The first hike will be this Friday, May 4th @ 11AM. Future hikes will most likely be on Mondays.

The details can be found below:

Cleanse + Detox Meetup RSVP Link

Can’t wait to see you on the trail!

Here’s a great quote from this video series that sums up my main download from Dr. Morse: “There’s nothing, absolutely nothing you can’t cure.” I repeat this line over and over to people I chat with about healing, and it always makes people pause, think deeply, and question their limiting beliefs that for their whole life they have taken as truth.

It is very helpful to immerse oneself in the loving healing consciousness of healers as powerful as Dr. Robert Morse when you want to move to the next level of your healing and evolution. If you choose to watch the video I have posted above with an open mind and heart, prepare to watch your consciousness expand and your body transform.

I know first hand how difficult it can be to be overweight or ill and feel powerless to change your situation. I hope that this food addiction series is empowering you with the knowledge and tools to improve your well being. I lost 60 pounds and have kept it off for 9 years and I know you can too. I made a lot of mistakes along the way in my recovery from food addiction and I would like to save you time and suffering by sharing what has worked for me and what I have seen work well for others to end their compulsive behavior around food lose weight and keep it off (or gain muscle mass if that is a goal), and even recover from a wide variety of lifestyle induced illness.

The truth is the human, body, mind and spirit is incredibly resilient and knows how to heal when it is well care for.  The problem is…

The Truth about what the ideal foods are for humans has been hidden

For Example: When you eat “diet” foods,  you get heavier and more ill. Excess weight = excess waste from eating all those toxic “diet” foods. When excess waste (weight) builds up in the body, and eventually symptoms of illness show up as more and more organs are burdened by excess toxicity/waaste.

It is my goal in the article to share the actions necessary to uncover the truth about how to nix food addictions, say goodbye permanently to excess weight, and feel great.

ACTION ZERO is to  make the conscious choice that you are committing to change your habits, your body, and ultimately–your life.  Make the commitment with your whole heart.

ACTION #1 is put your focus  on CROWDING OUT toxic foods from your diet by making  70-80% of your daily intake fresh, whole seasonal fruits and green vegetables. Start your day with a green smoothie or a green vegetable juice and you will notice your cravings for addictive foods don’t have the same power over your actions as they once did. When your cells get the message they are being nourished by mass consumption of fruits and veggies, and you are doing the work to address unconscious fat and sick programs, health and happiness are yours.

Intake of toxic foods are the cause of food addiction, excess weight, and illness. Of course, there are emotional, spiritual, environmental, and even DNA issues behind addiction, weight imbalances, and illness. However, if you don’t address what you put in your mouth it is nearly impossible to get address and overcome the other contributing factors that are keeping you from feeling great and enjoying your life.

The number 1 thing that has made a difference for me in making weight loss and food addiction recovery much more effortless is reducing or eliminating the intake of toxic foods and making green vegetables the cornerstone of my diet.  I have found the following concept which I first heard from Matt Monarch of the RawFoodWorld.com  to be very true  — that health is created by what we consistently exclude from our diet. If we only ate  ”meant for human consumption” food we would not have food addiction, and most modern illnesses would disappear. Excluding certain foods comes with great ease when we love the foods we are eating, because they taste great and make us feel good. Our true focus needs to be on creating new habits that don’t stay superficial. To make new habits that stick, we need to understand deeply what we are doing and why. We need to immerse ourselves in dietary TRUTH, instead of dietary DOGMA. Here is some truth for you…

The top addictive and harmful foods are:

• grains (including whole grains and baked goods of any type, glutenous or gluten free)
• pasteurized low-fat cow dairy
• unfermented soy products
• foods that contain synthetic chemicals (artificial sweeteners) or genetically modified ingredients
• concentrated sweeteners (white or brown sugars, agave syrup, brown rice syrup, etc). Minimal use of stevia or truly raw honey are your best sweetener options
• indiscriminate intake of animal protein (improper food combining, and regularly consumption of food from CAFO‘s)
• fried food

These foods are the top toxic offenders that if you keep consuming will keep you stuck in the energy draining cycles of yo-yo dieting, calorie counting, and illness. Their chemical makeup is such that they make you crave more and more of them, while depleting you of nutrition and energy, and make you feel artificially hungry all the time. Read my post on toxic hunger for more info on how toxic foods make you feel artificially hungry..

Eliminating these foods and replacing them with nutrient dense, easily assimilable foods, and a nourishing life will eliminate the need for being a slave of dietary dogma that says you need to eat 5-6 times a day in very specific ratios at very specific times of the day per whomever’s program you are following. This dogma fuels food obsession as it requires strict portion control, schlepping food around with you all the time, rigid discipline without long-term results, and will make you sick. You will now have the energy to enjoy your life.

ACTION #2: EDUCATE YOURSELF on how to ensure your nutritional needs are being met so your cells won’t be crying out for nourishment all the time, leaving you ready prey for the junk food that abounds. Have you ever experienced the cereal effect of eating bowl after bowl of cereal and still feeling hungry? Processed foods are anti-nutrient foods, the body doesn’t know what to do with them, and they clog up your system leading to weight imbalance and illness.

Two approaches that re-educate you how to feed yourself in indulgent and truly enjoyable ways (because when you are food addicted and sick, you are probably not having much fun) are the Paleo Diet and Natalia Rose’s approach. The Paleo approach is animal protein centric and Natalia’s approach is vegetable centric. Both approaches teach you how to eat in a way that will end your food addiction. Natalia’s approach is great for those who are curious about the connection between food and spiritual growth, and the Paleo approach is great for people who want a mainstream scientific explanation of why eliminating certain foods from their diet will eliminate food addiction behaviors. Both approaches have been reported to relieve symptoms of autoimmune and other illnesses.

Knowledge is your armor against all the temptation out there. The more consciously aware you become about how what you put in your body impacts how you feel and look, it will become that much easier to make wise choices consistently. The ticket here is consistency, not perfection. Addiction is fed by an attitude of “if I can’t do it perfectly I am not going to do it at all.” Throw that attitude out with all the cookies in your pantry if you want to succeed on your quest to health and happiness.

I encourage you to take a first step now. Go do research on these dietary approaches I mentioned, Natalia Rose and the  Paleo approach. Take it even a step further by cleaning out your pantry of grains, pasteurized low-fat cow dairy, soy, and artificially sweetened foods. There are healthy substitutes for all these things which it is now your job to fill your kitchen with.

Good Luck, let me know how it goes and contact me if you need help or have any questions.

If you are reading this, you or someone you care about is not happy with what they see when they look in the mirror. Or maybe  you are dealing with chronic illness and pain. What we put in our mouth directly translates into what we see when we look in the mirror and whether or not we have symptoms of illness. This is not to say the fat we eat = fat on our bodies, our that our cholesterol blood report numbers comes directly from the amount of cholesterol we consume. That is actually not true, but I will cover that whole debate in another post. It is only when we eat foods unfit for human consumption, that we get sick and fat.

Your ability to improve your health & change what you see in the mirror depends 100% on your ability to make wise choices about how you feed yourself. But that’s the problem, right? You can’t seem to consistently control what goes in your mouth. You are on a yo-yo diet roller coaster and you want to get off, or you want to have the willpower to say no to foods that make you sick without feeling deprived.

The Power of Visualization

If you are overweight, ill, depressed, or dismayed by what you see in the mirror it is because your unconscious mind is running a sick and/or fat program. You need to re-program your unconscious mind to run a healthy, happy, and lean program using the language of the unconscious mind: imagery. You already know that mentally brow beating yourself has not whipped you into good health or a lean body. This is because your unconscious mind has no idea what you are saying. Just as you would learn sign language if you had a deaf child, if you want to be able to communicate with your unconscious mind you must learn the art of visualization.

You also need to learn how to laugh at yourself when you notice yourself getting off track (or forgetting to do your visualizations), and to very compassionately bring yourself back to your healthy lifestyle regime. But that is the topic of another post…

On a personal note, I struggled with chronic illness for years, all the while knowing that if I could get myself to consistently follow what seemed at the time to be a radically healthy eating plan I would feel and look much better. A bodyworker friend of mind who works with people who have a wide variety of illnesses shared with me that the people who she saw make full and lasting recovery from illness all shared one thing in common: they used visualization. They used different visualization techniques, but she said the basic technique was this:

Remembering a time in their lives when they felt and looked their best, and spending quiet time every day visualizing themselves in their ideal state of health.

I know this sounds really simplistic, but once I gave up my skepticism and did what my friend suggested my behavior started shifting without me having to make so much effort. I took a large piece of cardstock, and pasted a picture out of a magazine of a really healthy and strong looking model’s body, replacing the model’s head with a decent photo of my head.  Around this ideal body I pasted inspiring clippings from magazines: various images of nature, people riding bikes with smiles on their faces, home vegetable gardens; basically anything I associated with a happy and healthy life.  I did this art project because I honestly could not think of a time when I felt really, really good. I had always felt kind of off and wanted to start this new body and life from scratch.

I did not even consciously believe it would work, I would pass by the collage that was posted in my office and scoff. It did work, however slowly, it did work. I am able to consistently keep toxic foods out of my diet, drink green vegetable juice and meditate every day, and even have a little home veggie garden sprouting up. Each one of us will have our own healthy lifestyle imagery that we will be feeding our unconscious minds. The important thing is to put the skepticism aside and get busy with your re-programming so you can start looking and feeling good.

I mentioned my collage method worked slowly. I believe it would have worked much faster had I been willing to use a tried and true visualization technique, such as the visualization/self-hypnosis techniques that are part of Jon Gabriel’s comprehensive body transformation program. Jon Gabriel’s awe-inspiring health and weight loss transformation is covered in the new movie  Hungry for Change. The health and weight loss techniques in this movie and other similarly themed movies such as Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, are now becoming much more widely accepted as the only way to permanent weight loss and a disease free life.

We are facing some real challenges when we want to be healthy and lean in a modern world. We will be bombarded with endless programming within and without that will keep us ill, overweight, and unhappy unless we start taking responsibility for our lives by:

1) Re-educating ourselves on what foods make human bodies thrive (when we eat exclusively these foods, our bodies easily achieve and maintain a lean and healthy state)

2) Re-programming our unconscious minds (which controls our bodies physiological processes & much of our behavior) to create healthy and happy bodies and minds via Visualization

In part 3 of this series, I will go over in depth what foods make our human bodies thrive and how to make them the cornerstone of your diet in fun and delicious ways. In the meantime, I really encourage you to actively begin your re-programming by either hopping on over to Jon Gabriel’s web site, or viewing Hungry for Change or Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead if you have not already.

Here’s a little visual of why I keep telling you to go to Jon’s web site. The images below speak directly to that unconscious mind of yours, if he could transform himself, you can too!

My husband whipped this up for me on one of these mornings and it kept me full for 3 hours. It is not a replacement for freshly made vegetable juice on a regular basis. But certainly better than a doughnut.

Green Juice on the Go

• Juice of 1-2 lemons (use citrus reamer)
• Stevia to taste (link to stevia)
• 1-2 scoops green powder such as AmazingGrass or Vitamineral Green
• 2-4 cups pure water depending on size of container

Put all ingredients in a bpa free to-go container, shake, and chug

This next recipe won’t keep you satisfied as long as Green Juice on the Go, but will delight kids and adults alike.

Sprite

• Juice of 1 lemon
• Juice of 1 lime
• Stevia to taste
• Water to taste to dilute the pucker inducing citrus juice, use sparkling unsweetened mineral water for a soda-like fizz

Juice lemon and lime in citrus reamer, mix in container of choice, such as a margarita glass. Add straw or umbrella & ice if it is summer-time or you are on vacation:)

Am I serving the small self or my Highest Self?

Let me explain a bit where I am coming from with this Highest Self business…I believe everyone has a unique and profound purpose for being on the planet. Each of us comes into this world with innate intuition and intelligence that guides us towards the path of living our life’s purpose. Some philosophers refer to this innate intuition and intelligence as the  Highest Self. Growing up in a modern world means you get programmed in ways that lead you  to become deaf to the voice of your Highest Self (read: violent video games, photoshoped images of drug-addicted & idolized celebrities, processed food diet, indiscriminate pharmaceutical usage).

You then develop an ego or small self to help you fit in,  “make it” in the modern world, and numb yourself to the pain of disconnection from your Truth. In the midst of all this busy-ness, your Highest Self speaks to you through what looks like dysfunctional behavior. This dysfunctional behavior takes the form for many of food addiction. Food addiction is eating when you are not physiologically hungry and/or eating foods that harm the body (anything other than whole, unprocessed foods). It does not necessarily mean that you are overweight. Maybe the sign of your food addiction is illness or chronic pain due to stuffing your emotional/spiritual pain by eating toxic foods.

The growing rates of overweight, obesity, and related disorders such as type II diabetes, depression, and chronic illness are undeniable signs of the prevalence of food addiction in our culture . Food addiction is nothing to be ashamed of. It is simply communication from your Highest Self that the way you are living is out of alignment with your intuition and intelligence. At the moment you admit to yourself that you have some (or a lot) of food addictions, you are also admitting:

You are intelligent and thus have the inherent wisdom (intuition) necessary to solve this problem and free yourself from your pain and suffering.

This is good news! Truth is so liberating. Pat yourself on the back for having the courage to read this article. Educating yourself is an incredibly important first step in freeing yourself from the bondage of addiction and ill health. So how exactly do you learn to pause before you take that first compulsive bite, and harness the power to serve your Highest Self instead of your small self? The answer to this question will be in part 2 of this series, which will be posted soon.

In the meanwhile, continue to educate yourself on nutrition.  There is SO MUCH mis-information about nutrition out there! Here are two trusted sources to begin (or to enlighten) your nutrition education:

Detox The World

The Paleo Diet

When you begin to juice, it is best to keep it the majority (75%)  of the juice mellow veggies such as lettuces, cucumbers, and celery. The remaining 25% of the juice would be a blend of anything else you want add in that has a stronger flavor (such as darker leafy greens or aromatic herbs like cilantro or basil).  Sticking to this formula will ensure the juice is not only palatable, but will also prevent discomfort in a system not yet habituated to green juice’s potent detoxifying impact.

Here are some of my favorite green juice recipes. They are vegetable based with the inclusion of non-sweet fruits such as lemons and cucumbers.

Good Beginner’s Juice (serves 1)

very mellow and mildly salty from the natural salt (electrolytes) in the celery

• 1 head organic celery (conventional celery is very bitter and pesticide laden)
• 1-2 organic cucmbers (peel if not organic)
• 1 head romaine
  • optional add ins: 1 bunch basil, parsley, or cilantro for a savory gourmet nutritional kick in the pants

Fennel, Bok Choy, Carrot (serves 1)

• 1 lb long stemmed carrots (with stems removed, I find them too bitter)
• 1-2 bunches baby bok choy
• 1 fennel bulb (fronds removed for some types of sensitive juicers)

optional add ins:

• 1/2 half lemon
• 1 teeny bit of unpeeled ginger
• couple of drops liquid stevia
• dash of nutmeg and cinnamon

Enter green juice. Freshly made green vegetable juices are superior even to green smoothies, especially for those with digestive impairment. The body does not have to put any effort into breaking down the cellulose. Nutrition is much more concentrated in a freshly made green vegetable juice simply because way, way more produce goes into make a 16 ounce green juice than a 32 oz green smoothie. The nutrients in the green veggie juice go straight to the blood stream giving one an undeniable sense of well being from head to toe.

Once I get people pumped up on the idea of drinking green juice, I often get asked to recommend a juicer. I just purchased my 3rd and favorite juicer:

The Breville BJE510XL Ikon 900-Watt Variable-Speed Juice Extractor

Note: they are out of stock at amazon.com and the breville web site , but I got mine off the shelf at my local Williams Sonoma

My first juicer was a very expensive and monumentally proportioned Green StarGP E1503 Green Powder Gold Juicer. This green veggie gobblin’ laby took up half my galley kitchen countertop space and was a nightmare to clean.  I sold it at a big discount to a happy soul on craigslist and bought a heavy duty version of the infamous Hurom , the Omega VRT 350. The Omega VRT 350 has been my juicer of choice for 18 months or so, but as my juice consumption has risen greatly in the past few months I have felt the need for greater speed and ease in my juicing experience.

Using the Omega VRT 350 it takes me 1.5 hours to make 2.5 quarts (80 ounces) of veggie juice. This includes washing and chopping the produce, cleaning the juicer, and tidying up the kitchen after the juicing is done. It took me HALF the amount of time to make the same amount of juice in the Breville Ikon: 45 minutes from start to finish including clean up. Other Breville Ikon pros:

• juice consistency was much better than the Omega VRT 350. Omega has major pulp problems, you have to strain the juice for a smooth consistently.
• much less foam than the Omega VRT 350
• massive chute = time savings due to almost no pre-chopping & ability to put entire medium celery heart through juicer all at once.
• higher yield of juice from producer than with any of my other juicers = cost & time savings
• gigantic pulp container

Cons of Breville Ikon:

• MUCH louder than the Omega VRT 350 (think vacuum cleaner level noise).
• Juices much faster & hotter,  thus juice oxidizes more readily than Omega VRT 350.
• You have to change the speed for different types of produce, which is not a big deal once you get a hang of it. There is similar learning curve for any juicer.

I always tell people, the best juicer is the one you will use most often. If your juicer makes the world’s highest quality juice , but is a pain to clean or put together, it is much more likely to gather dust in storage. The point is to get the green juice in your body so it can work its magical healing powers.

I have been known to make juice regularly in my vita-mix. I simply blend the veggies of choices at the lowest possible speed with the minimum amount of water needed to get the mixture going. I blend until halfway to a green smoothie consistency, and pour through a nut mylk bag into a large container (such as a soup pot with easy pour rim so there is no spill over). There are great videos of  how to do this on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dth23aMkH_Y

In my next post I will list some of my favorite juice recipes.

To substitute alternative sweeteners in my recipes that call for agave, simple use a combination of dried fruit blended into a paste with a teeny bit of water, and a few drops of stevia. I have used 4 to 6 figs or 4 large pitted dates plus 10 drops liquid stevia in my blueberry muffin recipe. This recipe originally called for 1/3 c. of agave. I have used the same amount of dried fruit/stevia to replace up to 1/2 c. of agave in a cookie recipe and it turned out fantastic as well. I got the idea to use a mix of very small amount of dried fruit and liquid stevia in place of agave from  Elana of Elana’s Pantry, who has several recipes using this sweetener combo that look fabulous. Yes, dried fruit has more carbs and is higher glycemic than fresh fruit. However, the amount used in this muffin recipe. for example, turned out to a very small amount of carbohydrate per muffin and adds the perfect amount of sweetness in my humble opinion.

Here is the link:

Food Addiction Article Series