Month: July 2019

July 30, 2019

Dishing It Up for July 2019

Dishing It Up serves up a selection of stories, studies & so on from the world of wellness & nutrition each month.

In this month’s issue of Dishing It Up…

Herb Infused Waters for Summer Hydration
Giving up alcohol may improve mental well-being, study finds
Why Food Could Be the Best Medicine of All
The Fish Is Boneless. (Fishless, Too.)
How to grill fish fillets straight on the grill

Here’s a taste of each from the sampler platter…

July 19, 2019

Stress Less Menu

This is the companion menu for my previous blog post, Stress Less This Summer. As promised, it focuses on foods that have been shown in studies to reduce anxiety and/or promote relaxation. These include salmon, yogurt, poultry, turmeric, green tea, dark chocolate and bananas. I will discuss the first two below.

It also is stress-free to prepare. The breakfast salad is pretty much a quick assembly job of readily purchased ingredients. For lunch, make the soup on the weekend and portion it into grab-and-go mason jars for a quick reheat and eat meal. And dinner is also a salad where the components may be prepared in advance at your leisure. So all you need to do when you get home is toss it all together. No cooking! This is a mercy in this heat. To keep you well hydrated, I’ve included a green tea lemonade you can sip on all day long. And to keep you cool, I’ve finished the day with a frozen treat.

Sign up here to receive the recipes. I hope you enjoy my Stress Less Menu and please do share these recipes with your family and friends!

Stress Less Menu

Breakfast: Smoked Salmon Avocado Yogurt Bowls (the only stress-trigger here is finding yourself without a ripe avocado, so plan in advance)

Lunch: Lentil Masala Soup (an appetizing, aromatic, all-in-one meal with loads of satiating protein and fibre)

Dinner: Thai Chopped Chicken Salad with Peanut Sauce (to make this even simpler, you can use a prepared fresh slaw mix…I like to blend two or more of PC Kale, Broccoli or Beet Slaws….and feel free to use thawed frozen mango chunks to reduce prep time even further)

Hydrate in the heat: Iced Green Tea Lemonade (add a pinch of Himalayan or sea salt to replenish electrolytes; also, green tea contains L-theanine, an amino acid studied for positive effects it may have on brain health and anxiety reduction )

Cooldown Dessert: Chocolate Banana Ice Cream (this is truly a revelation – frozen bananas and cacao powder whipped up into a creamy, cool, tasty treat)

Join The Nutritional Reset community here to receive this month’s menu today (as well as each month to come)! And read on for some nutritional tidbits about a few foods featured in the recipes…

July 11, 2019

Stress Less This Summer

I simply must begin by sharing the irony here. For this post on how to stress less this summer, I’ve been reading The Stress Solution by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee on my Kobo. Generally, I love my Kobo. It is handy to carry around and the highlighting and note function is useful. When it works, that is.

As it turns out, my Kobo has become as buggy as a sticky, humid Toronto summer day. While reading this book, it crashed more times than I can count (pretty much every time I opened it). I’d dutifully reboot but then it always put me back to the beginning of the book and randomly removed highlights I had made. In short, reading The Stress Solution on my Kobo totally amped up my stress levels, had me looking a lot like the woman pictured at left (in terms of tearing my hair out…unfortunately my hair isn’t so nice and long and I am about a quarter-century older) and ready to commit Kobocide!

On the sunny side, however, it gave me ample opportunity to try out some of Dr. Chatterjee’s sage advice for relieving stress. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list nor a comprehensive text on stress reduction, simply a subset of suggestions that worked best for me. Read on for my fave tips on how to stress less this summer.