The Best Mint Tea

Freshly grown mint has so many excellent properties to it if consumed!
It is easy on the stomach and relaxes the intestine. Great for trapped wind!

I could sit and list lots of excellent reasons to use mint. But trust me - it's good for you!

So how do you consume it? From a fresh herb, pick off a few of the top leaves and infuse in water to make tea. This is far superior to dried tea bags (although they are still great).

Anyway, after a trip to the wonderful  Leon restaurant (Which I cannot recommend highly enough for customer service and amazing healthy food - even gluten free goodies) I was thrilled to find they serve what they call a mint "steeper" which is loads of full of flavour leaves in a cup.

After growing mint in my herb garden at home, I have decided to regularly make tea and I have an excellent tip for you:
Pick the mint tips fresh, place them in a mini cafetiere and top up with water. After infusing for a few minutes, plunge and pour. Then you aren't picking bits of leaf from your teeth and it's so delicious!

Try it!

Lightbulb moments!

AHA!


That's it!


I know!


Why didn't I think of that earlier?


IT's a SIGN!


Sounds familiar doesn't it?!

Occasionally, you will wake up in the middle of the night, sit BOLT upright and remember something you had been trying to think of all day long!

You walk into a room, forget what you went in there for and to quote Lee Evans (genius) you say out loud "What did I come in here for?"
"Why are you asking you? You DON"T KNOW!!" Say's Lee. Quite right.
then as you turn to walk away, you remember, just as you have stopped thinking about it.

Well, in the world of the Law of Attraction, this is easy to explain, yet would take me a while to explain in a blog.

Suffice to say, it's good to know that sometimes you just need to 'go with the flow'.

Did it come from nowhere?
Did it seem like an idea you had thought about before?
Does it seem like the RIGHT thing to do?
Does your gut say "Go for it"?
Maybe you wonder why you didn't think of it sooner.

The big question:
Does it feel easy?


If it does, it is most likely the right thing to do.


So, when that lightbulb goes off, gets you very excited and you feel very positive.....I ask.....Why not?

GO For it!!!

What's stopping you?

Some power, stronger than us, has lead you there. Do it! Enjoy it.

Loads of love

Louise x

Paradise on earth

Picture this:

I'm cruising swiftly through deep blue waters. The heat is delightful at 43 degrees with the cool wind blowing.
There is a crew onboard this beautiful boat that treat all visitors simply like royalty. They cannot do enough.

After sailing for a couple of hours, dangling my legs over the side and posing bravely for photos Kate Winslett style (Titanic) there seemed to be another neighbouring boat getting excited. I more like felt the energy than saw it. One man was pointing at something with such conviction that I felt sure he was doing a catalogue pose! Suddenly, I knew assuredly what the excitement was all about.

DOLPHINS!
"Oh my goodness!" I screamed out loudly, "There are dolphins!"

The two boats began honking horns, the crew calling out loudly "Dolphins" And blowing whistles and stomping their feet. The dolphins loved this.....they playfully jumped through the water, circling the boats.
My children squealed in delight at what we could see before our eyes.

After they had played with our senses for a while they were gone.....
Recovering, We sailed some more.

The expert diving crew anchored the boat in the middle of the Red Sea in what I can only call Paradise. I'll use a capital P as it feels rude not to.
Hardly able to describe the feelings I felt, I will tell you a short story instead:
I was looking out at the Red Sea, watching the deep blue water change shades into a gorgeous pale blue turquoise as the water got more shallow leading up to an island in the middle of the sea. Covered by white sand, it simply looked like paradise. I would have loved to have taken a couple of models there for a photo shoot! Wow.
Most of my fellow travellers had left the boat to go snorkelling. Luckily they also swam to the island and walked up onto the sand to experience that paradise under their feet.

Beginning to feel quite overwhelmed by the sight before me, I took a moment looking out from the back of the boat and tried hard to control my feeling. It was like I was being grounded, rooted my feet into the world, the earth, this amazing country. Whatever was going on with me on a spiritual level that day, it moved me.
Leaning on one of the pillars at the back of the boat I couldn't help my eyes as they filled up with tears.
Thinking noone was watching, I was softly asked by the tour guide, "I am so sorry to disturb your thoughts, but can I please ask what the English mean when they say I am pondering?"

Obviously this was a very clever way of asking me if I was ok, without actually being as blunt as that. I felt his warmth was kind.
Deciding that he probably knew exactly what pondering was, I gave a brief explanation hoping that I could speak without the emotions I felt getting worse.

I failed.

I cried.

Happy tears? Well, yes, I believe so. I'm pretty sure what I felt was "Joy" which is the thing we should all be feeling all of the time, every day of our lives. That is the highest emotion. Everything is going to be ok, because we feel Joy.
Part of me felt a little sad. What were we doing to our world? The biggest house, the fastest car, the fattest wallet, the fattest waistband (!), the lack of time for others, dashing around all day every day, stressed, just to pay the bills. This is still never good enough for us as we always want more.
Yet, right there, at that moment in time......none of this mattered.

I was having "a moment" with the universe. It was spectacular!

The tour guy and me went on to have a very very deep conversation, speaking about lifestyles and the differences between muslim countries and Europe. How the ladies are so happy to be treated like princesses, they just look after the family. I say JUST like it's nothing much. Yet it's a hard job. Rewarding, but tough. When you work full time and expect a show home and perfect meal cooked every night before helping the children with their homework, and walk the dog, and goto the gym for the perfect body........
On the surface of things, looking materialistically, we might be forgiven for thinking these guys have less than us. Although do they? They make time for each other, respect the world and respect each other.

Tell me, who has got it right? Studying the Law of Attraction over the past couple of years, I can clearly see from that moment and that conversation that in Egypt, the locals naturally live life by the Law of Attraction. They are at peace every day while smiling thankfully. This is something I am 'practising' to get good at!

Bringing about these thoughts gave me even more access to the beauty of mother nature that day. I then jumped in and snorkelled myself, I FOUND NEMO! Amazing sight.
That evening I watched a lunar eclipse in a perfectly clear sky.

I felt the universe was telling me not to walk around with my eyes closed. There is so much to see. So much Joy to be felt. Allowing myself to feel it was a true honour.

Going Blonde - just like magic???

"I'd like to go blonde please" is a request I hear many times from clients. They think I can wave a magic wand and when I explain it's simply not easy to do (near on impossible) they seem to think my skills aren't "up to it"

I am so {SO} pleased to see that Katie Price addressed this issue beautifully on her latest show Katie on Sky Living. Watching late last night on catch up -as we call it- (sky plus) I could have squealed with delight (but there was a snoozy husband beside me) as I could see that the story unfolding in front of me was one which would do the hairdressing industry endless favours.

A massive icon such as Katie Price is well known for her utter devotion to image (I know it is her job but nevertheless) and she was definitely a woman with a bee in her bonnet wanting to change her hair colour from black to blonde.

Stylists would tell clients, this cannot be done in one go. For me, I have recommended to clients that they start with a few highlights and they will look kind of orange and build up and up until after a few months (if they visit the salon every 6 weeks) they will start to see some blonde resemblance. This is not an exaggeration or a lack of skill. It's Science!!!

Bleach lifts colour out of hair.
Tint adds colour to hair.
Black is tint.
So everytime you top up your roots with black and think "I'll just pass that through the ends for a nice bit of shine" you are adding another layer into the core of the hair. Consequently, the bleach will need to remove those layers of colour that months and months of tinting have added.

Katie showed her hair at various stages and you could clearly see a rainbow type effect from root to end of the hair as the several applications of bleach were beginning to strip the colour out.
Needless to say she was using TOP salon experts for this and they were obviously and expectantly struggling. It's an impossible task-really-not one that can be achieved in normal circumstances within the couple of weeks that Katie managed to achieve it.
I think I recall that it took 19 hours of bleaching and while Katie was training for the marathon she confessed that her natural hair was a combination of cotton wool and chewing gum now. This is what happens when you loose the condition of the hair and by using back combing and heat treatment on the hair for her photo shoots she will do well to get her experts to use the best conditioning treatments on the hair. Breakage will happen and there will end up more extensions than anything.
After trips to LA to have more colour correction and extensions added for more blonde colour (plus lots of hat wearing while avoiding the paps) you could clearly see that Katie was 100% committed to the cause of changing hair colour.

It also cost her over $11,000

Why?

Because the products used are expensive, and the skill and expertise of the stylists comes at a price. Often people complain that it's expensive to get your hair done. Have you tried doing it yourself? :o) I have seen the result of people who try it at home.
We goto college for years and continue to learn constantly and this truly is a skill that takes much practise.


Your hair is the outfit you never take off.
Invest in it, look after it and just think before you decide to dye it from blonde to dark! Going back is not quite so easy.......Katie spent lots of money, loads of time (had to laugh at Gary saying he was exhausted after spending hours in the salon watching her - tho his hair was a fantastic cut! WHO did that?) and she was very very patient indeed. I must say, in this latest photo, her look works fabulously!
I LOVE IT

So, Katie; it was all worth it and thank you for educating people that these things are not achieved easily, no matter how much money, where you fly, the best experts you can give to this delicate operation! But I love this colour!

Weight Loss emotions

Ok, so most of us have gained a few pounds here and there over the years.

A pound on, a pound off, not really noticing much.

Funny how it can add up to 7lbs, a dress size and before you know it you are joining Weight Watchers!

That happened to me. I was stunned to realise that I had spent lots of my life yo-yoing and going from quite skinny to really overweight.  Enough was enough. A neighbour talked me into joining Weight Watchers and I was up for it. I needed that level of support where somebody inspirational would help me acheive a figure just like my idol Jennifer Aniston

She is gorgeous, no denying that!

Ok so there is no way folks I'm going to post my FAT picture after this one, maybe on another post! 

Anyhow, sadly the neighbour didn't join me at the meeting. My mum did though.

Dissapointingly, we both found the weight watchers leader far from inspiring and we left after a few weeks. Although the plan seemed easy to do we needed someone else. 

My mum found another leader who was ok and kept going, having quite a reasonable weight loss. I gave up. And gained more weight!

Wedding fast approaching, no diets working, I decided to hit the gym EVERY DAY! Thanks Roko

Much as I loved it, I didn't loose any weight.........so  I got married a very curvy (but fit!) girly.

Hubby loved me anyway and I was happy. I just craved a different look. Was that Jennifer dream gone forever?

After being spolit in Venice on honeymoon (tiramasu-YUM) and then also giving my taste buds even more to smile about in Florida for the family holiday my weight was at an all time high. I joined Weight Watchers again with high hopes. 

Desperately unhappy with how every item of clothing looked, I clung onto the leaders every word. She was Amazing with a capital A. Her name was Lee and she was the inspiration I had been waiting for. The weight came off slowly at first and although I hadn't realised at the time, I actually had a pretty serious illness (that's another post entirely) and once that was diagnosed I went off armed with information and decided to research.

Able now to eat according to my illness, I adapted the Weight Watchers plan and I was home and running!

3 weeks after my 40th birthday I got to my goal weight and boy did that feel good. I cannot describe the feelings of pride and joy I felt. Right up there with the good events in life!

Everybody seemed pleased for me and even school mums who I didn't know would stop me in the street and tell me how good I looked and asked how had I done it. Can you imagine that? What a BUZZ!!!

The new Propoints plans from Weight Watchers became a new area for interest for me now as I am such a huge (Now not so huge!) ambassador for "You are what you eat" and for me, healthy eating is the key to life. If you put rubbish in, you won't perform to your best. So this new plan made me sit up and listen. It was much more encouraging of healthy eating and I finally did agree to go on and train to be a Weight Watchers leader.

Well, I was asked to be a leader  when I lost the weight and wasn't sure. Seemed like a lot of hard work to me. Yet this overwhelming desire to help other people like me who have been struggling makes me want to shout "Come on Down! The time is right! I'm here to help"

Starting training was a massive step and it has been very intense indeed. After qualifying, I have been to the handover of a lovely group of ladies and spent time contacting those who have missed a few weeks - "Come on down! The time is right!"

Tonight, my first group kicks off at 7pm in the Lordswood Leisure Center, Chatham. 

I will motivate and inspire these ladies and look for a nice weight loss next week! Imagine the feeling you will get from seeing that happen for these ladies.  

Watch this space for another post on how I get on!

Oh, and here is my "after" photo...

Ok so me and Jennifer look nothing alike

But as you can see, I'm happy with that!!