Alkaline Living: A Healthy Approach

Alkaline living is seeing an uptick in followers to this healthy approach for life quality. People are beginning to learn what it means to balance their lives. Especially, after this Coronavirus (Covid-19 and all its variants) pandemic. This means balancing their time, their relationships, their desires and even their diets.

How Did Our Ph Levels and Life Get So Unbalanced?

After a couple years of lockdowns, social distancing, isolation and a lot of time cooped up inside, people are looking for new ways to make their lives better. While the pandemic has been horrendous, it has also given many people a chance to step back and reflect on what is important to them. There has been an incredible shift of people giving up their former jobs to pursue careers and opportunities that take them in different directions. Much like the opportunity here that allows me to remain a stay at home mom and still provide for my family. But this process of adjusting to a pandemic lifestyle has been rough. Through the adversity,, people are just plain realizing how unbalanced their lives have been. And with the threat of a potentially deadly virus, our own personal health has become increasingly more important.

A Lack of Alkaline Living

Welcome to the Pandemic 15! The Pandemic 15 is the non-biased freshman 15 that hits first year college students. It refers to the fifteen pounds of weight many gain when they first go to college. In the Pandemic 15 case, it’s been all the time at home. Not able to get out, get around. People eating through their emotions and feelings of despair separated from family and friends. Junk food, food delivery, thick creamy fattening comfort foods laden with carbs and fat.

And LOTS of ice cream while sitting on the couch binging Netflix and other streaming spell-binding, captivating television series. Most assuredly, not a balanced lifestyle and definitely not alkaline living.

Alcohol consumption has hit a major increase too. Fine Wine has seen a dramatic increase due to direct to consumer delivery. Of course, wine has been around for thousands of years and has been proven to have health benefits when consumed in moderation. Although, alcohol is not considered alkaline.

However, my experience has been moderation is much easier to maintain with a fine wine enjoyed with family and friends. Sometimes, the wine is a beverage offered at an event. Other times, it is the wine that makes the experience become an event. Unfortunately, not everyone drinks alcohol in moderation. Herein, lies the imbalanced affects to the body. Plus, there are other alcoholic beverages loaded with sugars and yes, even small traces of arsenic. Bottom line, if you are going to have a cheat from alkaline living, drink fine wine in moderation.

What Happens When Our Bodies Aren’t In Sync with Alkaline Living?

Simply. We suffer! Our bodies begin to respond by not working properly. Our systems lack the power and strength needed to combat illness and diseases. We are off balance. our Ph levels are off balance. Our quality of life is diminished.

Ask yourself if find yourself feeling one or many or all of these? Perhaps, your doctor has given you a diagnosis?

tired
depressed
lack of energy
weak
brain fog; unable to focus
anxious
snacking when you aren’t hungry
feeling sluggish
loss of ambition
skin issues; acne, psoriasis, eczema
nausea
changes to your bowel function
high blood pressure
high cholesterol
headaches
lack of ambition
loss of libido
gout
fungal infections
bacterial infections
increased susceptibility to viruses
arthritis and inflammation
diabetes
heart disease
liver disease
kidney disease
anemia
cancers

All these thing leading to what is now commonly known referred to as “at-risk”. In other words, your body is suffering from symptoms, illnesses and maladies – out of Ph balance; at risk for hospitalization: even dying.

What Are Ph Levels Really?

Our bodies are sacred vessels for this crazy thing we call life. If there is one thing in the world we SHOULD be practicing in order to stay alive, it’s taking care of our bodies. It is our sole responsibility to ourselves to nourish our bodies in order to support the bodily functions of our systems which sustain our lives. And how are we going to know when our bodies are sufficiently nourished? By measuring our Ph levels.

The Ph level is a measurement of acidity, alkili, in our bodies. Specifically, the Ph stands for Potential Hydrogen. By nature’s design, we all have Ph in our bodies. And our cells need alkaline water. The recommended baseline Ph level for any and all individuals is 7.365. Just think about how often you rely on your body, your personal sacred vessel, to keep you alive. It’s 7 days a week. 365 days a year. Therefore, 7.365 is your Ph level. When you drop below that level, your body is experiencing increased acidity leading to health concerns. On the Ph Chart the range below 7.365 is Red. The red zone is your body saying it’s not healthy and there is too much acidity. Free radicals attack your cells in the red zone and have a heyday! Now you are susceptible to any of those things on the list above.

A Healthy Approach for Quality of Life

It’s Alkaline living! First, we require air and water to exist. Secondly, our bodies need food and we have supplements to help support the nourishment of our body. Finally, Alkaline Living includes our mindset. Our bodies and life balance reap the benefits of our positive thinking and purposeful practice for successful and healthy living. And a positive healthy mindset is vital to Alkaline Living.

According to the Ph Level measurement on the chart, a Ph level above 7.365 is in the blue range and indicates good levels of alkalinity, less acidity. Less your body has to fight to remain this sacred vessel for you. Reduced risk of viruses attacking your body. Lesser damage to your cells from free radicals and acidity.

Getting into the Blue – Alkaline Living!

If you are thinking this sounds complicated, think again, it’s not much different than what you hear about nutrition all the time. That’s right – EAT MORE FRUITS AND VEGETABLES! White meat is better for you than red meat, but there are plenty of protein alternatives available these days too — soy and tofu for example. Refrain from junk foods, processed foods and toxic lifestyle choices such as smoking, drinking in excess, illicit drugs and so on. Physical activity is great for your body and as a low impact exercise walking is FREE and great for your body.

Start With Making Simple Changes

The last thing anyone wants to do is make a drastic unattainable long range change. Understandably, it’s easy to get excited and motivated when you hear something amazing and how it can make you feel like a million bucks. Heck, yah — where do I sign up? Right? How many diet programs are out there? And how many successes and failures have you experienced with these programs? Frozen, pre-portioned, bland foods. And while they may have temporarily worked, your body still needed more attention, more balance. That is why the key is to address your lifestyle – turn to alkaline living.

Let’s begin with those fruits and vegetables. Next time you go to the store, look for your organic products. This isn’t about hunting down exotic produce. Everyday things like spinach, broccoli, kale, celery. I love pesto and its easy to make. The first time I had pesto, I fell in love with it. Basil, pine nuts, olive oil, parmesan and a little black pepper. Now, I am excited to try variations of pesto. I usually use spinach or basil, both great for an alkaline diet, as my base. But, did you know you can make a pesto using radish greens or carrot greens? Try arugula for a naturally peppery pesto. Swap out the pine nuts for walnuts. Take it a step further and get the most bang for your alkaline buck — go with almonds! Almonds are the highest in alkaline in the nut family. The parmesan cheese? No worries, once digested it hits about a 3.0 on the Ph level. In the blue zone, baby! But, I understand you can substitute the cheese with nutritional yeast too. Options, always nice to have options.

More at the Store to Look For…

Look for those citrus fruits. Grapefruit, oranges, lemons and limes. These are great food items to add to your day. But here, let me take you back to simple changes. Remember, first of all, something like a lemon is a common produce item at your local grocery store. Now, that you have that lemon, what to do with it? Slice it and squeeze the juice into a glass of cool water. Voila, you have made a simple change toward alkaline living. Lemon water. Boom. Wasn’t that easy? By the way, a couple tips to get the most juice out of your lemon. Roll it on your counter with slight pressure before you slice it. You can also microwave the lemon for about 10 to 15 seconds before you cut into it. The other trick is to use a fresh lemon; one that is brighter in color, smoother and feels almost a little heavy. That’s all that juice inside.

Root vegetables are another great way to go for an alkaline living diet. Parsnips, carrots, radishes, beets, onions, potatoes. See? Nothing extravagant that you have to look high and low for to buy. Doesn’t this make you want to throw these into a great pot of soup? Or roast them? Yum! And beans! Eat just a half a cup of white beans each day and feel your waistline shrink.

Also, while you are there, go ahead and grab that garlic and ginger too — good for you and high on the alkaline scale. Imagine sitting down to a cup of garlic navy beans and onions. There you go…another soup idea. Throw those together with some spinach and chopped carrot. In fact, many herbs and spices are high on the alkaline chart. Cinnamon, curry powder, chili pepper and mustard seed,

Mindset: Grocery Cart Challenge

Have you ever set out to the grocery store with a mindset that today your grocery cart will be at least 25% fruits and vegetables? That is the minimum amount. Really, you should strive for 30% or more. Or think of it this way, for that piece of chicken breast, you need to have 2 to 3 times that in fruits and vegetables today.

Use that alkaline living mindset to intentionally and purposefully stock your refrigerator with the food to nourish you. Make it readily available. Put fruit in a bowl. Take away the chips. Yet, if you don’t like broccoli, then don’t get it. Buy the vegetable you like. Or learn ways to hide the vegetable into a recipe. For example, cauliflower is not on my family’s choice list of foods they like to eat. Yet, they don’t know the difference when I make cauliflower mashed potatoes or use cauliflower rice in stuffed bell peppers (another great vegetable for alkaline living). Either way, grocery shop with intention and a healthy alkaline living mindset.

Start Your Day and Start Today!

How many times have you been told you need to eat breakfast to start your day out right? Don’t skip breakfast. Grab a banana if you are on the go. By the way, bananas are up there high on the alkaline produce list too. There are three produce items not mentioned yet, until now. They make what has been dubbed the C.A.T. breakfast. Cucumber, Avocado and Tomato. Start out your day every day with these three foods and you start out with an alkaline positive day.

C.A.T. Breakfast

Cucumber

Why these three? Well, cucumbers are an amazing food! They are full of water naturally and that helps act as a diuretic in your body. Releasing your body from that bloating feeling. And keeps you hydrated at the same time. Good for your skin — I mean, beyond just over your eyes at a fancy spa. Cucumber is also high in alkaline which begins working right away to reduce the acidity in your body and help with digestion. Plus, cucumber is loaded with other things like Vitamins K, B and C and good amino acids and magnesium and potassium. All stuff very good for you. It’s low in calories too.

A quick FYI on cucumbers. There are slicing cucumbers and pickling cucumbers. Most slicing cucumbers have many seeds and the larger seeds can taste bitter. Remove the seeds for a better tasting cucumber bite. However, an English cucumber tends to be a little longer and more slender than the average cucumber. A little darker too and fewer seeds. It is deemed the sweetest of the cucumber varieties. Pickling cucumbers are typically short. They go from a lighter green by the top to a darker green at the bottom. Their skin is thinner and they are frequently pudgy looking..

Avocado

Avocado. This is the new butter! So creamy, fresh. This is closer to the middle of the Ph level chart. However, it too has a number of vitamins (B6, K, C and E) and the magnesium and potassium. It also has folate which is good for your brain. You may have heard about the importance of folic acid for pregnant women. It is a crucial part of the brain development in a fetus. It makes sense then, years later, we want to keep up with that folate to our brains. Additionally, avocados hold benefits of the good fats like Omega-3’s that are linked to supporting our heart health. Most importantly, avocados act as the filler. It fills us up. Do away with the nagging mid-morning hunger that takes you right to the vending machine or the work break room with donuts and cookies and such.

Do you struggle to choose the right avocado in the store? When you get home and want to make guacamole the avocado is still too green? Or you want to add freshly sliced avocado to your omelet and the avocado is brown or black inside and mushy? Here’s a tip for avocado shopping. Avoid the bright green ones and the really dark ones. Find an avocado in between that is firm but it has a slight give to the feel. (Remember the old squeezing the Charmin commercial – like that, soft squeezes, please). Then look for the stem. It should be intact and light brown. When the stem is removed, the avocado ix potentially exposed to oxygen and bacteria that can accel ripening and potentially go bad. When the stem is dark or black, the avocado has passed its peak freshness.

Tomato

The irony of the tomato is it is commonly used to bring acidity to culinary dishes. It is also considered an inflammatory fruit. Of course, there is the debate, is it really a fruit? Or is it a vegetable? Hear is how to answer that – sprinkle it with sugar and it is a fruit; dust it with salt and it’s a vegetable! But here is the key to turning this acidic food into a positive for your alkaline living. Remove the seeds! That’s right – just remove the seeds. Much of the acidity is power packed into the seeds.

Therefore, it stands to reason you also need to look at the different varieties of tomatoes. For example, a beefsteak tomato is juicy and usually quite seedy compared to a roma tomato that is compacted into that oval shape. Personally, I chose long ago to switch mostly to Roma tomatoes because I wanted the tomato to be fresh on my sandwiches, burgers, or plain slices than to have juice saturating my bread and buns and plate. However, tomato varieties with the least amount of acid naturally tend to be orange and yellow, not red. So when you take the Alkaline Living Mindset Grocery Cart Challenge be on the lookout for a yellow or orange tomato. Try something new. And don’t forget to remove the seeds! There you have it! The C.A.T. breakfast. (Another hint: when you have a red sauce or use canned tomatoes or tomato paste, add a little baking soda to reduce the acidity).

Let’s Recap Alkaline Living

We know our bodies all have a Ph level. Our bodies are the one driving vehicle we have, our sacred vessel, to living and we need to take care of our bodies.

When our Ph level is in the Red zone we are at risk for symptoms, illness and diseases which could lead to hospitalization or possibly death.

Our Ph level should be 7.365 (or higher) and we can achieve this by making small adjustments to our everyday lives. For example, drinking lemon water instead of plain water. Buying organic produce rather than canned fruits and vegetables.

Our goal is to incorporate more fruits and vegetables and be mindful to provide our refrigerators and our bodies with recommended portions of healthy produce. Supplements are a part of alkaline living because they help support the nutrients we get through our food.

When we start our day with the C.A.T. diet, we are off to a great start for Alkaline Living!

BioHacking Supplements

Biohacking is taking what we know about science. specifically biology, and then finding ways that work with our bodies to enhance our health. To learn more about biohacking and see safe, healthy supplement products, visit here. Maximize your alkaline living with biohacking.

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