Will You Spend 2% of Your Day on Your Health?

What is the value of your health? Is it worth investing 2% of your life? If you are willing to give 28 minutes a day (28 is 2% of 1440 minutes or 24 hours) to nutritious food, you could prevent and reverse life-threatening chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, obesity and auto-immune diseases.

Here's how:

• Substitute green smoothies for pop, juice and other beverages (5 minutes a day to make)
• Eat beans and legumes instead of meat and dairy (3 minutes a day to prepare)
• Consume a Hugh Maughn Gus salad every day instead of refined carbs like potatoes, breads, cereals, etc. (10 minutes to chop vegetables, 5 minutes to blend dressing)
• Add sprouts to your oatmeal, smoothie, salad, or beans (5 minutes a day to soak and rinse)

Total time invested: 28 minutes. For less than 30 minutes, you could trade "sick and tired" for "vibrant and vivacious." If you're willing to give it a try, here's a little more detail about making the changes above:

For a delicious green smoothie, toss into a blender the following healthy ingredients:

• 1-2 cups leafy green vegetables (kale, collard, spinach, cabbage, bok choy, parsley, cilantro, etc.)
• 1-2 cups fresh or frozen fruit, including bananas, berries, stone fruits (pitted), tropical fruits and sub-acid fruit (tomato, cucumber)
• enough liquid to blend (water or re-juvelac)
• 1 Tb. omega-3 seeds (hemp, chia, flax)
• any vegetable you have on hand
• optional: juice and zest from one lemon or lime
• optional: 1/2 avocado (for creaminess and satiation)

Beans and legumes can be as easy as opening a can and rinsing. But if you are preparing dried beans, spend your three minutes this way:

• At bedtime, put 1 or 2 cups dried beans in a large bowl with twice as much water (1 minute)
• In the morning, drain, rinse, and dump in a crock pot with twice as much fresh water as beans. Set on low for an evening meal or high for a mid-day meal (1 minute)
• Drain and season (1 minute)

You can learn how to make a Hugh Maughn Gus salad here. Dress it with any of the fat-free healthy dressings from Healthy Girl's Kitchen.

Sprouting is easy!

• In the evening, put up to 1/4 cup raw grains or seeds in a container and cover with water. 
• Eight to twelve hours later, dump into a sieve and rinse. Leave in the sieve on your counter.
• Every time you are fixing a meal, rinse the seeds again.
• When little "tails" appear, use or refrigerate.

When you consider the benefits against the costs, you will see that the returns will be much greater than the investment.

To your health and happiness,