Healthy Eating Food Tips by Sarah

1) Buy a crock pot / slow cooker. This can be your best friend as you endeavour to cook healthy meals without spending hours in the kitchen! In the morning, just throw some meat (try and get it from a local farmer, or farmer's market, so it's healthy grass-fed beef, and leave the bones on if possible, good for minerals in the stew and helps digestion) and vegetables and potatoes or even rice and beans, in there. Add water and spices. Leave all day. Have a hot meal waiting for you at dinner!

2) Any time you're preparing food, throw some rice or beans, lentils, quinoa, etc... into some water to soak. Then, the next day, you are halfway to having some healthy digestible food to eat (soaking greatly enhances your body's ability to access the nutrition in beans and grains, and also makes them faster to cook!) Rice cookers are awesome, btw. i don't know how i lived before i had mine (and a super-basic model works fine). You'll need less than the recommended water when cooking pre-soaked rice (or beans etc).

3) Stock up on the things you need to make fabulous smoothies – they are a good way to pack some nutrition into your body. I like frozen fruit, yogurt, avocado (makes them creamy without really adding flavour), juice, sometimes a spoonful of green power or Vega (protein supplement stuff), almond butter... sometimes a spoonful of flax oil, for nutrition, sometimes some leftover coconut milk. My big tip with smoothies is to make sure you include some healthy fat in there because it makes them satisfy your hunger for longer.

4) Speaking of fat... the last 15 years or so in mainstream nutrition have demonized fat in our culture. I avoided it like the plague for years... and was miserable, hungry, and unsatisfied much of the time. Certainly not the picture of vibrant health! I've slowly come around to appreciating the importance of fat. Just stay away from modern icky fats... like canola, and margerine, anything artificially hydrogenated, etc. Be fearless with the good stuff though! Organic butter, organic coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, avocados, flax oil... all good, and in fact essential to curbing appetite, and keeping us healthy (fat soluable vitamins require... surprise surprise... fat). So go ahead, indulge! If you're gonna avoid anything, avoid white sugar and white flour, not natural fats.

5) Get some mineral salt. I use this: http://www.realsalt.com/
Himalayan and Celtic sea salt are also good. Your body treats it very differently than standard table salt, and so the usual warnings about salt being bad don't apply. Combined with tip 4 above, this is good news for you, because it gives you the option of being really boring with your veggies... because steamed veggies still taste pretty good if you put butter and salt on them. :)

6) Buy a good cookbook full of tricks for preparing yummy veggies: http://www.molliekatzen.com/vegetable_dishes_book_promo.php
its' good for inspiration with what to do with all those veggies you know you should be eating. Maybe grab a good crockpot cookbook too!

7) Same as #5 above... since you asked what to eat on movie nights... I'd say that popcorn you pop yourself, with organic butter and mineral salt, is just fine. Yay!