So it makes perfect sense that I would also love green smoothies and kale chips…except for the fact that although I know I should be a health nut, I am not.  But, thanks to the 21-Day-Detox I did a few months back, and being around so many inspiring, healthy people in the Bay Area (mainly, the lovely HoopGirl herself, Christabel Zamor), I have gotten into making green smoothies for breakfast almost every morning.  I have been asked by so many people for my recipe, so I thought I would just give you an idea here.  I don’t really have specific recipes, they are different every day and I am still trying new things.  It’s sort of trial and error and seeing what works for you.

Let me say first off though, I *do not* have a super nice fancypants VitaMix blender…although I hope to get one someday and I have put it on my vision board.  I sort of have it in my head that if I keep the daily smoothies up for a year, I will buy myself one.  I am almost at 6 months, so that’s pretty cool!  Anyway, I have a Hamilton Beach 10-speed Stay-or-Go Blender that comes with this really cool travel cup for taking my margaritas smoothies on the go!  It didn’t cost me too much and it works really well, and I put some crazy stuff in my smoothies!

So here is my smoothie recipe…I am not a big measurer, so I pretty much eyeball this stuff and vary it depending on my day and how much smoothie I need.

• a banana or two..this is my fave base for a smoothie, but apples are great too
• kale or spinach or some other dark leafy greens.  I have only tried kale and spinach so far, but will do collards soon.  I put a lot of these in…like enough to make a pretty big salad!
• frozen berries: I like strawberries, blueberries, cherries, raspberries, etc.  I’ve also done peaches, which was pretty good.  You can also do fresh fruits, but I actually like the frozen thing because it helps make my smoothie cold and I love cold beverages.  And yes, my blender blends these frozen fruits just fine…and super fast!
• water, soy milk or coconut water…I sort of eyeball this amount, depending on the other stuff I am putting in and seeing how thick I want it
• Vega powder…man this stuff is amazing and has all the goodies you need in it.  I learned about this stuff from my vegan friend, Allison.  I like the natural and chocolate flavors and have not tried the berry or the vanilla chai yet.  This stuff isn’t the cheapest, but it’s like buying a multi-vitamin and then some and I use it more regularly than I have ever taken a multi-vitamin.  So it’s good for me.
• I then also alternate other goodies in my smoothies depending on my mood or how I am feeling.  These things are: Amazing Grass’s Amazing Meal or other awesome products they have, chia seeds, hemp seeds, flax seeds, acidopholus, seaweed, bee pollen, Dr. Greens, etc.  I am still playing around with all this stuff and I keep it really simple.  I still need to look at all the nutritional info and get a better plan going to make sure I am getting all the right stuff daily or not overdoing it either.

So yeah, that’s about it.  Then I blend everything up in less than 30 seconds (sometimes I have to stir things around a couple of times in between) and voila!  I also have these amazing glass straws for my smoothies (especially helpful in the to-go cup)…so I am not using plastic straws and being more eco-conscious.  Oh and my smoothies come out way darker than the ones pictured…I think it’s the blueberries mostly…yummy yum yum.

Another thing I have finally gotten into is Kale Chips…yummers!  I cannot believe how much kale has become a part of my diet…my only experience with kale before this year was when I used to work at Godfather’s Pizza (my very first job…yummers again!) and we used it as a garnish for the salad bar…as decoration over the ice holding the buckets of toppings in.  Yeah in my world, kale was not edible and was just for looks…craziness!  It is actually a super food and is considered to be a cancer fighter!

Now the first time I heard about kale chips was through Christabel (again, such an inspiration)…but she makes them in a dehydrator.  She made some for us when we went to the Abraham-Hicks workshop in March, and I was hooked.  Unfortunately, I do not have a dehydrator (another thing for the vision board), so I thought I was out of luck.  But then I found out a couple of my friends were just baking theirs.  I know this isn’t considered raw, but I am not ready to go that whole route just yet, anyway…I need quick, easy and simple things in my life right now in order to be healthy…this is the girl who has been eating fast food her whole life, so I need my healthy food to be pretty fast too!

So I got a recipe from my friend Justine for the Kale Chips…the first time I made them a little too salty…I cannot believe I could ever make anything too salty for me, but I did (when she says a little goes a long way, she means it).  So here is her recipe!

To make the kale chips you will need:

1 bunch of Kale
Olive Oil
Sea Salt….
(and I use nutritional yeast as well, I sprinkle when I am tossing the leaves with the oil…..)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Wash & dry Kale and rip off the stem into large potato chip sized pieces. Put in a large bowl and drizzle with olive oil. Toss to coat lightly.

Place leaves in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Sprinkle to taste with Sea Salt (a little goes a long way). Bake for ten minutes or so until the edges become crispy. Cool & eat!

Yum! Feel free to share this with friends….may we all find (and share) good for us snacks…

p.s. today I added some Onion Powder as well and It rocked it!

Enjoy the kale chips…they really help me when I am in my crunchy, salty mood…which is almost every day!  I have also played around with garlic powder and stuff too…yummy and fun!

And enjoy the smoothies…let me know if you make some cool recipe…I am wanting to experiment with raw cacao and stuff too,  just haven’t had the chance yet.

Here’s to me getting healthier slowly but surely…cheers!

Ugh.  Seriously.  Ugh.  It’s been an odd past couple of days.  I am in a funk and can’t get out.  I need the LifeCall system in those old “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercials.  But it would be a button that would call up good friends, my mom, healthy food, a walk, and a great movie…all to bring me out of my depression.

It’s weird how this funk got started, but I am realizing more and more that it makes perfect sense and that it’s ok.  At least that’s what I am trying to tell myself.  It started with what was going to be an awesome evening on Friday night.  My friends Annie and Jenny and I were on our way to the Flow Show to see many of our hoop friends perform.   It was a free show in a small venue, so we ended up not being able to get in.  We missed it by only a few people, but it just wasn’t going to happen.  We were devastated, to say the least.  I personally had been looking forward to this for months.  So we decided that we would wait around until the show was done to be able to hang out with everyone afterwards.

Cut to: us waiting in the only place near the venue…a bar.  A bar with no food.  We each had a couple of glasses of wine and were feeling pretty good.  Then the show was over, we talked to everyone a bit and found out that people were meeting up at this other place soon.  So, off we went to this place which ended up being a club.  I had thought maybe we were going out to dinner or something.  But I just wanted to see everyone, so we went in.  We bought more drinks, we danced, and I still hadn’t eaten.  Most of the people we had wanted to see never ended up showing up, but we had paid to get in, so we stayed.  Pretty soon, I was drunk.  Drunker than I had been in a long while.  You see, I don’t drink that much anymore and when I do, I don’t drink a lot.  I just don’t enjoy the effects that much anymore and the after-effects are definitely not worth it.  But every once in a while, I get caught off guard and end up drinking a bit…this was one of those evenings.  I mean, we had fun, but I was sick by the end of the night and that part was not fun and I felt bad for my girlfriend having to deal with it.  But she was an awesome friend and was totally there for me!

But Saturday was not so fun.  I wasn’t sick, but I just did not feel right.  I couldn’t do anything, eat anything and just felt straight-up depressed.  I am no stranger to depression as many of you know, but luckily I don’t experience it as often as I used to.  But this hangover just made me lazy and sad.  I have a ton to do and have not done much of anything.  So it got me thinking about how alcohol affects your system.  I have studied these kinds of things in a few of my Psych classes and found an article that explains it well:

“The depression caused by alcohol actually starts with your physical body. First, alcohol lowers the serotonin and norepinephrine levels in your brain. These chemicals are the chemicals that give you your good feelings – a feeling of well being, and they help you to feel normal.

Alcohol also temporarily nullifies the effects of stress hormones. This is why after drinking you feel worse than ever, because alcohol depresses your nervous system and your brain. A study was done that followed people who were only drinking one drink a day and after these people stopped drinking for 3 months, their depression scores improved. And that is only at one drink a day, so it is easy to imagine the impact the kind of volume an alcoholic takes in every day can have.

Alcohol all but wipes out every vitamin in your system after a drinking session. A folic acid deficiency will contribute the brain aging and in older people, dementia. The folic acid deficiency also contributes to overall depression. Further, the alcohol in your system also breaks down and speeds the elimination of antioxidants in your blood. Antioxidants are critically important to our health because antioxidants fight free radicals and free radical damage causes diseases and aging. Our immune system actually creates the antioxidants which then neutralize the free radicals.”

No wonder I feel down in the dumps.  It also doesn’t help that my boyfriend is out of town indefinitely and I miss him like crazy.  I also am coming to the end of a really hard semester at Berkeley and am nervous about my final projects and finals and my grades.  I am also struggling with a few other things…so yeah, it’s been a bit of a rough time, and probably not a time to be drinking a ton.  But isn’t that what a lot of people do when they are depressed?  And it actually makes the whole problem worse.  *sigh*

But I can say that reminding myself of the effects of alcohol on the body made me feel a bit better about feeling so sad.  As did writing about it…so thanks for reading.  I am now going to attempt to get over it all and write the few papers I need to write today.

I found out that my father not only was HIV+, but had full-blown AIDS.  I was 18 years old and just 6 weeks shy of graduating from high school.  My mom came over to my apartment (yes I lived in an apartment by myself my senior year…that’s a whole other blog) and broke the news to me.  It was news to her as well, so she was still reeling from it.  My dad was living in Scottsdale and felt he had to tell us because he had just been diagnosed with full blown AIDS (this usually happens when their T-Cells get below a certain level) and was very ill.  He had actually been HIV+ for about 13 years at that point, but my mom and I didn’t know.

So on this fateful day, my mom came over and told me and I was obviously in shock.  Then I just lost it.  After a bit of crying, we started talking through it…neither of us could believe that even with all the information out there about HIV/AIDS, that it never occurred to either of us that my dad (who was gay) could possibly even have it!  I mean the man lived in San Francisco in the late 70′s and early 80′s…duh.  But it was one of those times where you can’t even imagine something like that happening to you.  But looking back, I suddenly remembered that there were warning signs all along.  He had a bout of Hepatitis, shingles, etc.  It was all making sense.

After crying and discussing, my mom and I decided to go shopping and eat at McDonald’s…you can see now why spending money and eating bad food are such comforts for me now.  They have been there for me through it all…good times, bad times, etc.

Anyway, I ended up going to see my dad only a few weeks later because we weren’t sure how much longer he would survive.  I ended up getting a cold while I was there and had to leave early because as my grandmother put it “you might kill your father”…yeah, that’s a wonderful thing to tell an 18-year old girl who loves her father more than anything.  It was a horrifying experience seeing my dad so sick…the last time I had seen him he was fine.   This time he had lost a ton of weight and had lesions on his face and hands.  When I had to leave, I thought that maybe it would be the last time I would ever see him.  Yeah, that sucked.

Luckily, it was not.  My dad ended up living another 5 1/2 years with his health being up and down throughout that time.  It was a rough time and I didn’t get to see him that often, but I am so grateful for every moment I got to spend with him.  By the end, his body had been ravaged by Lymphoma, TB, Pneumonia and skin cancer…he also had peripheral neuropathy and was legally blind.  He had just fought off the Lymphoma and his health had actually been getting better, but overall it just wasn’t a fun life for him.  I miss him dearly but I am so glad his suffering finally stopped.

I guess this should just be a friendly reminder to be safe and get tested.  And to hug your loved ones…LOTS!

I was featured today as a guest blogger on HoopGirl.com about my recent 21-Day Detox experience…here it is:

I am excited to be guest blogging here on HoopGirl about my 21-Day Detox experience. I first must say that I have some definite issues with food. I am a classic emotional eater, stuffing my face when I am feeling sad, stressed, anxious, and even happy. I also just love heavy foods like breads and cheeses, salty/crunchy foods, lots of soda and of course some sweets here and there.

I have been aware for a very long time that my eating habits needed to evolve…in the past few doctor’s visits I have had high cholesterol. Not through the roof high, but enough that a woman in her early 30’s should be a little concerned about. I also hit my heaviest weight last year and that was difficult for me. But still, my food addictions have always gotten the best of me and I didn’t do much about it. Luckily in moving to the Bay Area 6 months ago, I have lost some weight. This is due to the fact that I have been able to take more hoop classes here in the area and am also now teaching hoop classes here at HoopGirl. I also started school at UC Berkeley and if you have ever been there you know the hills are a killer…so walking around campus has helped as well….