How to set more powerful intentions & reach your goals

It's been a long time between drinks (not literally, I have been loading up on booze), but I know that one day I will make myself commit to this blog.

Whilst not a whole lot has changed, everything feels a whole lot different (in a good way.) Life is awesome and I've been making things happen. A bunch of projects (new and old) are back in the pipeline and it feels great to have different places to divert my attentions now that I don't have any immediate travel plans. (Does Byron Bay for Splendour in the Grass count?)

Ok, let's get into the nitty gritty. 

I wholeheartedly believe in the power of the universe, energy and manifestation... blah blah blah you've heard it all before. Sometimes I decide I want something to happen, and it serves itself on a silver platter within 12 hours. However, it's not unwise to have other processes in place for life's big plans to ensure you are continually supporting yourself, your life vision and your potential to make things happen.

Here are seven ways to make your intentions more powerful, and keep you on track to reaching your goals!

1. Write down your intention, outlining it in very clear and specific terms.
2. Understand what makes your intention quantifiable, so you can measure your success.
3. Is your intention achievable? It may not be realistic for tomorrow, or next month but believe with every cell in your body that you can achieve it.
4. Note down the time frame for this intention to manifest itself.
5. Put your written intention on display so you don't lose sight of your goal - it will always be in the forefront of your mind & reminding you to take action. If it is visible to other people, they can help you stay accountable.
6. State your intention like a mantra in the morning - it is a great motivator to start the day on the right foot.
7. Mentally simulate the process of achieving your goal, then clear your mind and imagine you have already achieved your goal - How do you feel? How do you look? Who are you with? Don't underestimate the power of visualisation. 

Tell me, what is one of the goals you'd like to see manifest in your life? 

bianca xx

Tune of the week:

Glass Animals / Hazey

Diet Staples: Super Green Smoothie Recipe

The ingredients that make up my favourite green smoothie! x

Happy Saturday! If you've been following my blog over the last couple of weeks, you'd know that I have been prepping for a 30 day raw food challenge! The time has finally arrived to detoxify my mind and body - I will begin on Monday. I will be tracking all of the changes that occur right here, as well as uploading meal plans and some of my staple recipes.

Two activities that I will be partaking in to assist the detox process are dry brushing and sweating! Both provide a myriad of benefits through helping your body eliminate and excrete toxins - over the coming weeks I will write a post outlining all the reasons why you should incorporate these activities into your daily routine (such as reducing the appearance of cellulite, need I say more?)

Over the past year or so, my morning green smoothie has become a coffee-like ritual (sans caffeine so I don't experience energy spikes or anxiety). I get nervous at the thought of skipping it, and have seen so many improvements in my health and happiness from starting my day with this mostly veggie boost! They are so versatile as you can literally mix and match any fruit and veg (minus melons) to pack a nutritional punch first thing in the morning! Mentally, I also find that when I start my day with a smoothie, I don't want to steer from the clean-eating path so it serves as an encouraging tool to ensure you eat right all day.

It can be a little time consuming chopping all your ingredients and mixing it all up, so I make a batch that yields about four smoothies at the beginning of the week. (I'm not very hungry in the morning so each serve for me is only approximately a 250mL cup.) To ensure the nutritional value of the smoothie doesn't decline after spending a few days in the fridge, I freeze the smoothies and let one defrost overnight the night before I intend to drink it up!

This here is my current go-to recipe, but you can get adventurous and try different greens and fruits or a base like coconut water or almond milk. Also, your may prefer a different consistency to your smoothie so if you prefer it to be smoother you would add more liquids, if you prefer it to be thicker and with chunks of the food you could add more veggies.

Super Green Smoothie

Ingredients:

6 large kale leaves

1 large cucumber (with peel)

1 large celery stem (with leaves)

1 medium carrot

1 kiwi fruit (with peel)

1/2 pear

1 tsp chia seeds

1 1/2 cup of filtered water

1 tbsp lemon juice

Instructions:

1. Wash and cube all fruit and vegetables.
2. Add all fruit and veg, water and lemon juice to blender.

3. Blend until desired consistency is achieved.

4. Serve and stir in chia seeds.

5. Freeze leftovers and defrost overnight before consumption.

Until next time , drink up xxx

Diet Staples: Vegan Cheesy Baked Potatoes Recipe

cold water steeping, vegan cheesy baked potatoes & a rose out of Nonna's garden

Happy Tuesday! I hope everyone had a fabulous Labour Day weekend, I tried (not very hard) to keep myself out of mischief. 

In the lead up to my 30 day raw food challenge, I've been very conscious about eating as clean as possible, to try and reduce the potential shock my body might experience once I start detoxing. (Read a bit about my food philosophy right here.) Like most people, somewhere between lunch and dinner I feel the need for a snack. My taste buds definitely favour savoury over sweet, but this poses a problem when you consider most packaged salty foods have an overwhelming amount of artificial flavourings and preservatives added to them. 

Enter my new favourite go-to snack. 

These potatoes taste naughty enough to have come out of a packet, but they are essentially guilt free. Loaded with a myriad of benefits from the various spices in the mixture and plenty of B vitamins from the nutritional yeast (which is where the cheesy taste comes from!). Please note you could use a different preferred cooking oil, however I only ever cook with coconut oil due to it's high smoke point. I have a feeling these flavours would go well with kale chips, amongst other vegies - so watch this space!

Vegan Cheesy Baked Potatoes

Ingredients:

400g chat potatoes

3 tbsp coconut oil

3 tbsp lemon juice

3 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 tbsp garlic powder

2 tsp cumin

cayenne pepper (to taste)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees.

2. Wash and cut potatoes into slices, halves or quarters (depending on your preference.)

3. Mix the coconut oil, lemon juice and spices in a bowl. (Coconut oil is quite solid at room temperature so it's a good idea to whisk over the stove to ensure a creamy consistency.) Add potatoes to the mixture and coat well.

4. Spread potatoes out on baking paper and pour any remaining mixture over the top.

                                                                                                5. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until golden and crispy.

My Food Philosophy: Holistic Health

La Boqueria Market, Barcelona / June 2013
'Let food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be food.' - Hippocrates 

I’ve rewritten this post a couple of times over – careful not to overshare but wanting to be honest.

I have had a turbulent relationship with food, my weight and self-esteem. Rewind three years ago, and I was still a teenager riddled with anxieties about her body and plagued with low self-esteem. I was caught in a vicious cycle from approximately age 13, where I would (always secretly) diet, lose weight, plateau, eat my feelings, regain weight. Counting calories (and then later diet pills, laxatives, starvation) consumed my thoughts.

Every year I took at least a couple months off school, because I was always sick. My immune system was essentially non-existent, my skin was sallow and pale,  I would break out into acne and rashes, my mind was foggy and worst of all were the terrible mood swings I suffered. It became impossible for me to escape my emotions, I hated what I saw in the mirror and I hated myself.

All of this, I attribute to my then-diet. My diet was highly processed. I was uneducated in nutrition, and misled by advertising to believe that products labelled diet/low-fat/low-sugar/low-calorie were healthy. In the context of a product, out of a box, off the shelf, with a label - these terms are not synonymous with health. Just as fast food is artificial, these foods are loaded with artificial sweeteners, sodium, food preservatives, colouring, flavouring. There was nothing nutritious about the food I was eating, and the condition of my body and health fully reflected this.

Present day, I eat a nutrient rich, plant based diet. My diet is not always perfect, but I am very conscious about making good food decisions and focus on eating whole foods. I used to focus on the quantity of the calories I was consuming, now I focus on the quality. I have no doubts that the chemicals in the foods I used to eat played absolute havoc with my clarity of mind and emotions. (Not to mention I was always starving – how can any positive thoughts find room in a brain that can only think about when it will be allowed to eat again!) I have made a ritual of eating, and I have become so mindful of this that I can almost feel the cells in my body being nourished with every mouthful. Food is no longer my enemy, and I can enjoy it.

I never deprive myself of food - the eternal sadness which used to consume me (potentially also chemical imbalance in my brain) have disappeared, I am motived and full of energy, I have clarity of mind, my skin glows, my eyes sparkle, I’m never sick and I have lost around 10 kilos – all of which has stayed off, regardless of how much I eat. The countless changes and benefits that my body has undergone since adopting this lifestyle and since altering my relationship with food, have been so extreme that I could never go back to my old diet, and return to that starved and undernourished girl. Food is literally my medicine and has healed me of all my previous ailments.

Make no mistake – while I mention that I did lose weight, I am in no way advocating this as some quick-fix weight loss solution. This is a holistic health lifestyle approach that first and foremost seeks to nourish the body therefore increasing vitality, and serving to prevent illness (rather than curing illness with medication.) It requires far more time, commitment and dedication than microwaving Jenny Craig meals but it is a lifestyle that I have adhered to because of the way it’s made me feel. It has completely changed my outlook on life and the way I value myself, so the decision to stick with it has not been based solely on the way it’s made me look.

It’s important to me that I share my experiences and spread the knowledge which I have acquired along the way. A misconception exists that ‘diet’ products are healthy, but in reality these products are void of any nutrition and are literally poisoning our body and minds. I believe if the food industries weren’t controlled by the government, people would receive a more sound education in nutrition, and effectively, with this deeper understanding, would cease to be misled by food advertising.

I wish for people to see their self-worth and value their bodies. I hope for people to invest more time in their health, so here on out, I will post at least one entry per week outlining tips for wellbeing, reviewing health products I’ve tried or recipes which make up the staples of my diet.

Decluttering Your Way to Self-Improvement

More often than not, our external environment is a reflection of our internal state. If we live in mess and clutter, this is an indication that our mind and spirit are misaligned and are in a state of chaos.
Stagnant energy is a result of clutter - negative energy which traps you in the past, preventing you from attaining your goals and progressing towards a satisfying future.

We often disassociate ourselves from the word 'clutter,' as we have become conditioned to affiliate clutter with hoarders and collectors. This is not the case, clutter is not just physical but also emotional excess which weighs down our mental state. Holding onto mementos from past friendships and relationships, old clothes which you no longer fit into, trinkets that gather dust on your window sills  - this sort of clutter prevents the movement of positive vibrations around you.

We may convince ourselves that hiding our clutter in boxes under the bed or at the back of our wardrobes is clearing space and effective, but why are we holding onto these objects 'just in case.' The energy still looms because we know the clutter is still there. See how often your reach into one of these boxes over a four week period - any objects that you fish out you can find a prominent home for - everything else should be eliminated. A clear living space = a clear, serene state of mind.

By all means it is important to 'decorate' and 'beautify' our surroundings, but material objects are not necessarily conducive to self-fulfillment and 'meaningful' objects that remind of us negative experiences are sure to repress the best version of ourselves. Our surroundings should inspire us to dream and to accomplish these dreams, but they should also serve us as a retreat to reflect on our self-improvement.