Eating a diet completely free of added sugars is all the rage right now, and justly so - finally a health trend that's actually based in science! Unfortunately even foods that might seem healthy, such as granola, can have way more sugar than you'd ever imagine. On top of that, homemade granola is SO easy to make, so it begs the question why to even bother spending more on packaged granola when homemade is fresher, tastier, easier on your wallet, and more nutritious too. While companies might take shortcuts to increase their profits, you and I can easily afford to throw in some extra nutritious ingredients like hemp seeds, chia seeds, and walnuts to make this granola truly slammin'.
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Winter isn't over yet, and so soup is still on the menu! I've been making this decadent soup over and over all winter long. The best part about this soup is that it's packed with veggies - NINE different ones, to be exact - but it brings such a great flavor that it's an easy sell to friends and family alike. This soup has passed muster with my picky father, my veggie-loving but not spices-loving grandma, my partner who (claims to) not like coconut, and almost every other mouth that's come in its path. 

This soup takes a bit of prep work, but cooks together really easily once all the chopping is done. I almost always make double the recipe because it's just that good - it freezes well too, so save some for later! 

This recipe was adapted from this recipe of Dr. Mark Hyman. 

​Over the past 3 weeks, I have drastically reduced my added sugar intake to almost nothing. Although I’ve allowed myself a maximum of 1 tablespoon per day of specific all-natural sweeteners that I, and only I, add to my food, I’ve cut out all other sources of added sugars from my diet. As a current victim of candida yeast overgrowth and psoriasis (which I believe to be a symptom of my candida), I’ve been experimenting with a 30-Day No Sugar Challenge with the high hopes of finally vanquishing these unwelcome hitchhikers. The results haven’t been exactly what I hoped for, but they still have been interesting. See below for the full rules of my Challenge.

Read on for updates about my progress and experience so far. Be sure to check out my first and second blog posts chronicling​ this journey. 

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I have spent the last week or so attempting to avoid almost all sugar in my diet. This first week was more challenging, but in different ways, than I expected. I had images in my head of writhing on the couch in misery with a sugar withdrawals that I ultimately fought off valiantly. The truth is that, even while armored with a bachelor of science plus a post-grad certification both in the nutrition sciences, sugar STILL found ways to sneak into my diet! As for sugar withdrawals, thankfully I only experienced rather mild symptoms. I thought it was would easy enough to identify all sources of sugar and eliminate it from my diet while experiencing withdrawals, yet the opposite turned out to be true. 
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Fried rice is as American as apple pie. Or something like that. Americans love our Asian cuisines - whether it's a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant, dim sum for brunch, all you can eat sushi deals, curry, ramen, sushi burritos, dumplings, Pad Thai, General Tso chicken, Panda Express - we'll eat it all. We love everything from the most authentic recipes to the most bastardized once-Asian-turned-American recipes. 

​Oh, candida. What a doozy. If you already know that you suffer from candida, then I'm sure you can relate. Candida is the chronic overgrowth of the usually benign Candida albicans, a parasitic fungus that loves to torture you by overgrowing in your nooks and crannies, often promoting painful symptoms across the whole body. Candida can manifest in your warm wet mouth (known as thrush), around your warm wet toes (known as athlete's foot), in the vagina (see vaginal yeast infections), or in other warm wet places, such as your small intestine. When candida takes over, it can cause you to develop food allergies, joint pains, hemorrhoids, being "hangry", digestive issues, fatigue, skin problems, mood swings, and can even be the root cause of diagnoses such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome – to name only a few possible symptoms.
 
Personally, I have suffered from candida for at least the past 5 years, but possibly longer. I can trace my candidiasis directly to my chronic psoriasis, anxiety, sugar addiction (I now consider myself a recovered sugar addict), and gluten/wheat intolerance. For me, it seems that the candida had taken over my small intestine and made my intestine so sick that it became excessively porous (see leaky gut), thus allowing incompletely digested food particles to leak right into my blood stream. Which then sent my immune system into over drive, leading to my gluten intolerance. So much fun.
 
Candida is a complex disease state, one that the entire western medical community seems to be struggling to identify, understand, and treat. While I have made great strides in eliminating my own candidiasis, I still have work to do. My joint pain and sugar addiction have been mostly eliminated, but I continue to experience gluten intolerance and psoriasis (although the patches have greatly reduced in size and severity). As I continue on my own journey to finally squash the unwelcome hitchhiker riding around in my guts all day, using food as medicine has made life with candida way less painful and much more bearable.
 
One last note before I get into my anti-candida morning regimen: in my experience candida is a vicious and highly adaptive creature. You may start a treatment that is helping to reduce your candida, only to find maybe a few months later that you have hit a plateau where your candida levels have reduced but are no longer reducing, and/or you may find that the same regimen just doesn't work as well as it used to. Additionally, if you have a lot of candida or are just beginning treatment, it is important to begin your treatment slowly, so the candida dies slowly. Live candida is filled with toxins, and so killing off a bunch of candida at once will release a large load of toxins into your system, which can be dangerous and highly uncomfortable. I can attest to how horrible candida die-off is from personal experience. The released toxins are fat soluble, which make it even harder for your body to remove them. For myself, I've determined that my body removes these toxins by pushing them out of my skin, in the form of psoriasis. In this way, my psoriasis is directly related to my candidiasis.
 
Navigating the healing process for those who suffer from candida is complex and nuanced. To seek professional help, we suggest heading to our Contact page and reaching out to us to schedule an appointment to begin discussing your individual treatment. We are happy to speak with prospective clients in the comfort of their own homes (if you're a New Yorker), on Skype, or over the phone. 

It's been years now since I started using alternative laundry detergents. I first switched to using alternative detergents when I learned about the environmental impact of the phosphates contained in many common brand name detergents. If you need a refresher: these phosphates from your detergent leave with your wash’s wastewater, and can flow into natural freshwater systems at unnatural levels.  High levels of phosphates in oceans, rivers, and lakes leads to uncontrolled algae growth. As this algae dies off and begins to rot, the decomposition process sucks up all available oxygen found in the water (called eutrophication), which then goes on to cause the death of fish and other plants. This is a good enough reason for me to switch detergents, not only out of concern for the immediate environment, but also out of concern for the negative impact that such pollutants have on our own food safety. Plus, the list of chemical ingredients on the back of a laundry detergent bottle is long. What are all of those? Are all those chemicals truly necessary to wash my clothes well? 

I started my quest into natural detergents by first trying out the Seventh Generation laundry detergent line about 7 or 8 years ago and was satisfied with the wash, but remained unsatisfied with the list of ingredients. Do my clothes really need ingredients such as laureth-6, sodium lauryl sulfate, or methylisothiazolinone to get clean? I had many doubts. What was the environmental impact of these chemicals after they'd left my washer, and furthermore what was the impact of even manufacturing all these chemicals? I didn't know, but I also wasn't optimistic. Seventh Generation’s detergent got the job done, but it still wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.