Preparation is key. I recently started planning out my meals the night before. It really helps so you don’t get sidetracked.

Here are a few of my favorite shopping list items from Whole Foods Market:

• Celtic sea salt
• Hemp oil (great for salads)
• Dried mangos (yum)
• Avocados (love of my life)
• Tahini (perfect base in dressings)
• Dulse (a little B12 snack)
• Champagne mangos (best fruit in the world award)
• Raisins (classic)
• Pistachios (no shells please)
• Lemons (adds the ”umph” to a meal)

Swung by Liquiteria in East Village this morning for a ”grasshopper” juice – which consists of pineapple, pear, wheatgrass, mint, and apple. Sipped on it as I walked to work. New York is still a little chilly, but summer is just around the corner.

Natalie Portman actually gets her juices here too.

When you’re having one of those bad days, make a list of all the things that make you happy in life. You’ll realize how much you actually have, things you should appreciate more, and things that you simply take for granted. My list always amazes me and puts a smile right back on my face. Try it…

In today’s society, eating disorders are quite common and it always upsets me to think about all the time and effort that is putting into limiting calories or the negative criticism that our minds directs towards our bodies. Think about it, we should eat to live, not live to eat and focus on loving ourselves and nourishing our bodies with beautiful organic produce.

Here is an excellent book by Natalia Rose that you can download straight from her website if you or someone you know needs support in this area.

This book is for anyone who wishes to live and eat without feeling burdened by the body, including those who have ever purged after eating too much or withdrawn entirely from eating because they couldn’t manage safe boundaries around consumption. This is for anyone who wants to understand why, despite finding success in other areas of life, they still wind up feeling powerless around food. And it’s for those who wake up morning after morning and ask themselves, despairingly, Why did I let myself do that again?

I recommend keeping a small fruit bowl at the office so you don’t run down to Starbucks in panic and grab a venti mocha cappochino & some sort of cinnamon-loaded-with-sugar-swirl-cupcake around 4pm. Recharge with the beautiful offerings by mother nature instead and keep it natural kids.

Boosting my energy with an orange today. Vitamin C blast off… 3…2…1…

Headed out to the Hamptons this weekend, but before we roared away, we made a pit stop at the Juice Press in East Village. Picked up this luscious thing – made of mixed berries, mango, and coconut water.

It’s really important to have a good ”flow” and go the bathroom every morning – since your body spends the nights cleaning out your system, you should be ready to release when you wake up. If you are not even going once a day, you need to take a look at what your eating – do you get enough fiber in your diet? Do you take probiotics on a regular basis? etc.

In order for your body to function properly, it’s important to help it out with colonics. This will help push out toxins and get rid of old mucus stuck in there – oh trust me, we all have that….

Elimination is the most important element in creating health. The colon, also known as the large intestine, is the collection site for most of the unwanted materials that the body would like to eliminate. This includes food residues, metabolic wastes and foreign toxins like food additives, drug residues and industrial pollutants. Unsuccessful or incomplete elimination of this material prevents our bodies from reaching peak levels of health and energy.

What Will Colonics Do For The Colon?

1. Cleanse the Colon: Breaks down toxic excrement so it can no longer harm your body or inhibit assimilation and elimination. Toxins built up over a long period are gently removed in a series of treatments. Your colon can begin to co-operate again as it was intended. In this sense, a colonic is a rejuvenation treatment.
2. Exercise the Colon Muscles:The build-up of toxins weakens the colon and impairs its functioning. The gentle filling and emptying of the colon improves peristalsis (muscular contraction) by which the colon naturally moves material. Having Colonics is like taking your colon to the gym.
3. Reshape the Colon: When problem conditions exist in the colon, they tend to alter its shape because the colon is a muscle and it will enlarge to the build up of toxins not being released. That in turn causes more problems. The gentle action of the water, coupled with massage techniques of the colon therapist, help to eliminate bulging pockets of poop and narrowed, spastic constrictions finally enabling the colon to resume its natural state.
4. Stimulated Reflex Points in the Colon: The colon is connected to every system and organ in the body by reflex points. The colonic stimulates these points thereby affecting the corresponding body parts in a beneficial way. Thus creating overall well-being and health in the body.
5. Hydration of the Whole Body: Water is absorbed into the body through the colon which increases the volume of blood. The circulation of the blood is increased, resulting in a greater bathing of the cells. This dilutes the toxins and flushes them out; relieving toxemia and uremia; and increasing elimination both through the kidneys, and the skin as well as the bowels. All this generally assists the cardiovascular and circulatory systems to be more efficient.

Try my favorite spot: Gravity East Village

(Reasons from http://www.fountainofhealth.com/colonicbenefits.php)

…you consume each morning. Why? The nutrients will go deeper into your cells (especially since the fiber has been removed – versus a smoothie, where the fiber still remains). Green juice is like a natural vitamin pill. Yum.

Whenever I visit Stockholm, I max out on my favorite smoothie – Eat Your Greens – from Blueberry. It consists of fresh spinach, wheatgrass, spirulina, pineapple, mango, orange, apple & lemon.

A few years back supermodel Carol Alt did an interview with PR.com, explaining the concept of alkalinity vs. acidity and how cooking food effects this balance…

What is this concept of alkaline versus acid?

Carol Alt: This is just based on the research that I’ve found and what I found with my own body and from the doctors that I’ve worked with. I was taught by Dr. Timothy Brantley that the body is acid by nature but alkaline by necessity. That means when we work out, when we stress, when we digest food… whatever we do, we make eight different kinds of acids. Hydrochloric Acid, Lactic Acid…you name it, we make it. We don’t make anything alkaline. But our organs like to sit in a neutral PH. Well how do we do that? If our bodies are only producing acid, how do we get our organs to sit in a neutral PH? Well, if you pull spinach out of the ground and it’s on the alkaline side, but you cook that spinach and now it becomes a tub of acid, what do you do? Do you cook it?

Ok, so by cooking food you’re making it acidic?

Carol Alt: You change the PH as well as the molecular structure, as well as de-naturing the vitamins and minerals, as well as killing the enzymes. Here’s the problem. People are like, “Well they ate wheat way back when and they made bread.” Yeah, they germinated their grains. They ate the whole grain. They put them into patty cakes and they laid them in the sun. What is that? That’s dehydration. When we started creating ovens, we started dehydrating things faster and at a higher heat. The trade off was, at the higher heat we killed the enzymes and de-natured the vitamins and minerals. Those four things are the most important things the body needs. And when you give the body everything it needs it can cure itself, in my opinion, from anything. Because every disease we have is from de-generation; from the body breaking down. Well don’t you think acid breaks down the body? It destroys cars; rusts them right out! Molecular structure. Do you put tea in your car? Why not? It looks like gas. It’s liquid like gas. It’s the same color as gas. Why don’t you put tea in your car? The molecular structure is different. The car can’t read the molecular structure of tea. Well, our body is brilliant and it can read the molecular structure of a lot of things, but when you change the molecular structure to the point where it looks like a toxin to the body, it’s going to react to the food like a toxin. We call that allergies.