DETOX YOUR KITCHEN: real beauty starts in the kitchen

To me beauty starts in the kitchen. Because what you eat affects your body, and your skin and hair are a part of your body.

If you're consuming foods which dehydrate, which cause inflammation etc, this will eventually show on your skin/hair. As much as I love skincare, no cream/lotion or potion is ever going to give you the same results as eating a fresh, real, wholesome diet.

When I eat good food, I feel good, and to me nothing is more beautiful than feeling good.

So a great way to start detoxing your kitchen is by eliminating certain items which are masquerading as food, and replacing them with nutritionally dense real foods.

I know it seems these days that EVERYTHING you love seems to be bad for you! But I think when you start learning about why certain "foods" are not good for you, than it starts becoming easier, as you'll naturally gravitate towards the healthy options.

I don't keep any of these products in my kitchen anymore, and it feels great, knowing that I have replaced them with foods that are actually doing some good for my body, and are actually nourishing my cells, rather than me just eating empty calories.

1.Drop Margarine and pick up (grass fed) Butter 

Margarine is not a real food. It is a highly processed food product, and its primary ingredients are vegetables oils, emulsifiers and colorants loads of crap basically. Now the thing is vegetable oil is liquid at room temperature (so it can't be used as a spread), to overcome this, the vegetable oil undergoes a hydrogenation process. Basically this meas that it is subjected to high heat, high pressure, in short it's processed to high heavens! All so the shelf life of the product is prolonged. There is no nutritional value to be had by consuming margarine.

Butter is a health food, a nutritional powerhouse of vitamins A, D, & K-2 and that all-important dose of saturated fat our bodies crave down to a cellular level.

Specifically you want to be getting butter from grass fed cows, this means that the cows are free to roam and eat a natural diet of grass, rather than being fed grain based feeds. If your a real foodie, you will already know how great butter is. Butter is a real food, it does not need an ingredient list, and it's damn delicious!

A lot of people seem to be sacred of butter, don't be! Butter is a very healthy fat. I love butter and use it daily to cook with, and I'm not fat :) 

If you don't believe me, than listen to Sally Fallon, author of the infamous 'Nourishing Traditions', talk about the great health benefits of butter from grass fed cows.

I buy the Kerrygold brand, which is easily available in the UK, this butter is made from grass fed cows. You need to look for butter that comes from grass fed cows, as how the cow is fed will have a major impact on the nutritional composition of the butter.

If you are still sitting there thinking - but butter is full of artery clogging saturated fat?!! then you must check out this fantastic post. 

2. Drop refined salt (Table salt) and pick up Himalayan pink salt

Refined salt is bad for your health, because the naturally occurring nutrients have been stripped away, and what you are left with is a toxic chemical.

Our bodies need salt but the good kind.

I use Himalayan Pink Crystal Salt because it contains the full spectrum of 84 minerals and trace elements just like Mother Earth intended. It is an unrefined, unprocessed "raw" salt that's hand-mined from abundant salt caves that were formed 250 million years ago as ocean salt settled in certain geologic pockets around the earth.

Virtually all salt is sea salt because it all came from the sea at one time or another in the Earth's history. So be careful of  processed salt companies now claiming to offer "sea salt."

The term "sea salt" is essentially meaningless. White processed salt can still be called "sea salt" even though it is devoid of full-spectrum sea minerals.

The way to tell if your salt is really the good stuff, is to look at the color. If it's pure white, it's not full-spectrum. White salt is just like white sugar: It's missing the key supporting minerals and nutrients your body needs.

Full-spectrum salt always has a non-white color. Celtic Sea Salt, for example (which is also a really good salt) has a brownish sandy color. Pink Himalayan salt is a sort of sandy rose color. All the truly natural full-spectrum salts are sandy or brownish in color.

3. Ditch boxed cereals and eat real food 

Boxed cereal is not a food, it's a food product, even organic boxed cereal. Also, don't be fooled by the words "wholegrain" there is no whole grain to be found. During the production of breakfast cereals grains are placed through a machine called an extruder, after being mixed with water into a sludge. This sludge is forced out of tiny holes at high temperatures and pressures into the little O shapes, stars, flakes and puffs. During the process much of the nutrients are destroyed, and any left are denatured, making them useless to our bodies. This whole process makes cereal TOXIC for you. I don't have children but when I do I will not be giving them boxed cereals for breakfast!

The proteins found in boxed cereals are not recognised by your body because they have been altered by the extrusion process. This makes them toxic. What's really bad is that since organic grains are higher in protein, they are even more toxic for you!! According to Sally Fallon (Weston A Price Foundation) organic cereals are so toxic that it would be better to have "conventional" boxed cereals, full of dyes and high fructose corn syrup!

A lot of cereals claim to have added vitamins and minerals, but these are synthetic man made vitamins, that the body is simply not build to utilise. Synthetic vitamins can also cause imbalances in the body that may lead to health problems in the long run.

On top of this, the body cannot absorb many key nutrients if they are not consumed with foods that contain saturated fat. If you’re eating boxed cereal with low-fat or skimmed milk, the vitamins and minerals added in are providing virtually no nutritional benefit.

Eat a real breakfast. 

There is a whole host of foods you could choose from to provide yourself (and your family) with nourishing real foods to set you up for the day. Now this will depend on what diet preference you have (i.e vegan, meat eater etc)

Some breakfast foods I like to eat are:

♥Eggs - you can do so much with eggs - omelette, scrambled, boiled, poached....

♥Green smoothie

♥Green Juice

♥Homemade granola (there are tons of recipes online from lots of fantastic websites)

♥I love nothing more than a good old English breakfast (cooked in butter of course)

Just eat real food. It really is that simple. There will never be any substitute for nature.