Total Health One Step at a Time

Dianne & Robbie’s Experience – Creating Vibrant Health

“How our love affair with food changed!”

We started in May 2010 with a Greenstar juicer and having a vegetable juice each morning – we did not change anything else of our usual diet.
Our juice is usually 2/3 carrot, 1/3 green maybe celery, spinach, or a mix, couple of sprigs of parsley and a slice of ginger (only if you like it!)

I started to realize that I wasn’t flagging at 7 or 8pm and in fact still had energy at 10pm! I was also sleeping better. The other thing I noticed was that I wasn’t “looking for food” at midday so with everything we were reading we decided to stop having our other breakfast food and just have the juice. Around this time we also introduced having a glass of BarleyMax as well. A high nutrition powdered barley green juice which helps build and maintain your immune system. This doesn’t taste exactly fabulous but it is brilliant for you. We’ve had lots of great feedback from customers so wanted to try it for ourselves.

Our readings showed that the body is doing mainly cleansing in the morning so we have a glass of BarleyMax when we first get up and then a glass of vege juice or sometimes fruit about 30-60 minutes later. The fruit juice we have in the morning is often apple, pear and berries – a brilliant vitamin bomb. If we do this we sometimes have our vege juice mid morning or before lunch. Also we do this at breakfast as it is easier to change this than lunch or dinner but many people choose other meals to do this with.

What we came to understand was two main things.

1. Our body is made up of 100 trillion living cells and we need nutrients, vitamins and minerals from living foods. Simply put, these are naturally grown foods that haven’t been cooked. Nothing that comes out of a packet! And the easiest way to gain these living enzymes is by juicing vegetables and fruit.

2. Our body runs at its optimum level when it is in an alkaline state. On the pH scale 7.0 is neutral, everything above is alkaline and anything below is acid. At 7.35-7.45 – which is ideal – you can’t get sick.



So by doing the BarleyMax and Juice we were really helping ourselves.

Next we started adjusting our lunches – do not change everything at once as you will not keep up with the habit. Once you are comfortable with one change then bring in something else. You do not need to do it in the order we did. With regard to our lunches I used to often eat two sandwiches such as tomato or banana so my fillings were great I just needed to adjust the wrapping – so I either had a large salad and sometimes on a slice of bread or I have a wrap and you can get yummy sun dried tomato or garlic or spinach and fill these with lettuce, avocado, tomato, capsicum, parsley, mint, hummus – just whatever is in the fridge.
The other thing we started to notice was our taste buds were changing. I used to love sweet corn on toast as a quick Friday night meal and when we had some it tasted like gloop. I couldn’t believe how much our taste buds had developed!!

With making these changes we started to notice that we wanted other things less and less such as meat, cheese, bread and alcohol and Robbie has reduced coffee substantially replacing it with green or sleep tea in the evening. So with having our juices in the morning, and green tea at night he has his coffees around the middle of the day. We never made a conscious decision to stop having anything we have just reduced or replaced by choice.

I haven’t had a chance to work it out but I am sure the cost savings are great as well. We buy substantially less bread, butter, cheese, milk, meat, jams, and canned and packet products. With this I also enjoy buying us many yummy fruits and vegetables such as strawberries, pineapples, and avocadoes no matter what the price. As a wonderful bi-product we also have less rubbish!!

As we kept reading more we started to understand that dairy products are acidic and ironically for someone with osteoporosis if they drink milk for more calcium they are making their body more acidic and the body wants to be alkaline therefore will draw calcium out of the bones thus creating a worse problem with the osteoporosis!! People ask what do you take for calcium or protein – look at cows and gorillas – planting eating animals that are big and strong without eating dairy products other than feeding their young their own milk (not milk from another animal!!)

Dinners are often soups, baked kumara, salads, seafood, sometimes pasta and if we are in a hurry and had a big lunch we will have a wrap at night instead. If we visit friends or family we just have what they are having.

During this time the weight just started coming off and ironically we were involved in a biggest loser competition over 12 weeks and I came 1st (losing nearly 10kg) and Robbie 2nd and with very minimal exercise.

We also noticed other health benefits – a very blood shot eye that I have started getting better. I have small fatty lumps on me and these were reducing in size. I would never have said I was constipated but after eating more raw I would say I definitely was!

When we started changing our eating habits we did notice the detox process of feeling a little “off”. If you get these symptoms don’t give up – just let me know so we can check everything is OK.

With these efforts you are looking to:

Cleanse
Heal &
Repair the body.

We change the oil filter on our car once a year but don’t do anything for our own body! When you start the cleansing you may wish to utilise Fibre Cleanse which is a fully natural product and clears the colon so that your body easily takes up the good nutrients you are putting in to it. Many people take supplements but are often just peeing them down the toilet as the liver, kidneys and colon are slimey and don’t take in the goodness. As my daughter says “too much information” but it is what it is!

We have taken on this eating regime as a lifestyle change but if you were just wanting to do your body a good turn then have as much of a raw food diet as possible replacing, reducing or removing the following as much as possible:

- White salt
- White flour
- White sugar
- Meat
- Dairy products
- Alcohol
- Caffeine

Do this for two weeks and see how much better you feel.

Then slowly keep making changes and you will be surprised how easy it is to keep some of these changes in place and what you will want to be changing in the future.

Some other things to consider.

Drink liquids either an hour before a meal or 30 minutes afterwards which allows are digestive enzymes to do the best work they can without being diluted.

Plant some vegetables or herbs in your garden. Parsley, mint and basil are wonderful additions to salads.

Enjoy desserts such as natural fruit sorbet – we make then in our Greenstar juicer, or banana cream pie – no sugar, salt, flour, eggs or butter and not cooked – perfect raw food and it tastes great – again made in the juicer.

Get a great raw food recipe book – check out our products section or email me for a recommendation dianne@totalhealth.co.nz.
Organise a raw food presentation – discuss with me - Dianne 09 431-5670.

Make smoothies – dairy free and delish! The Tribest Personal Blender is great.

Change to using cold pressed olive oil, remove margarine type products – you are better using butter than margarine and try and reduce this as much as possible.

Omega 3 & 6 is good for the body and can be put in dressings if you want.

Enjoy fresh pesto’s, hummus and guacamole instead of can or preserved dips.

Remember change one thing at a time and enjoy – don’t make it a chore, a have to, or make yourself feel like you can’t have something.

Robbie also noticed that an arthritic joint that had been painful has reduced so that it is not agitating him on a daily basis

Another fantastic thing that happened for us was Robbie goes for an annual WOF at the doctors and his prostate reading had been getting high – 7.3 – and if it was close to 9 he would have had to see a specialist. Well at his recent visit his reading came down to 5.4, his cholesterol was good, his blood pressure near on perfect, his waist measurement down from 88cm to 83cm and his weight down 5kg – 75kg to 70kg! At Robbie’s last visit his doctor had said that he could lose 5kg to be right weight for his height but Robbie dismissed this having been much the same weight for the last 30 years and was amazed when he had lost this amount without specifically trying. His doctor was very impressed and the only thing that was different was our food. Exercise has been minimal and stress levels much the same so nothing else had changed and was a great testament to our eating regime

Nutrition is a major part but is not everything. Some other things to consider are:-

- exercise
- good drinking water
- sleep
- love and laughter (letting go of grudges)
- doing something for someone else
- sunshine
- a purpose
- gratefulness

We love it and hope you get great benefits and enjoyment as well.