5 Ways To Detox Safely Everyday

Toxins enter our bodies through the food we eat, water and drinks we take, the air we breathe, the skincare products we use daily. We are being bombarded every day with toxins, so wouldn’t it be just nice to find a way to get rid of them on a daily, regular basis?

The detox process doesn’t have to be complicated and expensive. You can do these 5 little things regularly every single day!

Stay Hydrated. Drinking a minimum of eight glasses of clean, not-too-cold water every day is one of the best things you can do to detox and purify your body in a natural way. It is also very easy to do and inexpensive too. The more hydrated your body is, the healthier you are.

Move Your Body. Some people cringe at the mention of the word ‘exercise’. Exercise is good for you. Getting regular exercise is an important step to staying healthy and strong. Do something you love. Exercising can be fun! A mild walk with your friend, spouse, or dog or all by yourself to get some ‘me-time’. If you do not like walking, you can dance, jump, swim, chase your baby around, play with the dog, tend a garden, jump on a bungee…anything to get your body moving and do it everyday! A 5-minute regularly exercise daily is better and yields more results than going to the gym to sweat for an hour just once a week. The little stuff adds up real good over time.

Eat clean. Try to stick to organic, pesticide-free foods, and eliminate antibiotics and hormones from your diet. Learn to read the labels on your food and know what’s going into you. The food you eat has the greatest effect on you than any other thing. You are what you eat. Eat fresh produces. Eat what you love and enjoy. Eat healthy to stay healthy. You cannot keep eating junk and expect to have good health. You just have to make those changes.

Stay away from processed foods, caffeine and alcohol: Try to stay away from ingredients you can’t pronounce. If you cannot pronounce it, chances are you shouldn’t eat it. Stay away from white flour, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol as they hamper your body’s natural capacity to process toxins.

Supplement with Detoxifying Herbs or Join A Detox Program: Eating a balanced diet rich with fruits and vegetables is important, but taking it a step further may be your next step. Try adding detoxifying herbs to assist with the detoxification process. These herbs help to eliminate toxic build-up and leave you feeling energized and strong. Herbs you can use if you in Nigeria includes: ugwu, nchanwu, uziza, ntong, bitterleaf, edisimmong, moringa, garden egg leaves, dogoyaro leaves, etc. Find herbs that are readily available wthin your locality and use them for a 3-day, 5-day, 7 or 14-day detox program. If you would like a ready-made detox blend, please read more about it here.

So there you go, ridding your body of toxins is so simple it can be done in the blink of any eye, right!

#StayHealthy

Chicken: Parts, Preparation Style, Portions and Calorie Values

Just like the title suggests, the concluding part of the chicken story is on preparation and calorie values. Having read the health benefits of chicken in a previous post, it is not for you to run off and start munching on every chicken part. Lol. Though it is healthy, eating in moderation and knowing the value of what you are eating will help you in keeping track of your portions so you can easily achieve your goals.

How to cook chicken in a healthy way

Different parts of chicken have different levels of fat and cholesterol. The breast meat is the leanest with 28g containing just 1g of fat. This is followed by the chicken’s legs which has 2g of fat per every 28g.
Before you decide to cook chicken, make sure you cut of all the visible fat as it isn’t good for your heart. These fat deposits usually look white in color, and you can ask your vendor to point it out for you if you have trouble identifying it. To make it healthier, you should first marinate it with healthy spices like curry, turmeric, coriander or any other spice that tickles your fancy, so that the chicken absorbs all its nutrients and becomes tastier. After that, you could try cooking it in a pressure cooker so that the chicken is soft and tender to eat. Baking or grilling it in a regular oven is also a healthy option that you can consider. (I’m not an advocate of using microwaves but if you want to use it to grill your chicken, fine and good).
These days with the advent of cold-storage a lot of people have started consuming frozen chicken. After removing it from the freezer, thaw it in the refrigerator. Doing this anywhere else will cause bacteria to build-up. Also, once you’ve thawed a frozen chicken you should never refreeze it. So, thaw only the amount of chicken you need at that point.

Based on the table above, some people might be asking what chicken light meat and chicken dark meat are?

Here’s an answer I found on the net from a food science professor:

“The white muscle of some birds represent burst muscles that do not have as much hemoglobin/myoglobin as muscles for sustained activity. Some might call these muscle “anerobic” muscles — a chicken can only fly a short distance. The white muscle are essentially the breast muscles which are used to move the wings. The wing muscle itself is also white. The rest of the bird is mainly dark meat. (Source(s): http://www.calorie-count.com)”

Light meat is healthier because it contains almost half the fat of dark meat and fewer calories. Definitely avoid the skin because that’s really fatty and unhealthy (which is why wings are really bad because it’s mostly fat and very little meat). As for taste, no matter how you cook it dark meat will always be jucier and more tender than white meat, because of the fat content.

So the next time you pick up that chunk of drumstick you know exactly what is going inside of you.

A few years ago, I saved a recipe called ‘No raincoat peppersoup’. I’m digging up my diary to look for it. It is healthy and a very good choice for weight watchers, especially during this rainy season. If I find my diary, then that delicious recipe would be up in the next post.

Chicken – Is It Really A Healthier Choice?

Chicken has become a favourite meat for the health-conscious folks. Chicken soup, chicken stew, chicken rotisserie, chicken in soup, chicken sandwich, chicken breast on salad…chicken in almost any form is great for your health—unless you’re the chicken of course!

The health benefits of eating poultry are plenty. When this fowl comes in a lean breast, it’s low in fat and calories and high in protein, which makes it ideal for weight maintenance. Not to mention that this bird is jam-packed full of essential nutrients and vitamins.

Here are the 11 healthy benefits of eating chicken:

1. Help builds muscle
If you’re looking for a great source of lean, low fat non-vegetarian protein, chicken is it. The protein in chicken lends itself to muscle growth and development, and help support a healthy body weight and aid weight loss. A 100g serving of roasted chicken offers you 31g of protein, making it great for those who want to bulk up and build muscles.

2. Keeps your bones healthy
Apart from protein, chicken is rich in several minerals like phosphorus and calcium, that helps keeps bones in mint condition. Also, it has selenium which has been known to cut risk of arthritis.

3. Relieves stress
Chicken has two nutrients that are great for reducing stress – tryptophan and Vitamin B5. Both of them have a calming effect on your body and this makes chicken an excellent option after a stressful day.

4. Reduces PMS symptoms
Magnesium, a nutrient present in chicken helps soothe symptoms of pre-menstrual syndrome and fight the various mood changes that a woman might experience during her periods. Now every woman has a good excuse for eating chicken.

5. Helps boost testosterone levels
Men should consume foods rich in zinc as it helps regulate testosterone levels as well as boost sperm production.

6. Boosts immunity
Chicken soup has long been used as a home remedy for relieving cold, flu and other common respiratory infections. The hot steam of chicken soup helps clear nasal and throat congestion while the thick fluid coats the throat to prevent invasion of respiratory linings by microbes to cause infection. A study evaluating this effect suggested that chicken soup inhibits migration of neutrophils, a type of immune cells, thereby preventing inflammation during common infections and boosting immunity [1].

7. Promotes heart health
Chicken, being rich in vitamin B6, plays an important role in preventing heart attack. Vitamin B6 helps by lowering the levels of homocysteine, one of the key components linked to an increased risk of heart attack. Besides, chicken is also a good source of niacin that helps lower cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease development. The American Heart Association also recommends consumption of chicken over red meat since it contains less amount of saturated fats and is also a good source of omega-3 fatty acids that exhibit beneficial cardiovascular effects.

8. Plenty of Phosphorus
Chicken is also rich in phosphorus, an essential mineral that supports your teeth and bones, as well as kidney, liver, and central nervous system.

9. Metabolism Booster
Vitamin B6 (or B-complex vitamins) encourage enzymes and metabolic cellular reactions (or a process known as Methylation), which means eating this bird will keep blood vessels healthy, energy levels high, and metabolism burning calories so you can manage a healthy weight and activity level.

10. Promotes Eye Health
Chicken is high in retinol, alpha and beta-carotene, and lycopene, all derived from vitamin A, and all vital for healthy eyesight.

11. Essential for Healthy Tissue Growth
Most people are plagued with chapped lips, cracked mouths, tongue sores, or dry skin at different points. Riboflavin (or Vitamin B2), found in chicken livers, will drastically reduce your skin problems and repair dry or damaged skin.

Now before you go off eating every piece of chicken available, do you know that not all chicken parts are created equally…some are more healthier than the others. Really? Find out about chicken parts and their calories in our next blog post.

References
 1. Rennard BO, Ertl RF, Gossman GL, Robbins RA, Rennard SI. Chicken soup inhibits neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro. Chest. 2000 Oct;118(4):1150-7. PubMed PMID: 11035691.

Oil-free Okro Soup – A Weight Watcher’s Best Friend

Writing a Nigerian meal plan is never complete without my adding ‘Okro Soup’ to it – oil-free Okro soup for that matter. 

Okro soup tops my menu list for the following reasons:

1. It is nutritious and loaded with a lot of essential elements.
2. It is very high in fiber and fiber is good to keep the digestive system healthy
3. It is tasty when prepared even with minimum ingredients
4. It serves as a bulking agent and makes you feel full it’s just a little quantity
5. It is low in calories and high in nutritional goodness. Okro soup has about 105 calories per serving
6. It is very affordable, easy-to-prepare, and time-saving
7. It contains 4g of carbohydrates, 2.8g of fibre per serving, 3g of fat and 11g of protein. I bet you didn’t know it had this high a protein content, did you?
8. It binds fats allowing them to be easily eliminated from the body
9. It is readily available and can be prepared in an variety of ways.
10. It can also be prepared and eaten without any form of swallow.

All these and more make Okro soup the soup of choice when I’m creating meal plans for my clients.

Today, I will give you a simple recipe for an oil-free Okro soup. It is delicious, easy to prepare and cost you between N500-N1000 to prepare.

Okro Soup On-the-go

Ingredients

300g Fresh Okro

10 pieces dried prawns (okporo) or 1 roasted chicken breast torn into pieces

1 tbsp. crayfish (ground)

Dash of ground pepper

Salt to taste

Seasoning (1 cube of Maggi/Knorr/Royco, etc)

Preparation

• Wash Okro to remove any dirt
• Chop Okro into squares or circles based on your preference. Discard the hard stalk at the end of the Okro.
• Place a pot or pan on the fire.
• 50ml of water to it.
• Clean and add the dried prawns to the pot of boiling water. You may break the prawns into pieces or leave them whole. (If using the roasted chicken, you add it at this point)
• Add some pepper, seasoning cube and salt to the pot.
• Allow it to steam
• Add your chopped Okro to the pot
• Cook for 3-5 minutes and stir continuously
• Depending on how thick you like your Okro soup, you may add more water to make it lighter.
• Switch off the gas/stove.
• Serve

Preparation Time: 10 Minutes

Cooking time: 7 minutes

Image credit: Facebook

Hope you enjoyed the recipe. Do you have a favourite Okro recipe? Share with us in the comments below.

Welcome to my blog!

With the rapid increase in obesity and its attendant complications, there is a great need for solutions that work. The aim of this blog is to educate and guide you towards making the right health choices and improve your overall quality of life. I also promote weight loss products from one if the best companies around, Total Life Changes. I will be writing about their products and how you can choose which one is best for you. My aim is to get you to lose weight. If you cannot find a product here that woukd suit you, then I would work with you to get the best option. You just have to lose the weight and get it down!