Bloomly

Are you daunted by the idea of practicing yoga every single day? You don't need to be!

Remember that a yoga practice is exactly that - a practice. It’s through regularly practicing yoga in whatever way speaks to you that you can truly experience the physical and mental benefits of yoga. My tips are up on the blog for how to start a daily yoga practice, and stick with it! Link in my bio.

COVID-19 and Vitamin D. What's the link?

Self-care... what does this look like for you?

Self-care is a hugely important part of looking after our health. But it's so often overlooked.

Society is very good at teaching us (especially women!) that prioritising ourselves is selfish or not something that we need to make time for. But even though it can be difficult to put yourself first - in front of family, work or social commitments - it's often the best decision you can make to improve your health and wellbeing.

For me, self-care is something that I try to practice daily. It can be by:

- cooking home-cooked meals
- making my own cosmetics to ensure that I'm giving my skin the very best care I can
- growing my own food so I know that I'm nourishing my body as much as possible
- beekeeping - this is something I find relaxing, and beneficial for my health!
- my morning yoga practice

What are your self-care tips? Share them below and you may just inspire someone!

We all experience stress in our day-to-day lives. But how do you handle it?

These are some of my favourite ways to manage stress. They're quick, simple, and you don't need anything special (like a yoga mat) to do them. Even better, if you practice them regularly they can help prevent stressful feelings from arising at all!

However please note that if you are experiencing chronic or acute stress, you should seek help and support from a qualified health professional.

With studies showing that when you eat is as important as what you eat, syncing your meals with your circadian rhythm may be the key to improving your digestion, sleep, and overall health.
Here's everything you need to know about eating with your circadian rhythm!

Eating with your body clock: the circadian rhythm diet - Bloomly When you eat is important. Syncing your meals with your circadian rhythm may be the key to improving digestion, sleep, and overall health.

From its proven health benefits to reducing your carbon footprint, there are so many benefits to a plant based diet! If you're looking for reasons to motivate you to switch to a plant based diet, look no further. Up on the blog now!

5 Benefits of a Plant Based Diet - Bloomly From improving your health to reducing environmental impact, there are measurable benefits to a plant based diet. Here’s why you should go plant based.

Recipe of the week!
Winter root vegetable salad

This is one of my absolute favourite winter salads. Made with seasonal root vegetables like carrot, celeriac and cabbage, it's rich in vitamin C, K, B6, A, E and Selenium - all of which are very important micronutrients. As an added bonus, it's cheap, easy to throw together and makes a great side dish. Enjoy!

Makes approximately 3 portions.

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup of grated carrot
1 cup of grated celeriac
1 cup of grated white cabbage
1 tbsp of fresh ginger
2-3 tbsp sunflower seeds (or any other seed that you like)
¼ cup watercress (or any other herb that you like)
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice (or more, depending on your taste)
½ tbsp mustard

METHOD:

Roughly grate all the veggies, and finely grate the ginger before adding to a large bowl.
Toast the seeds at low temperature in a frying pan (without oil) for a few minutes until they slightly brown.
Prepare the vinaigrette by mixing the olive oil, lemon juice and mustard in a cup, then add it to the bowl.
Mix everything together, making sure to coat all of the grated veggies with the dressing.
Just before serving, top the salad with the seeds and the watercress.

New Year's Resolutions for your health and wellbeing... did you make any this year?

If you did, how are they going? Do you feel like you're making progress? Or are you slipping back into old habits?

I'm not a huge fan of the idea of new year's resolutions and the idea that we have to make changes to our lifestyle or diet at this one time of year. ANY time is a good time to prioritize self-care and to improve your lifestyle and nutrition habits. You don't need to wait for Monday, the new year, or for anyone else!

If you feel like your resolutions aren't going well - don't worry. Prioritizing your health and wellness is a lifelong journey, not a quick fix. You can always try again tomorrow, the day after, and the day after. So keep going, you're doing great!

Yoga is known to be an excellent stress management technique, but is there more to it than simply postures and breathing? Absolutely! So, what can yoga’s ancient texts teach us about how to manage stress?

Why Yoga Is The World's Most Ancient Stress Management Technique? - Bloomly One of the best ways to manage stress? Yoga, the world’s most ancient stress management technique! Here’s what ancient yogic teachings say about managing stress.

Now it's easier to contact Bloomly.

Bloomly updated their info in the about section.

Bloomly updated their website address.

Iron deficiency is one of the most common deficiencies in the world, with women of child bearing age as well as vegetarians and vegans being more at risk.

If you're worried about your iron intake, there are a few things you can do in order to boost your intake.

Firstly, a plant based diet doesn't mean an iron-deficient diet! We can get iron from plant sources (also called non-heme iron), so try to increase your consumption of iron-rich foods like legumes, lentils, beans, seeds (pumpking, chia, sunflower), soy, green leafy vegetables.

However, the body absorbs non-heme iron less efficiently. So in order to maximise the amount of that's absorbed, it's important to always combine iron-rich foods with Vitamin C. An easy way to do this is to add lemon juice to your food.

The other major way that many people inhibit their body's absorption of iron is by consuming too much tea, coffee and dairy together with food. Studies suggest that these may limit the absorption of heme-iron when combined with iron-rich food. So remember to not mix dairy products with your leafy greens!

Recent studies are now showing that using a holistic approach to feeding which prioritises nourishing ourselves in other ways is more successful when it comes to boosting our health and wellbeing. And you may be surprised by what the most important indicators of health are! From stress to joy, air quality to relationships, we need to fuel our lives with so much more than food.

Here’s why food is not the only important thing that you feed yourself, and what actually is.

With its countless proven health benefits from reducing the risk of certain cancers to reversing type 2 diabetes, many people are turning towards a more plant based diet. But the switch can feel overwhelming.

Have you thought about starting a plant based diet, but you're worried how your friends and family may react? Or you think that it would be impossible to live without your favourite cheese?

Instead of thinking about switching to a plant based diet overnight, focus on making it sustainable, and enjoyable, for you in the long term. For more tips and to read the full article, head over to the blog!

Yoga has long been known to help people relax, and there's a growing body of scientific evidence to back these claims up. Here’s how yoga can help you manage both the physical and mental aspects of stress.

5 Ways Yoga Can Help You Manage Stress - Bloomly With yoga being used more and more as a complementary therapy for stress, here’s how yoga can help you manage stress - backed up by science.

It's been said that we eat first with our eyes, then with our stomachs, and then with our hearts. So, if the first thing we notice about our food is how good it looks, make it colourful!

But, did you know that a more colourful diet also means one with a wider spectrum of health benefits?

This is thanks to the unique phytonutrients that plants contain. Phytonutrients not only give plants their colour, but their specific nutrients. Studies have shown that different phytonutrients are linked to specific health benefits and the prevention of certain diseases.

So the more colour you have in your diet, the more different phytonutrients you're nourishing your body with!

In recent years, numerous studies have shown how the timing and frequency of eating can affect our biological rhythms, also called circadian rhythms.

A circadian rhythm is a 24-hour biological clock that affects your sleep, digestion, and metabolism . It is a natural process that affects all living creature and is mainly regulated by light. It is our inner clock that defines what function of our different body systems should work when. It regulates our hormones, eating habits and body temperature and we also know that our biological clock is implicated in the development of metabolic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

So when our biological are disrupted due to frequent jetlag, night shift, clubbing, late-night eating and breakfast skipping, we are putting our health at risk.

If you are struggling with losing weight despite a healthy diet, a disrupted circadian cycle might be a cause.

How to put your biological clock back on track? It’s very simple;
• follow a regular eating pattern and eat your food within a maximum 12h window.
• eating most calories in the earlier part of the day – breakfast (around 8am) and lunch (around 1pm)
• avoid food intake close to bedtime, during the night or very early morning, when melatonin levels are high. Ideally, take a light dinner before 7pm.

What does this inspire you?
, , , thanks for the picture :-)

DON’T ADD HONEY TO YOUR CUP OF WARM TEA!!!
You love to put honey in a warm cup of tea? Me too… but I add it when the tea is cold. When you heat honey, you actually “kill” the honey and destroy most of the beneficial components of the honey and it becomes sugar without all the benefits of the honey. And instead of adding a superfood to your diet, you actually add pure sugar.

According the latest research (1) honey is composed of 82.4% carbohydrates, 38.5% fructose, 31% glucose, 12.9% other sugars, 17.1% water, 0.5% protein, organic acids, multiminerals, amino acids, vitamins, phenols, and a myriad of other minor compounds. In addition, honey consists of minor amounts of bioactive components, including phenolic acid, flavonoid, and α-tocopherol. Honey constituents with health benefits include phenolic acids, flavonoids, ascorbic acid, proteins, carotenoids, and certain enzymes, such as glucose oxidase and catalase. Those compounds contribute to the antioxidant, antimicrobial, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antifungal, wound healing, and cardioprotective activities of honey. Even if the ways through which all those components act on our health is not yet fully understood by modern science, all ancient civilizations (Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians, Roman) were using honey for its medicinal use and in particular for it’s wound and gut healing properties.

When you heat the honey in your cup of tea or when baking, you lose all the benefits of honey. I add honey to cold water or cold tea and it’s even tastier than when it’s heated. Try it and let me know.

When you buy honey, make sure you buy a honey that is organic and raw, event better if you know the beekeeper, so you are sure about the quality of the honey.
(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5549483/

Do you manage to do that?

Tell me what is your favorite eating habit?

What are your favourite whole grains, legumes, nuts?

For body: use 100% cold pressed coconut oil or sesame oil
For face: used 100% cold pressed jojoba oil, abricot kernel oil or hazelnut oil. You can use only one oil or a combination of them.
Massage your skin with those oils instead of conventional creams. Don't worry, your skin won't be greasy and it will absorb all the goodies of the oil.
By doing this, you nourishes you skin and you don't polute the water with microparticules.

For one portion; Mix the following ingredients and let it soak for a couple of hours or overnight;
1 tbsp Chia Seeds
1/2 cup (or 4 tbsp) Steel Cut Oats
1 tbsp Unsweetened Coconut Flakes
3/4 cup (or 170 ml) Unsweetened Almond Milk

Before serving, add for example;
1 tbsp Raisins or any fresh fruit you have at hand
1 tbsp Pumpkin Seeds & 1 tbsp Sesame Seeds or and other seed or nut you have at hand

For additional sweetness, you can add honey.  You can also add a little almond milk in order to reach the consistency you like.
This makes a well-balanced breakfast or snack.  It will provide you with the following % of your daily values; 48% calcium, 43% iron, 53% fiber, 20% magnesium, 30% protein.