Entries from July 2008 ↓

I picked up a block of ‘Flame Of Chicchan’ organic raw chocolate made by E3Live yesterday.

I don’t know what E3Live was thinking when they made this product, because it has to be the worst chocolate I’ve ever eaten in my life. And I’m quite confident in stating that it will probably be the worst I’ll ever eat.

I even uttered these words after my third bite, “This tastes like disgusting!”, and I have a witness to prove it.

It’s a pity, because I was so excited about bringing this block of chocolate home from a ‘healthy’ grocery store yesterday. I found it in the refrigeration section which was a real treat. It was almost like it was hiding so I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. Even better is how this chocolate is chocked (excuse the pun) full of super foods and it’s a raw food product. I’ve been learning a lot about raw foods lately so I felt like finding it was fate.

So why do I say this chocolate taste so bad? Well, it doesn’t taste like chocolate at all. It tastes like some kind of strange health bar that forgot to add a sweetener. Then it has this chili aftertaste which burns your throat a little. So essentially it’s a chunk of bland savory stuff with a hot ‘n’ spicy chili aftertaste.

I do have to give E3Live a little bit of credit for creating something that’s so damn healthy. It does contain a few superfoods (raw cacao, raw honey, spirulina, coconut oil), and there isn’t one ingredient on the list that isn’t highly beneficial to our bodies. If this block of choco actually tasted good, I’d be buying it by the carton, that’s how healthy it is.

I’m disappointed in this chocolate for a couple of reasons. First, I had high hopes that this would be THE brand of delicious tasting healthy chocolate that I was looking for, and second because it goes against everything that I’m all about when it comes to healthy eating. Because these ingredients modified and mixed around a little can make a healthy chocolate that actually tastes good, the way healthy food should. I feel like E3Live just got it a little bit wrong somehow. Yes it’s great to make a healthy chocolate, but it’s also important to make it actually taste good too.

And it’s not impossible. Healthy food, especially raw cacao, does not need to taste bad. In fact, raw superfoods and raw cacao can be some of the tastiest foods we’ll ever eat.

Now this product is handmade and the recipe obviously would have been sampled by the people that make it, so I’m wondering if I’m missing something here. I guess it is called ‘Flame Of Chicchan’, so perhaps the chili flavor should not have been such a surprise. But I’m also wondering if my taste buds are just not aligning well with the product. Perhaps my travel buddy (who also sampled it with a similar response) and I are just not acquired enough to fully appreciate this raw taste.

In any case, I won’t be buying this product again. And unless you like your chocolate to taste like cardboard and chilis, then I’d hold off from purchasing one too.

Sorry E3Live for the very bad review, but you still get top points for being super healthy!

Fran

Sadly I couldn’t fit my yoga mat into my suitcase when I left Australia for my overseas adventure three months ago.

It was silly of me really. I should have taken something else out of my bag so that it would fit, because I like to do a lot of yoga, and I had every intention of doing a daily yoga practice, even while I was traveling.

My friend Cathy advised me in Brisbane to buy a travel yoga mat that I could easily fold up and take with me in my bag. If I’d been properly prepared for my trip I would have taken her advice and bought one. Unfortunately yoga stores are few and far between in Brisbane so I left for overseas minus a yoga mat.

It wasn’t until I was in a bookstore in Chicago two months later (and a lot of doing yoga on a borrowed mat or towel) that I stumbled across one of those fold up travel yoga mats that Cathy was talking about. It had a sticky grippable surface on one side and a nice soft surface on the other. It was a perfect size for carrying around with me while I was traveling, so I grabbed it off the shelf. Definitely worth the US$30 price tag.

If you want to check out the Gaiam travel mat I bought, you can visit the Gaiam website.

But sadly the travel mat just wasn’t good enough … Continue reading →

That’s right, my mini-course, 7 Easy Steps To Acne-Free skin, has now passed 1000 members! Well, it actually passed 1000 a while ago but it took me this long to write about it

You too can watch the High on Health members grow if you like. You may have noticed the little growing number in the right hand side box (see image, look at where the red arrow is pointing). This number tallys how many High on Health members there are. I remember when I used to have just one member, so this growing number is awesome. And of course it means there are many of us now in the High on Health community, so we can all support each other, and share what is and what isn’t working for our skin.

To celebrate I’ve given the course a bit of a face lift to make it more intuitive and easier to follow. The biggest change is the format - the lessons will now be delivered online instead of as emails.

This new format will allow you to follow the course at your own pace. So you can do the course at the recommended weekly pace if you like, or you can read the whole lot at once.

From your feedback (and I’m very grateful for that) I realized that not everyone wants to do the course at the pace that I preset. So putting it all online was a fantastic solution. The online format also gives me the freedom to ‘pretty it up’ with nicer font and a little color.

If you’re a current High on Health member and you’ve already completed the course, don’t worry about missing out! I’ll be emailing you the URL of the course so you can take a look at it online too and refer back to the content whenever you need to.

Have you taken my free mini-course?

If you haven’t yet signed up to my free mini-course, 7 Easy Steps To Acne-Free Skin, now’s your chance.

It’s a holistic plan that runs through step-by-step how you can finally get rid of your acne. The steps are a result of months of research, trial and error to cure my own severe acne that I developed almost overnight at the ripe old age of 27.

To join, all you need to do is put your first name and primary Email address in the box below and hit the join button. You’ll then receive your first Email from me. Don’t worry, you’re not selling your soul when you join up - you can unsubscribe at any time.

And thank you to all my lovely past and current members for your feedback and support!

Fran

I was surfing YouTube last night and stumbled across this video. It’s awesome. It shows how quick and easy it is to touch up photographs in Photoshop.

What I love about this video is how it’s a great lesson for us perfectionists to stop spending so much time standing 2 inches away from the mirror and examining every tiny little detail of our skin. Remember - perfection is rare, if not impossible.

This video was created by a young girl for a school project (damn she’s good though), so even though it’s a great demonstration on how many improvements you can easily make to a photo in Photoshop, I still don’t think the after shot looks that great.

It did however make me wonder why I hadn’t used Photoshop on my photos before!!? I kind of feel like it would be cheating with me considering the topic of my blog so don’t worry, I won’t be touching my images up. Although I am going to take the teeth whitening tip because I have fluridosis damage on my teeth so I’m very embarrassed about the color of them. I figured that’s my teeth not my skin so it should be okay …

Anyway, enough rambling. Here’s the video:

Fran

On the topic of chocolate (sorry I know …again), I have recently discovered raw cacao beans and of course how ridiculously healthy they are for you. If you can handle the bitter taste, then these little beans are definitely something awesome to incorporate into your daily diet.

Not only are they absolutely amazingly fantastic for our body, but they contain an unbelievable amount of:

• Anti-oxidants - way more than any other food, and which are very powerful at healing the skin.
• Magnesium - more than any other food and which happens to be the number one mineral deficiency in the US.
• Chromium - again more than any other food and which also happens to be the number one trace mineral deficiency in the US
• Incredibly high levels of Vitamin C

So if you eat one of these little beans, you are getting a concentrated source of anti-oxidants, magnesium, chromium and vitamin C. More than any other food around and way better than popping a synthetic supplement or pill.

The word ‘cacao’ actually means ‘cocoa’. Apparantly the Brittish couldn’t pronounce the word cacao, so they called it cocoa instead. Seems strange to me, it’s not hard to say, you kind of pronounce it like: ka-cow. You can watch my video below for the proper pronunciation.

This food is so special, that a long time ago in Mexico City they even used it as currency. That’s how amazing and valuable the cacao bean was considered to be. Now you can just pick up a giant bag for around US$15. I guess we’re really lucky now how affordable and accessible this food is.

But what exactly are anti-oxidants?

So apart from anti-oxidants protecting us from free-radical damage of the skin, they are really just a measure of the color pigment in a food. So essentially, the darker the color of the food, the more anti-oxidants it contains. You’ll notice in the video when I crack open the cacao bean that it’s a black or deep purplish color. This just shows how many anti-oxidants are present in the bean.

Now blueberries are quite dark too, and they’re often thought of as being fantastic for our skin. But while blueberries contain 32 antioxidants, and wild blueberries contain 61 ..cacao beans contain an unbelievable 621 anti-oxidants!!! That is an insanely high amount. Now you know why I’m putting up with the bitter taste of these little things, because I know how GREAT they are for my skin.

Here is a video I recorded which shows the actual cacao bean, and some chocolate I bought from a farmers market that was made out of these beans.

Fran