As a journalist, you get to meet people from all walks of life. Over the years I’ve met some wonderful souls, been welcomed into people’s lives in the name of a story, learned many things and questioned much.
In the 15 years I’ve been doing this, there have been a few incredible people who have, just by their very nature, etched their message into my heart—some, albeit few, have even influenced me to change my life.
Once such interview was about five years ago: “Come along and meet this guy, he’s amazing,” the publicist promised. She was talking about Don Tolman, a guy from Utah known fondly by many as the Indiana Jones of Wholefoods. I’d never heard of him, or his message.
His message, I soon learned, is simple: live with nature, by nature and from nature. Understand what foods benefit particular body functions and eat them. Stop putting chemical pills and potions into your mouth. Drink fresh spring water. Stop brushing your teeth with fluoride. Listen to your great grandmother and use her natural remedies. Know that your body’s symptoms are your body’s cures. Eating meat causes putrification and dis-ease. Question everything.
A 30-minute meeting with the Stetson-wearing cowboy felt like five minutes. His message spoke directly to me, as if what he was saying I already knew on some deep level. I’d already been following some of his recommendations, purely on instinct, such as never taking a pill to relieve a headache or antibiotics to fix an ill, and no longer eating red meat.
If you haven’t had a chance to hear Don Tolman speak, below is an interview he did with Samantha Backman. I hope you enjoy hearing his message, as much as I always do.
Why it’s great: Packed with a gold mine of information that will change the way you look at your body and the food you put in it, forever. Tolman also talks about how every wholefood has a signature that corresponds to parts of the body, such as an avocado, which looks like a pregnant woman and takes nine months from blossom to ripened fruit. If a woman eats just one avocado per week, she is helping prevent cervical cancer.
Who’s watching it: Health care professionals, university lecturers and doctors who are realising the Western way of healing with pharmaceuticals doesn’t work. Also anyone who is interested in honest-to-goodness nutrition and how it greatly improves life through diet and exercise.
What you’ll learn: How your body actually works, why disease is not a mystery and how wholefoods, water, sunshine and clean air can prevent just about any disease.
Want to know more? See www.dontolmaninternational.com
Photo by Wheeloflife.tv
Have you ever been stressed and not realised it? Caught in a constant cycle of doing more, wanting more, achieving more? If you’re not sure, take a minute to focus on your body. Are your shoulders tense? Is your breath shallow? Is your stomach in knots?
Just as eating a healthy vegan diet is important, so too is looking after your mental and emotional state. The two go hand-in-hand to create a balance that will serve you well into old age. One without the other creates ailments, illness and dis-ease.
There’s something magical about just stopping and doing absolutely nothing. The “nothingness” might be reading a book, watching a funny movie, or simply sitting in silence and meditating. The key to doing nothing is to release any guilt that might arise from not sticking to your usual routine. The Tao Te Ching is a 2,500 year old book, written by Lao Tzu, that speaks of just this. Do nothing and you’ll actually achieve more. One of my favourite translations of this ancient text is by Dr Wayne Dyer: Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao
Simply looking to nature shows by doing nothing, so much is accomplished. An animal, regardless of its species, doesn’t have a to-do list. It just does. It follows the flow with trust and without question, knowing that everything is in perfect order—and it is.
Neurophysiologist and owner of Jubb’s Longevity, David Jubb, says rest is integral to achieving and maintaining complete cellular health.
“Rest allows one to regain nervous system energy potential,” he says in Jubb’s Cell Rejuvenation: Colloidal Biology: A Symbiosis
In the fast pace world we live in, it’s often difficult to find the time to just stop and take a check of our emotional and mental state. But getting in the practise can not only bring greater joy to your life, but also prevent the onset of illness and dis-ease. Doing nothing at some point every single day can bring you closer to your true self and closer to source, or God.
Here are my top 5 ways to relax…
1. The morning is the perfect time to meditate. The day is fresh and so are our minds. When sitting in silence to meditate is challenging, I reach for my iPod and select a guided meditation by Kelly Howell
2. Walking in nature. Getting away from the concrete jungle if you live and work in a city environment is crucial. Putting your feet into the sand or grass not only feels great, it also connects us to the living, breathing earth and is literally very grounding.
3. Spending time in the kitchen. Food is much more than something to stop hunger. While the art of at-home food preparation has been greatly lost with food-to-go and frozen meals in a box, taking the time to connect to our food, through conscious preparation can do wonders for mental, emotional and physical health. It’s also a great way to forget about everything and focus on creating works of vegan food art.
4. Having a Reiki session. Reiki connects us directly to life force energy, through the hands of the practitioner who shares it. Reiki not only puts us in a relaxed, meditative state, but it also allows the receiver to work through particular issues they may have to restore physical and emotional wellbeing. A qualified Reiki Master can also teach and attune you to this energetic healing modality, so you can give yourself the gift of Reiki energy whenever you need it.
5. Taking a candle-lit bath. Breaking out the lavender oil, soy candles and playing some chilled tunes is a great way to de-stress. To clear your mind while you’re soaking, concentrate on your breathing. Be sure not to load your tub up with toxic bubbles, instead, pop in a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin coconut oil to give your skin a moisture infusion. Be sure not to slip when getting out! Also, as many city municipal water supplies are polluted with flouride, chlorine and the like, it’s best to have your home plumbing fitted with a reverse osmosis filtration system.
Photo courtesy of Richard Stowey
I started getting a few gray hairs in my late 20s. While it bothered me a little at first, these days, I’m a little less fussed. A little character never hurt anyone right?
Raw food pioneer Ann Wigmore says she rid her silvers by regularly drinking wheat grass juice. While I’m yet to do my own experiment with Ann’s findings, I have worked out a natural quick fix that turns my grays to a natural shade of light brown—particularly useful when I’m in between (organic) colour touch ups.
Organic black tea, in bags, is a great way to add some (brown) colour back to grays, even if it’s just for the day or until you next wash your hair.
So, here’s how you do it: once you’ve washed and towel dried your hair, simply pour a very small amount of warm water into a small bowl, dip in your organic (black) bag of tea and dab, dab, dab. Dry as usual. The less water you use, the stronger and more effective the tea will be.
While I’m not promising it will take away every gray hair on your head, it can definitely be a Godsend when you need a quick beauty pick me up or have a last minute job interview to go to.
That’s it! If you know of other vegan friendly, gray hair quick fixes from nature, feel free to share in the comments.
Photo courtesy: House Of Sims
Each time I visit the supermarket, especially the big chains, I remind myself that every product I buy is an endorsement for that particular brand, the company’s values (or lack thereof) and the quality of food inside the packaging.
I’m often amazed that much of the produce on the shelves (in NZ) is shipped in from China, the US and beyond. Most of these are gassed or treated in some way to stop vegetables from sprouting, fruit from spoiling etc. So customers are not only buying pesticides with their “food”, but also other chemicals used to preserve the produce for the boat ride across the big blue. Of these chemical-laden loads, one only then has to wonder which ones were born in a laboratory … nutrient-deficient genetically modified imposters. Wannabe apples, if you will.
But the great news is, the more people who buy organic, locally-grown produce, the more supply there will be. Additionally, the more people who choose to eat this way, the less dis-ease there will be. Whether we consumers want to believe it or not, we can turn things around, every time we line up at the register. Every beep of the scanner is a vote.
Buying food as nature intended may hurt the hip pocket more than the mutant kinds that currently fill many supermarket shelves, but the vibrant health that can result from eating healthily means fewer doctors appointments and hospital visits in the long run. It’s also a beautiful way to contribute to the restoration of the planet. It’s a win-win for all.
Before I became vegan, I didn’t really give much thought as to what was organic and what wasn’t. Fast forward a couple of years and I won’t eat anything else. I know it’s the best thing for my own health and the health of the planet (not to mention the farmers who aren’t spraying toxic chemicals).
Since leaving the US, I’ve been astounded at how tricky it is to buy organics. Big chain supermarkets in New Zealand only offer a very limited selection — hardly enough to fill a dinner plate. I won’t even talk about how astronomically expensive they are.
So the question remains, how do we bring real, affordable organics to the masses while keeping the big corporations honest? It’s the big businesses that threaten the future of organics, because they come at it from a money-making point of view—not from what’s best for the consumer. Get it out quick at as little cost as possible to them. If it looks like an apple, it’ll sell as an apple. Who cares what the nutrient content is.
Science has helped these corporations meddle with nature, with genetically modified produce on supermarket shelves just about everywhere. Studies have shown such meddling is at a huge cost to human health. Big corp organics could be mutant potatoes that resist anything nature throws at it. It may have grown without pesticides and without a scratch, but it won’t mean it’s healthy to eat.
Organic Nation TV caught up with The Environmental Working Group’s President Ken Cook (see video below) to chat about the potential issue of big corporations hijacking organics, threatening its quality and the current standards.
Host Dorothee Royal-Hedinger asked Ken to talk about the anxiety some consumers and activists feel about the trend of big corporations taking over organic brands as well as the tension between making organic food affordable and maintaining the standards on which organics were founded.
He was interviewed at Kickapoo Country Fair held by Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative of more than 1,300 organic family farmers nationwide, in LaFarge, Wisconsin.
Courtesy of organic.org, I’ve included a top 10 list of reasons to grow and buy organics, as well as why we all can benefit from supporting the organic industry, regardless of where you live in the world.
1. Reduce The Toxic Load: Keep Chemicals Out of the Air, Water, Soil and our Bodies
Buying organic food promotes a less toxic environment for all living things. With only 0.5 percent of crop and pasture land in organic, according to USDA that leaves 99.5 percent of farm acres in the U.S. at risk of exposure to noxious agricultural chemicals. Our bodies are the environment so supporting organic agriculture doesn’t just benefit your family, it helps all families live less toxically.
2. Reduce if Not Eliminate Off Farm Pollution
Industrial agriculture doesn’t singularly pollute farmland and farm workers; it also wreaks havoc on the environment downstream. Pesticide drift affects non-farm communities with odorless and invisible poisons. Synthetic fertilizer drifting downstream is the main culprit for dead zones in delicate ocean environments, such as the Gulf of Mexico, where its dead zone is now larger than 22,000 square kilometers, an area larger than New Jersey, according to Science magazine, August, 2002.
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“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest … a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” ~ Albert Einstein
A lot of big business has benefited from the rise of diseases such as cancer and diabetes (think pharmaceutical companies, multi-billion dollar charities etc). I love (note sarcasm) how some brands of margarine are marketed as having the ability to lower cholesterol. Who regulates this stuff? It’s just another reason why it’s so important to never believe marketing hype on any product. Ever.
Okay, whinge over.
The purpose of my post is to highlight a documentary I highly recommend to anyone who’s suffering from any type of diabetes, or any dis-ease for that matter. Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days is a movie featuring some of my favourite people in-the-know: Woody Harrelson, Tony Robbins, David Wolfe and Dr. Gabriel Cousens.
It’s an independent doco (see trailer below) that chronicles six Americans with diabetes who switch to a diet of vegan, organic, uncooked food to reverse disease without pharmaceutical medication. The six are challenged to give up meat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, soda, junk food, fast food, processed food, packaged food, and cooked food for 30 days. The results are inspiring and undoubtedly would give hope to people who want to be disease-free.
Imagine seeing an end to the likes of “World Diabetes Day” (which was yesterday) and products emblazoned with pink ribbons. Enough of big businesses making money from illnesses and multi-gazillion dollar research that only offers a band-aid “solution”. If we all become our own doctors and refuse to put anything into our bodies that’s not as nature intended, the problem, I sincerely believe, will be a problem no more.
Here are some great quotes from the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates.
“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”
“Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.”
“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”
“It’s far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has”
“Walking is man’s best medicine”
“Everything in excess is opposed to nature.”
“As to diseases, make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.”
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
“What happens almost universally when one stops eating flesh foods is that one drops excess weight. The loss of superfluous, unneeded weight continues when one stops eating dairy products. One’s true, ideal weight is often easily discovered after one adopts a live-food diet. A body built on high-quality, whole, organic, nature-developed foods is also of higher quality than body weight built on poor-quality commercial foods.” — Dr Gabriel Cousens, Conscious Eating
The best time to do a cleanse, according to many holistic health experts, is between the full and new moons. So this month, that’s exactly what I’m doing — cleaning house.
Armed with Andreas Moritz’s The Amazing Liver and Gallbladder Flush, I’m on day two of drinking the required six litres of organic apple juice. That’s one litre a day before the seventh day of the actual flush. According to Moritz, cleansing the liver and gallbladder from gallstones is one of the most “important and powerful approaches to improve your health”.
Thanks to toxins and cholesterol from animal foods, pesticide and chemical-laden water, and deadly pharmaceuticals, the gallbladder can be packed with stones of all sizes, colours and shapes. Some, says Andreas, are even as big as 3cm wide and are literally as hard as rocks. It’s not uncommon for some people to release hundreds of stones with one cleanse—and that usually means there are more where they came from (which means keep on cleansing).
While I’ve been vegan for a couple of years, and have done juice cleanses and undergone colonic hydrotherapy, I have 30-odd years of bad eating and lifestyle habits to clean up after. The liver and gallbladder flush is just the next step in my natural health journey.
So what does the prescribed six litres of apple juice do? The malic acid in the juice softens the stones to enable them to pass easily through the bile ducts. It also has a strong cleansing effect.
Speaking of the apple, this amazing fruit that I’ve often taken for granted is really one of nature’s superfoods (as all wholefoods are in my opinion). Cut an apple in half to reveal a star, which is a mirror of the body’s star formation (think Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – see below). This wholefood signature suggests that the humble apple benefits every part of the human body. Hence the saying, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”.
Some of the known benefits from eating (raw) apples include: improved lung capacity, blocking diarrhea, prevention of constipation, cushioning the body’s joints and even slowing the aging process. Bite that, botox!
So this week, to prepare for the actual day of flushing (which will fall on the day of the new moon), I’m not eating any foods or drinks that are cold or chilled because they chill the liver and stop the cleanse from being effective. Andreas also suggests giving animal products the ol’ heave ho. No problem there. Also no overeating.
Rather than bore you all with a day-by-day account of drinking truckloads of apple juice, if you’re curious, check back later in the month to get the lowdown on how the cleanse went.
One of nature's incredible superfoods, the humble apple
