When life gives you lemon,

...makes warm lemon water :D

One of the recent photos on my Instagram; @hildamildaa // Feel free to follow me if you haven't (:

Since I'm on holiday now, I've been reading up a lot about healthy diet/food/recipes and I stumbled upon an article of the benefits of lemon water. So lately, I've started to make myself a nice cup of warm lemon water for breakfast besides the usual hot green tea after realising that the wonders lemon water can do to your body. 

Most of us might think that lemon is an acidic food for the body but it's actually one of the most alkalizing foods for the body. Sure, they are acidic on their own, but inside our bodies they’re alkaline. By drinking lemon water regularly, you will reduce your body’s overall acidity. It also has been shown that people who maintain a more alkaline diet lose weight faster.

Just to share if with you guys the few benefits of lemon water;

1. Aids in weight loss. I guess most girls would love this! :P The high level of pectin fiber in lemon helps to fight hunger cravings.  
2. Boost your immune system with vitamin C and potassium. 
3. Helps in digestion. The digestive qualities of lemon juice help to relieve symptoms of indigestion, such as heartburn, belching and bloating 
4. Cleanses your system as lemon is a natural diuretic. It helps to flush out unwanted materials/toxins in your body and increase the rate of urination in the body.
5. Clears your skin too! The vitamin C component as well as other antioxidants helps decrease wrinkles and blemishes. 

Fair enough? And it's really simple to prepare it as well. All you need is lukewarm (not scalding hot) water and lemons. You would want to avoid ice cold water, since that can be a lot for your body to process and it takes more energy to process ice cold water than the warm. Always use fresh lemons, not bottled lemon juice. I squeeze 1/2 a lemon with each glass and I drink it down first thing before I eat a single thing, or workout.

Never underestimate that yellow sour fruit anymore. A cup of lemon water a day, keeps the doctor away too. I've looked into why this is recommended and after what I've learned, I’m making lemon water a regular habit (: Do you drink lemon water everyday too? If not, why not give it a try too?

xx

Banana Smoothie in 3 minutes!

Since I've been at home for a few weeks and I have nothing better to do, I've been finding and reading up tons of recipes for me to try out (: Plus I'm now on a almost-healthy-diet, still trying my best to make sure I eat healthy and clean everyday or else my workout effort will be such a waste. One of the important things in eating healthy is that you eat your breakfast everyday and since I'm rarely a morning person (unless I get to eat out for breakfast, I'm choosy like that :P) thus I don't usually have breakfast and due to that, it has now become a habit that I don't eat breakfast even before going to class. I normally have brunch but fret not, I've found a solution :D

Since I don't have Greek yogurt or any drive-thru near me and I hate oats fyi, the only option would be smoothie (as stated at the bottom right of this photo)!  — Source: Tumblr  

Smoothies are so refreshing and super easy to make. You don't really need lots of ingredients or any special technique, let the blender do its thang! Since Mum bought this huge comb of bananas last week and banana is one of the top ranking healthy food, well don't let me start with the #banana-nutrition-facts blab. Click on the link yourself to find out more, maybe this link as well!

Alright, back to the banana smoothie. Healthy low fat, low calories alternative to milkshakes, cheap, and with no added sugar yet it tastes ten times better. It's really quick and requires few ingredients and one of them is ice - how simple is that!

The ingredients: 

• 150 ml Low Fat milk (It's even better if you have skim milk but I can't get any here)
• 2 tbsp of plain yogurt (You can a few more tablespoon if you want it to taste more sour)
• 1 frozen banana, sliced (I would recommend you to peel it before you put it into the freezer the night before, I had a hard time peeling it the next day -_-)
• A few ice cubes 
• Optional: 1 tsp of vanilla extract, 1 tsp of cinnamon powder, 1 tbsp honey, other fruits like frozen strawberries, berries, peaches etc 

P/S: If you don't like milk, you can just substitute it with a cup of plain yogurt instead but I think it tastes better with milk (: 

Toss everything inside the blender and let it blend till its smooth and thick. 

And voila! Super easy and quick banana smoothie is done after two minutes. See, I purposely sliced a banana and decorate the smoothie you know! :3 Attempted to put a few in the middle of the smoothie, but it drowned in mere seconds before I even had the chance to snap it #facepalm

The ingredients that I've mentioned is enough for 2-3 glass of smoothie, so you can have it with your loved ones to kick start your awesome day (:

If you're a fan of smoothie or you feel like trying it out too, you might be interested with these links;
Healthy Diet Shakes
6 healthy fruit smoothie recipe

Now you can enjoy your banana smoothie while tweet/instagram/fb-ing about the smoothie mustache you can haz in the remaining one minute! ;D

Too bad I don't have a blender or a fridge back in my hostel, or else I can have this every single morning. Besides smoothie, you can make so much other snacks with banana like peanut butter with banana slices, nutella fudge pops with banana and even banana ice creams. It seems like I'm so into banana LOL which sort of reminds me of THIS! *points down*

I know most of you have seen this, but yeah still wanna post it up! （＾ω＾）

Happy smooching eh I mean smoothie-ing! :P

xx