Heidi Strickland-Clark

Brain Matter

I have just made a discovery, not only do I have 3 books on the go and two more have just arrived from Amazon, but they are all on the same topic. I’d not considered this until I saw open books sprawled all over the house and in my bag in various stages of completion.

I am learning to listen to myself for once, but the message from these book titles is loud and clear. “You want more, you want to know how to improve, be better, get more out of life!” — funny how sometimes your subconscious works. I’ve found myself reading them rather than deliberately choosing them. Some I’ve had for ages and read before (Michael Heppell’s – brilliant “How to be Brilliant”) and others like “Do the Work” that was recommend by a friend when he couldn’t have known I already had several books like this on the go.

Anyway, their messages are clear and sometimes it just depends who tells you as to when you’ll listen. Here are a few key points I’ve learned.

Whatever you want to be successful in you should…

• do what you love and do it with passion.
• mix, socialise and learn from successful people. Follow their formula, apply it to your task and follow it exactly.
• surround yourself with people who have the same aspirations as you.
• find an accountability partner.
• have complete and utter self belief.
• change your behaviours, what you’ve always done has kept you where you are now.
• work on it, each and every day.
• get stuff done quickly, stop the procrastination as you only get results/paid for done!

You can apply this to anything…getting in shape, training for a sporting event, making a business work, getting out of debt or being a super parent, partner or friend.

The most poignant thought I’ve taken from these books (and many more) is that we get what we think about the most. So when you focus solely with dedication and belief on any task, you can only succeed.

Go to it — we have nothing to lose! 🙂

I thought I’d comment on the some of the ways to chose your fruit and veg. For several reasons really;

• Most people tend to buy the same things each week regardless of season or price.
• Most people don’t consider the air miles that fresh food travels and then make choices accordingly.
• Fruit and veg is marked up highly in supermarkets.

First things first. I want you to forget about ‘5 a day’, start thinking about ’10 a day’. That is what we should be aiming for, this will change your health and wealth in so many way!

• You’ll fill up more quickly and need fewer high calories, no nutrient snacks. This will save you money and wasted empty calories.
• Your digestion will improve as your fibre and water intake goes up.
• Your health will improve as the extra vitamins, minerals and flavanoids boost your immune system, improve your skin, give you more energy and less bloat.

Supermarkets mark up fruit and veg quite a lot and you can’t always get what you want in terms of quantity or quality. Also food are available all year around and so the seasonal side to food has disappeared. So we don’t buy our veg from the supermarket anymore. We go to the Wokingham market on a Saturday afternoon sometime between 15.30 and 16.00 when Joe, the lovely market trader, is finishing for the day. He is usually keen to make sure he takes as little home as possible and sells you good quality food for a fraction of the price of your local Tesc-Asd-Morris-Sains.

In the past we’ve had what can only be described as a ridiculous number of carrots, garlic, parsley and onions.  But we store them well, or I batch cook things and freeze them as I did this week.

End of day deals from Joe

• This week we have over 4kg of peas. In their pods. They cost me £7, when I worked out how much they would have been in Sainsbury’s it was over £15. Now I know you’re thinking, but I don’t want 4 kilos pf peas…but I can pod, blanch and freeze them. Perfect.
• I also nabbed 6 boxes of raspberries for a fiver. The smoothies have been great this week!
• A complete tray of mushrooms. I’m thinking soup, stroganoff, pate…and I pickled some just to see what they would be like.
• Grapes buy the bag. Apparently, according to Joe, they need ‘pecking over’ — but there are no more dodgy ones than Sainsbury’s so have washed and either eaten or frozen those.
• I also managed to get a whole box of bunched spinach (which looks like this — not the tiny, perfect leaves in a plastic bag in the supermarket for silly money) for about £4.50.
  

  Proper, market spinach!

  So as you can see, if you don’t mind putting a little effort in, negotiating a little with Joe (normally to buy less than he wants you to! “Go on lady, you wan’ some peaches, a whole tray of peaches, go on lady”) then you’ll come away with a bunch of food under half the price of what you’d pay elsewhere, of an excellent quality, in a more natural form (limited plastic wrapping, brown bags at the stall) and offering the opportunity for some preserving or freezing or batch cooking.

My kind of perfect weekend!

Last night I had a moment of clarity. A moment when suddenly, after years of wondering what I should be should be doing with my life, after countless self-developments books and online programmes to help me discover my path in life,  it came to me whilst having a shower.

What was all the more amazing was how simple the answer was. The answer to my question has been right under my nose all the time (just like all the books and courses said it would be!) In all those programmes and pages you’ll learn that the thing you should do in life is that thing that you’re so passionate about, you’d do it for free. You’d give your time away to do it, you’d give up other work to do it. So, what makes me feel like this? What makes me tick, what gets me excited to read and write about? Well health and nutrition yes, but ultimately it’s food.

Sourcing food – local suppliers, farm shops, homemade and organic, going to markets and meeting people passionate about their craft, buying cheaply to save money and not wasting food.

Preparing and cooking food – making up recipes, following a recipe and adapting them, reading recipe books! I’ve read recipe books since I was a kid. I love food magazines, recipe books with pictures, without pictures. I love to prep a meal on my own, with no help, but company welcome. I am a good multi-tasker in the kitchen. Chatting , chopping, stirring and reading recipe books all at the same time is very doable!

Eating! — I’ve always loved food. My tastes have changed over the last few years. I used to say I would eat everything apart from honey and dates. Now I do eat dates but have cut lots of crap and processed foods out of my diet and my tastes are definitely more refined. But if I wasn’t in fitness I would be round ball. I do have quite a loud, fat person trying to escape this body of mine.

Eating for health — I love to know the best way to feed me and the family for long term health whilst still making it nice and tasty. I do like salads (a lot) but I love cake and chocolate and cheese and coffee too. Finding how to incorporate those into my eating plan is fun!

So with all this in mind and my dawning realisation I have decided to focus on this much more from now on. To look to help people with preparing their own meals by running workshops, to taking time to speak to local suppliers and share their good work, to blog about food in a healthy and easy to understand way. Sharing recipes, health tips and foodie experiences. Whilst also integrating it with my fitness work at Fit Camp too.

The clarity with which this hit me last night was pretty energetic. I wanted to dance around the kitchen and go “wheeeeeeeeeee” at top voice. Infact when I told Dale I cried! How wacky is that?! But that is how I knew it was real. It was a relief, now I can just get on and do it!

Watch this space for news, reviews and information on local suppliers. I can’t wait! 🙂

Have you found your true calling?

I love a bargain, I really like food and I especially like baking and cooking. So, this week when I was looking through the reduced item shelf in the supermarket I was really pleased to see a bag of ripe bananas (about 9 of them) for about 50p. Most people would have left them, but I saw this as a great opportunity for some batch baking.

Banana batch baking

Today I have made Banana and Raisin Muffins, Banana and Date Loaf and Banana and Pine Nut Brownies. I’ll freeze the majority of them into portion sized pieces and then we can take one out as and when a packed lunch is necessary. Also when they are frozen they travel better and can’t be eaten randomly when you’re making a hot drink or folding the washing! They are all adapted recipes using only wheat free flours, natural sweeteners and nothing nasty.

This ‘cost’ me 6 bananas, the others I peeled and popped in a freezer bag. I’ll use them in smoothies when it eventually gets hotter. They add an ice-cream like texture without the sugar and dairy. I also froze a punnet of strawberries that were looking OK, but not brilliant for the same reason.

Banana, Strawberry and Coconut Smoothie

Other items I’ve bought cheaply in bulk and cooked up this week:

5 x bags of watercress for 15p each and made a batch of watercress soup for 4 people.

Made French Onion Soup with not nearly enough of the onions I have in a sack in the kitchen. We’ll be on this for a while me-thinks!

A bag of mini cucumbers from the market for next to nothing and pickled them (so preserving them).

Used 10 bulbs (yes bulbs!) of garlic from a huge bag we got from the market for under £3 and pickled those too.

Food waste is a huge problem not only in this country but globally and food prices continue to rise. I see no reason not to use everything I buy and also to buy wisely so I can cook in advance and bake or freeze or pickle. Go to it people!

Pickled Garlic Cloves

Following on from the Patrick Holford blog last week I had a few questions about ‘what should I take?’, ‘what should my children take?’ and also ‘I eat my 5 a day, I don’t need to waste money on supplements do I?’. I hear ya!

If you want to live a long and healthy life (which isn’t the norm these days) then diet and nutrition plays a large part in this. Most over 60 year old people spend the last 10-15 years of their lives in pain, struggling to move, over medicated and dealing with illness and disease. It’s taken for granted that this is due to their age and people expect to be struggling in their later years. It really doesn’t have to be this way.

With good nutrition, regular exercise, a healthy attitude to life and yes, for most, supplementation too, living a long life and dying peacefully in your sleep is possible.

Some common views on supplements are that they ‘aren’t working’ if the person taking them gets a cold for example. Vitamin C won’t stop you from getting ill, but it will reduce your symptoms and duration of your cold.  Got to be worth it for that! No one likes being ill and Facebook always has someone moaning about having a ‘stupid cold’. Quick tip, at the onset of a cold, scratchy throat etc. Take 2 x 1g Vitamin C. Then take 1g every hour. You may find that you get loose bowels, that’s your maximum dose. Drop one of those tablets (so if you got to 8 then had to run to the loo, drop to 7 the next day). Keep taking that hourly dose until the symptoms have gone. Chances are you won’t need to complete day two!

A good basic supplementation plan alongside a diet that looks like

6-8 portions of vegetables and salad are eaten each and everyday
2-3 portions of fruit
2-3 litres of good quality water (not from your tap)
Good protein from fish, organic, grass fed meat where possible, beans and pulses
Minimal dairy from organic and raw sources where possible.

And where you make sure there are/is

No processed foods that rob your body of vital nutrients.
Very occasional sugar (best if none)
Limited alcohol
Very minimal processed carbohydrate foods like cakes, breads, pastries, pizza, pie, cereal, crackers, sweets, crappy chocolate, crisps etc.

Should comprise of:
1 x good quality multi-vitamin and mineral tablet each day – twice a day (1 morning, 1 lunch)
1g vitamin C – twice a day ( 1 morning, 1 lunch)
2 x fish oil (EPA/DHEA) – twice a day ( 1 morning, 1 lunch or dinner)
1-2 x anti-oxidant daily.

If  you are on medication, have other conditions or your diet is poor then this isn’t going to apply. Also, if you are elderly then your requirements will be different to someone younger, so time of life is also an important consideration. Children would need a different protocol again, but once again it depends on their age, activity and diet.

Supplementation isn’t compulsory that’s for sure. But for a nice old age and a pain-free retirement I’d rather consider it as an insurance policy worth contributing to for now.

I took myself to London this weekend for a workshop with Patrick Holford. I’ve seen him present before and am signed up to his newsletter. As a result my interest was piqued when I saw that he was doing his last tour on Healthy Aging.

His presentation was sold as being for Practitioners only, I felt a bit cheeky signing up but once I was there over a quarter in the room were people with no nutritional qualifications or merely an interest in living a longer life, which made me feel a bit less of a fraud!

In summary the day was very interesting, if you want to live a long, healthy life and die of old age and not in pain, having been immobile for the previous 6 years then start doing something about it now! Don’t wait! Life is fast and waiting until you’re ill is too damn late.

So you want to know what the steps to ‘healthy aging’ are?

1. Stay smart and avoid Alzheimer’s disease (you can and if caught in the early stages you can retard the decline)

2. Keep your joints mobile (avoid arthritis — you can and you can reverse it)

3. Stay lean (obesity related disease is the biggest killer)

4. Sleep well and reduce stress (stress is the biggest cause of heart disease, remember stress comes in many forms, it’s not just your annoying boss)

5. Keep your skin youthful (the power of vitamin A, good oils and vitamin C)

6. Say no to cancer (by doing all the above, the risk can be diminished and it can be reversed, eat lots of anti-oxidant rich foods)

7. Keep your heart healthy (be careful of taking statins ‘just in case’ — there is no need if you do all of the above. But if you absolutely do have to you must take 90mg CoQ10 a day minimum to protect your heart function)

8. Protect your eyesight (using good fats and fish oils and not using a computer all day long)

9. Look after your hormones – (avoid HRT but consider natural ways to boost your levels. This goes for men and women. Low testosterone levels are terrible for men too.)

Easy eh? Well you’d think that with all those qualified nutritionists in the room they’d be doing this wouldn’t you?! Well think again! At one point Patrick asked us to put our hands up if we thought we had a healthy diet. Of course, 90% of the room put their hands up. He then showed a slide and said, ‘who had at least one of these 4 combinations of foods yesterday?’. It was a slide with 4 examples of fruits and veggies on it. Only 10% of that larger group did (smug note — I was one of them!) — so just like all professions you can’t always expect those who are qualified to do it to do it properly for themselves.

Personal trainers aren’t always fit. Hair dressers don’t have the best hair. IT guys don’t have the best back up system and shock horror nutritionists don’t eat a healthy diet!

Finally, I wanted a memento of this last speaking tour of his and also something that would be useful to you. So I asked him if he would kindly do a short video on why we need to supplement. He said yes and this is the result —-> enjoy!