Wild Blueberry Smoothie #Recipe

Delicious and filling, this blueberry smoothie breakfast keeps me satisfied until lunch. Try it!

Lots of studies have shown that wild grown blueberries are a very healthy fruit choice and one of the most nutritious foods you can buy. The antioxidant and anti-inflammatory components of these superfruits have been scientifically connected to heart health, brain health, gut health, cancer prevention, reduced risk of diabetes, and urinary tract health. Wild blueberries have high concentrations of an antioxidant called polyphenols (along with other plant-based foods like dried peppermint, cocoa powder, dark chocolate, black currants, and hazelnuts). Wild blueberries contain 30% less sugar than highbush blueberries. And did you know you can get 25% of the RDA of fiber just by eating 1 cup of of these little beauties? It’s true.

I buy my wild blueberries in the freezer section of my grocery store. Make sure the bag states “Wild Blueberries.” I love having these healthy and nutritious berries on hand whenever I want them.

Wild Blueberry Smoothie  

Blueberry Smoothie

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup frozen wild blueberries (do not thaw)
  • 3/4 cup vanilla flavored almond milk, unsweetened
  • 1/4 cup non-fat Greek yogurt
  • 1/2 cup organic baby kale or spinach
  • 1 tablespoon black Chia seeds

Place all ingredients in a blender (I have a Ninja Smoothie Maker) and blend until smooth.

Enjoy!

Reclaim My Heart is the story of second chances.

Reclaim My Heart

 

Teaching an Old Gal New Tricks #RachelleAyala @Mimisgang1 #mgtab

Today (January 13) is my 62nd birthday and strangely enough, I feel younger than I did 20 years ago. My face might be more lined and I have a few more gray hairs, but I’m learning new tricks and trying new things and happy that I’m still around.

It’s never too late to try something new. Here are a few things I learned this past year.

  • Improving my Photoshop skills by using a pen tablet. I don’t know why I didn’t try this earlier, but drawing with a mouse or on a touchpad while holding it down with another finger is so antiquidated. But it was all we had twenty years ago, and that’s what I learned on. Who remembers mouses with those balls underneath on spongey mousepads? I remember using AmigaDraw with my Commodore Amiga computer to make simple graphics. How time consuming was that? So last year, in 2021, after a prolonged session of Photoshopping using the infamous Lenovo red button resulting in painful index finger and wrist pain, I bought a Wacom One Drawing Tablet. It’s about the size of a small laptop. It has an electronic pen and it fits on my lap while plugged into my computer. Night and day! Now, I can draw shapes and select objects with no problem. I can connect dots, do those Bezier curve handles, and ink in sketches as easily as using pen and paper. As for signing my name? Piece of cake. Why did I wait so long?
  • I finally converted to using Scrivener writing software. For years, I was a Microsoft Word gal. After all, before Word came out, I used LaTex, a non WYSIWYG word processing solution and “vi” to create the files. After my Amiga died, I got an MSDOS machine and have been with Word forever and never took the time to learn any of its advanced features. When Scrivener first came out, I bought a license but it was too complicated so I put it away. Early last year, Scrivener sent me a survey and while filling out the survey, I wondered if I could get more organized by using it. After all, I was constantly revising my writing AND saving off copies of my drafts. Up to 20 drafts with dates appended to the filename. Scrivener made it easier to organize my deletes. I can now simply create a folder for each chapter’s deletes and copy over deleted text with a note on why I deleted something. This way, if I ever want to resurrect that text or storyline, I only have to drag it back to the manuscript and insert. I’m sure there are a hundred more reasons why Scrivener is useful, but for me, keeping track of all my “deletes” makes it worth using.
  • Intermittent Fasting. This is an “old” thing that is becoming “new.” Back in the day, before microwaves and trail bars and snack-sized treats, we ate three square meals with no snacks and nibbling in between. If we were hungry between meals, we went outside to play instead of sneaking into the cookie jar. Snacks were not a thing. They would spoil your appetite. Parents thought nothing of sending misbehaving children to bed without their dinner. No one would starve by skipping a meal, at least back in the days before microwaves and juice boxes. In the late eighties when the price of microwaves dropped enough to be commonplace, people started eating all the time. Snacking became a thing, and families stopped eating together at the dinner table. Along with all the eating came the massive increase in weight gain. I, too, joined this eating pandemic as my weight crept up steadily during my thirties, forties, and fifties. We just believed it was part of getting older. Little did I know that snacking constantly, especially on so-called healthy snacks like trail-mix bars, smoothies, and flavored yogurt, that I was putting myself on a constant elevated insulin state. My body was always in “grow” mode, where sugar enters the blood. Insulin comes in and mops up the sugar, stuffing it into cells, and the cells store the extra energy as fat. Because I was snacking and eating continuously, I didn’t allow my body to have a chance to burn off any energy since it was always available. It turns out that fasting, or not eating for a long stretch allows your body to go into “burn” mode where insulin is no longer in control. You don’t enter this state until 4-6 hours after your last meal. Once you are in “burn” mode, glycogen is depleted first. After about 20-36 hours, your body switches to fatburning mode. If, however, you feed yourself at anytime before entering fatburning mode, you are instantly back in “grow” mode, where food is mopped up and stored for future use. The problem with eating all the time is that the majority of time, your body is in “grow” mode and eventually, if you fill your body with too much sugar [even excess protein gets turned into sugar], you will become insulin resistant. It isn’t the fact that you don’t make enough insulin [assuming you’re not a type 1 diabetic], but the fact that your cells are FULL of sugar and they are barring the gates to more sugar entering them. This excess sugar ends up in the blood, floating around looking for a home and the end result isn’t pretty. [Note: I’m following Dr. Jason Fung who wrote several books, among them, The Obesity Code, The Diabetes Code and The Complete Guide to Fasting. He’s also on YouTube with many videos explaining intermittent fasting and the science behind it.] What I learned to do this year is to stop snacking and eat only at set times. I started intermittent fasting with a 18/6 schedule where I would eat only between 10 am and 4 pm. After I got used to it, I would go on a 24 hr fast two days a week. Go from 10 am to 4 pm as usual, and the next day, not eat until 4 pm. Resume the following day from 10 am to 4 pm. Eventually, I want to get to 42 hours where I can go from 4 pm, skip an entire day, and resume at 10 am. But I would only do this once or twice a month. I’ve already dropped all the weight I gained over the holidays, and I only wish I’d known about this technique earlier. Of course, I’m not sabotaging myself by overeating during my eating windows, and I’m not eating sugar or junk food because I don’t want to stimulate insulin. But I’m glad I’m going back to my roots. No snacking and no nibbling. I want my body to swing between “grow” and “burn” mode evenly, the way God designed us to be.

Well, these are the new things I tried out last year that worked for me. I hope I didn’t bore you, but I will continue to live and learn as long as the good Lord allows me to.

Please check out my Birthday Email chock full of giveaways, freebies, and discounted paperbacks by clicking/tapping on this link or the banner below, and I wish you all the best in living and learning in 2022.

https://www.rachelleayala.net/so/70NvFNBsN?languageTag=en

Losing Weight by Mona Risk

In our culture it’s easy to pack up pounds and indulge into eating calorie-dense food. Our body wasn’t designed to overeat high-fat, processed food. While we sit in front of the computer or TV, our body simply converts all this high calorie food into billion of fat cells.

Over the years, I tried every diet on earth. They all worked. Every time, I wanted to lose weight, I became very determined, very disciplined. And I lost the weight. It was the maintenance period that turned into a disaster. I lost focus and fell back in my old routine. And after a few months, the pounds returned.

A friend of my mother, a beautiful old lady told me once when she saw me desperate with my useless efforts. “Do you know that your face is the first place to lose weight? And then the lines form and the wrinkles deepen. Do you want to be a bit overweight and good-looking, or skinny and…”

Okay, I got the message and I bought the Mayo Clinic book on Healthy Weight.

The Mayo Clinic Weight Pyramid is my guide to health now. It shows me the healthy food to eat and the daily quantity in five steps.

1- Calories: Identify a daily calorie level suitable for me. [1000-1200 for women]

2- Servings: Identify the number of serving I should eat from each food group.

3-Serving size: Become familiar with serving sizes for a wide variety of food.

4- Record keeping: It’s important to record the amount of food –calorie–eaten every day.

This is the only non-diet ‘diet’ that’s working for me and allows me to maintain a stable weight and health. While you lose weight in a healthy way, reward yourself with two heartwarming romance novels, newly released at Amazon.

Prince Philip’s Cinderella: A charming jogger saves her from danger. But he’s a prince… and she comes from nothing. Should she run or risk her heart?

High school sweethearts separated by life…They meet years later, successful but different, each with a heavy baggage.

Not Ready Yet: High school sweethearts separated by life…They meet years later, successful but different, each with a heavy baggage.

Struggling with your weight by Mona Risk

If you are struggling with your weight welcome to the club. Did you know that 55% of adult Americans are overweight? It’s a growing problem. Apparently weight-loss products and services average $34 billion a year.

Part of the problem is that weight management is hard, complicated by genes, environment and emotional issues. Chances are that unless we make long-term lifestyle changes to alter our eating habits and become more physically active, the pounds lost with a strenuous diet come back on, with a few extra.

The only way I managed to lose weight was to keep a journal and record everything that went into my mouth. Keeping records made me aware of the quantities I ate.

Exercising is essential. But I have never been an athletic person, and I suck at sports. Regardless, I make it a point to move as much as I can around the house, walk every morning, do my own type of swimming in the pool.

By the way I highly recommend getting a Fitbit watch that counts your steps and makes you feel guilty if you don’t walk enough.

I will never be as slim as my heroines, but I am trying to be healthy and make up for the hours I spend sitting at my computer, writing and editing!

Unfortunately, writing and publishing don’t fall under exercising. Yet it requires so much effort!

I have two new books published almost back to back:


Prince Philip’s Cinderella: Modern Princes Series, book 4
A charming jogger saves her from danger. But he’s a prince… and she comes from nothing. Should she run or risk her heart?

Not Ready Yet: The SEnator’s Family, book 4
High school sweethearts separated by life…They meet years later, successful but different, each with a heavy baggage.