It's OK to Be Abundant with Your Food

Yesterday's Abundance of Raw Deliciousness:

Breakfast: after an ecstatic 6 mile run in my new Vibram Five Finger shoes! http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/ Check these out
Amazing smoothie with frozen mango, banana and wild blueberries; with red chard, parsley and mint (and water)

Lunch at The Stand, Norwalk, CT:
Choco Cherry smoothie with cacao, date, nutmilk and banana; Yum!
Curried Collard wrap with curried almond pate, red pepper, cuke, avo and sprouts

Snack:
pack of Emmy's Mint Chip macaroons; Yeaow!!!
Late Snack:
Raw Revolution chocolate hazelnut bar

Dinner at One Luck Duck Juice Takeaway, 17th Street, NYC:
Shared meal of tortilla wraps, in mini flax taco-shaped filled with spicy sundried tomato spread and corn cilantro guacamole, with tomato lime salsa and cashew sour cream; Mmmmmmmmmm
Thai lettice wraps in collard greens filled with mango, pea shoots, carrots, savoy cabbage, cashews and spicy tamarind sauce; outrageous!
Desserts: I ate so much of these :)
Moonpie (modeled after the childhood moonpie or "Ho Ho") with coated raw dark chocolate, layered with a cream and chocolate
lemon square
raw vanilla almond butter cup ice cream
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! I had raw chocolate OD!

8 ounces water

I ate with abundance, savoring every mouthful of my raw meal while sharing a beautiful four-hour conversation with my male BFF (Best Friend Forever) Ron. The intimacy of the conversation, catching up on our lives after not seeing each other for awhile, complemented and supported our relationship with the food. Did I eat alot? Yes? Was it rich? Was it sweet? Was it filled with many ingredients, textures, colors and sensations? Yes to all of the above. In fact, it was directly connected to our conversation, which also was rich, sweet and filled with all the ingredients that make up who we each are and what we were sharing.
Allow your food to model your healthiest relationships. So much of our relationship with food is based upon our childhood models, which were often not supportive of our highest selves shining bright. Now we have the opportunity to cultivate food as a metaphor for the richness of our lives and our relationships.
Please write in and share a story about having a meal as extraordinary as the relationship that surrounded it...

Seder #2

Today's Repast:
Breakfast:
Cacao Morning Madness with coconut water, frozen banana, psyllium seed powder, flax seeds, cacao powder and nibs, almond butter and agave; YUM!!

Lunch:
Salad with romaine, carrot, mushrooms, radish and sprouts with dulse and nutritional yeast; dressing of sea salt and olive oil

Snack:
Synergy Grape Kombucha probiotic drink
Raw Revolution chocolate hazelnut bar

Later Snack (I knew I would be eating late due to the seder and was hungry):
raw cashews

Dinner:
OK, so first of all, I had some more wonderful Shmurah (hand-batched) matzoh tonight, enjoying every crunch.
I only took sips of my wine and grape juice for the 4 cups; total of both maybe = 1/3 cup
jicama and avocado salad with what tasted like a mango dressing (raw)
red and golden beets with a vinagrette (cooked)
cucumber tomato salad (raw)
carrot walnut salad (raw)
Kiwi slices with scoops of pineapple and mango sorbet (no sugar; just fruit and ice)

I just got home from a beautiful second night of Passover seder at the home of Rabbi Moshe and Leah Shemtov of Stamford Chabad.
Chabad is an organization dedicated to serving Jews of all ages regardless of religious background or affiliation.
I cannot say enough about the energy each time I walk into their home. I have been invited their a few times for dinner, and this time for seder. Last time I was there, because Leah knows what I do as a health counselor and how I eat, she made me all kinds of raw vege appetizers for a Sabbath dinner! She has even organized a holistic health night for the community.
The love, the spirit of community and family and the welcoming energy were all present.
When I came in, Leah told me that specifically on Passover, they never use anything processed to make their food; it is all from scratch. They don't use any sugar. She said she had been thinking of that and of me, knowing I would appreciate that. Because of this, though, they do not use oils and just for Passover use chicken fat (schmaltz) instead; just a little bit in all the main dishes.
So, I had all the amazing vege and raw starters and skipped the main course. One of the main course dishes had chopped parsnip and carrot and sweet potato and eggplant; roasted root vegs. I didn't eat it because of the chicken fat, but it looked delicious. Forty five people came to share this seder!
I sat across from a neurologist and we shared what we each do professionally; he appreciated my focus on food as medicine, healing eating disorders and creating an ecstatic relationship with food as our most intimate partner.
He was even sharing some holistically oriented methodologies he brings into his practice.
There was a wonderful young man in his junior year of high school asking me how I deal without having meat and how hard that must be. I got to tell him that it is actually ecstatic. Surprisingly, the neurologist piped in and said, "Meat is an inflammatory in the body, right?" I loved it!!
Please write in and share what food you appreciated today...

Courageous Eating: Creating a Divine Relationship with Your Food, Your Body and Your Health

Only a couple of days until we start our teleclasses again. When I held Courageous Eating this summer, those of us in the class were able to uncover major childhood scenarios and conditioned belief systems that contributed to our present struggles in treating our bodies with self-love and eating in a way that both offers us joy and health consistently. Our relationship with food can go back to the way our parents and siblings interacted with us around the dinner table: If we were not properly protected, allowed to be heard, listened to, embraced and encouraged to be magnificent, and this also played out at mealtime (our daily and life-sustaining ritual of feeding ourselves properly), then we learned at a young age that food was: Scary; anxiety-producing; something we could control when we could not control the words and actions of those closest to us. We could also treat ourselves poorly with food because that is the message we got; that we didn't deserve to be great. Food became a personality; our primary relationship; the one that took on the character traits of our other primary relationships. In order to shift this relationship with food, we need to deconstruct the old belief sytem and reconstruct one that holds food as our most intimate lover. How would you like your relationship with your most intimate lover to be?
I love the teleclass format: It enables participants to share freely without monitoring other people's physical responses. It's actually an amazing way to create intimacy and bonding without our egos, or "monkey minds," getting involved and making up stories. There is a real freedom of expression in hearing others share from their hearts and support each other fully without interpreting body language.
Tuesday night from 8:00 - 9:00 PM begins: Courageous Eating part I; Creating a Divine Relationship with Our Food, Our Bodies and Our Health. It's a 4 week series that takes place via dial-in conference call. Tuesdays for Women; Thursdays for Men.
Then on Wednesday night we start: Courageous Eating Part II; Food, Fitness & Focus, where we put concrete pratices into place on eating in a way that supports our mood and our health and integrating physical exercise into it. If you want to come on board, you can email me at theholisticempire@yahoo.com
In Health & Bliss,
HolisticGirl

What have I noticed in all my years of counseling people with food and their bodies?
That everyone still follows the model out there: Learn the nutrition part; make the changes; lose weight; let go of disease; feel better.
OK, so how come so many come to me still not feeling better and feeling locked up inside with something deeper making them sad about all these changes?
I know so clearly that the new paradigm for our highest health is to go underneath the underneath, and deconstruct our early "relationship" with food and our bodies. Then we can create a new one that supports the nutritional changes we would like to make. How do we do this?

If you understand that food is your most intimate relationship; your life partner; the primary relationship from which all others develop, which of these expressions would describe your personal relationship with food and with your body:

Loving; Warm; Nurturing; Frustrating; Emotional; Ecstatic; Joyful; Weighty; Sad; Depressing; Anxious; Angry; Easy; Stressful


Would you like to have an intimate, blissful, loving, ecstatic, healthy and nurturing relationship with food and your body?

Please email me your thoughts on this....

Next week, I'll be starting my fall teleclasses, which are all about this conversation. If this speaks to you, then let me know and I can tell you more.
"Courageous Eating: Creating a Divine Relationship with Your Food, Your Body and Your Health."
This is my commitment to you.