more than 3 times per week (if at all).
* Eat fruits alone
* Stop drinking with meals. Do drink 8 oz of water 30 mins prior to meals.

WellWithU Radio had a show on this same topic last week. Click here to listen to it.

It’s simple. And it simplifies. Something that I REALLY like.

I recently listened to this WellWithU radio show about proper food combining and why it’s important. I was reminded that meat & potatoes or grains is not a good combo. This I already knew; we don’t do it much and seem to tolerate it all right once in a while. But the important thing that I was reminded of was that couscous AND potatoes AND bread all in one meal would be TOO MUCH of the same type of thing in our bodies (even if it were properly combined). So, I made a change in the dinner I was preparing. I usually add potatoes to the stew, but realized that it would be much better to leave those out and fill up with more veggies instead.

Crock Pot Stewed Chicken

About 2 lbs chicken parts*. I’ve done it with wings, legs, thighs, whole bird cut up. Whatever.
1 large onion, chopped
3 carrots, sliced
4 celery stalks, sliced
Any other veggie that you have laying around and want to use up. I usually add cabbage or zucchini. This time I added 1/2 a bag of frozen green beans.
1 can crushed tomatoes
1 tin tomato paste
About 1/3 c white wine
A big pinch (approx 1 tsp) each of Basil, Oregano, Thyme
1 Bay leaf

Put everything in, turn it on, walk away, come back 8 hrs later to dinner. Serve over rice/couscous/quinoa (whole grain, of course)

*I recommend that you only consume animal meat that is certified organic and free to roam, with no antibiotics or hormones injected. And even then, do so sparingly. Accompanied by lots of veggies.

My friends over at WellWithU.com host a BlogTalkRadio show every Monday at 2pm EST.

Click here to listen to The Combo Platter show.

Join Dr. Jeff and Chaim to find out what a healthy “combo platter” looks like.
Topics to be covered: * Who should worry about food combining?
* What is food combining?
*Why is proper food combining essential for many people?
* Common symptoms of not combining well.
* Combining foods properly.
* A practical plan to institute good food combining in your diet.
*** Plus the last 15 mins of the program is reserved for listener questions. *** (Dr. Jeff broadcasts from Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Chaim from Jerusalem, Israel.)

You can listen to the player here (after the show, of course), or click this link to the archive.

This is an important topic: I haven’t gotten to it yet as a post, but realized I can just send you over to the good information there. Enjoy! I know I will.

update: I created a newer post from the info in this same radio show. If you prefer to read than listen, you can go here for it.

WellWithU.com

Helping people regain their health, naturally, is a passion I have. And, for those who are Bible-Believers, most of the existing resources are a little too….out there, in a new-age-y kind of way, if you know what I mean.

The name and mission are based on Deuteronomy 4:40, which states that when you follow the instructions of the Almighty, “…it will go WELL WITH YOU, and your children after you, and your days will be prolonged…”

Join WellWithU for their official launch, at a FREE WEBINAR TONIGHT. (the large link above works; this one doesn’t and won’t change for some reason. sorry. Use the one above!)

Click on the large link above for more information and to register.

The group of presenters are fantastic; I can’t wait to hear what they have to say.

After you register, pass on the link!

www.WellWithU.com/launch