Thinking of a New Years Cleanse? Try These Four Simple Steps

San Soma is dedicated to helping clients create health for themselves, through more than our offering of therapeutic massage in Incline Village. We believe that exercise, healthy eating, quality sleep, inner peace, contributing to society, and general joi de vivre are important pieces for creating a complete, healthy lifestyle.We are quickly nearing the end of the holiday season. We hope yours have been filled with joy and memorable times shared with others. We know that many people resolve to create more health for themselves in the New Year by creating a list of new year resolutions. For some, that list starts with the desire to lose some of those holiday pounds. The question then becomes, “How shall I do that?” Generally, people choose diet and exercise, which can be effective for some people. In this post we’re suggesting a commitment to clean living and clean eating.Because San Soma focuses on offering therapeutic massage in Incline Village, we thought we’d let an expert share nutritional information with you. Therefore, we’ve invited Colleen Carney Ruge, our nutritionist friend from MoxiRx, to share some best practices for creating a clean and healthy eating lifestyle.Here are some basic principles:

1. Reshape Your Thinking: Instead of focusing all of your thinking power on losing weight, think instead of eating clean foods. Whenever possible, choose whole foods. Also begin reading labels and selecting wild and cage-free chicken and fish (eating grass-fed beef and pork only occasionally), organic veggies, unprocessed carbohydrates (in moderation), nuts and seeds, and low sugar fruits like berries and sour apples.

2. Give Your Pantry a New Year Cleanse: Take this time to clean your pantry of the foods you don’t want to eat. Eliminate the allergenic, inflammatory and addictive foods, such as dairy, gluten, soy, processed food, sugar and other yeast promoting foods.

3. Be Consistent: It might be a struggle at first if this is far from your current eating behaviors, but try not to snack and be sure to have a meal every 4-6 hours, staring with a good nutritional breakfast. Most of us have phones with alarm clocks on them, which can be useful for breaking us out of our busy lives and reminding us to eat. If you find yourself watching the clock and longing for that next meal, drink a beverage instead of reaching for a snack. Oftentimes, water, green tea or a greens drink will hold you over until the next mealtime. Lastly, aim to have your last meals at least 3 hours before bed each night.

4. Make each meal a “Healthy Meal Wheel”: We’ve found that meals (and snacks when necessary) portioned in the following way provide energy, are filling and help balance the body. If you eat with this kind of balance and portion size, you will feel well and drop extra fat. To follow the Healthy Meal Wheel, each meal should consist of the following:

• ½ cup High Fiber Carbs and Low Glycemic Index Fruits
• Healthy Fats 1 serving (1 tablespoon)
• Non-Starchy Vegetables (fill your plate with as much of these as you can)
• Lean Protein: 3-4 oz for women, 5 oz for men
• See the photo in this post for a visual.

We’d like to thank Colleen for sharing these tips with us as we all begin thinking about our 2015 health and wellness goals. To learn more about clean eating you can contact Colleen Carney Ruge at MoxiRX by clicking here. colleen@moxirx.comSan Soma will be teaming with Colleen to facilitate a 28-day clean-eating program starting in January. We’ll be covering a variety of health and wellness practices and introducing some of the new MoxiRx products, which are tools (protein powder, greens drink, etc.) to ease the process of creating a clean-eating lifestyle. For more information, or to sign up, please contact Denne or Colleen for more information.Here’s the celebrating your health in the New Year!