Eat Dance Live

For all those of you who spend a lot of time reading food blogs (read: me), you may or may not have been made aware of a recent Marie Claire article that's been creating quite the controversy amongst healthy food bloggers worldwide. While I encourage you to read the actual article rather just basing your opinion on what I have to say about it, in short, it talks about the fact that many female health food bloggers are now using their blogs as an outlet for unhealthy, often disordered behavior regarding both diet and exercise. These patterns of behavior and the "health tips" they share are then adopted by a whole slew of avid readers who then themselves fall into unhealthy attitudes towards themselves, their bodies, and their health. In many ways, I agree with this. There are plenty of blogs out there that are overly obsessed with monitoring their food intake, the amount of time they spend on a cardio machine, or that are fanatical about labels (whether it's fat-free,...

"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...

Four days of high raw and I feel like a new person. I can't get over how amazing the raw diet is. As I mentioned yesterday , I've been eating about 95% fresh fruit and veggies and I've regained the mental clarity I lost over the past 6 months. Like I used to in the beginning, I woke up bright and early today (at 6:45am) and felt totally alert and ready to go. I went upstairs to our super new loft that I'm turning into my yoga/dance harem and did 20 minutes of yoga from Yoga Download to get my day going. It was delicious. ( photo source ) Despite the fact that it's also super hot up here (yep, even Canadians get 35C/95F degree weather sometimes!), we trekked all around town and I managed to survive 30 minutes of sweaty jungle beast cardio at the gym later in the afternoon... All of that, and I still feel great! For those who have expressed curiosity on what my day looks like now that it's more 'structured'. It looks something like this: Breakfast: Frui...

Eating consistently is one of the most important things you can do for your body and mind. Everyone has always said not to skip meals and the like, so... I'll say it again! I've tried a lot when it comes to tweaking my metabolism to see what works best to feel great and stay healthy. Though I'm sure I still have much to learn, I think I now know what's most important for me. While these aren't totally original, here are just a few pointers I should have listened to more today: 1) Don't skip breakfast: Like many teenage girls, I have to admit that I did skip breakfast for far too long. Adding breakfast back into my life was perhaps the single most noticeable dietary change I made before going raw. Eating breakfast keeps you awake, active, alert, and ready for what the day holds. It fuels you. You can't run an engine on empty or nearly empty without damaging it, can you? And what do all nutritionist and fitness instructors say anyway? It's been proven tim...

With the end of classes coming around and procrastination from papers increasing with the end of the semester, I'm hoping to be posting more frequently from now on (along the lines of twice a week). It seems like people are looking for all sorts of substitutes recently (myself included!) whether it is to make something vegan, gluten-free, low-fat, low-sugar, low calorie, the list goes on… this is why this week’s ode is to quinoa. Quinoa: it’s something of a grain, but it’s gluten free and you can use it for ANYTHING! It can substitute rice, couscous, breakfast oatmeal, you can find quinoa flour, you name it! Like I mentioned in one of my last posts, I always find it fascinating (but mostly scary) how far removed we have become from our food. When we consider that traditional South American diets understood the need for complete proteins, or that traditional Chinese cooking emphasizes the consumption of ‘internal body cleansers’ or 'energy balancers' like ginger...

This post and the next few are cross-posts from my old blog on Vox. I switched over to this site in the hopes of increasing my readership, but also because unforunately, only Vox members can post comments on that site. It was a pretty snazzy site though, but not fully suited to my needs! This is from March 4, 2009: Of all the hundreds of things I learned at Powershift ’09 this weekend, this is one of the comments that stuck with me the most: “98% of people who blog just want to be heard.” This seems like a really obvious statement and though I’m sure that the ‘98%’ was just pulled out of the air, it speaks volumes. ‘Why am I starting a blog?’ it made me wonder. What is it that I want from this? For me, it’s not just about being heard, it’s also about listening. I don’t just want to rant, I want to teach, educate, and above all, I want to share. Now more than ever we have access to so much information. We have so much to learn from each other and we can now communicate those thing...