7 Most Alkaline Rich Foods: What Does 1 Serve Look Like?

On 21st March 2012 FoodMatters released their new health movie “Hungry for Change” to huge acclaim, with a free premiere that runs until 31st March (yes, you can still see the entire movie for FREE by clicking here).

In the 7 days since the premiere opened it has been watched over 200,000 times and has attracted HUGE attention.

It is a quite brilliant movie. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it is the most influential, motivating force for change I have ever seen.

I’ve been telling you all to go and see it for free all week and my inbox has been full of people thanking me for letting them know.

If you have not seen it yet, I URGE (read: beg) for you to go and watch it now and come back to read this later – watching that movie is more important right now.

I am toying with the idea of campaigning to have this viewed at every school in the UK (should I?) it’s that powerful…

I’ve now watched it over a dozen times with various friends and family members and there are five big lessons that I think we can all learn from watching Hungry for Change:

Hungry for Change Movie: 5 Big Lessons

Lesson 1: Juicing is CRITICAL to Unlocking Your Health, Energy and VItality

If you’ve been visiting Energise for long or have been getting my newsletter (or if you’ve been through my Beginners Guide to the Alkaline Diet) you’ll know that my TWO most important tips for dramatically changing your health as quickly as possible are:

1. #1 Get hydrated with quality water
2. #2 Make a fresh green vegetable juice every single day

“Most people are overfed, and they’re undernourished…Freshly extracted juice is the 15 minute nutrient express to health” Jason Vale.

I was delighted to see how much attention juicing got in the movie as it is still so far away from being a mainstream thing to do. SO few people juice, but I can tell you now – if you juice daily it will change your life forever, starting today -within 15 minutes of drinking your first juice.

It was awesome to see that juicing was mentioned throughout the movie over and over. Every one of the experts who had been through a personal health turnaround started with juicing. Please start today!

However, the movie really focused on juicing at around the 57 minute mark with Dr Mercola and Jason (Juicemaster) Vale, Joe Cross and Evita Ramparte all talking about how juicing changed their life.

It was especially exciting to hear Dr Mercola (who has never been that forthcoming with his love for the alkaline lifestyle) say how he has a vegetable juice every day.

We need 6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables per day, but I like to twist that around and say it should be vegetables and fruits, as vegetables are really the most beneficial food group that we can have access to – and most people are not getting enough. They just aren’t. You need a LOT of vegetables, because they’re full of the phytonutrients and antioxidants and everything that you need to stay healthy.

One of the ways that I ‘cheat’ this, because getting vegetables is a challenge, is that I do vegetable juicing. I typically buy 20lbs of vegetables a week and juice them. A few lbs per day, so that I have a quart of dark green vegetable juice.

As a base I like celery and cucumber, then I add the dark deep green leafy vegetables like kale and collards.

I loved this because it’s almost like listening to Robert Young talking!

I’ve blogged a LOT about the benefits of juicing and also the benefits of chlorophyll that you get from juicing these dark green vegetables, and to get you started here are a few fresh, green, alkaline juice recipes:

1)Alkaline Green Drink Recipe
2) Blood Building Juice Recipe
3) Anti Stress Veggie Juice

Please commit, that over the next 10 days you have a fresh green vegetable juice at least 7 times (on 7 days). Make it happen, make it real and your body will thrive.

See the Energise Guide to Juicing here

Lesson 2: Processed Food IS Worse Than We Thought

I’ve always said ‘fresh is best’, but the lesson in Hungry for Change takes this to a whole new level.

At a basic level, fresh spinach is better than frozen spinach. Fresh pulses are better than tinned. A freshly cooked meal is better than a microwave meal. Of course. You all get that.

The insight that Hungry for Change highlighted was that the ‘stuff’ that goes into refined, pre-prepared, long-life, and let’s face it ‘unnatural’ meals is shocking, dangerous and addictive.

SO it’s not only that non-fresh foods contain WAY less nutrients than their fresh counterparts, but also that packaged foods contain so many nasties that they’re actually depleting our mineral reserves, clogging our digestive systems and arteries, destroying cells, forming free radicals, are carcinogenic, addictive and down right disgusting.

It’s scary stuff. In the film it was revealed that MSG – which we all know is awful – can be hidden behind something like 50 other names, so we’ve no idea its in there. In fact the film quotes Raymond Francis from MIT who states:

“msg and free glutamates are used to enhance flavour in about 80% of all processed foods”

There are so many hideously scary additives.

Aspartame might be the scariest though. Its found in so many refined foods and causes formaldehyde build up in the brain, frontal lobe inflammation, causes migraines, symptoms that mimic multiple sclerosis, cognitive problems, cancers and more.

Please go fresh. Not just for more nutritional value, but because pre-prepated, fake foods are so damn bad for you!

Lesson 3: Add First, Take Away Later

I’ve been teaching this principle at Energise for years, but Jason Vale, David Wolfe and Joe Cross in the movie (and possibly Mike Adams too) all gave another perspective that builds quite nicely

Sometimes it can take me a while to catch on to things, but in my 8 years of Energise I’ve learned a LOT about what works and what doesn’t when people are wanting to change their diet and lifestyle. I’ve helped, coached and supported thousands of people to change their lifestyle and this trend is one I did spot early!

When you try to be perfect straight away you will fail 99% of the time. You have to take it slowly, take baby-steps and one day at a time. And if you slip up, have something ‘bad’ or ‘naughty’ don’t give up, throw away all your hard work and say ‘I’ll start again tomorrow/next week/on Monday’ – just dust your self off and get back on it.

The core of this is to start by ADDING GOOD STUFF IN rather than taking stuff away.

When you start by taking stuff away you give your brain the message of deprivation and then DESIRE. WHen you restrict you set yourself up to fail, but if you tell your brain that “y’know what, it’s OK to have that coffee, but hey let’s have a glass of water first”, then your brain starts to create POSITIVE associations rather than NEGATIVE associations to the way you eat, drink and live.

Then something magic happens. The more good you do the less you WANT to do bad. The better you start to feel the less you feel like doing the bad stuff. The better you feel the more you LOVE how you feel and the easier and easier it gets to cut out the crap. Or at least see it as a treat (which is perhaps the best place to be).

Eventually you find yourself happy, healthy and vibrant.

Nobody wants to live in pain, deprivation and negativity – it’s not the road to happiness.

This was my reasoning and thinking behind the Add First, Take Away Later but the guys on Hungry for Change gave me a perspective that adds so much to this too!

David Wolfe in particular talks excellently about this (and Daniel Vitalis – heck everyone in it is great!), and the way he explains it falls into two great forces that propel you in the right direction:

1) there is only so much you can actually eat in a given day – if you say to your body that you’re not depriving yourself of unhealthy treats – but if you eat as much as you can of the good stuff, there is literally less room for the bad stuff, so even if you DO have it you have a lot less (PLUS you’ve had all the nutritious goodness too).

2) unhealthy foods are devoid of nutrients, so they never fill you up – they leave you empty. Even if you feel full in the moment, they are chemically designed not to leave you satisfied for long so that you eat more.

As Jason Vale pointed out, food manufacturers “manipulate the chemical structure of their foods so that it never becomes fulfilling, but empty. BUT, gives the impression when they very first ingest it that it is the most fulfilling thing they’ve ever had.”

So the message is simple, don’t stress about eliminating anything from your diet to begin with, just add the good stuff in first. And a great place to start would be with that juice.

Lesson 4: Hidden Addictions (also Worse Than We Thought)

Man, this stuff freaked me out. I mean, of course I know that certain big food companies are not the most ethical, or rather, altruistic, and I know first hand that the goal is simply to sell as much as possible, but I didn’t realise how deeply this ran. Or how sneakily.

My girlfriend read The End of Overeating which I admittedly only scanned – and it touched on all of this – the scientifically proven fact that certain combinations of sugar and other additives are literally addictive to the human body. We actually become addicted to them and our body becomes reliant on them.

Yet they’re legal.

No different from ‘drugs’. But legal. Hidden. And sold on a massive scale. To children.

Is this crazy? Absolutely. Is it happening right now? Absolutely.

JASON QUOTE: for me the biggest cause of obesity, bar none, is addiction.

I could never explain this as powerfully as Jason, Mike and Dr Mercola do between minutes 12 and 17 in the movie.

Please go and watch Hungry for Change for FREE right now – even if it is just between 12-17 minutes – this 5 minutes of footage will change your health, your life and everything in between.

Remember, the movie is only free until 31st March, so please go and watch it now!

Lesson 5: You Get What You Focus On

Again, something that synchronises HFC with Energise so well is the focus in the final 15 mintues of the movie on visualisation.

It opens with this powerful (and favourite of mine) quote from Tony Robbins:

Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life. Tony Robbins

It’s so true. In so many instances of my life this has been proven over and over and over again. In life, in love, in business, in health. It is real and it works.

I challenge you now to write down even just ONE goal in detail, with quantifiable results on a piece of paper and I challenge you to read it aloud and write it out again once when you wake up and once when you get into bed.

Come back and tell me if you’ve seen advances in this goal in a month’s time.

YOU GET WHAT YOU FOCUS ON.

Jon Gabriel (who is just awesome) explains it like this in the movie:

“Visualisation is like a language, which you can use to talk to your subconscious. The problem with the subconscious is that it doesn’t speak English! So we’re being run by a brain that we can’t talk to. But what I realised is that visualisation is like a language that you can use to talk to your subconscious. Because just like you can’t talk to someone that doesn’t speak your language – say you have to go to a bathroom in a foreign country and you could ask a 1,000 people where the bathroom is and they wouldn’t be able to tell you – but if you drew a picture and show it to anyone instantly they know what you mean.

It is so true. Your body WILL guide you. It will support you, give you a helping hand and ultimately NOT LET YOU FAIL.

I plead with you to give this a try. Here is how Jon suggests you do it in the movie:

When you make a visual image of the way you want to look – it could be you at another time when you were fit and healthy and happy or it could be someone else, it doesn’t matter – just look at the picture for 30 seconds, kind of like as if you were looking through it, unconsciously, as if you were looking through it. Let your subconscious absorb it, for just 30 seconds. And then close your eyes. See yourself, imagine yourself, feel yourself inside that body. Imagine yourself walking on a beach with that body. If you do this when your mind is calm, relaxed and powerful your subconscious understands. Jon Gabriel

Hungry for Change is STILL FREE!

You can still watch the entire movie for FREE by clicking here. This incredibly generous offer ends on 31st March 2012 so please don’t miss out!

Click on the video below to watch the entire Hungry for Change movie for free.

My interview with James Colquhorn, the co-director and co-creator of Hungry for Change

A few weeks ago I drove up from Brisbane to the beautiful Sunshine Coast to chat to James just before the movie went live and we chatted about the movie, how to get the health of your dreams and some steps you can take now to get alkaline for life!

CLICK HERE TO WATCH HUNGRY FOR CHANGE IN FULL, ABSOLUTELY FREE

I hope you loved the movie as much as me and I’d love to hear your big lessons below!

Ross