On Cleansing, D#0

A Hindu Scholar named Swami Adiswarananda once said that we must renounce what we've been doing for something that feels better. None of us renounces what feels good for something that feels worse.

His words frame my entry into the official start of our Gottfried Cleanse tomorrow, which is designed to balance your hormones and reduce your toxic load. You can join us via webinar at any time up to March 30. 2011 by clicking right here. I am going to post daily, Monday-Friday, on what is happening while I cleanse for the next 21 days: what comes up, what I'm working with, what about my relationship to food (and self-realization) is shifting, what I'm learning as I transcend the desire for food that makes me ill.

Today I asked our cleansers to start with an inventory of their relationship to food. Here are some questions to consider (please let us know your responses in our comments section!):

• POWER What makes you feel most powerful when reviewing how you eat and your relationship to food? When do you shine with food; what best serves you?
• HARM What is chronic, charged, repetitively not serving you in how you feed yourself?
• STOP What would you like to stop eating or doing with food? Examples: eating standing up, eating in the car while speeding to school to get your kids there on time, drinking 2 glasses of wine when 1 would have been fine.
• FEEL How do you want to feel with food?

Meanwhile, we talked about many fun and practical things that I wanted to share, for instance:

• For getting off caffeine over the next 7 days, meet or re-introduce yourself to the many detoxifying benefits of skin brushing. One cleanser from Oregon tells me there's no Whole Foods Market near her, so could I help a girlfriend out and give a link to where to obtain one. Here you go. Today on our webinar, I demonstrated how to dry skin brush, but my tiny little video didn't quite do it justice - so here's another video on it.
• Eat lotsa greens! Here's a favorite recipe from an old post on massaged greens. Share other fave recipes in our comments section!
• Breakfast ideas. When I'm cleansing, I eat 1 oz dry of quinoa flakes or gluten-free oats (when "wet" they usually weigh 5-6 oz) with 6oz of berries, 10 almonds and 2-3T of flax seeds. I add 2 poached eggs.
• There are significant risks from eating off food cooked on teflon-coated pans. Much better alternative: Scan Pan. Here's a link to scan pans at Sur La Table.

Some come back and join the dialogue as we transform your relationship to food, which I believe is foundational to both hormone organization and self-realization!