I don’t like to be in the kitchen….

There I said it. I feel like it’s a big fat waste of my time to stand in the kitchen for an hour or goodness sakes more, and prepare food. I must admit, my favorite thing to make is a smoothie because it literally takes 3 minutes and BOOM healthy snack or meal.

Realty, though, is that my husband would go nuts if I didn’t put some effort into the kitchen and those who know my husband know our not-so-well-kept secret… that Brian makes an incredible wife who helps a lot in the kitchen. Chuckle, chuckle...

Thankfully for him we are not always drinking our meals, eating a salad or having a bowl of the same soup three nights in a row (this was me single).

As healthy as I like to eat, I really don’t like spending much time in the kitchen! So what does that mean for a girl like me?

1.  Eat a lot of simple raw meals and snacks such as salads, avocados, green smoothies, nuts, fruits and veggies.

2.  Planning ahead of time so I can meal prep for an hour and have enough prepped food for a few days of meals and snacks. Like washing and cutting up your veggies so you can grab them to throw on a salad, or making enough brown rice or quinoa to last for the week's salads and side dishes.

3.  Using the crock pot too cook my veggie soups and eating left-overs during the week for lunch.

4.  I soak my oat groats over night so in the morning all I have to do is heat up the bowl for a couple minutes and add my toppings! That's a hot breakfast in 5 minutes or less! I love to make a green smoothie, which takes as little as just a few minutes to throw together.

5.  Exhausted tonight? Just make yourself a smoothie bowl and call it good! 

Now every once in awhile I get a wild hair in the kitchen and really enjoy washing and cutting up my farmers' market veggies. Seeing all those God-given colorful bunches of produce on my counter gives me a high. Must be the good flora enzymes!

I actually look at fresh locally grown produce sometimes and see art lying in front of me. The beautiful multi-colored peppers in the fall that you only see at farmers' market stands, gorgeous heirloom tomatoes, carrots of all shapes, colors and sizes, and strawberries in the summer as sweet as can be.

I truly believe that buying produce from your local farmers' markets connects you to your community like nothing else can. It gives you an appreciation for the life around you that produces beautiful, satisfying, healthy food for us all to enjoy, season after season. It becomes an enjoyable event that you can spend with a friend or your partner, not only supporting your own community of farmers but walking around and enjoy the outside air.

It really doesn’t take as much work, time or money as you think to eat healthy. You cannot go wrong with eating vegetables every day. If you don’t have a local farmers' market or the funds to buy organic produce, just buy the vegetables you can, but I definitely recommend using a vegetable wash to get any waxes or coatings off the produce from the pesticidal sprays or preservatives.

With how acidic the modern American diet is with the amount of meat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, caffeine and processed foods we consume today, adding in a good daily dose of some high alkaline produce wouldn’t hurt to help balance out the overly acidic guts walking around out there. Many people are starting the process of disease formation, speeding up aging, or taxing their bodies internally with being overly acidic.  

*Take a Probiotic to help with digestion and healthy gut flora! I like this one. 

I hope you are inspired to eat well and be well. If you are like me and don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen every week, try some of these simple suggestion and see if you feel relieved. Let me know if you have more suggestions or ways to inspire us all to live and be healthy!

I hope you experience love this week and time well spent!

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