Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

We’ve been talking about our experience with water fasting, so this time, we’ll tell you how we prepared for the fast and how to make things a little more tolerable.

Approximately 6 weeks before we water fast, we started to change our diet. We cut all types of rice out of our diets. No white rice, brown rice, red rice, black rice. We also cut pasta, pastries, breads, and finally we tapered off on our desserts.

The more carbs you eat before you fast, the harder your cravings will be. So it is always a good idea to start to eat clean at least a month before you water fast.

And, of course, make sure you clean up your pantry and your fridge. Anything that is bad...

Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

We often rely on our ‘Gut’, don’t we? Our gut feeling tells us that he is not our soul mate, that we should get the blue dress not the red, or that we should pick these 6 numbers for the lottery ticket.

In other words, we often rely on our gut to make the decisions for us. And, in order for out Gut to make decisions for us, it must have a brain?

In fact, yes. It is now proven, scientifically, that your gut has a brain. In other words, you have not one, but TWO BRAINS! (Tweet this)

Don’t you just instantly feel twice as smart as before?

Hippocrates, way back in 370 BC, already said that all diseases began in the gut. Recently,...

Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

Last time we talked about water fasting, and when I tell people that I am doing a water fast, the most common response is that we’re doing it to lose weight.

If you missed our last episode, here's the link to it:

https://www.thefoolishacademy.com/blog/WaterFasting1

They are so wrong.

There are a ton of different ways to lose weight, and to be honest, that was not our goal at all.

Sure, losing weight is good, but we’re ok keeping our current weight. I think the best way to explain is to give you an analogy.

Over the last few years many car manufacturers came out with new hybrid vehicles. A hybrid vehicle is a car that can run on both...

Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

Last week, we were actually separated for almost 9 days. I was visiting my family in Canada and Minna stayed behind.

Typically, when we travel, we tend to eat. A lot. Because that’s part of what makes traveling so much fun. But this time, since we were not traveling together, we decided to do something different.

Actually, we decided to do something drastically different.

We, decided, to stop eating altogether.

(Andrew) We are going to give water fasting a try, for probably 3 to 5 days. Or, in my case, I’m going to water fast for as long as I can, probably about 20 hours a day. Since I was traveling I had some social gatherings where I would have to eat something, so I...

 Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

This week we are talking about simple things we can do to tweak the Chinese way of eating and cooking for better optimal health.

Today we are taking on the one ingredient that will ultimately give us Type 2 and type 3 diabetes and that ingredient is White Rice!

White rice is the staple of all Chinese cuisines. We eat white rice with virtually all Chinese dishes and we tend to eat a lot of it. We eat white rice in the form of congee for breakfast, and we eat it for lunch and dinner. And when there’s leftovers, we turn it into fried rice.

Rice is a grain and it naturally does not come in white. So to turn a grain into white rice, there is a lot of...

Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

 This week we are talking about simple things we can do to tweak the Chinese way of eating and cooking for better optimal health. So far we’ve talked about oils and salts.

 Today, we are going to talk about breakfast substitutions.

 In the morning, if you are eat at a Chinese restaurant, the typical way to start the day is with a bowl of Congee, which is basically a bowl of rice soup essentially mixed with some type of meat, usually chicken, beef or pork. And we typically eat that with a fried Chinese donut or chow main. If you are at home, more then likely you are eating a bun from a Chinese bakery or toasted white bread. 

Chinese typically...

Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

This week we are talking about simple things we can do to tweak the Chinese way of eating and cooking for better optimal health.

Yesterday we talked about cooking oils and how it can cause inflammation and a lot of health problems, and what kinds of oils you should be using to cook with. 

Today, our topic is salt.

Salt is a very simple substance and it is made up of a chemical bond of 40% sodium and 60% chloride. Sodium is a crucial electrolyte in our bodies. Many foods naturally contain small amounts of sodium, but most of the sodium in our diet comes from salt.

Sodium binds water and maintain intracellular and extracellular fluids in the right balance. It is also an...

Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes. 

Over the next few episodes, we are going to look at why Chinese food is not the healthiest and how we can make small changes to make it healthier.

You will learn how the foods you eat everyday is actually causing inflammation in your body, hurting not only your body but also your brain. Many of our foods can lead to Type 2 diabetes, or even Alzheimers.

 If you have not heard,

Alzheimers is now known as Type 3 Diabetes for the brain (Tweet this)

 Growing up, I always thought that I was one of the luckiest kids that had a stay at home mom who cooked for us every day. She is an amazing cook and she made all three meals for everyone in my family, for me, my...

Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes.

To wrap up our series on Brain...

Yesterday we talked about our second brain, our enteric nervous system in our GUT, which is why we really do have ‘gut feelings’. So how can we tell whether we are truly hungry, meaning that we are physically hungry and need to get food into our bodies, or are we just emotionally hungry?

We may be having cravings because we are sad, anxious, upset, angry, or bored.

We’ve all seen it in movies. The guy breaks up with the girl. The girl gets very upset, cries and pulls out a tub of ice cream and starts eating it. Do you think she is really, physically hungry? Or is that just emotional eating?

 How do you...

Hello. Welcome to Foolish Insights. We are the Foolish Couple, Andrew and Minna, nutrition coaches and success mentors. We created FoCo Academy to guide and mentor people like you to achieve true health and healthy relationships through nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle changes. 

Continuing on with our series on Brain Health,

Today’s topic is about your 2 brains.

We eat with our brains before food even touches our lips.

Because humans evolved at a time when food was scarce, our sense organs and their processors in the brain are exquisitely attuned to the project of finding and consuming food.

What is the process of eating?

First. We see our foods. And we are more susceptible to bright colors like colorful fruits and vegetables. And companies know that, so they also make their packaging on processed foods colorful and attractive.

And then we smell the food. We tend to sniff out our foods before we actually put them...