© Joop Kleuskens | Dreamstime.com

1. You have a difficult relationship with food, struggle with body image, are often consumed by it, you find it taking up too much space in your life. Understanding: food as nourishment, food choices and how the mind-body makes these decisions offers a path out of the compulsion and confusion.

2. You have metabolic syndrome, T2 diabetes, cardiovascular problems or high blood pressure. New ways of looking at nutrition and self-nourishing without compromising taste or ease can safely be a part of your health giving eating plan and help turn these issues around.

3. You suffer with anxiety. Anxiety has many roots, nutritional imbalances can be the cause of years of anxious fearful feelings that when corrected bring lasting predictable relief.

4. Your child or teenager has issues with food, eating healthy, weight gain or weight loss. Disordered eating patterns can begin early in life, with an emphasis on health at every size and nourishing education the nutritional needs of teens can be met -without dieting.

5. You need to gain or lose weight. Considering weight as only one marker in a health profile, changes can be made to find peace with food while understanding of the role nutrition plays to ease into weight balance.

6. You have an aging parent or loved one needs your help. Nutritional changes for the golden years can be easily implemented as specific needs and tastes are uncovered and understood.

7. You feel surrounded by temptations and unable to curb the running food thoughts in your head. Come home to the realization that it is not “all in your head” and uncover the trigger substances that cause your mind and body to become chemically altered and driven into craving.

8. You have struggled with addictions. Self nourishment is paramount in recovery from any addiction. Clear understanding of nutrition’s role in healing and how it chemically sets up brain chemistry offers an easier and well rounded path to recovery.

9. You feel confused by all the nutritional advice and labels. Eating well can be easily demystified with clear nutritional education and a basic understanding of your personal needs and goals.

10. You want Inspiration, Motivation and Guidance. Lasting changes are made with your willingness and desire for more and better life. Let me inspire, motivate and guide you as you journey to your best health and wellness yet!

Scroll down for the latest posts or check out the categories to the right to browse by subject.

Leave a comment below or by email, I love your feedback!

Aloha, Gina

Pleasure! Yesssss!

And no -seems it would be bliss but as the sign to the left states to devote our life to pleasure is less than pleasuring.

The seeking of pleasure is seen clearly in our culture around eating. I am the first to practice and teach that eating is a pleasurable activity and it adds much to our lives day in and day out. Actually with out the pleasure and desire for certain foods and tastes we would not have evolved to where we are today.

It was the non-edible and rotten foods that made our palate revolt and spit it right back out to where it came from. We desired, enjoyed and  found pleasure in the foods our body’s thrived on. Consider the sweetness and heavy on fat found in mothers milk the perfect taste for the baby -perfect pleasurable taste.

So where on earth has this gone wrong? If following our pleasure tastes has kept us alive, growing and thriving for all this time why is it now killing us with obesity, coronary artery disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes (metabolic syndrome)?

Lets look at what else, in the timeline of evolution, might have changed right along with our pleasure seeking going haywire in our brains (we used to actually stop eating because we had the hormonal signal to stop and we also did not ingest foods that were actually drug like causing us changes in brain chemistry that would have us jonesing for  food like it was a drug.)

Dr Loren Cordain (professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University) has done a beautiful visual using a football field (100 yards) as a timeline for the evolution of modern humans. (There is a lot that goes on in the 99 and 1/2 yards but that is not the focus of this post.) When we travel to the final 1/2 yard of the entire football field of evolution, Dr Cordain explains, we finally see grains, dairy, and legumes being consumed regularly with the onset of the agricultural revolution. Interesting but not the end of the story!

Lets travel now to the last 1/5 of the last inch of the field,  let me say that again, because its a teeny tiny measurement we are talking about here, the last 1/5 of the last inch to the start of the industrial revolution, to finally see where processed foods become a regular staple of the diet. Now we are talking super recent!

The evolution of even eating grains, dairy, and legumes is still in it’s infancy and we come along and start processing the foods we don’t even have down pat yet.

Here is where we have a huge glitch, we are eating drugs (processed, refined, food-like substances that cause drug like chemical and hormonal actions and reactions) and calling it food. Interestingly most people are completely unaware of this and consider anything in the store edible.

We can no longer devote our taste buds to pleasure, as we have seen in this grand digestible experiment, it is absolutely less than pleasuring!

Maybe now it’s time for an “evolution revolution”…using our brains, all those yards of evolution that cultivated the amazing thinking brains we have today, to say “no” to anything short of real, nourishing and evolutionary food so we can continue to evolve.

Aloha!

You! Yes  that’s right you are the best nutrition expert when it comes to your own body! This is really the best work we can do as healers is to teach others how to listen to, really hear and respond to the messages their body is sending.

What I see people struggle with is the notion that something from outside themselves holds the key to their healing. Of course there are times when this is not only true but it is the best medicine in the moment. Although we need help from the outside now and then what we have done is to give all our healing power away and look only to the outside world for our answers to health and wellness.

Nutrition is a powerful example. As a nutritionist I get to hear of all the latest and the greatest diets, healing super-foods and miracle promising supplements on a regular basis. As a woman who is of a “certain age” I can tell you I have seen way too many latest and greatest diets, healing super-foods and miracle promising supplements come in like a lion only to be barely baa baa-ing like a little lamb in a year or so. The promise is great and the sales letters and advertisements make us drool with the possibilities of finally being saved from ….ourselves.

The real promise is this: You have the power to know your body well enough to know what you need, when you need it and how to get it! Really you do. Yes it takes time to hone the skills and yes it takes practice but what the largest ingredient in this recipe for health is is awareness. We have to be awake and aware of how we are feeling physically, mentally and spiritually to be able to touch in on the wellspring of knowledge we hold inside.

Just for today why not take a moment and use that moment to get in touch with your self. Here is a great video to get you started (its a 5min video but you will only need to watch it once, I promise) I love the idea of a minute being a moment with handles on it. So here is a short video on using a minute, 60 seconds, a moment with handles for you to be with you. How else can you hear what you need if you haven’t spent any time with you?

Make it a fun moment….I bet you’ll enjoy it!

As the calendar year 2012 comes to a close thoughts of resolutions, goals and New Year plans fill the air. While we all hope to have direction and achieve our goals in the upcoming days that will make up the year ahead one thing stands out for me …Love.

I’ll let Rick Hanson PhD the author of many books on the brain, including Buddha’s Brain, say it in this video I received just this morning.

May You Love~

Happy New You 2013 and Aloha!

Let’s not let these articles get buried and ignored!

Interesting article published in the Internal Medicine Journal looking at sugar, cardiovascular disease, addiction and evidence for a sugar addiction syndrome.

Sugar restriction: the evidence for a drug-free intervention to reduce cardiovascular disease risk

Check out the entire article here:  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1445-5994.2012.02902.x/full

Here is the conclusion for those who are busy Although it really is worth the time to read!

“Conclusion

What do we conclude from this survey of the evidence? First, sugar intakes have increased substantially against a nutritional backdrop that has focused on reducing fat intake and salt to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Second, excess intake of fructose, due to the accumulating, consistent epidemiological evidence of links with risk factors for cardiovascular disease, suggests that substantial health gains will result from limiting intakes. Third, from the parallels among drugs of abuse, overeating and carbohydrate addiction, we speculate that many patients will find it difficult to limit their intake of sugar due to stimulation of reward pathways in the brain, and the experience of unpleasant withdrawal symptoms that accompany attempts to restrict intake.

The American Heart Association has published guidelines that suggested limiting intake of sugar to no more than six teaspoons per day for women and nine for men.[6] From food disappearance data, average daily sugar consumption is between 30 and 40 teaspoons per day in English-speaking countries, such as the UK, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The implications of the advice are enormous: most adults should reduce their intake by between 1/6 and 1/3 of their current consumption. As we have shown, the largest source of added sugar in the United States comes in liquid form, either from soft drinks and fruit juice which may be overlooked by patients.

One of the authors (RT) has considerable experience of advising patients how to cut down their intake of sugar. He suggests making patients aware of their intake by translating weight (grams), which is often reported on the nutrition panels on manufactured foods, into teaspoons. Four grams of sugar is about 1 teaspoon. When patients understand how many teaspoons are in commonly consumed food portions, they are often surprised. Many people are taken aback when the sugar content of soft drink, fruit juice, breakfast cereals and seemingly healthy sweetened yogurts is revealed. For the clinician advising people to cut down their intake of sugar, we recommend first advice about how to reduce intake of added sugar. This includes fruit juice, soft drink, cordials, sweetened yoghurts and breakfast cereals, as well as the better understood sources in chocolate, sweets, desserts, cakes and biscuits.

From the published evidence of a likely sugar withdrawal syndrome, we also suggest warning patients that they are likely to suffer withdrawal symptoms when they attempt to restrict their sugar intake. Such symptoms are likely to include irritability, loss of concentration, hunger, craving for sugar and restlessness. Cues left around the house, such as the presence of available sugary foods, arelikely to prompt consumption especially in the early phases (<1 month) of restriction. We, therefore, suggest removing sugary foods from the house and work environment, reducing the chance that the patient’s resolve to forego sugar will be broken.

This paper suggests a deviation from widely accepted practice for many cardiologists, general physicians and family doctors concerned with reducing the CVD risk of the patient that they have before them. Rather than reaching for the prescription pad, we suggest a brief conversation about the perils of a high-sugar diet and practical advice about how to cut down.”

Sweet Huh!

This is a must watch as I have seen people who I know to be savvy and in the know on health and wellness issues still go forth and use the Statin drugs and suffer the consequences. Please do yourself a favor and watch this well done Documentary on the Cholesterol Hypothesis (myth in my humble opinion). I leave the rest to the movie!

PS Mahalo to you Jimmy Moore of Livin La Vida Low Carb for sharing such important work.

Julia Child remix. How delicious!

In case you missed Dr Robert Lustig on 60 Minutes earlier this year here it is:

Yet again a calorie is NOT a calorie! Now that they are using the Cancer word, maybe, just maybe people will begin to listen. Even though it is heart disease not cancer that is killing us faster. Here’s a fact on women and Cardiovascular Disease:

 

The facts are both startling and alarming. Heart
disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular
diseases (CVD) are the No. 1 cause of death in
American women, claiming almost 420,000
lives each year, or nearly one death each
minute. CVD kills more women than the next
three causes of death combined, including all
forms of cancer.

From the American Heart Association Fact sheet: Cardiovascular Disease: Women’s No. 1 Health Threat.

Penny for your thoughts

What is “The Perfect Diet” for me?…

A question asked more times than I can count. The answer is less important than the question. Our quest for perfection and our need to be right have taken over the food supply. While externalizing the body’s needs and deferring to the “experts” be they nutritionists, doctors, diet books or trainers has become a new epidemic. I think we lost more than nutritional values when we stopped passing down our dietary know how from generation to generation, we lost our way as ever evolving human beings. We became perfectionists.

This drive to be perfect with food choices and meals has driven many to total distraction. The over thinking and under feeling what and when to eat is epidemic. Dietary Perfection has become fashionable, the problem is perfection is not attainable. When confronted with this most will say yes of course I “know” that yet they continue to strive for the very thing they can never reach. The punishment is violent yet the prison door is wide open.

Today I read a wonderful post at TaraBrach.com titled

Imperfection Is Not Our Personal Problem

In the post she quotes Chogyam Trungpa:

“The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”

The ego loves to convert the basic everyday act of eating, fueling the physical body for surviving and thriving into a war-zone of good vs evil. This is not only for the purists of veganism, vegetarianism, paleo, or the current diet guru but also the junk foodie who swears to start the perfect diet on Monday. The ego and it’s over thinking and desire for control has us believing it is our duty to pursue the perfect diet.

What if we could come to accept the imperfection of life? Imagine the rest, relaxation and deep breath you could have if you could feel the ease of not having to change yourself to belong to your world. Imagine being at peace with yourself right here, right now. How much more life force and energy would you have available to yourself, your family and community?

How much better could you actually digest, sleep, play, love and work without the relentless voice calling for “faster”, “better”, “more” in your head?

Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being

“without anxiety about imperfection.”

Eating is a constant reminder of where we are emotionally. Perhaps you will try a meal without anxiety over the perfect macro or micro-nutrient value. Or accept yourself for having more weight on your frame this year than last. Maybe you can let your body be your guide…eating when hungry, stopping when full and getting to know your self and your needs a little more intimately. All with curiosity and a dash of humor.

Letting go of the savior of the perfect diet (that may or may not be started in the Monday) puts more value on the here and now the plate right in front of us. When given this space of now, over time your body can and will let you know what is needed.

Bon Appetit!