Yesterday as I was getting my hair cut, my hairdresser told me and others keen to listen about her new healthy lifestyle. I was quite inspired so thought I should share.

• Heavy breakfast
• Salads
• Coconut Oil (apparently the most healthy fat! If you eat a table spoon or two a day there are many health benefits…maybe another blogpost!)
• No canned foods
• Smoked fish
• Beans
• Brown rice instead of white
• No sodas/minerals/sweet drinks
• Exercise you enjoy

Her advise was to not make any extreme changes, but instead make “life changes” you can live with.

My own experience is that when one takes the time to make a salad with every meal – or make your meal a salad! – eating becomes more enjoyable. The textures and colours of a salad on your plate (fresh herbs/sunwarm, tasty tomatoes/mango/crispy lettuce/green papaya/green beans/olives…) adds something that I love. In Ghana you can get it the whole year around! And for not drinking sodas, yeah we all know that is better.

To help this lifestyle, there are markets selling organic foods popping up like the Goethe flea market “Open Air stock exchange”(first Saturday of every month) and Accra Green market [and on FB] (every last Saturday of the month, for now in East Legon ).

Photos from Accra Green Market.

I was lucky to spend time with quite a few of my friends this past week. It was a lunch here, a phone call there, a filled table at a bar, a laughter shared.

Just like many others, I feel friendship is what makes a difference in life. What is special about me is maybe I have so many friends. I am not saying it to brag, it’s just who I am. Maybe it is even a sort of problem as this leads to often feeling like time is just not enough to regularly see all the people I want to keep close. I think it is one of the reasons I love social media so much, it allows me to keep up with my big pool of friends.

And make new ones, of course! I have a very low threshold from bumping into someone to “take them as my friend” as we say here in Ghana. I have meaningful encounters with others in queues, on Twitter, at events – I even feel cheated if someone choose to sleep next to me on a plane!

I am passionate about my friends. I pride myself they are all very different (although many of them seem to be “storytellers” or talkatives, I have noticed, although talkative myself, with them I am the awed audience!), well in outer descriptives: age, sex, background, class and so forth. They give me useful perspectives, they make me smile, they give me energy and I love to think about them and plan the next time we meet.

I realise, it is not often I tell my friends how much they mean to me,  but this weekend, my friend Kofi found an excellent way of describing it:

“If you surround yourself with the right people, then life is Gold. Gold!”

I dedicate this post to my friend Anna who has made my life gold many times.