I’ve been doing a whole foods cleanse for the past 2 weeks or so (halfway done!) and it’s certainly had its ups and downs. I’ve learned a lot about self-care and how being a busy Mom leaves you with little time to focus on yourself. With many things in life, I’ve had to do the best I can with the cleanse and forgive myself for my shortcomings. But the other, more important side to the story is that I want to take time to celebrate my accomplishments – something none of us take enough time to do.
The most impressive improvement that’s come out of this cleanse is my openness to trying new recipes. I’m often the type of person who just throws things together without using any type of guide and let’s be honest, that gets old. I’ve armed myself with with endless detox-friendly recipes, which have all been mostly amazing! I’ve also started experimenting with fermented foods recipes and I can’t believe I didn’t start this sooner!
Why fermented foods? First off, they’re simply delicious and have a really unique flavor that automatically upgrades any dish’s creativity. Secondly, because they’re excellent for improving digestion. Our gut is filled with millions, no billions of tiny microbes that are responsible for helping us digest our food, making all of the food’s parts (proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, etc.) available for uptake and assimilation in our bodies. Our job is to nourish this little (little in size, of course) population in order to keep our digestion going strong.
You can purchase a number of different fermented foods from a health or natural foods store include kimchi, miso, kefir, sauerkraut, yogurt and a number of others that I’m less familiar with. But make sure they’re coming from the refrigerated section rather than from a can – if they’re canned, all of those healthy microbes have been killed. You can even try your hand at making your own fermented foods, which turns out to be pretty easy. Although the link below isn’t exactly what I did in the pictured sauerkraut above, it’s pretty close, and there’s some great information in this post to help guide you along the way:
Happy fermenting! Be sure to comment below to let us know how it goes!
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