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5 Steps to Healthier Eating in the New Year

SPONSORED POST: I’ve partnered with Milk & Eggs, an amazing farm direct grocery delivery service, to bring you guys some delicious, super seasonal, and always healthy recipes a few times a month.  I’m so excited to share some of my favorite dishes with you!

5 Steps to Healthier Eating in the New Year | The Organic Beauty Blog

We all seem to start every new year with the best of intentions for eating healthier, losing weight, or getting more energy.  But so often that goal can feel so huge and nebulous.. where do I start? What is healthy eating? Should I start a cleanse or a new diet?  Oftentimes, our overcomplicating or overthinking of this relatively simple concept can suck the resolve right out of us.  And after a few well-intentioned weeks, we’re right back where we started… Tired, bloated, and squeezed into jeans that feel too tight.

What I always tell my nutrition clients is this: healthy eating is SO much easier than the media and diet industry make it out to be.  You don’t need a diet, or a detox, or a book to tell you the common sense food rules that govern great health.

Michael Pollan put it best:

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

There.  That’s IT.  Seriously.

But I know we need a little more guidance than that, so here are my 5 simple steps that you can start doing right now, that will make eating healthier and feeling better an immediate reality.

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How to Winterize Your Smoothies

Winterize Your Smoothies | The Organic Beauty

I love green smoothie. I’m not going to go so far as to say I moved all the way across the country to California so that I could have green smoothies for breakfast every day without any consequences — but that isn’t as far from the truth as you would think.  I really LOVE my morning green smoothies.  They are my absolute favorite breakfast, and I find them to be the most wonderful vehicle for getting insane amounts of nutrients and superfoods into my body in a very efficient fashion.

But as great as green smoothies are, drinking them in the colder months actually messes with your health, digestion, energy, and immunity.  Eating and drinking cold foods, especially during periods of cold weather, forces your body to work harder to warm it up and digest it.  Cold foods can throw off the delicate balance of your stomach lining, can increase phlegm, decrease immunity and cause or exacerbate digestive issues like constipation and diarrhea.  No fun.

In both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, eating and drinking warm foods is a big part of keeping one’s body running smoothly and optimizing digestion.  I get chastised about my smoothie habit by my acupuncturist every time I see her, and I am in a constant heated back and forth with the Ayurvedic practitioner inside me every time I opt for a smoothie or salad in the middle of December.

So what’s a smoothie and salad loving girl to do?

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Greens, Greens, Greens: Wintery Kale Beet Salad and Green Toddler Muffins!

SPONSORED POST: I’ve partnered with Milk & Eggs, an amazing farm direct grocery delivery service, to bring you guys some delicious, super seasonal, and always healthy recipes a few times a month.  I’m so excited to share some of my favorite dishes with you!

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In this installment of our collaboration seasonal cooking with Milk & Eggs farm direct grocery delivery, I am really excited to talk about more wintery seasonal eating, particularly of greens.  Dark leafy greens are one of the most nutrient-rich and delicious foods that come out of winter, and this is the perfect time of year to increase our intake of these blood-purifying, immunity-boosting foods.

To get the most out of the season’s local produce, specifically greens, nothing beats the Milk & Eggs Organic Farm Sampler Bag (pictured below), which is the most budget friendly way I’ve found to get a load of delicious, local, seasonal cooking going on in my kitchen and onto my family’s plates.  At the insanely reasonable price of $29.99, you get SO MUCH ORGANIC PRODUCE, it’s kind of crazy.  This week, I received a big bunch of kale, a bag of spinach, two heads of green leaf lettuce, celery, beets, a bell pepper, 3 heads of broccoli, a few bananas, an assortment of citrus fruits and a carton of strawberries.  WHAT?!  This usually costs me $50 or more at Whole Foods or my neighborhood natural foods store.

Seasonal Cooking with Milk & Eggs | The Organic Beauty Blog

In addition to being super budget friendly, the organic farm sampler is a great way to get all the fruits and veggies you need for the week!  This one bag has yielded countless salads, smoothies, soups, and toddler meals this week, and with the addition with a few other items in our standing order (organic greek yogurt, sprouted whole grain bread, wild-caught salmon), I’m able to feed our family of three delicious, healthy meals that come straight from our local California farms.  Boom!

My two favorite seasonal cooking recipes this week are lovely little showcases of winter’s bounty that made perfect use of my Organic Farm Sampler Bag!

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My Winter Veg Obsessions!

By: Kristina Tortoriello

My Winter Veg Obsessions! | The Organic Beauty Blog

Admittedly, I’m tickled by in-season produce. It literally delights me to bring home goodies that are winter-grown. Does that make me a weirdo? Hey man, I just appreciate feeling connected to my food. Prepare for some propaganda on why shopping seasonally is the best!

For winter, a few flavorful favorites are as follows: clementines, winter squash, beets, kale and escarole, certain onions, horseradish. As you can tell, my palette generally runs from sweet to spicy, and everything gets satiated this time of year! So no matter the weather outside, I’m a happy girl in the kitchen.

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Boost Your Winter Beauty!

Boost Your Winter Beauty! | The Organic Beauty Blog

Winter has a habit of increasing the puff factor. Both in terms of unwieldy coats and under-eye regions. For as much as there’s a romantic side to the holiday season, not everything seems so peace-on-earth these days (is it me?). At least in my own life, basically everyone is constantly freezing, frenetic with holiday shopping/budgeting, and wishing for the hibernating life…  so why not expedite energizing our best snowbunny selves? Some everyday habits can help bring joy back to your wintry personal world.

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