Green Smoothie=Success!

So I finally gave in to my green smoothie craving today and made one! OMG this thing is good: frozen banana + 1/4 chopped apple + a little chopped pear + a big handful of spinach + 1/3 c kefir + 1/3 scoop vanilla protein powder = awesome!

Americans Not Eating Their Fruits and Veggies

Recent CDC surveys show that only 33 percent of U.S. adults eat adequate amounts of fruit everyday and just 27 percent get the recommended amount of vegetables.

While this figure totally baffles me, I do have to remember that I'm in school to become a dietician and am therefore slightly more inclined to be mindful to eat my 5 servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

Seriously, though, it doesn't have to be hard to get what you need. Here are a few super-easy ways to incorporate these important foods into your day:

*Slice a banana onto some cereal or oatmeal

*Eat an apple for a snack

*Toss a generous handful of fresh berries onto yogurt

*Instead of soda, drink 4 ounces of 100% juice topped off with seltzer

*Try using banana or apple slices instead of jelly with peanut butter on a sandwich

*Carry some baby carrots with you to work or school to munch on

*Throw steamed broccoli into pasta dishes

*Go for marinara sauce over cream

*Pop a sweet potato in the microwave for five minutes and enjoy alongside a veggie burger or some salmon and spinach

*Pile dark leafy greens and tomatoes onto your sandwich

...and the list could go on and on.

Often, a piece of fresh fruit is cheaper than a bag of chips. Not only will it give you more nutritional bang for your buck, it will help you stay fuller, longer and feel better.

The Law of Attraction Works Again!

Do you guys believe that by putting forth thoughts into the universe, you can manifest your desires?

Hah, that's some seriously hippie-dippie vocab I just pulled, but I mean it! Since I started being more mindful of what I send out into the void, I've noticed that I usually do get what I wish for, for better or worse.

This morning, it was definitely for better. Even though I had a very filling breakfast, I got a tiny bit hungry around 11. Go figure, about five minutes later, this thing arrived—a thank you from a patient who just had a baby. Talk about sweet!

Picking the Best Summer Fruit

I don't know about you, but I hate it when I buy a beautiful piece of fruit from the market, only to bite into it and want to spit it right back out. When a fruit is too ripe or not ripe enough, it's a major bummer.

On their Healthy Bites blog, Self magazine staffers offer a guide to choosing the best summer fruits:

Apricots: Plump, pretty firm, velvety skin, even in color with a deep yellow, pinkish hue. Store in fridge.

Peaches: Fragrant, pretty firm, no brown spots. You can ripen underipe peaches in a paper bag for a few days.

Plums: Firm (with a slight given whe you press it), plump, heavy, no brown spots, which means it's been sunburned. You can refrigerate a few days to keep.

Mangoes: Yield slightly to gentle pressure, fragrant, yellow skin blushed with red.

Watermelon: Hard rind that's dull (not shiny), symmetrical (no flat sides). Slap the side of the melon--if you hear a hollow thump, it's a sign it's probably ripe.

Cantaloupe: Sweet scent (but not too strong), deep, thick thump when slapped, heavy.

Tomatoes: Firm (with a slight give when you press it), free from blemishes, and heavy. Don't refrigerate--cold temps kill the flavor.

5 for a Dollar

I feel a bit funny about always taking the extra banana from the fruit vendor on 9th, but I do it anyway.

My sister tells me this is how people like me get into trouble. What she may or may not realize is that I wrote the book on trouble—it's just that nobody bought it.

I've actually written several books on various sorts of trouble. I've only showed one or two manuscripts to people, only actually shopped one around. One agent wrote back to me, "When you have a story that is not your own, get back in touch with me."

No thank you. I had a weird moment of clarity a few months after that in which I realized that instead of using my writing to share painful stories, I could use it to spread positive ideas that could help people more directly.

Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for neglecting my fiction and essay-writing since I spend so much time and energy doing other work for my jobs and school. I do get to do a ton of writing and blogging, at least, it's just about different subject matters.

It's been an interesting path so far, and kind of funny to see how after a while, writing about sex is so much less interesting than writing about, oh, I don't know—Chinese medicine, vegetarian protein sources, or weird findings and goings-on around the city.

The closest I come to writing about sex lately is when I have to write fertility-related blog posts (check here for the latest one), but somehow, I think that's okay. I feel like in a few years (or many), I'll look back and see that the stars were, in fact, in alignment.