It is my mission here at Daniela’s Kitchen to empower people to let go of their suffering (extra weight, food allergies, chronic illness, food addiction) and replace their old habits with empowering and enjoyable new ways of feeding themselves on all levels: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

I was once a hopeless food addict and chronically ill lady. I’ve been a student of alternative  healing since 1999 when I embarked upon my quest to release the 60+ extra pounds of waste, negativity, dis-empowerment, and dis-ease I was carrying on my body. My quest led me to Overeaters Anonymous, various forms of psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, breath work, homeopathy, raw foodism, the natural hygiene movement, nature, and shamanism.

It also brought to the light hidden food allergies, and a myriad of other diagnosis I no longer identify with: lyme’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, arthritis, hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, PCOS, Irritable bowl, and the list goes on. These diagnoses now have no power over me as long as I live my life by the following mantra:

Cleanse, Breathe, Move, Love.

I have found healing to be as simple as bringing myself back to this mantra time and time again.

I’ve tried all the diets, gadgets, supplements, and exercise regimes. I’ve made all the mistakes and taken all the detours so you don’t have to! I’ve discovered the path to health and permanent weight loss can be paved with ease and grace. It does not need to be wrought with pain or deprivation.

I coach clients who want to detox and lose weight in person, over the phone, or via webcam. I offer a free 15 minute  consult to anyone interested in working with me to make sure I am a good fit for your needs. Contact Me to set up your initial consultation.

One of Mark’s recommended sites is Paleo/Non-Paleo. The author of this site is a woman named Alison who makes the gluten free/grain free/autoimmune diet sound very doable for the average person–especially if those around them aren’t familiar or support of the diet. I highly recommend her post “27 Ways to Life with Your Non-Paleo Spouse” and her summary of the gluten free and paleo Autoimmune Protocol.

I will be visiting Alison’s sites regularly as I am always looking to stay inspired and upgrade my lifestyle choices.

• The energy, strength, and endurance it gives me
• The way it makes my cells dance and tingle (especially when there is ginger in the juice)
• The way it makes me want to do a happy dancer when I drink it
• How light and bouncy I feel during the day, instead of bogged down by heavier food
• The beauty of the variety of produce in my shopping cart, refrigerator, and  on my kitchen counter
• Endless variety of flavor and health promoting juice combinations
• My commitment to juicing encourages me to get to my local farmer’s markets where the BEST tasting produce is to be found
• My juice habit has refined my tastes buds to crave less sweets and salt
•  I appreciate and enjoy the natural flavor of unadulterated produce much more
• When I drink green juice daily I effortlessly maintain a lean body
• My daily juicing habit makes my skin glow and my hair thicker

I could go on and on. If this list doesn’t inspire you to start veggie juicing, here is a simple descriptive article on why you would benefit from Getting Your Juice On! from the folks at Cleanse America.

 I am thrilled to offer you what I believe is the simplest, most delicious, and sustainable Detox program out there: The Down to Earth Detox Program

There will be a free informational tele-class offered this Saturday, June 30th at 10AM PST. If you can’t make the time, a recording will be available for registrants..

The call will give you a clear sense of what a day in the life of a Down to Earth Detoxer is like, leaving you confident that this is a program that you can sustain long-term.  As with all the calls on the program, this prep tele-class will include time for live Q & A. Contact me to register for this free, no strings attached teleclass.

Even if you are sure you aren’t going to register for the program, this is an amazing opportunity to learn about what living a detox-oriented lifestyle entails. 

UPDATE 7/29/12: We’ve had to postpone the tele-class and detox program dates due to a scheduling conflict. However, I would like to offer a free 30 minute detox kick-start session to all my readers who are interested in applying  simple, sustainable, and delicious detox methods into their lifestyle. Contact me for details before July 7th to take advantage of this special offer.

Detox Talk & Green Veggie Juice @ Calafia Cafe + Stanford Cactus Garden Walk

This meetup is in response to several requests from my meetup group members for a talk on cleansing and detoxification. You will get a breakfast of the champions, education, and exercise all in one.

What: I will be giving a 20 minute talk with group member & Holistic Health Coach Kate Crawford on:

“The Top 5 Detox Mistakes: How to Stop the Yo-Yo Detox-to-Retox Cycle”

Free handouts included via email for reference to attendees.
For more info about Kate, see her web site Clover Holistics

After the talk: 60-75 minute walk across the street around Stanford’s gorgeous grounds. We’ll be sure to stop at the rarely visited & fascinating Cactus Garden. Get your questions from the talk answered. (optional)

Where: We are going to meet @ Calafia Cafe in the Town and Country Shopping Center. They are one of the very few places that makes fresh green vegetable juice on the Peninsula. They also have smoothies and other yummy, healthy fare available. Meet at the deli/bakery counter at 9am to place your order. We will get seated for the talk @ 9:15am.

We will then walk across the street to Stanford, leaving our cars parked at Town and Country

Schedule:

• 9:00a-10:00a: Juice Drinking & Informal Talk (includes time to order juice and visit bathroom b/f walk).
• 10:00a-11:15a: Walk @ Stanford (optional)

To register, you will need to join the Cleanse + Detox Hike meetup group or contact me directly: dmagozzi [at] gmail dot com

It is about the inspirational, over the top life of  M.D., homeopath, and trapeze artist Toni Bark. Dr. Bark is 52 years old and exudes mojo and vitality.  She drinks green veggie juice, hip hop dances, has opened her home permanently to a teenage Haitian refugee, and still has time for her homeopathic medicine patients!

Why you should read this article: 

• Dr. Bark totally busts the myth that women who are givers are programmed to be crabby, run-down, self-sacrificial martyrs. It is clear her ability to give comes from making joyful activity and adventure a necessity and priority.
• Dr. Bark gives priceless tips for aging beautifully and gracefully– from a balanced perspective. She is not all about Patchouli and rabbit food. She advocates common sense, delicious, and do-able tips.
• Fascinating natural skin care tips with ingredients from the kitchen
• It is ridiculously empowering. We all need role models, and people who walk their talk to this level are rare finds in mainstream media.
• Amazing recipes, that are all gluten and grain free!
• The message of a healthy, balanced, non-obsessive relationship with food as “non-negotiable.” I couldn’t agree more!

So What about the Nut Butter?

Dr. Bark talks up the nutrient and energy boost she gets from nuts and seeds in her mostly vegan and high-raw diet (she still drinks wine and eats some fish). She’s a big fan of good fats, like me:).

In honor of Dr. Bark’s inspirational article, I thought I’d share this over the top delicious recipe. I am a loyal fan of almond milk, but believe variety is the spice of life and decided to give this a whirl. It is creamy and so good as the base of a lighter version of my chia seed ice pudding in place of the cashews and coconut oil:

Macadamia Nut Milk Recipe:

• 1 T. Macadamia Nut Butter
• 1 cup water

Method

• Place water and nut butter in blender. Blend on high for 90 seconds in standard blender, or 60 seconds in a high-powered blender (such as a Vita-Mix).
• Place in tightly sealed glass mason jar in the fridge for up to 3 days.
• I usually make 4 cups of nut milk at a time, using the ratio of 1 Tablespoon nut butter : 1 cup water

I’d love to know: who are some of your role models? Who do you want to be like when you are 52, or 92, and why?

I know that as I age I want my life to feel like a dance , to embrace my sun-”damaged” skin, and to have a glow that comes from exuding unconditional love from within.

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 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!