Mariana's BLOG page with her best health tips & recipes
Balance with Mariana's blog page, The Balance Journal, provides unique and useful tips on healthy living and holistic nutrition, delving into topics of digestive health, hormonal balance, weight loss, making healthier choices, improving body image and more!
Mariana also emphasizes eating healthier (yet delicious), more balanced, plant-based meals, and provides easy and delicious recipes.
Our liver removes all toxins, clears medications from your body, breaks down our food so we can properly process it, and even helps us with hormone regulation - so it is absolutely crucial that we take proper care of this essential organ!
In this blog, I share my 10 most important steps to take to better care for your liver (via simple lifestyle and diet habits).
Read MoreI used to constantly struggle with a bloated belly, where I often felt like I was 3 months pregnant. It was terrible, but nothing I did seemed to make it go away, so it became normal for me. I tried many diets, and maybe a 2 or 3 day juice cleanse would help temporarily, but of course, a few days back to my normal eating and the bloating would come back.
It took me a long time - essentially one year of nutrition courses and lots of additional personal research and experimentation - to finally realize that the bloating was not normal, and was totally curable.
So if you’re in the same camp as I was, struggling with constant bloating and maybe occasional gasiness, it’s important for you to know that there is a cure to get rid of this for good. Like most things, it all starts with identifying the root cause behind your bloating. So let’s take a look at what I have found to be the key triggers of bloating, gas and constipation:
Imbalance in your gut bacteria
Gut infections and/or Food sensitivities
Lack of digestive enzymes / low stomach acid
Lifestyle: Stress, Eating rushed, and Not chewing your food properly
Diet: Eating inflammatory foods, Improper food combinations and Not prepping/cooking your foods properly
Read more at my blog to discover the 5 steps to cure your gas and bloating both short and long term!
Read MoreBoth Seed cycling and Tea cycling are 2 of the easiest ways we can help support our hormones in a gentle way (especially when combined with other diet/lifestyle habits to support hormonal balance). The idea is to use different seeds and teas to help support our hormones in the different stages of our cycle to help regulate our cycles and minimize PMS. It can also be beneficial for women with PCOS and women trying to get pregnant naturally.
Read MoreAs women, in order to feel our best and support our health, it’s important to understand our menstrual cycle and connect with the different stages and the hormonal fluctuations that accompany each stage.
This is the basis for what we call “Cycle Syncing” - which teaches us to connect with how our body shifts throughout our cycle, and use these changes to our benefit. It involves aligning lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, social commitments and more, in accordance with the different phases of your cycle to improve hormone balance, alleviate common PMS symptoms, improve fertility, and more.
The result is an increased sense of health, balance and connection to our femininity in our day to day.
The gut-brain connection is extremely powerful, which means that a huge part of having a healthy mind is having a healthy “gut”.
If you’ve ever felt butterflies in your stomach when nervous, or nauseous when scared, you KNOW your gut is sensitive to your emotions and stress. And the reverse is also true. The health of our gut has a direct effect on our brain and mood. Poor digestion from too much processed foods, bad food combinations, or poor elimination (ex. not pooping properly) can have a huge negative impact on your mood, energy levels, mental clarity (and more!).
SO if you want to have a healthy, happy brain, you need to start by having a healthy GUT! Here are 5 steps to get you started…
Read MoreFor those days when you feel a little “backed up” and need some help going to the bathroom, this delicious green smoothie is a great way to support your digestion and get you some good bowel movements!
Read MoreYou can spend all you want on improving your skin from the outside, but to get the best results, you also need to focus on improving your skin health from the INSIDE.
This also applies to SUN-CARE. You can literally use food as sunscreen (in combination with your physical/mineral sunscreen of course). Apart from applying a good nontoxic sunscreen daily, it helps to consume certain foods that can help to protect your skin from the damaging effects of the sun's UV rays.
Almost everyone wants to know what do to “boost longevity” and delay the signs of aging.
The good news is there is A LOT we can do in our day-to-day to help delay our aging (and feel younger and healthier for longer).
Even though we often associate genetics with aging, it is now well-known that only 20-30% of longevity is related to genetics, which means that environmental factors such as diet and lifestyle play a much larger role in how long we live (and more importantly, how we FEEL and LOOK while aging).
READ MORE for 6 (well researched) holistic practices that can help support longevity.
Read MoreOctober is breast cancer awareness month; a month to raise awareness about our need for Cancer prevention education, something I’m passionate about ESPECIALLY since we’ve discovered how much we can do with food and lifestyle to lower our risk
Today I’m sharing 6 important doctor recommendations to lower your risk of breast cancer, plus 8 more holistic tips to help reduce your risk of disease in general.
Read MoreCheck out my blog for 8 TIPS TO BOOST YOUR ENERGY and 2 DELICIOUS METABOLISM-BOOSTING, ENERGIZING RECIPES to start off your day right and give you energy all day long.
I wanted to write about the anti-inflammatory diet because, even though I’m against “dieting”, this isn’t really a diet; this is about creating a lifestyle of limiting inflammatory foods and regularly incorporating anti-inflammatory foods and lifestyle choices to support better health. It’s something that has helped me immensely, and I can testify that it supports gut health, hormonal health, and maintaining a healthy weight WITHOUT dieting. Following these tips that i’m sharing below will help a lot towards achieving your health goals, I promise!
The food we eat — and don’t eat — can help lower and even prevent this chronic inflammation, to help us feel better, lose weight and reduce our chances of illness.
Today I share 4 ways to enhance your diet and lifestyle to help you reduce inflammation and feel better overall.
Read MoreThere are so many things we can do in our day to day to support our brain health, even through our diet. Remember to first use FOOD AS MEDICINE. Incredibly there are many foods that have proven to boost our brain health and help prevent early “ageing” of our brain (preventing memory loss, etc).
To increase your chances of an amazing, healthy pregnancy, birth and baby, you want to focus on eating a real whole-foods diet as much as possible, avoiding processed junk foods, eating a variety of colors, and including these 12 pregnancy “superfoods” as much as possible (in addition to your prenatal vitamin and any other supplements/medicines that your doctor or midwife prescribed).
Check out my blog for 12 super foods you should be eating regularly as part of your Pregnancy Diet, for a healthy mom and baby.
Read MoreNowadays, we are all experiencing some degree of oxidative stress in our bodies, which is keeping us from attaining our health goals. It can negatively impact our fertility, our ability to reach our ideal weight, our ageing process…. and more.
So what causes oxidative stress, and how can we decrease it?
In this blog, I lay out the key contributors to oxidative stress and 8 tips to reduce it in your day to day life.
Read MoreSustaining balanced blood sugar levels (aka blood glucose levels) and minimizing swings in blood sugar is absolutely paramount to weight loss, and moreover, to a healthy lifestyle and avoiding disease.
The good news is that there is so much we can do through small DIET and LIFESTYLE changes to support our blood sugar levels and simultaneously boost our overall health.
Today in my bog I share 11 tips to keep stable, healthy glucose levels (which simultaneously support healthy weight loss).
Read MoreHypothyroidism is so huge nowadays that I feel approximately one out of every 5 clients I see has some degree of hypothyroidism. Crazy. Which is why I wanted to write a quick blog on the topic.
Like most things, diet and lifestyle play a big role in your thyroid function. Eating the wrong foods, chronic stress and poor sleep can interfere with your hormones and even contribute to autoimmune disease like Hashimoto’s.
I share 6 KEY things you can do right away that can help support your body to normalize your thyroid hormones.
Read MoreIf you’re suffering from low-thyroid (and the commonly related symptoms including slow metabolism and low energy), you’re not alone. It’s more common than you may think, especially with women.
Whether or not you’re already taking medication, your diet plays a large role in your thyroid function and it’s important to use your meals to help you in your healing process.
START BY TAKING BABY STEPS. Start by incorporating these 5 superfoods into your everyday diet to help you in your journey to balancing your thyroid hormones and therefore improving your overall health.
Read MoreWe ALL poop but are often afraid to talk about it. We’re often unsure if our poop is healthy or not, and what we can do to make it better. So I address all of this - what is “normal” poop supposed to be like - shape, consistency, color, how often should we poop, and most importantly, what we can do to improve our poop (and particularly, relieve constipation).
Why does this matter? Because the health of our poop says a lot about the health of our gut, which says a lot about our overall health. So i believe we should all be making the effort to incorporate those healthy habits that help boost our gut health.
Read more for my poop 101 and 9 tips for improving your poop!
Read MoreIf you haven’t tried golden milk yet, you’re missing out! It’s a creamy, hot, milky (yet dairy-free) drink that’s delicious and PACKED with nutrients. It’s like a “warm liquid sunshine in a cup.”
READ MORE for my super easy, delicious and nutritious recipe - which adds some superfoods to help boost digestion, balance hormones and relieve stress.
Read MoreIt amazes me how many people - even those that live a healthy lifestyle - still drink Gatorade (and similar electrolyte drinks) despite all the chemicals and sugar they contain. So it dawned on me that most people don’t realize the amount of sugar and chemicals in these drinks, and the fact that it may be doing your body more harm than good.
So what is a better alternative? Read more for an easy homemade “electrolyte water essence” recipe that will quench your thirst and prevent dehydration (which is cheaper, way healthier and just as effective).
Read MoreBalance With Mariana is a holistic Health Coaching practice that works with individuals looking to lose weight, overcome their food addictions and improve their digestive issues, by teaching them new healthy lifestyle habits that help them reach their specific personal goals. Clients of Balance With Mariana develop not only a better relationship with food, but also an overall more balanced and happy life.
Balance With Mariana | , Miami, FL
