If you’re not eliminating waste from your bowels, you’ll end up wearing it on your face. Listen up. The skin is our body’s largest excretory organ. Crazy but true. You want luminous skin? Make sure your pipes are on speaking terms with you.
Cranking up the fibre in your diet will have you shaking your booty like Lady Marmalade on the dance floor. By fibre, I don’t mean a bowl of wholemeal pasta. Nice try. When you want fibre, you need to call in the services of black belts like flaxseed, bran, oats, prunes, beans, hummus, and psyllium.
Research confirms that scoffing more than 35g of dietary fibre a day can result in a 40% chance of living longer. Jeesh.
Here’s what happens in our very own waste plant. Insoluble fibre from our food acts like a traffic warden, clearing jams and keeping junctions clear. His job is to keep things moving. If nothing moves, waste can build up and re-enter the bloodstream. One way of ridding toxins is to sweat them out on a treadmill. Or frequent the village sauna. Both options are about as appealing as sex with Donald Trump.
So let’s fight with our fork?
Arm yourself with this marmalade. It’s criminally good and much more refreshing than the regular jammy stuff. One taste will ignite your dimples, like kissing Bradley Cooper, or giving Michael Flatley a wedgy live on stage.
The weird sounding seeds can be purchased in savvy pharmacies or health food stores nationwide. They help to set the marmalade. Prunes Shmunes. Psyllium are the King Kong of the colon.
A healthy marmalade
3 unwaxed organic oranges
3 tablespoons psyllium seed husks
Pinch of sea salt
2-3 tablespoons local honey
Start by grating the zest from 2 of your oranges. Set aside. Then slice the bum off each of the 3 oranges, and sit them on a chopping board. Carefully carve the skin from each orange with a paring knife, and discard. The white pithy stuff is a little bitter, but it does contain a whack load of nutrition so maybe don’t take it all off.
Cut the orange into chunks, to check for pips.
Add the orange zest, the juicy chunks, your psyllium husks, sea salt and really good honey to the blender (or food processor). Pulse until jammy, but not entirely smooth. You still want beautiful blobs of orange in there.
Scrape into a scrupulously clean jam jar and leave to set for 30 minutes before spreading over hot toast. Refrigerate for 1 week – it will set even more when chilled.
