Blenders at the ready – there’s a delicious, new way to detox. i-Detox teaches us the long term solution to healthy eating.
i-Detox is founded and run by Anita Cheung. Anita has a wealth of experience that I was just dying to tap into. She was lucky enough to have been taught by renowned superfood king, David Wolfe, yet also exceedingly unlucky to lose her father to colon cancer, a disease she describes as being almost 100% preventable. Anita’s level of nutritional knowledge is astounding. After managing to persuade her father to adopt her superfood enriched diet when he was first diagnosed with the life threatening disease, she was able to reduce his cancer markers considerably. Even the doctors where surprised. After nutritionally coaching her father into full recovery, it seems that old habits die hard, as once he received the all-clear he adopted all his old dietary ways and quickly developed the cancer again. But this time it was too late. The cancer had already spread, and there was nothing Anita could do. Having witnessed the diet work so profoundly on her father, Anita wanted to help others on their quest for wellness, whether that meant; loosing weight, battling illnesses or just improving general health.Admittedly, the diet Anita recommends ‘don’t come cheap’ but Anita urges you to think off the long-term savings you are making: reductions in medical bills and the old saying “you have nothing, if you don’t have your health” resonates hard as she describes just how life-changing this new approach to eating could be. The hard part of the diet really is at the beginning since you will unlikely find some of the more obscure ingredients (Blue Green Algae anyone?) in your local supermarket. I didn’t even have a smoothie maker (needed for most of the recipes), but Anita assured me that I didn’t need to fork out for something top of the range (a Kenwood smoothie maker is £24.95 from John Lewis). “Just don’t blend nuts in it,” I was warned, as this will burn out the motor. So with a blender at the ready, Anita reveals her healthy habits that will help you gain more energy whilst losing weight and prevent life-threatening diseases that you aren’t going to want to deal with later in life.
Go Organic
In the UK, we absorb 13-14 pounds of chemicals every year, from foods, air and water. This figure doesn’t even include the toxins found in other things such as the common flu jab, which contains more than 25 times the EPA standard of hazardous waste. Pesticides in fertilizers are essentially hormones as they aim to interfere with the sex of the pest, making it more feminine so that it is unable to reproduce. So when we consume non-organic food we too are exposing our bodies to these harmful toxins. Something we certainly don’t want to be doing if we want to have children, since amongst other things, pesticides have been proven to cause infertility. China is one of the worst areas in the world for using pesticides and a recent study found that 86% of Shanghai College Students are already infertile. The US also reported a whopping 50% of its students as being infertile. And it’s not just the women who are being affected – boys are being born with smaller penises and up to 287 toxic chemicals are found in an average baby in the US. Natural fertiliser is made up of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The difference between eating organic or not is ingesting these three harmless compounds or 52 toxic ones.
Start the day with warm water
We have heard it before but few of us follow this most simple of health rules (including me). Having your routine cup of caffeinated tea could actually be preventing you from loosing weight since the caffein boosts the production of the hormone, adrenalin, which is what makes us feel alert. This hormone was originally used, back in cave man times, for those just about to take flight and therefore instantly put it into use and burn it off. But we don’t. We drink our tea and the sit at a desk for the best part of the day so our bodies’ end up storing the extra unused adrenalin as fat. Starting the day with warm water and lemon helps flush out all the toxins that are bodies have been working hard to get rid of over night. The lemon helps replenish any vitamin C that has also been lost.
Balance your PH
An acidic body is an unhealthy body. An ideal blood PH is 7.35. You can find out your PH by buying the PH paper from your local chemist. To keep the blood flowing smoothly the outside of our blood cells should all carry negative charges so that they repel one another and don’t stick together. When we eat acidic food we destroy this negative charge causing some blood cells to attract to one another – creating a sticky blood substance that does not flow nearly as well. Top alkalising foods include lemons (despite what you may have thought), kale, apples, apricots, limes and seaweeds. Acidic foods are all the usual unhealthy suspects including, white bread, artificial sweeteners, beef, fizzy drinks, cakes, and alcohols.
Incorporate superfoods into your daily diet (not supplements)
If you are guilty of buying a bunch of supplements only to leave them collecting dust on your shelves, you are not alone. Taking supplements is just so boring so we end up neglecting them all together. So, incorporate a delicious superfood into your diet and you are much more likely to eat them because you want to. Supplements are good, but they are not foods and therefore are not as easily absorbed by the body where as the body instantly breaks down superfoods and extracts the goodness from them. Top superfoods include goji berries, cacao, maca, honey comb, spirulina, aloe vera, hempseed, prunes, blueberries and blackberries. See the recipes for easy ways to incorporate these daily.
While you’re detoxing – Avoid these like the plague
Alcohol; sugar; caffein; milk chocolate; fried food; dairy; red meat; microwavable food; processed food; wheat; refined carbs and sweets.
Words by Sadie Macleod
Images by Smaranda Cheregi http://www.flickr.com/photos/46322990@N03/