Food: Drink Yo Tea! Kampai to Skin and Overall Health

I LOVE TEA.

It is calming, steadfast and comforting. This is a post about all my adventures in drinking.

I have been drinking cups and cups of tea in different types and tea sets and situations. You can drink commercialized, pre-packaged or coffeeshop-prepared tea all you want but nothing really beats boiling water and steeping the tea bags yourself.

Sure, there are benefits of drinking tea, we all know that somehow these little packets do a lot of good to the body, but few know that it is excellent for the SKIN. You wouldn't mind a good boost in elasticity and firmness to your skin, would you? But more than that, there is a longer list of benefits when you drink tea everyday!

Tea with Le Kareshi

Aside from the benefits of tea, one of my favorite things is completing the tea prep. Above is my matching tea set. I use this on weekends or when I have people to have tea with. It is a 6-piece pot and cup flowery, spring-love thing and I adore it very much.The porcelain is perfect to keep the liquid scalding and it is very good with light brews!

Excerpts of "Tea Benefits" from TeaMuse.com

Aging
In a recent experiment carried out jointly by researchers from the US, Taiwan and Japan, mice which were fed tea displayed fewer signs of aging than mice that were fed water.

Bone Strength
Compared with nonhabitual tea drinkers, tea regulars had higher bone mineral densities, even after exercise and calcium-which strengthen bones-were taken into account. 

Cancer
A compound called EGCG, a powerful antioxidant in tea, inhibited an enzyme that cancer cells need in order to grow. The cancer cells that couldn't grow big enough to divide self-destructed.

Cholesterol
Levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol dropped 10 percent among the test subjects who drank tea. Vegetarian Times, Jan 2003

Weight Loss
Recent evidence shows that in the battle of fat loss, green tea may be superior to plain caffeine. According to a new study, green tea appears to accelerate calorie burning - including fat calories. Researchers suggest compounds in green tea called flavonoids may change how the body uses a hormone called norepinephrine, which then speeds the rate calories are burned. Joe Weider's Muscle & Fitness, April 2000

Tea is certainly something, isn't it?! I feel so relaxed when I drink it, even when I drink it at night and I finish a pot for myself, I somehow sleep very well! Because I work two jobs, there are also those stressful days... To combat it with a flourish, I use my Giovanni Valentino set to drink my tea with!:

Berry Tea: A whole day when I was working on pretty much EVERYTHING.

Milk Tea: When I stayed up very late to finish some workload and I was terribly lonely...

The Valentino is a beautiful blue china with blue flowers with gold lining. Nothing really cheers me up when this little thing is filled with tea! It's SOOOO pretty. I feel prettier when I drink from this. It makes me feel like I'm a princess (well, clearly I'm not but the tea cup looks like it's used only for royalty!) or I'm a character in one of my favorite shows, Downton Abbey. :D

Finished some stressful work just in time for the last drop of Earl Grey! Winding down with books...

Chilled apple, Barquillos and weak Milk Tea for DINNER, foo'!

 Tea is the second most drunk liquid in the WHOLE PLANET EARTH. So you don't have to feel "Oh I drink tea, I'm such a hipster." Wrong! Hipster drink is warm ginger ale. Tea makes you belong to the world as millions of people drink it every minute. Even in sickness, tea makes you feel better faster!

Playing around with a Nendoroid Miku when I was sick

Some of my boxes of tea that I like: My favorite is Yellow Label (when I have a lot of things on my mind) and Earl Grey (when I need that certain sophistication and the feeling that I can take over the world)... Fruit-infused teas are usually only prepared as requested by others, but I like them also!

Yellow Label (Hirameki), White tea (Strawberry and Vanilla Infused), Earl Grey, Wild Berry Herbal

One of my good friends gave me a packet of pure love: Rotbusch Tee in Vanilla. HOLY CRAP IT WAS SOO GOOD. WHAT. But I can't find it anywhhhheeerrrreeeee....

Sometimes when I can't be at home to fix myself a pot, I rely in various booths and establishments for my daily cup!

good old Hirameki Cup

Yellow Tea!

Random cold tea... This was Oolong, I think

Obviously a fruit-infused type...

I usually drink my tea straight/plain except when I am deeply depressed that I need milk in it. Fresh milk from the carton seems good enough, it makes the tea smell like a freshly-washed pillow and you just want to sleep in it.

I'm glad that malls and shops are offering a wider variety of tea nowadays, and even people are into the Bubble Tea craze. Still, I'd rather prefer to fix my own, but the world is so on-the-go...

Are you drinking tea? Tell me your fave! Keep healthy!

Review: Ginseng Foot Patch Detox

Hi everyone~ I'm sure you're all tired and bored reading about facial skin care products. I thought that for a change you'd all like to discover some quirkier products for the feet! That's right! Our feet is equally important too.

During one of my trips to Saizen, I chanced upon this really quirky Foot Patch Detox pack. It looked a bit daunting, as it is written in Japanese Kanji and I could only make out a few Kanji and Hiragana. Good thing there was some English sprinkled on the packaging, or else it would have been all lost on me.

This is the Korean Ginseng Sole Sap Sheet that contains two pieces of pads. It is made as a one-time, single-person use. The packaging is in-your-face-herbal with a badass picture of a ginseng root. Personally, it looked like a freaking sorcerer's Mandragora plant. Or something.

The pads are made of a thick kind of paper with something inside. Upon closer inspection, it seemed like a mad gathering of tough, dried ginseng chopped up and ready to do its magic. It also comes with  a wide adhesive, wider than the pad of ginseng herbs.

So I put these things to good use, following the crazy directions as best as I can. The directions are pure genius, Japanese only! Take your lingua franca outta here! The best thing about this is that I'm a visual creature, so if I can't be arsed to read along the step-by-step I usually just glance at the picture and rip things off. 

So the first thing I did was to ask Le Kareshi (Mike) to put it on. I didn't have the raw nerve use it on me, and its a good thing since he has had this ache in his foot from walking too much in bad footwear and he was desperate enough to try it. He washed his foot first with water and soap and dried it off.

After plastering the pad, I pestered him with a lot of questions. At the end of the day, it turns out that somehow this did work. After about 4 hours of this being plastered on his feet, he felt some warmth all through out. I guess that pad was trying to suck out all that extra moisture in the body. It's crazy too, when we peeled off the adhesive, the pad had turned into the yuckiest shade of grayish brown! EWWW!

And all runny-moist from lots of foot sweat! DOUBLE EEEEWWW. Hahaha.

He didn't feel anything from the pad, nothing special, except when he said he felt a slight warmness. We had a lot of fun peeling it off just for the sheer grossness of it. I didn't take a picture of it to save you guys from ruining your breakfast/lunch/dinner.

Well I hope you take care of your feet too. This is a recommended product since it's cheap and somehow it works as promised! 4/5 only since it is gross afterwards LOL.

Thanks for reading!