Eat Dance Live

"Where do you get your B12?" The more nutritionally-conscious raw diet skeptics have cleverly replaced the age-old "where do you get your protein?" question with this one. However, as always, I come prepared! While we only need a very small amount of B12 every day, it's vital that we get it so I welcome the question. B12 helps your body convert carbs, fats, and proteins into energy. It helps maintain red and white blood cell health. Finally, it helps form necessary protection around your very important brain nerve cells. Deficiency usually expresses itself in the form of anemia, fatigue, weakness, constipation, inexplicable weight loss, and more dramatic neurological changes like tingling of the extremities, maintaining balance, depression, confusion, dementia, and memory loss. The thing about a B12 deficiency is that for some, it hits them suddenly, but for others it could take up to a period of as long as 20+ years to express (but then the consequences are pre...

Oh the successes, I have known this week! There's nothing like a 6 day camping festival surrounded by friends old and new, fire-lit drum circles, pine woods and cool rivers to completely rejuvenate you and make you feel alive. These past few days have been extremely curative for me both physically and mentally, and I feel so grateful for the life I have. But on to my successes: Success #1: Mosquito Prevention As I mentioned in my last post , one of the most successful ways to avoid getting bitten by mosquitos is to avoid potassium foods a few days prior to and during your camping trip. So it's been no bananas, pumpkin seeds, strawberries, whole grains, and brazil nuts for us for almost 10 days now and the mosquito bite tally: 5 over 6 days, while everybody else was massively attacked. I don't know if it's the raw diet or potassium or both but it worked so well that at one point, we were talking to a friend and all the mosquitos were swarming around him while we just sa...

Yes, it has begun... the long birth process of my very own kombucha scoby mother. For someone whose pretty lax about sanitation in the kitchen when cooking for myself (double-dipping, re-using mixing bowls, etc.), it's interesting to see how OCD I get about cleanliness the minute anything fermented is involved. Because I assume that things can easily go wrong with the fermentation process (mould, too much oxygen, unclean utensils, etc.) I read the instructions to my starter culture about 10 times and checked out all sorts of kombucha making websites before even touching anything. I was also extra careful to follow the instructions word for word and was probably more sanitary than I have been my entire life. (This coming from someone who has to be tied down to just follow a recipe.) Given the care I've put into this, I'm sure it's going to work awesome though! Starting your own kombucha culture is pretty easy actually. All I had to do was boil water in a steel pot, add ...

So, one of the many reasons to have awesome friends is that when they discover a really amazing place to eat, they share it with you. (Okay, so that was a pretty lame reason to want to have friends, but as a foodie, I guess it's still pretty high on the list.) Though we just moved into Ottawa, we do know a few people here and one of them told us he just discovered a really amazing restaurant in the middle of a random strip mall that not only had organic vegan food but raw options as well. We saw him a couple days ago and he said we had to try it, and that he was trying to tell as many people as possible and share the love. We agreed to go on one condition: that we go with him and meet his significant other, to which he readily agreed, though now I know it was probably more for the food, then our company! It's a small place called Cafe My House that we would never have found on our own. Like I said, it was totally randomly situated. Who knew you could find organic vegan food i...

What a way to start our day! I think I have to amend my statement from yesterday that I could live off of Green Machine Smoothies, I'd like to add 'Dustin's Mimosas' to my list (another one of Meredith's great recipes !) One of the recipe's ingredients is Kombucha, which I love to get on occasion (the only option I know of are individual 16 oz. containers that are too much for my environmentally obsessive-self, despite them being made of glass)! Kombucha is an amazing drink, and GT's Organic Raw Kombucha has some wonderful options (the Gingerade and Spirulina are my favourite... go figure). Kombucha is a live culture of healthy microorganisms that benefit your body from the inside out! It's a drink (some people call it a tea) packed with active enzymes, probiotics, amino acids, antioxidants, and more. Really, it's a cultured and fermented drink that pretty much tastes like fizzy water with a kick. On a raw diet, I probably don't ge...