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Flavorful, alkalizing and beautifying: Apple Cider VinegarRaw apple cider vinegar is the only acceptable vinegar to include on a beautifying detox, because its not acid-forming. It also helps promote good digestion and encourages growth of good bacteria in our digestive tract, which is so important for you to stay looking and feeling great!Apple cider vinegar is high in minerals and potassium, so it supports cellular detox cleansing and it has antiseptic qualities that help cleanse our entire digestive system from unwanted bacteria.Be sure to buy a brand labeled "raw and unfiltered," you want it looking a bit cloudy. It must be refrigerated because pasteurized versions don't have these qualities any longer.I've begun to get addicted to apple cider vinegar in my salad dressings, here's a recipe you can try:Oil-Free Balsamic-Free Italian VinaigretteIngredients:
- 2 1/2 Tbs raw apple cider vinegar
- 1 tsp. organic Dijon mustard
- 1/2 tsp. sea salt
- 1 1/2 tsp. Italian Seasoning
- 1/2 cup filtered water
Blend all together, best if in a high speed blender. Enjoy! - 2 1/2 Tbs raw apple cider vinegar
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Sugar detoxget off the roller coasterSugar addiction is very common physical addiction and withdrawal is comparatively mild to emotional and psychological withdrawal that usually accompanies it. Symptoms of this process are fatigue, anxiety and irritability, depression, detachment rapid heart beat and palpitations.Getting off refined sugars and processed carbs that make blood sugar spike can be one of the keys to permanently staying at your healthy weight easily. This is also a key to avoiding disease, getting the kind of stable energy you want throughout the day and sleeping better. It will also be reflected in your skin, because your hormones will be more stable and your break outs will begin to diminish.Good Foods to replace sugary foods with:FruitPopcornAlmond butter & celeryProtein smoothiesTeamixed nuts & seedssaladdried fruit (if tolerated)Once you get off the sugar roller coaster, you will easily spot how one sugary treat sends you right back into the cravings cycle! You will start craving carbs soon after that initial sugar rush starts to let down, and that's the time to reach for protein or a salad to break the cycle.
Tips for breaking the sugar craving cycle:- Drink 8 glasses of water + tea per day
- Make sure you are getting enough fiber by eating whole foods
- Check with your doctor about a multi-vitamin/mineral supplement and testing to see if you are deficient, some nutrient deficiencies can provoke cravings
- Look out for hidden sugar + artificial sweeteners that mimic sugar in your body, especially in sauces and condiments
- Try stevia or xylitol to see if they work for you in replacing sugar
- Make sure you are getting enough complex carbs + protein to fuel your body, starving it of nutrients and fuel creates a blood sugar crash
- Most bottled juices and juice drinks are mainly sugar, avoid these as well.
- Add fruit as a dessert
Here's more instructions on breaking a serious sugar addiction, remember take your time with it, it didn't happen overnight and it won't go away overnight. From an article "4 Steps to Successfully Cut Down on Sugar" in the Huffington Post:"The average American adult consumes the equivalent of about 32 teaspoons of sugar per day. Sugar is really the number one food additive: it is added to drinks, often in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, to bread, sauces, dressings, and to all kinds of processed foods including many low-fat products. " -
Running is a challenging, effective workout, there's no doubt about it. Considered the gold standard for burning calories, running does have some draw backs, often beginning runners get injured and then are sidelined for an extended period of time. Plus, it can be boring and isolating if you often run alone.
Creating a new, varied Spring time exercise program with many different challenging workouts to cross train the body protects you from injury and overusing muscles, plus our bodies love to be constantly challenged in new ways to keep our metabolism and muscles surprised, which is great for your body and keeping you mentally engaged as well. Have fun with it, create a chart or use an app on your phone to pick 5 things you haven't tried before and see if you can do them each once a week for the next four weeks!
Your goal: Design a life you love, try new things that get results in less time and don't make you dread doing them. We're looking for exercises that burn around 10 calories per minute. Some you can sneak in from the list below, get up 20 minutes early or try doing them at night instead of snacking. I'm also going to challenge you to try something new that's SCARY! Like ballroom dancing, hula hoop class or surfing, anything you've always wanted to try but haven't yet! Something that the very thought of it gets you excited and thinking "wouldn't it be so cool if I knew how to...."
That's how you design a life you love!
Here's a list of other exercises that burn over 10 calories per minute:
Weight training
As little as 10 minutes, 3 times per week can have a positive effect on your body composition. It doesn't have to be a full-blown gym session to count either!
Researchers at the University of Southern Maine used a more advanced method to estimate energy expenditure during exercise, they found that weight training burns up to 71 percent more calories than originally thought. Which suggests that a fast-paced circuit workout burns as many calories as running at a 6-minute per mile pace.
Make sure you're lifting weights heavy enough to produce fatigue within 8-10 reps and perform the "negative" portion of the exercise twice as slowly as the lifting portion, this will maximize your results.
Burpees
Here's an explanation from Wiki
The burpee is a full body exercise used in strength training and as an aerobic exercise. The basic movement is performed in four steps and known as a "four-count burpee":
- Begin in a standing position.
- Drop into a squat position with your hands on the ground. (count 1)
- Kick your feet back, while keeping your arms extended. (count 2)
- Immediately return your feet to the squat position. (count 3)
- Jump up from the squat position (count 4)
This link has a tutorial on burpees and other jumps: http://skinnyms.com/jazzed-up-jacks-and-jumps-tabata-workout/
Indoor Bike Sprints
Its possible to burn over 80 calories per minute if you give it everything you've got, make sure to follow the sprint with a cool down at least twice as long. Usually this requires a gym membership, but you can find creative solutions if you look for them. They even make under desk mini cycles now you can use while you work!
Jumping Rope
Portable and very inexpensive you can take a jump rope with you on a walk, travelling, in your car, outdoors, inside watching TV or while your kids play at the park, you can burn approximately 13 calories per minute jumping rope. It is one of the higher impact exercises on this list, so mix it in to your schedule but don't rely on it everyday. This link has tutorials on jumping rope and other jumps: http://skinnyms.com/jazzed-up-jacks-and-jumps-tabata-workout/
HIIT Circuits
From Dailyburn.com here's a beginners 20 minute HIIT circuit, where you perform 45 seconds of work, followed by 15 seconds of rest for 5 exercises and then you rest 1 minute between rounds and complete 3 rounds:
- Push Ups
- Squats
- Butt Kicks
- Tricep Dips
- Side Lunges
Tabata Jump Squats
This four-minute miracle drill burns major calories both during a workout and after. In an Auburn University at Montgomery study, participants who did eight rounds of all-out jump squats—20 seconds of hard work, separated by 10 seconds of rest—burned 13.4 calories per minute and doubled their post-exercise metabolic rate for at least 30 minutes.
This link has tutorials on a jumping sequence: http://skinnyms.com/jazzed-up-jacks-and-jumps-tabata-workout/
Kettlebell Swing
This explosive exercise works the big, powerful muscles around your glutes and quads, and sends your heart into overdrive, according to research from the University of Wisconsin. The motion of swinging the kettlebell really feels strange at first and works muscles you didn't even know you had! For between $10-$20 you can find one of these at Target and its an easy, fast workout to do while you're watching TV. This exercise will help you get those flat abs you want to show off in summer too, start with 10 sets of 10. See the instruction below from Prevention.com
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Negative-accentuated training
Not the laziest tip ever, but if you want to get out of the diet, gain, diet cycle forever you're going to have to change some of your body's composition to become a more efficient calorie burner. Newport Skinny Tea supports this on several levels, as do the tips we've given in this series, but here's a tip from Prevention Magazine about negative-accentuated training which was written about in The Four Hour Body as well as by many other life hackers. If you want to build fat-burning muscle in the least amount of time possible, here's a great way:
Almost everyone who's lost weight has eventually put the weight back on. Why this cruel reality? It's simple, really: During the first months of any diet, your body loses both fat and muscle. Then, when you gain back the weight, you add back only fat because it's much easier to gain fat than it is to gain muscle.
"That's the dirty little secret of most popular diet plans," says exercise researcher Ellington Darden. "They don't combine muscle-maintaining exercises with the calorie reduction. More muscle is your ticket to a better body."
It's no secret that muscle is more metabolically active than fat, so by having more lean muscle on your skeleton, you'll burn more calories even at rest. Fortunately, Darden says he discovered a super-efficient way to build muscle while losing weight: It's called "negative training," and Darden tested it on more than 100 people at Gainesville Health & Fitness in Florida a few years ago. The technique involves doing the lowering part, or "eccentric phase," of a resistance exercise very slowly. But Darden gave this old-school bodybuilding trick a tweak: He found that by using heavier weights and doing just one and a half reps very, very slowly, you can achieve remarkable results from just one or two short workouts per week.
To get a taste of what Darden calls "negative-accentuated training," grab two dumbbells, and stand upright with your arms straight and the weights resting against your thighs. Do a quick bicep curl to get the weights to your shoulders; that's the starting position. Now very slowly lower the dumbbells—that's the negative phase—taking 10 to 20 seconds to let them lower to your thighs. Then immediately curl the weight very slowly to your shoulders (again, it should take 10 to 20 seconds)—that's the positive phase of the lift. Finally, without pausing, do another negative movement, taking a final 10 to 20 seconds to lower the weights to your thighs. So the idea is that you'll do the negative movement for twice as long total as you do the positive movement. (Eventually, you'll want to increase to 30 seconds for each phase of this exercise.)
By doing one and a half reps of a lift, you can complete a workout in just 20 to 30 minutes—and feel like you've exercised for more than an hour. The moves are simply that tough, which is why you'll need several days for your muscles to recover.
The negative-accentuated style of weight training results in 40 to 50 percent greater stress being put on your muscles, compared to more conventional training methods, says Darden. This stimulates key hormones that boost muscular growth and oxidize fat-cell content at a faster rate. "It may be that the higher level of stress put on your muscles, combined with just the right amount of carbohydrates, decreases insulin responsiveness in fat cells to make them shrink," says Darden.
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Lazy version of the Cold Water Thermogenesis Protocol
Do you know what those big words mean to your lazy desire to get healthier? Ultimately, they mean that if you expose yourself to cold water, like swimmers do, you burn fat at a highly accelerated rate. I first learned about it from Jack Kruse, MD and you will have to trust me that his blog is intensely thorough and you will have to feel very motivated to read it all! It has also become a popular topic with biohackers like Tim Feriss and in the paleo world.
If you want the lazy version it requires that you stick your face in a bowl of ice water for approximately 10 minutes every day. You need to start slowly (maybe with 1 minute) and work your way up to 10 minutes. Never keep your face in water when it hurts or feels uncomfortable, you adapt to the cold over time and that's what causes you to burn more fat. If you want to further this practice- and it does get way more intense, make sure you do a lot of reading and talk with your doctor before doing a full body cold bath.
Drinking ice water does help also, you do have to raise the temperature of the liquid to your body temp and that burns calories, approximately 70 per day.
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How does bathing help you detox?
Your skin is responsible for eliminating 25% of the toxins in your body. It also absorbs up to 60% whatever is applied to it, this is why it is so important to use natural, non-toxic skincare products. You absorb up to 7% of the oxygen you use through your skin!
The ingredients in detox baths both pull toxins from the skin and are also absorbed by the skin, providing minerals that support the body’s natural detox systems and overall health. That's why you must time your detox baths correctly, long enough to pull the toxins out, but not long enough to reabsorb them.
Extremely healing, relaxing bath recipe
- ½ cup bentonite clay This healing clay magnetically pulls toxins and heavy metals from the body.
- ½ cup Himilayan Sea Salt: Himalayan sea salt contains 84 essential minerals that are efficiently detox the entire body. A strong himalayan salt bath (1-2 full pounds of salt per bath… that’s a lot of salt) is claimed to be the equivalent of a 3-day fast in terms of detoxification. Start slowly. Drink ALOT of water.
- 1 cup Epsom Salts: Magnesium sulfate flushes toxins and also promotes relaxation, improves oxygen use, helps muscles and nerves function properly, and improves the absorption of nutrients.
- 1 teaspoon vitamin C crystals: Helps neutralize the chlorine and chloramine (chlorine and ammonia; used in water treatment and can be more dangerous than just chlorine).
- 1 cup baking soda: Baking soda helps neutralize the body’s pH. It also helps neutralize the chlorine in the water. Arm & Hammer is shown to be aluminum free in testing, you can find large bags at discount stores like Cost Co.
- 20 drops Lavender essential oil promotes relaxation and eases tension. Juniper Oil is also nice and can help diminish appearance of cellulite.
Shower and wash your entire body thoroughly beforehand. You can also dry brush your body before showering to stimulate my body’s detox processes and shed dead skin cells so the detox bath can more easily penetrate my skin, this stimulates your lymph system.
Fill your tub with hot water, but not so hot that it makes you uncomfortable. The heat of the water opens your pores and allows for maximum toxin output. It will also make you sweat, a natural detoxification process in itself.
Dump all of the ingredients into the tub as it is filling. The clay will likely clump — this is no problem. When you get into the tub, simply try to break the clumps up. You can wet the clay and rub it onto your skin if you have areas that you would like deeper penetration of the clay.
Stay in the tub up to 30 minutes, relaxing and deep breathing, enjoying the scent of the lavender. Drink water and/or tea before, during and after this process or you will feel dehydrated. If you feel bad at any point, slowly remove yourself from the water, sit or lie down and drink water When you are done, drain the tub and rinse off. Then apply a natural moisturizer like coconut oil.
You will lose some water with this process, but that's not the point of it, because as you are losing the water through sweat and the clay is pulling toxins out of you as well. You should also feel lighter and happier after, but remember that any detox stirs up toxins in your body and it also stirs up emotions. Realize that this is part of the detoxing process, it may be helpful to journal or listen to music, nap or talk to a friend. Also, try to eat a nourishing meal with fiber, like a salad and fruit after which will further help eliminate toxins from your body!
As always, you should never detox in any capacity while pregnant or breastfeeding, if you have any medical concerns, past medical history or problems or on medication you must check with your doctor before detoxing!
