Most of us are renters, so we don’t have the luxury of actually renovating our homes into something special, but there are some ways that you change your surrounds to be more Eco-Friendly.  First I guess I should go a few paces back and explain what Eco-Friendly is and why it is good for you.

Eco-Friendly seems to be all the rage these days to save our planet, but there are other reasons why this is a great thing to adapt to your home and that is yours and your family’s health.  Have you ever lived in a place in Shanghai where there is a lot of wood paneling scattered around and maybe you always felt a bit under the weather, but couldn’t quite figure out why.  All products in your house are slowly (or some, not so slowly) releasing emissions that you are breathing in and when I say all I mean all.  Furniture, paints, cleaning products, timber, plants, etc all emit VOC’s (Volatile organic compounds).  The reason for mentioning the timber paneling is because I have actually heard of cases in Shanghai where the tenants have become sick because the products used to treat the wood were emitting too much Formaldehyde.  That is why a lot of Chinese people will renovate and not move in for months, but you could seriously reduce these emissions by choosing the right materials.

People who know me understand that Buddhism, Yoga and Meditation are large part of my life in Shanghai.  I recently had a great experience that I wanted to share.  Over the May holiday weekend I got the opportunity to go to a Meditation and Yoga retreat in Shanghai.  The idea behind this retreat was to try and teach the students how to introduce some Meditation and Yoga into their lives on a daily basis.

It all started around 2pm on the Saturday when I went to meet the bus at a downtown Yoga centre.  I have been to these types of retreats before and the usual attendees are all Chinese with me being the token foreigner!  This time there was around 40 in attendance and to my surprise I was not the only foreigner…  There were three of us!  We jumped on the bus all eager to find out what was in store for us over this weekend with lots of excited voices and casual getting to know each other conversations.

Recently I started getting injury after injury… (actually maybe not real injuries, but aches and pains that I like to nickname “Julia Pains” and I always figure they will disappear if I ignore them for long enough!).  What can I blame for this recent spate of pains?  Too much exercise, not stretching, too much stress, not sleeping properly?  Who really knows, maybe it is a combination of the lot!  I first hurt my leg, which then lead to my back and shoulder hurting.  In the back of my mind I am thinking that maybe I am finally getting too old and need to slow down, but the energetic part of my personality refuses to accept that!

So in the search of a way to NOT slow down my lifestyle I went looking for something that will help me through and get me back into working order.  When you live in China there are different options to choose from when it comes to health.  You could go for western treatments, e.g. Chiropractor, Physio Therapist, etc, but these are not only western, but western prices and for people like me who are not on expat salaries they are not really an option for ongoing treatment.  Another option is obviously Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which is what I decided I should try.  Okay, after this decision is made then you come up with a whole new set of questions...

We all think eating fruit means just buying fruit, cutting it up and popping it into our mouths.  It's not that easy. It's important to know how and when to eat fruit.What's the correct way to eat fruit?

It means not eating fruit after a meal! Fruit should be eaten on an empty stomach!Eating fruit like that plays a major role in detoxifying your system, supplying you with a great deal of energy for weight loss and other life activities.

Fruit is the most important food!

Let's say you eat two slices of bread, then a slice of fruit. The slice of fruit is ready to go straight through the stomach into the intestines, but it's prevented from doing so. In the meantime, the whole meal rots and ferments, and turns to acid. The minute the fruit comes into contact with the food in the stomach, and digestive juices, the entire mass of food begins to spoil.Eat your fruit on an empty stomach or before your meal!  You've heard people complain: Every time I eat watermelon I burp, when I eat durian my stomach bloats, when I eat a banana I feel like running to the toilet, etc. This will not happen if you eat the fruit on an empty stomach.

Meditation is one of those things that we hear about all the time in different circles and someone always knows someone who does it and talks about how it is something that changed their life for the better.

My personal journey with meditation probably started over ten years ago when I kept hearing about it from different sources and thought it was something that I should try.  So knowing nothing about it, except the fact that you are supposed to sit in a cross-legged position and maybe say OM a few times while having your hands on your knees I sat down and attempted to meditate.  As you can imagine this did not work!  I was one of those people who kept telling people that it is impossible for me to meditate.  I would say things like “I just can’t do it, my mind is too crazy and is incapable of thinking about anything, but mundane things like what I need to get at the grocery store or “I wish that cute guy in the office would just ask me out on a date already, because it is obvious that we are sole mates”.

Over the past ten years I did attempt meditation on numerous occasions, but always failed, because I lacked the tools I needed to have a successful meditation practice.  I had never actually been told how to meditate!  Obviously there is more to it then just sitting with your eyes closed and thinking about nothing.  I think another factor that stopped me was that I thought everyone who was capable of meditating just sat down on there butt and started and it was so easy for them.  This, I am here to tell you, is a complete urban myth.  It would be like saying that tomorrow I think I might run a marathon with no training at all!  Running a marathon with not training is impossible; meditating with no practice or some kind of instructions is also completely impossible.

In my quest to find something interesting to write about, while staying on the topic of healthy lifestyles and losing weight, I thought what better topic than the thing that some women seem to love more than sex!  SUGAR!  Yes that little ingredient that women will search high and wide for, they will leave the comfort of their apartments in the depths of winter to get that fix…

In my research to write this article I found so much information about the bad affects of sugar that it was actually hard to cull them down to write something that didn’t read like a text book or wasn’t hundreds of pages long… So I have endeavored to try and condense all the information into a user friendly version and go through and pick the health issues that I thought you could relate to!

When you do you a search for the reasons why sugar is bad for you the first website that comes up is an actual list of 146, yes I said 146 reasons why sugar is bad for your health!  Personally if 146 health problems don’t turn you off sugar I don’t know what will!  In this list there are so many things that you would read and just go “huh”, so I have taken out the ones that only doctors would understand and left you with some that you can actually contemplate what it would mean for your own body.

Are you ready?  Here we go…

Last October I decided to take myself off to Thailand for a holiday.  I know when people mention heading to Thailand we all conjure up images of cocktails at the beach and partying until the early hours of the morning.  That has to be the complete opposite of what my holiday was about!

A little background information before heading into the life-altering holiday that I went on.  When I arrived in Shanghai over three years ago my company shipped me off to humid Guangzhou and while I was there I got incredibly sick with salmonella poisoning!  Not a pleasant experience and I was then chronically ill for 10 months until I flew back to Australia to see my doctor.  Long story short there was an unusual strain of bacteria living inside me which needed an extremely strong course of two different types of antibiotics to kill them off.

Lots of people always ask me when the best time of the day to exercise is and for most people the answer is whenever you can get up the motivation to do it is the best time.  When you are first starting out with an exercise regime the most important thing is to actually “do” exercise on a regular basis!  Continuous cardiovascular exercise, such as walking, jogging, stair climbing, or cycling, sustained for at least 30 minutes, will burn body fat no matter when you do it.. But saying that there is a “best time” of the day to exercise and this is what I am going to talk about and list the extra benefits of training at this time.

So if your goal is to get the maximum benefits possible from every minute of your weight loss exercise then you should consider getting up early and doing some cardio before you eat your first meal of the day.  Even if you are not a morning person you will still get the same benefits out of this type of exercise and you would be surprised how quickly you start to wake up before the alarm clock goes off each morning.

There are three advantages of early morning exercise versus doing the same later in the day.

As a nutrionist and founder of Eat Well Shanghai, one complaint I hear from many new foreigners living in Shanghai is constipation.  Seems when you get your residence permit, your digestive system comes to a screeching halt.   Constipation is complicated and can have many root causes, including emotional stress (hello, moving to Shanghai, China?!?), lack of fiber in the diet (white rice anyone?) and not enough water (what is in that bing shui exactly?).  Coupled with a frequent lack of exercise from getting escorted from one place to another in the back of a GL8 or a taxi, and you have a recipe for a serious backup.

For mild constipation, adding more fiber to your diet is really important.  In Western countries, grocery store shelves are often lined with high-fiber products such as whole-grain pasta, whole-wheat bread and bran cereals, not to mention health food stores tauting everything from raw bran to wheat germ to psyllium.  So, I went on a little dig around Shanghai to find my top high-fiber items that may help keep you moving and feeling good.

I think there can be a big misconception about the benefits of Boot Camp or what Boot Camp actually is!  I am what you could call a Boot Camp Junkie, because I love doing this kind of activity for many reasons.  Some of them include the fact that it is by far the fastest way to get fit, toned and to look fantastic!  Also, not to mention the huge effect it has on your mood in making you enjoy life way more.  I find it really inspiring and motivating to workout with other women who have their own set of goals and see not only my progression towards the end objective, but theirs too…One of the biggest preconceptions of this type of exercise probably comes from the name – Boot Camp!  It does tend to conjure up images of a drill sergeant screaming at you to drop and give him 20, but I am here to tell you that that is definitely a false idea!  The first Boot Camp I ever worked my way through was called “Bikini Boot Camp”, funny name I know and again even that invokes images of women running around in their Bikini’s!  It was actually called that, because it was to be used as a tool to get you looking hot in a Bikini.

There are so many “off the shelf” detox kits these days that it makes it hard to know what to choose from!  I should go back a few paces first – Detox?  What is a detox, well it is a way to rid your body of excess toxins that we may be carrying from all the processed food that we eat and drink and antibiotics that we take.  There are different schools of thought on doing a detox for your body with one being that the whole thing is a way for companies to make money and if you just ate what you were supposed to, i.e. a healthy diet, then you should be fine and would never need to do a detox.  The other school of thought is that there are great benefits from doing this one or twice a year and it is a fantastic thing that you can do for your overall health.

I am not going to argue one side or the other if you want to get an abundance of information about both arguments you can just look it up on Google.  I just wanted to give you first-hand information on what actually happens when you do one of these, because I have just starting one!  In the end I opted for the 21-day Internal Cleansing Kit from Blessed Herbs for two reasons, one being that there were loads of raving reviews about it on the market and that they don’t only do one part of the body they do it all!  Actually, come to think of it there are three reasons with the third being that when you purchase the 21-day detox kit you get the 5-day colon cleanse detox for free!

After moving to Shanghai I noticed a huge difference to my skin and hair, and unfortunately that difference wasn’t a good one!  I am sure most of you have suffered from dry skin and lifeless hair after having a shower in the metal-filled / chlorine soaked Shanghai water…  For almost two years I have been using a ShowerBaby in my bathroom and it makes a big difference!  My skin is nowhere near as dry and my hair is actually shiny!  The ShowerBaby removes over 95% of the chlorine and heavy metals out of your water, which in the end helps your skin to stay nice.

The company that sells these also sells other products that can be used in your kitchen or when you are washing your clothes.  They can also test your apartment water to let you know what scary things are lurking within.  They were the most highly recommended company when I started doing some research about options to help improve my health in this city.