Welcome, we are truly glad you’re here.  I’m Michelle and my partner Toi and I are our journey to improve our life through practicing better eating and better living. Initially we started making small changes because we thought we wanted to lose weight – and what we discovered through the years is that we were never making permanent changes. I wouldn’t say we yo-yo dieted, we just simply never undertook anything that was sustainable for us, nothing that we could stick with, and honestly it all seemed so flippin’ hard. Truthfully, weight is just a measurement we can relate to, what we really wanted (and still want) is to feel better, have more energy and be able to enjoy life instead of just laying on the couch.

In early 2011 we decided to stop with the non-sense of trying to do everything all at once and apply a more incremental approach – which seems right since I did author a marketing book  called Incremental Marketing on a Micro Budget – why not apply some of these “incremental” principles to changing our lives permanently, just very slowly.

So our new quest began and several months in, we’re still going strong, so strong that our friends have begun asking questions – and we wanted a way to share what’s been working. Hence the blog.

Healthier Twist is about finding small ways to make improvements. For instance if you go out to eat – what is one small thing you can do with your meal to make it a Healthier Choice for you? Leave off the cheeese? Have only one glass of wine, instead of two.  Really, the real simple stuff. Not rocket science. How about in preparing meals at home, is there a way to make that pasta a little better by simply choosing a different pasta like 100% Buckwheat instead of Semolina?

I started by reducing my soda intake by 1 a day, and over 2 months finally have been having none – and my teeth have never looked better. Toi cut back on white jasmine rice, a real staple from her youth in Thailand, and now she doesn’t miss it. As a healthier twist Quinoa is an amazing replacement (even our young nephews loved it). Ever since, we’ve been looking for simple ways to make each meal, each day just a little healthier.

On our blog we share our triumphs and perhaps our tears on this journey. The real thrust for us was seeing a movie called Food Matters (which we watched on Netflix Streaming). There was a lot of “scary” stuff in the movie, but really our strong takeaway was that we needed to be eating more raw foods.  And so our healthy twist path led us to something very simple (hooray) – lots of great tasting shakes, smoothies, juices and salads added to our eating style.

As we began eating better and sharing with our friends, we were told about a program called “CLEAN”. We didn’t know much about it but a week or so later Toi read about it in a magazine and we just knew we had to try it. It wasn’t faddy – it was a practical way of looking at what we eat, and offered a 21-day detox plan. That seemed like a great “next step” in our healthier twist. So in May 2011 we started the CLEAN PROGRAM Detox and we are in the midst of that program now.

You can follow along with our progress, recipes, tips and more, here at our blog Healthier Twist.  Thank you for joining us on this journey.