Some tips for a really healthy breakfast.

I mention this in another blog. I make most of this in a typical Chinese rice bowl and do most of the preparation the night before. I use two types of frozen 'juice' made into  iceblocks and these are they. No 1. I blend beetroot, carrots, pomegranate kernels, sour or Bramley apples, lemon seed, Kiwi fruit, pineapple including the deep skin and core and dish about 2litres of this into ice block trays.
No 2. This ice block is just frozen organic pomegranate juice which I get from a Russian outlet in Nth London.
Doing this at night means the ice blocks have melted by the morning.
I add some 11 large frozen cranberries - absolutely no sugar and all thinly sliced, a soup spoon each of lingon berries, black currant, and sea buckthorn berries all thoroughly washed, To this I add three heaped teaspoons of my mix of ground almond, linseed and sunflower kernels.
Pour some full cream goats' milk over it, pop it in the fridge until breakfast time.
At breakfast all I have to do it top it with a good handful of jumbo oats and dust with psyllium.
Mix together and add more goats' milk to keep it soft. Don't delay in eating for too long as the psyllium will 'jellify' and spoil the texture. I make a point of crushing any seeds in the berries with my teeth - most of sea buckthorn berries have a pronounced and hard seed so beware jamming it between your teeth.
I have a slice of my rough oat bread with raw sardine fillet and sheep cheese and after I've downed this I have a mug of coffee with xylotol and goats' milk.

Why raw vegetables help you lose weight.

It is unadulterated fibre which is the matrix of raw vegetable and it is that which makes your intestines work to break it down.
Apart from exercising the muscle layers of which the bowel is made, from tongue to tail, it uses a great deal of energy doing this. It means it will keep you lean.
Of course the antithesis of this is cooked vegetable which is, as I have previously mentioned, is identical to rotting and from a health point of view probably worse. This is because the heat of cooking destroys nutrients much more effectively than aerobic oxidation at room temperatures.
I mention, somewhere, thinking about a liquidizer or blender making a selection of raw vegetables such as you would make for a meal to end up like the soft putty you excrete. This really does take some energy. These machines vary from 350  to 1250 watts with a mean somewhere in the region of 680. This is nigh on one horsepower and kept on for five minutes is five  horsepower. Of course you're deploying this energy over 5 to 8  hours.
Never the less this is real energy you are deploying in your gut and it uses up the calories you so want to lose. Remember your bowels were designed for roughage and not refined food, be it cooked vegetables, or other refined carbohydrate,  so all you are doing is what nature intended.

The C word but its not about cancer

The connotation I want to engender when you hear the C word is the dark side of 'convenience'.
So many of the ills in this world occur because convenience rules. Whole philosophies by which food is packaged relates to this word and no where more so than breakfast cereals. I am particularly affected by this as it takes me some 10 minutes last thing at night to prepare my cereal breakfast -  fuzzy headed in the morning it would take 20 minutes at least plus the fact I use one or two certain ice cube preparation which need an  hour to melt - this can happily occur in the fridge overnight. I am not left off the hook in the morning either as the addition of raw jumbo oats and psyllium has to be carefully sequenced to make the whole thing palatable.

I shall discuss this breakfast later but it is on the convenience of the commercial breakfast cereals that is worth focussing.

Cornflakes, crispies of any sort, puffed cereals, bubbled rice - they all have the crunch which patently is really liked. But what does this crunch really mean. To get that experience the manufacturers have to heat the cereal to a really high temperature, not just to drive the natural water content off but to make brittle the cellulose fibre. Such treatment makes the cereal fracture and gives the crunch but the fibre content now is seriously altered to become starch or even actually sugar like. Naturally the nutrients like vitamins are affected and usually are replaced by addition later. In effect the best that can be said for such cereals is, that when they have had them added, their vitamin content. Along with the rush to get cereal down in the morning is the addition to them of milk and sugar - in fact as a kid the thing I liked best at the end of such bowl of cereal was the sweet milk that I captured lifting the bowl to one side!