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4 Simple Tips on Mindful Eating…….

 

What is Mindful Eating?

Mindful eating is a way to bring awareness to your experiences with food. Practice  helps your brain and body communicate so you know when you’re hungry, satisfied, or full. When eating mindfully, you pay attention to what your body is trying to say and take notice of the smaller actions you might not normally notice. This means taking your time to be fully aware of what you’re consuming, only eating when you’re hungry, and stopping when you’re full try our 4 simple tips on mindful eating and see if it helps.

Mindless eating is often associated with obesity. When curbing mindless habits, you can eliminate bloating and indigestion – plus potentially be at a healthier weight.

4 Simple Ways to Start Today

  1. Am I hungry?

When reaching for a snack, try asking yourself that question.

 If you answer no, then ask, “Why am I hungry?”
Are you bored? Thirsty? Tired? Upset? These can often be confused for hunger.

 If you answer yes, then ask, “How hungry am I?”
Assess how much food you really need and stop eating when you’re not hungry…not when you’re full!

Helpful tip! Take 5
 Can’t figure out your level of hunger, take five minutes and distract yourself before turning to food.
Try this hunger scale to see how hungry you really are.

  1. Stop with the distractions

Are you using a phone, computer, or TV while eating, if you are not listening to your body telingl you when it’s full. During your next meal, take a break from the electronics and only focus on the food you’re consuming. Notice the look, texture, smell, and tastes!

  1.  TrySlowing down

It takes 20 minutes for our stomach to receive the signal that we’re full.  Putting down your fork between bites and drinking a glass of water as you’re eating helps with mindful eating.

  1.  Help Manage your environment

Controlling food temptations around you can be another easy way to create a mindful eating habit.

  • Put away part of a meal before you start eating – this will help you prevent overeating, and leaves you with leftovers for the next day!
  • Take out a portion of the food, instead of eating right out of the container
  • Use different sized dishes to appropriately match a meal
    • Salad plate for dinner
    • Smaller dish for ice cream

Try Mindful Extras

Switch things up by adding these mindful eating hacks to your next meal:

  • Use a fork with your non-dominant hand
  • Scrap the fork and knife altogether…give chopsticks a shot instead!
  • When socializing around a table of food, hold your drink in your dominant hand so you can’t easily grab food
  • Why not try your new found tips with our super nutritious seaweed recipies….
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Sprinkle, Infuse, Drink Goodness and Flavour

With our new and exciting Oishii Range of seaweed and condiment sachets. You can. Sprinkle, Infuse, Drink.

Sprinkle flavour onto your meals.

Infuse as a stock.

Drink the goodness from a cup.

 Tide -Calming and Reflective.

Earth – Earthy and Savoury.

Sun – Zingy and Refreshing.

Feed your Body and Soul with Oishii……

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10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

What is Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating is an approach developed to help people heal from the side effects of chronic dieting.  People who repeatedly diet often experience a “diet backlash” – increased rigidity regarding good and bad foods, restriction leading to increased binging, reduction in trust of self with food, feelings about not “deserving” food, social withdrawal, and shortened duration of dieting episodes.

An intuitive eater is defined as a person who “makes food choices without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma, honors hunger, respects fullness and enjoys the pleasure of eating.”  Few of us are immune from guilt and judgment regarding our food choices because of the many sources of “food police” in our culture.

 Learning to honor hunger is a key component in the learning process.    The emphasis is on honoring health and taste buds together through gentle nutrition.  Movement, in this approach, is respectful of the body and focuses on finding fun, joyful ways to move the body.

Decrease in Weight 

Initial studies of intuitive eating have found that “intuitive eaters” have a decrease in weight, thin idealization, and triglycerides, and an increase in wellbeing, good cholesterol, and self-esteem.  Be Nourished programs and services provide tools for people to relieve the psychological, as well as the physical burden of chronic dieting.

Principles of Intuative Eating

1. Reject the diet mentality
Diet culture surrounds us, but you don’t have to participate. We all have friends or family members who have been on diets that strike us as a little (or a lot) extreme or unsustainable. Say no to rigid food rules, dietary restrictions that aren’t medically necessary and the pressure to eat perfectly all the time. There’s always going to be a new fad diet to try, but research shows crash diets don’t work.

2. Honor your hunger
Since we were born, we’ve had people telling us when and how much to eat. But the thing is: as babies, we cry when we’re hungry — even if it’s outside the typical breakfast, lunch and dinner eating times. While some structure to meals can be helpful if you have a busy schedule, ignoring your hunger because it’s not “time to eat” isn’t helpful. Most of the time, it just makes us hangry. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

3. Make peace with food
Stop fighting with food and allow yourself to eat all types of food. There are obviously cases where you should strictly steer clear of a food, like if you have an allergy to it or it will interfere with an illness or medication. But generally speaking, if we tell ourselves not to eat a certain food, we feel deprived and often overeat, which can be uncomfortable and guilt-provoking.

4. Challenge the food police
Avoid categorizing food as good or bad. If you feel “bad” for eating a piece of chocolate cake, you may need to tell your internal “food police” to take a hike. Rigid food rules and feelings of insecurity about eating “bad” foods can harm our relationship with food. All foods, especially when eating a variety of them, can serve a purpose in your eating plan. 

5. Respect your fullness
Get in tune with your hunger and check in with yourself as you eat. If you start to feel full, consider saving the rest of your meal as leftovers for another meal this week

6. Discover the satisfaction factor
Sometimes in our diet-obsessed culture, it’s easy to overlook the pleasure of eating. When you eat what you really want (like a diverse meal of roasted potatoes and vegetables and salmon cooked with oil, plus a handful of chocolate-covered almonds) instead of what you think you should eat (lettuce, boiled chicken, no dressing) you may find it takes less food to decide you’ve had “enough” to eat.

7. Honor your feelings without using food
We all experience negative emotions, but using food to solve those problems rarely works. Instead, find a proactive way to process your emotions — whether it’s through calling a friend, taking a bath or adopting a new hobby that clears your mind.

8. Respect your body
Respect your body, because it does a lot more for you than you might realize. It’s hard to reject dieting if you are overly judgmental of your body size or shape.

9. Exercise — feel the difference
Movement is an important part of health, but you’re more likely to participate in exercise if it’s a type you enjoy doing. Focus on how you feel during the exercise — you’re more likely to engage in consistent exercise if it makes you feel energized instead of physically drained.

10. Honor your health
Intuitive eating (a non-diet approach to eating) is not anti-health. Most of the time, you choose foods that make you feel good, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, protein and healthy fats. At the same time, intuitive eating encourages practicing compassion if you overeat or eat indulgent food and recognizes that your worth is not based on your pants size.

These  principles make intuitive eating a little less mysterious and a little more practical. They can help improve your relationship with food so you spend less time thinking about eating and more time engaging in meaningful life experiences.

This blog post includes contributions from Liz Saunders

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How to Cure a Hangover

Cure your hangover with Kelp

Abstaining from alcohol for the month of January is becoming increasingly common.It’s now known that seaweeds are great for a body detox but did you know seaweeds are brilliant for liver detoxification.
Seaweeds contain sodium alginate which absorbs toxins from the digestive tract.

Kelp is a type of seaweed that is particularly rich in algin and green seaweed is rich in chlorophyll, a green pigment containing special fibres that bind to and remove toxins from the body.So don’t just rest your liver detox it with seaweed.

So if you are back on the sauce in February and feeling hungover, try a little seaweed and find out how to cure a hangover.

 

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5 Ways Seaweeds Can Benefit Your Health in 2020

Benefits of Eating Seaweeds

 

I have put together some of the health benefits of eating  seaweeds for the New Year health regimes.  I’ve called this article 5 Ways Seaweeds Can Benefit Your Health in 2020.

Adding seaweeds to your diet gives taste and texture to your food and benefits your health. They have been described as the most nutritious forms of vegetation on the planet.

It’s probably fair to say that for lots of people reading this, seaweed isn’t a regular staple of their diet. While it’s consumed around the world in many coastal cities and particularly in Asian cuisine, most people wouldn’t ordinarily come across seaweed in food except when it’s used to wrap up sushi rolls or flavour rice crackers.

But we should change this, according to a team of Danish researchers who advocate that people should be eating seaweed daily to make their meals healthier – and to help reduce the impact of obesity and the conditions that stem from it.

“Certain substances in seaweed may be important for reducing cardiovascular diseases,” says Ole G. Mouritsen, a biophysics researcher at the University of Southern Denmark. “We think this knowledge should be available for society and also be put to use.”

A study published in Phycologia Mouritsen and his colleagues say incorporating seaweed into our diets shouldn’t just be left to the consumer, suggesting that the food industry has a big role to play in making seaweed a common ingredient in the foodstuffs we buy and consume every day from businesses such as Ebb Tides Seaweeds.

All manner of processed foods could incorporate small amounts of seaweed as an alternative ingredient or flavouring, the researchers suggest, including frozen pizzas, hot dogs, dried pasta, and even fast food.

In the new paper the researchers examine the dietary profile of 35 different species of seaweed, many of which confer a variety of health benefits. Seaweed is high in a number of healthy nutrients including essential amino acids, antioxidants, minerals, trace elements, dietary fibre and polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Seaweeds are also Good for Flavouring 

It’s also good for flavouring, with its potassium salt content not leading to high blood pressure like sodium salts, plus it delivers umami, generally considered the fifth of the  basic human tastes, which promotes satiety and can help regulate food intake.

Five to 10 grams of dried seaweed per day is a good estimate.

Not that you should need to seek this out or sprinkle it on your breakfast cereal (although you can if you wish). Mouritsen and his team say we could easily hit this daily amount if seaweed were absorbed into other foods we consume, such as replacing 5 percent of the flour in pizza dough with dried and granulated seaweed. It can also be used in bread dough, where, if it’s kept to 5 percent, it won’t affect the dough’s ability to rise.

Don’t Eat Seaweed of the Beach

  Research  advise people to never eat any seaweed that washes up on the shore. But for the right variants, when procured safely, a small amount daily could be a flavoursome boost to a healthy diet.By adding seaweed to processed foods, we can make food healthier. In many cases we also get tastier food, and it may also help reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases.”

5 Ways Seaweeds Can Benifit Your Health in 2020 

 

 1) Weight Control

 

Brown seaweeds contain Alginate that reduces fat   digestion by the body by 30%

 

Iodine in seaweeds helps maintain a healthy metabolism and burn calories.

 

Seaweeds rehydrate the stomach making you feel full and less likely to snack.

 

 

2 ) Dry January

 

Abstaining from alcohol for the month of January is becoming increasingly common.It’s now known that seaweeds are great for a body detox but did you know seaweeds are brilliant for liver detoxification.
Seaweeds contain sodium alginate which absorbs toxins 
from the digestive tract. Kelp is a type of seaweed that is particularly rich in algin and green seaweed is rich in chlorophyll, a green pigment containing special fibres that bind to and remove toxins from the body.So don’t just rest your liver detox it with seaweed.

 

3) Keeping Warm

 

Guess what your thyroid controls in your body? Your temperature. The combination of poor circulation and a thyroid that is down can cause the feet and hands to be cold. So what can you do about this? How can you improve your circulation and thyroid health in order to have warm feet and hands again?Beyond the external things though you want to get more iodine in your diet to feed the health of your thyroid. Iodine can be found in Kelp and Dulse  seaweed. Be sure to include these in your diet, add them to your salads, soups, raw food recipes etc. So during this cold snap make sure you get your iodine fix.

 4) Detox

 

Did you know Seaweed Detoxifies From The Inside Out

Seaweed removes fats and toxins from the body and helps protect the liver from toxic damage. The sodium alginate in seaweed, especially kelp, absorbs toxins from the digestive tract. A Canadian study from McGill University found that seaweed soaks up cadmium and lead from inside the body, which can accumulate from cigarette smoke and industrial and transportation waste in the environment. Green seaweed is also a potent detoxifier because of the presence of chlorophyll in it, which contains special fibers that bind and remove unwanted toxins.

 

 5) Low Salt

Use seaweed as a seasoning and salt replacement.

 

 

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