Hello Beautiful People!  I'm so excited because I'm learning all about Pinterest and how to set it up on my blogs.  This is going to be awesome because you can now use Pinterest to save any inspired posts to your board.  This photo is an amazing vegan dinner that was ordered at Salt Life Food Shack in St Augustine.  I often ask restaurants to modify orders to take off the animal meats to make dishes vegan.  This way I can go out to eat almost anywhere and eat.  My dinner guest ordered this entree and it was so good that I kept sneaking my fork over to this plate over mine!  Food thief!  Hey what can I say, I like to eat:)

One of the hardest things for me to do when I went plant based was to learn how to order foods from restaurants so that I can join my friends.  Socially, being vegan was isolating me because I didn't have the courage or know how to customize orders at restaurants.  I often stayed home feeling like I had to make my own foods because restaurants didn't have something that I could order.  This was a real drag because I still love all of my friends no matter what and I wanted to spend time with them.  Also, where I live there are only a small handful of vegan restaurants which I found limiting.  At restaurants if I asked them to take off the meat or cheese then I would look at what is in other dishes to see what they have in the kitchen.  Then I would ask them to substitute a vegetable, fruit or nut instead of the meat of cheese or simple ask for extra vegetables.  The first time that I custom ordered, I was surprised at how accommodating restaurants were to my special needs.  Not all places but many were willing to bend over backwards to meet my needs.  What a relief!  I was often scared to speak up because I didn't want to be high maintenance but I also wanted to be happy with the food that I was paying for.  I needed to deal with my throat chakra issues and learn to speak up and request what I wanted.  I feel like every request is planting a seed to restaurant owners to add a plant based option on the menu as well.  Please, politely speak up if there is something that you want but you don't see it.  Over time, with enough requests we will see restaurants creating more and more plant based entrees.  We need to band together to create the change that we'd like to see.

Now I love going to restaurants because I'm often inspired by what different places have to offer and I can then recreate at home.  I am often cooking for others and I find that I make the same 10 dishes over and over again so I love learning more things that I can add to my rotation.  I'm a fan of simple dishes with a limited number of ingredients.  I found that if the dish was too complicated then I simply didn't make it that often.  My goal as a health coach is to give you options that are simple, delicious and affordable.  You can be successful eating plant based.  You might have to start one meal at a time, slowly converting your repertoire of regular dishes to healthier plant based options.  Your health is so important so never underestimate the efforts that you are making even if they seem small.  Cumulatively they add up over time.

There is a new documentary out called Game Changers and it talks about how plant based helps to increase athletic performance.  I have been plant based for 10 years and I can attest that my athletic performance has been soaring, even in my mid-40's.  This is very exciting to me and I feel amazing.  I want to share it with the world.  I specifically am doing a high raw low fat plant based diet that is high fruit.  If you want to learn more about what I'm doing, then check out my book on Amazon Kindle called Health Through Fruit.  I poured my heart and soul into this book about my personal journey going plant based.  It's only $4.99 and I wrote it specifically for kindle so it's a shorter book at about 40 pages.  I love hearing from you so please feel free to reach out to me anytime and let me know if there is anything that I can help with:) . I'm here for you to answer all your questions!   Also, I am available to speak at public speaking events or at your companies wellness days.  Let's connect!  Much love to you all!  Peace!

Hello beautiful people!  I'm so excited to be writing again and connecting with you!  I've been hibernating in the world of learning entrepreneurship.  I realize that I have a lot to learn and I am throughly humbled.  In the process of working in my business and not on my business I learned from an Assisted Thai Yoga client of mine about Adult Children of Alcoholics, ACA.  I never heard of that before so just when I think I got everything down someone comes along and teaches me more.  I've been having blocks with turning my business into a membership site mostly because it seems so overwhelming to me.  I have a lot of technology to catch up on and I have to believe in myself and this project a lot to make it work.  I have to admit it's kinda scary but also exciting.  In the process of learning everything I realize I can have more fun than I'm having.  I realize that I like to have a lot of control with building this business and if things don't go as planned then I'll get frustrated easy. 

I happen to be an ACA adult and I'm realizing that my need for control stems down to my childhood.  ACA children often grow up to be co-dependents.  I was in major denial of this for awhile, mostly because I didn't know all the things that entailed being a co-dependent.  Also, who really likes to look at their shadow side and admit that something is wrong.  There's humility needed to look at our dark side so that we can shed light on it and expose it.  Through awareness we can start to consciously make changes.  First we need to understand what it all means.  I had a traumatic childhood growing up.  There was a lot of verbal abuse in the home and as my four brothers got older, it turned into physical violence as everyone was reacting to the abuse.  My father drank a six pack a night and sometimes more on the weekends.  He never admitted it was a problem and never stopped drinking.  My mother is a narcissist and the two of them together had lots of arguments.  Terrible things were said to everyone in the house and the police were at my house often to break up fights.  ACA adults strive for control because in their childhood they never had control.  Common symptoms of being a co-dependent are people pleasing, seeking validation, an enabler, caring more about what other people think than yourself, spending more emotional or mental time taking care of someone in a relationship than the other person spends on you, victimization, minimizing out feelings, feeling stuck, complaining, evading responsibility amongst other things.  I don't blame my parents as I know they also were victims of ACA and narcissism but I do want to understand it and understand the patterns so that I can make conscious changes.  They simply did the best that they could with what they knew.

Wow that was a humbling list for me as I realized that I fit into almost every symptom.  Bottom line, there is a gap between my intellect and my emotions in that my emotional life wasn't taken care of as a child.  Co-dependents often grow up in a chaotic war zone as a child.  This set them into a constant fight of flight mode calculating their moves, if I do this then I won't get yelled at, etc.  We often come into a state of hypervigilance and not feeling safe or secure.  We stop seeking pleasure and simply try to avoid pain.  It becomes hard to keep our head straight in school and we miss out on learning self because we spend so much time worrying about what's going on outside of us.  Our connections to our self are turned off and we suppress our feelings. 

When we begin to make changes out of co-dependents then it can be difficult as our old crowd might not like the new us with better defined boundaries.  Also we have a tendency to attract other people who are as dysfunctional as we are.  Co-dependency is a learned behavior and the cool thing about this is that we can unlearn this behavior too.  I found myself with an incredible desire to be a healer because I was so broken.  In the process of healing myself, I realize that I can help others come out of this.  I still have so much to learn but it's exciting as I feel that light shining on my darkness and allowing me to make changes in my life so that I can start living that life that I always dreamed of.  I really want a beautiful life and I'm willing to hold myself 100% accountable for everything that is happening.  I'm tapping into my power and dropping the victim.  It's as if my old self, my false self is dying and I'm re-born.  I understand myself and my triggers more.  As I become less critical of myself, I'm becoming less critical of others.  I really do believe that we live in an abundant world.  Instead of letting my need for control seize my day, I'm starting to ask myself, "I wonder what will happen today".  

I hope my story helps you in some way.  Talk to me and tell me if you also experienced anything like this and how you found success in turning your life around.  Life is good and becoming conscious is a beautiful thing.  Sending you all lots of love and light!