Watching kids eat these days is horrifying and it makes me cringe. Carbs and Sugar are everywhere – from pizza’s, candy, french fries, chips, muffins, sodas, juices, cereals. Kids these days have their insulin raised from the moment they eat their breakfast to the moment that they fall asleep. Their poor cells are being assaulted with insulin to get rid of sugars in the blood. But the cells can only take so much before they start to get resistant to the insulin and not working properly. This is how we become insulin sensitive and insulin resistant.  The pancreas has to produce more insulin to get rid of blood sugar. The thing about high insulin is that it STORES FAT! That is why insulin is called the fat storing hormone.

With this kind of high sugar and carb diet we are ensuring that our kids will battle weight gain in adolescence or adulthood. This is what happened to me. I was a skinny kid that ate sweets and carbs and as I reached adulthood the fat piled on. As an adult I was eating natural whole foods but still I gained weight.

Why do kids need special menus at restaurants made up of processed carbs? Why are crackers a staple in kids diets? Kids should not need to have juice boxes for lunch.  Limiting these foods would do your kids a great favour!

A lifetime struggle with chronic disease and overweight is hard! By limiting sugars and carbs you would be doing your kids a huge favour.  ADHD, allergies, behavioural problems, cavities, diabetes, obestity, cancers are just a few of the diseases that can be attributed to the above aforementioned foods.

We should be teaching our kids about living a healthy lifestyle and not how to treat disease.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

To your health and wellness,

Tweet This Post

Let me tell you about the time when my daughter Aliena was a year and a half. She had a really hard time eating vegetables.  We were vegetarian at the time and I thought that a balanced diet should include veggies!

As hard as I tried and searched ways to be creative, nothing really worked. I blended veggies in sauces, made dips, pretended that broccoli were trees, made carrot muffins and zucchini bread. Veggies were not foreign in our house and were served on a regular basis. These were the foods that we would eat and that  she was growing up with and nothing new and unusual. I was determined to find a way to get my daughter to like them.

One thing that I did notice that was bothering me is that she loved carbohydrates. She craved her cereals and oatmeal, devoured her crackers, ate the bread instead of her whole sandwich, inhaled her pasta and rice. She just loved those carbs.

As it turned out she ended up having some health problems and we had to severely restrict her grain consumption. Taking away her favourite foods was very much like going through a withdrawal period when you are addicted to something. Not only was she a toddler and going through normal toddler phases and sickness but she was going through a carb addiction withdrawal. Who new that this could even happen? But she just screamed at the cupboards were here food normally was. It took her a while to get over it.

After a few weeks of this she started to experiment with veggies. To my surprise she started liking them. She started eating them without being prompted to and she was even eating salads and other green stuff! I no longer had to disguise them for her.

Since realizing how detrimental excessive carbs can be to children, I also restricted my second daughters carb intake. From the moment she tried solid food she was enjoying her veggies. She is more of a picky eater when it comes to dark green salads, I can still get them in her with a little bit of creative play.

I try not to give my kids more than one serving of sprouted or soaked grains a day. The sprouting and soaking of grain is necessary to neutralize anti-nutrients. So they enjoy Ezekiel Bread and on occasion soaked oatmeal. As side effect of limiting carbs my kids enjoy their greens in green smoothies, and Aliena eats kale salads and collard green wraps.

Having kids means that you enjoy the company of their friends. It is a shame to observe today’s children say stuff like “I hate veggies and I never eat them”, Or that when you serve veggies for snack that it does not get eaten. Children are becoming malnourished even though they are eating plenty of food. It is just not the right kind of food.

This has been my experience.

I would love to hear yours! How do you get your picky eater to eat their veggies and green salad?

To your health and wellness,

Tweet This Post

Last week I took the kids and myself to the dentist. The kids normally have a checkup every six months, but I was a bit nervous about this appointment. You see I also made an appointment for myself. I have not seen a dentist since I was 12 years old – that was 20 years ago! Everything went well and no cavities in any of us so far.

My eldest daughter Aliena has had some issues though. When she was a small baby she developed small black pits in her front teeth and white discolourization in some others. I was concerned because she also was classified as failure to thrive and was losing weight. We were vegan at the time (due to milk and egg allergic skin reactions in Aliena) and I had a vegetarian pregnancy.  I was very concerned about her growth. [Read more →]

Tweet This Post

Things are not looking so good here in the small community that I live. I live in a rural area in the middle of nowhere. There are 4 industrial companies in the closest town (they manufacture work shoes, ice cream, furniture. In the next town over, they bottle water – and that is where my husband works). These companies pretty much sustain our small town economy. The shoe factory has just closed, the ice cream factory is laying off shifts and workers, the furniture factory is closing up as well, and the water bottling company is laying off shifts and workers (gulp! Will my hubby be next??). Were will all these workers go? The next big town is about an hours drive away and with the gas prices being high some people will not be able to afford the gas.

I also found out that three friends of mine have lost their homes due to financial difficulty. All have lost their homes for different reasons. The first mom has two young boys under 7. The second mom has 3 young girls under 7 and is very pregnant with her 4th baby. The third mom has 4 kids – two girls ages 12 and 11 and 2 boys ages 7 and 5.  So in total there are *nine* kids and a *baby* that is not even born yet going through the STRESSES of losing their home! Children need the stability and comfort of home. They should not have to worry about moving, losing their friends, changing schools and the fact that their feet are growing and they don’t have new shoes! Not to mention Mom and Dad fighting over bills.

Hey, I don’t even have a big circle of friends. So I can’t believe that 3 of them are going through such horrible things.

But I am not going to let this kind of thing happen to my family. And since my husband’s company is laying off workers, our nice little secure nest is being shaken up a bit.

To help with this situation I have created this website to help with our income. This website was created with Blogi360. I have no techie experience or html knowledge. I just cut and paste code that is given to me into the spot that the tutorials and videos tell me. It is so easy that anybody can do it. Why am I telling you this? Because I believe that you might need a website for a second family income. If my friends are going through financial hardships and my husband is faced with a possible lay off then extra money is what is needed! A Blogi360 website can provide that.

A website is a storefront that you can sell products online without actually physically having a store. You don’t need to pay rent, electricity, heat and phone or hire employees. A website works for you even when you don’t. It is open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. It never takes holidays. It’s the best employee you ever hired and it never gets sick! With Blogi360 all tech help is included. They have a staff to keep things running smoothly.

My girls just finished dance camp. In dance camp they got create – They created plays, choreographed dances, created their own costumes and characters, they even created dance camp songs. I was incredibly impressed by what kids ages 3-14 can do. This is what is lost when we become adults - we lose our ability to create. I know that I have trouble creating the imaginary stories that my kids want me to tell them.  So how does this relate to your website?

Well I believe that creativity is the way that we recession proof our families! It’s a simple formula – we find a problem, we find a creative way to fix the problem, we create a product to fix this problem, then we sell the product — the end result …. the problem is fixed and you have some money in your pocket!

It’s as simple as getting out of the rut of being a consumer and becoming a creator! There are products to help you get started on that path of creating.

But you don’t even need to create your own products to start making money. You can make money selling other peoples digital products. The great thing about digital products is that they are digital. You don’t have to worry about shipping/handling. When you make a sale then you will get a commission. The commission percentage can be as high as 75% of the total product price! This is called affiliate marketing and it is one of the easiest ways of making money online.  The only thing that you have to worry about is getting traffic to your website.

There are courses and products out there that can sell for up to $2000 and they will tell you the latest secrets on how to get traffic to your website. Well if you use Blogi360 you will not have a problem getting traffic to your website. The reason for that is that Blogi360 is a website on steroids! Google loves it. The Google spiders love fresh new content and frankly static websites just don’t give that. They just sit there unchanged getting stagnant. People spend a lot of money on pay per click ads – if you use Blogi360 you won’t have too. If you write on your blog using your keywords, Google will find it and rank you. There are a few secret tricks that Blogi360 uses that make it powerful and unique. This is not your ordinary blogging software. Click on the “membership benefits” tab to see all the awesome profit generating tools you get.

With Blogi360 you don’t need to pay a web designer thousands of dollars to create a static website that you can’t use and need to go back to them for every little change. You get the freedom of using your own dashboard to make all kinds of web pages: blog pages, stand alone pages, one time offer pages. You can post video and audio on your website. This helps to convert sales and makes your website interactive. An interactive website connects you to your costumers bringing you more sales! And those customers will come to your website because Blogi360 has secret tools that Google loves.

Everyone needs a website to beat the recession. We don’t want to leave our children without a roof over their heads. You can get started for only $1!

Warmly,
Catherine Osthaus

P.S. You really have nothing to lose. You can test out Blogi360 for just ONE DOLLAR for 30 days. In my neck of the woods buying a chocolate bar costs me more than one dollar! It takes me five minutes to eat it and then I feel guilty for eating it. But take that same small amount of change and put it towards building a powerful business and then the guilty feelings change into empowerment, excitement, fulfillment, joy. And you are building financial security for your family.

P.S.S. If you are a visual learner like me you can also check out the Unstoppable Blogging videos that Bob Jenkins who is an incredible teacher (i.e. He makes things simple) made on how to create an efficient business blog using the Blogi360 system. This is a step by step video tutorial for beginners to Internet Marketing that has some fantastic lessons on how to get started as well as getting down and dirty with Web 2.0 and social media networking. Unstoppable Blogging helped me discover Blogi360 and helped me get it up and running faster and more efficiently. I found these videos to be extremely helpful. But that is me, I like some visual guidance and hand holding.

Tweet This Post