Have you ever struggled with the discipline of rinsing your sprouts twice a day?

Sprouted seeds, pulses, grains and nuts are highly nutritious: they are living foods with all their vital force present, and as embryonic plants they are loaded with the enzymes our bodies need to carry out a myriad of processes. They also help alkalise our bodies, and are rich in minerals.

Cooked and processed foods are enzyme-poor, so many of us end up short of enzymes, and our bodies may even draw enzymes from other organs to help us digest the food we eat.

What better than to eat live, nutritious foods in the form of sprouts? As well as being nutritious, they are very tasty – with flavours ranging from the peppery radish to the nutty chick pea. I’ve also been surprised how filling they are.How to sprout the easy way

1. Buy yourself an ‘Easy Sprout Sprouter’ at a very reasonable price from Amazon UK, or USA.
2. Select something to sprout – my favourite is a mix of different types of lentil – green, puy and brown. [Sprouts that get mucilaginous, and therefore do need to be rinsed frequently are not suitable for this method.]
3. Fill the inner sprouter beaker to about one third full with eg lentils, and place inside the outer beaker.
4. Add water to almost fill the sprouter (I use filtered water, as the sprouts will absorb the water). Put the vented lid on, and leave to soak overnight.
5. Empty the excess water, take out the inner beaker with the sprouts and rinse very thoroughly under the tap. Drain the excess water by shaking the beaker containing the lentils..
6. Replace the vented lid, and leave the sprouts to grow until the shoots are about the same length as the lentils. This takes 2-4 days depending on the temperature. I keep my sprouter on a sunny window ledge.
7. Once the sprouts are ready, store in an airtight container in the fridge. You can use the sprouter itself with its sold lid, or another container.

Your sprouts will easily keep for a week in the fridge.

Easy, eh?

Eating your sprouts!

Now for the good part! Because your sprouts are still alive, they have not lost any of the nutrients as happens with so many transported fresh foods.

Sprouts are good in salads, sprinkled on soups, as an addition to wraps, or even as part of your juice. You can also use them as the base for making pates and dips, like hummus.

It’s good to eat a variety of different types of sprout, to benefit from a range of nutrition.

The Delicious Nugget: Sprouts are highly nutritious, live foods, that you can easily grow with a minimum of effort.

Your body is unique, so why not tune into her specific needs, rather than follow the rules someone else has developed for their very different body?

In the self-development arena there’s sometimes a notion that we need to get beyond the shackles of the body into the ‘higher’ world of the spirit. On the contrary, our bodies are highly aware – perhaps more than we are, and you can easily tune into your body’s awareness.

The Leaning Test

There are many ways to check what your body wants to eat, such muscle testing and dowsing with a pendulum, both of which take a bit of practice.

Here’s the easiest way to check if your body wants to eat a particular food. from Access Consciousness.

1. Stand with your feet together, heels and ankles touching.
2. Have an open mind about what your body wants!
3. Hold the food or drink you’re considering in front of your solar plexus (ie a little higher than your navel).
4. Check which way your body leans:
   • towards the food means your body wants the food
   • away from the food means your body doesn’t want the food.

After a few practices, you’ll find this a quick and easy way to check what your body wants to eat.

If you’re unable to hold the food, as in a shop or restaurant, simply look at the food, or the item on the menu, and your body will respond to its vibration.

Now to explode another eating myth – what your body wants to eat today, it may not want to eat tomorrow! Your body has no hard and fast rules like never eating chocolate; one day it may need chocolate, another it may not!

Prepare to be surprised at what your body wants to eat and drink, and how this changes from day to day!

As always, please check with your medical practitioner if you are concerned about the food your body can tolerate.

The Delicious Nugget: Your body knows best what it wants to eat at any given time, use the leaning technique to tune into your body’s awareness of what it needs at any given time.

As a change from a slice of lemon in your water, try a slice of cucumber.

One slice in a glass of water, or four slices in a jug. To comment click:

Ginger has a multitude of healing properties

Cut thin slices of fresh ginger root. Add boiling water and a slice of lemon. Allow to infuse until it reaches the strength you like. Sip and savour!

I first tasted this tea with an Italian fig biscuit in the tranquility of the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge! To comment, click

They are less likely to be contaminated with pesticides. And, freshly picked, you get the full benefit of all their nutrition. Here are the wild plums I picked from the woods near our house. I’ll soon be on the lookout for blackberries, elderberries and rose hips.

What wild fruits could you enjoy?

I was wary of adding beet stalks and leaves to my smoothies, thinking they would make it bitter. Not so, it came out a beautiful pink colour and delicious!

Blend: 1 peeled orange, 1 inch slice fresh pineapple, 1 banana, 1 apple, handful of beet tops (stalks and leaves). Add some water if you prefer a drinkable smoothie. Vary the ingredients to match what you have available.

Enjoy! 

First, develop a vision of a healthy you. As your body becomes more alkaline you’re very likely to experience improvements in your health, which vary from person to person, and commonly include: weight release, clearer skin, easier joints, feeling lighter and brighter, mental clarity and easing of various health symptoms. How do you see yourself, once your body is more healthy?

Of the various possible approaches to alkalise your body, the one you’re likely to have most control over is the food you eat. The aim is to eat less of the acid-forming foods such as meat, dairy and wheat, and more of the alkalising foods such as fruit and vegetables.

As a general guide, to maintain good health, your aim is to move towards making sure over half the food you eat is alkalising – say 60%. This should result in your body becoming slightly alkaline with a pH slightly above the neutral value of 7. My article How Acid Is Your Body? explains how to measure your pH.

To restore your health you may need to temporarily increase your consumption of alkalising foods to around 80%.

So, what to eat?

Generally, eat less:

• Dairy: milk, cheese
• Eggs
• Meat
• Poultry
• Wheat: bread, cakes, pasta
• Sugar and sweeteners
• Fizzy drinks

This is quite a challenge to the average western diet with its focus on dairy, meat and wheat. A meal of burger, chips (fries), tomato sauce, side salad, ice cream and coke/coffee/milk shake would be very acid-forming!

Generally, eat more:

• Vegetables
• Fruit
• Green leafy vegetables such as spinach, lettuce, kale
• Peas, beans, lentils
• Seeds and nuts.

The difference between ‘alkaline’ and ‘alkalising’

Generally speaking, foods which are alkaline have an alkalising effect on the body when eaten. Similarly, most acid foods have an acidifying effect on the body. However, there are exceptions, notably lemon juice and cider vinegar, which while being acid have an alkalising effect on the body. So, the most helpful charts are those which give the alkalising/acidifying values of a food rather than its actual pH.

To find out more about individual foods

You can Google up various food charts, including charts giving the pH value of individual foods, and charts giving lists of foods that are high/moderately/low alkalising, and high/moderate/low acidifying. There’s a helpful set of charts here.

7 tips to alkalise your body

1. Develop your vision for a healthy alkaline body

Mine is ‘Fully alive in body, mind and spirit’; bringing this to mind usually neutralises the temptation of acidifying foods such as crisps and biscuits which my family eat. Some people like to develop an image of their vision, as in a vision board.

2. Have a green smoothie for breakfast

Green smoothies are delicious and highly alkalising, See my Green Smoothie Challenge for more information. You may be surprised to find out they contain protein!

3. Introduce salad ingredients to lunch and dinner.

Our family meals always include a salad, which forms the main part of my meal, while the rest of the family eat it as a side dish. This has proved to be a win-win, and I’m having to make increasingly larger salads! For lunch you might choose a salad, rather than a beef sandwich.

4. Familiarise yourself with the alkalising foods, and introduce them to your eating.

You may want to print off one of the charts from this link. For example, highly alkalising foods include: water melon, lemon and seaweeds, while moderately alkalising foods include bananas and potatoes. Experiment to find alkalising foods you really like, then you’ll want to eat more of them!

5. Replace highly acidifying foods with less acidifying ones.

Again the charts will help you. Examples of highly acidifying foods are artificial sweeteners, fizzy drinks, beef and white pasta, which you might replace respectively with: honey, fruit juice, nuts and wholegrain pasta.

6. Aim to have some overall alkalising meals

You could aim to have a couple of overall alkalising lunches a week, later moving on to one a day. Again, experiment to find meals you really like.

7. Get support

Find a friend who is interested in moving to a more healthy, alkaline body, so you have a source of support and inspiration, and someone to hold you accountable for the choices you make.

Please consult your healthcare practitioner before making any substantial changes to your diet.

The Delicious Nugget: An effective way to achieve a healthy alkaline body is to eat more alkalising foods, and less acidifying foods.

My article ‘The One Scale You Want To Move Up’ explains why an alkaline body, made up of oxygen-rich cells with an overall positive change, is essential to good health.

To measure the alkalinity of your body accurately you need some pH Stix, or a similar product. They are easy to use, and available from these links: Amazon.com (USA), or Amazon.co.uk (UK).

About pH

You may remember using litmus paper in school chemistry to measure pH – dip it into the liquid and it changed to red for acid, or blue for alkaline.

• pH values below 7 are ‘acid’
• A pH of 7 is ‘neutral’
• pH values above 7 are ‘alkaline’.

The optimal value for your pH is between 6.75 and 7.25

pH Stix are designed specifically to measure the pH of urine or saliva, with colour changes to show small changes in pH.

Measuring your pH

pH Stix give a detailed explanation of how to test the pH of your urine and saliva several times between rising and an hour after lunch, and work out a composite score.

I prefer to use a simpler method of measuring the pH of my urine just once a day, when it is strongest on rising, ie the first urine of the day. This way I feel I easily get a general indicator of the cumulative effect of what I ate and drank the previous day.

It’s a good idea to keep your pH Stix close to the toilet for quick access!

Don’t be discouraged if you find the pH of your early morning urine is quite acid. Unless you’re consciously eating and managing your emotions for an alkaline body, your early morning urine is more than likely to be acid as toxins have been extracted into urine during the night. However your pH will probably become less acid as the day progresses, and you flush out your kidneys. To prove this to yourself, you may also want to measure your pH an hour after breakfast and lunch for the first few days.

If you get a urinary reading above 8, this is likely to be false. It probably means your urine is so acid that your kidneys have produced ammonia to neutralise the acid.

It’s encouraging to know that when you take action to change your pH, you’ll quickly see the results. You can test this out by measuring the pH of your saliva an hour after eating an acid-forming meal such as pizza, or meat, compared with an alkaline-forming meal such as salad and fruit.

There’s a simpler, though not very accurate, way to watch for changes in your pH. As is becomes more alkaline, your early morning urine will become paler in colour, and have a milder odour. These days, as I eat predominantly raw food, my early morning urine is almost colourless and has no odour – much more pleasant!

If you have concerns about your pH level, please consult your doctor.

My next article will give you practical tips to move your body towards the alkaline end of the pH scale.

The Delicious Nugget: Measuring the pH of your urine each morning gives you a good indicator of the acidity of your body, and provides a baseline against which to measure your progress towards a more alkaline body.

This also works for whole brocolli, cabbage, celery, lettuce etc. For best results first trim off the dried end of the stump, so the water can get in.

Enjoy!

Do you have a comment or a similar tip to share?

Avocado stones (pits) are extremely high in insoluble fibre, which binds to excess cholesterol, and there is more anti-oxidant in the stone than the rest of the avocado!

The avocado stone is surprisingly soft – simply cut through the whole avocado, and the knife goes through the stone. Safer than trying to cut a slippery stone.

I’ve tried the stone grated in salad – it’s OK if you like a bitter taste. The best way is to add half an avocado stone to your green smoothie.

Thanks to Victoria Bounteko of The Raw Family for this tip.