What could be more fashionable than consuming healthy fare? Not only do we feel better, but we also look better when we eat cleaner. Our skin glows, our hair shines, our body performs at its peak and our mood tends to be both happier and better-adjusted. It’s downright sexy to see a woman or man eating a 'real', clean, life-enhancing meal; the way food was meant to be. I don’t mean rabbit food either - Eddie Murphy joked about “salad eatin’ bitches” and how he hated when a woman coyly ordered only a salad for dinner. My joke of preference is, “I may be small, but I pack a powerful lunch.”
The first question people ask me when we meet is, “Do you ever eat a burger?” My reply? “Hell yeah! I’m the meat-eating, 0 blood type cavewoman, and damn proud of it!” We 0’s are tough as nails and fight disease better than any others. Because of my caveman-roots, I need to eat a lot of food. So I have, out of necessity, created a ‘clean food’ protocol that fits my needs and desires to be beautiful from the inside out. Make no mistake about it, toxic foods affect and penetrate not only superficial beauty that people can see (such as skin eruptions… pimples), discolored/dull skin tones, added adipose or cellulite and fine/splitting hair), but may also be felt in the mind – this is commonly described as ‘brain fog’.
I lecture to yoga teachers about the importance of being mindful – i.e., what they feed their bodies, minds and spirits. I feel it is truly our responsibility to teach and be of service from an intuitive and connected place, both physically and spiritually. It is not so easy to connect with clear inner qui/energy that proceeds to resonate within our students when we are polluting our bodies with caffeine, alcohol, and chemicals found in so many of the foods we eat. Because I need to simultaneously be intuitively, mentally, and physically on my A-game for people with whom I share the health, I follow these protocols:
-Eat seasonally-correct; do not consume tropical fruit in the middle of winter.
-Avoid any foods or substances such as wheat/ gluten, dairy and refined sugars that can cause brain fog and all manner of mental stress such as ADD, depression, anxiety and/or inflammation. These foods also create stagnation in the lymphatics and in blood flow to the brain, which causes more unclear thinking.
-Ditch all sugar-free or chemically-laden foods, as these are neurotoxins. This includes sugar-free/diet soda and gum!
-Eat right for my type: we are all as unique as our fingerprints and there is no ‘one size fits all’ diet, so I follow how I feel and I suggest my clients do as well. I have a keen sense of myself and my needs. In the winter I eat more soups and stews, and less salad. Think more warming herbs, such as turmeric, ginger and cayenne. For summer, I can go with more raw fruits and veggies, like from the farmers’ markets.
-Greens, greens and more greens! I eat some kind of alkalinizing green with almost every meal, and I’ve been known to bring my own bag of arugula to a breakfast place to have fresh greens with my eggs. I have had people look over and say, “I’ll have what she’s having!”
-Always eat organically, seasonally and grass-fed when possible.
The biggest problem I face when readjusting my clients’ food protocol is that in our culture, food is a very social event. It is also the number one addiction in our country. Most meetings, parties and social gatherings of all varieties are focused on food. One only needs to look at popular television shows to see that people who are whipping up interesting, eclectic and culturally enlightening food are hot and the limited world of pizzas, pasta, hot wings and fries are not. There is no excuse for a closed up food-mentality these days with foodies like Zimmerman, Bourdain and Lakshmi as the Channel, Laurent and Versace of food: they are creative in their collective endeavors towards making food a worldly obsession. Even though it’s not always about health, it certainly takes us back to what food was meant to be before mass processing, chemicals and fast food came in to play.