Lifestyle Master Program

Author(s): Ellen Livingston
Publisher: Ellen Livingston

Page 33

Lifestyle Master Program
eBook 1.0 by Ellen Livingston
comfortably, even if this step back is accompanied by physical disease. Also, until you have securely developed new habits and built up a support system for your new healthy lifestyle, it can be easy to be tempted by the stimulation and addictive nature of many mainstream foods.
Another factor that can influence your ability to stick with a healthy natural diet is the experience of becoming vulnerable to the full range and depth of your emotions. Eating meals that require vast amounts of nerve energy for their digestion (such as cooked or otherwise processed foods, or fatty foods, or very large meals) effectively numbs our emotional experience and dulls our thinking. When we free up much of this energy on a simple, easy to digest fresh raw fruitpredominated diet, we may feel more fully and think more clearly than ever before, and this can be quite uncomfortable at first for some people. We may open up to feelings of sadness, anger, or dissatisfaction with our lives. We must have some sort of support or faith for dealing with this experience, or we will likely seek the relative and familiar comfort of emotionally numbing cooked foods and unhealthful eating habits again. We may also start to open up to a joyful exuberance that's been buried deep inside of us. Not knowing how to give this inner joy outer expression, or finding out that our expression of it seems to threaten others, is a profound experience for which we may also need support.
As we have strayed away from our natural diet, we have come to experience food as entertainment. Many people look forward to a smorgasbord of stimulating, exciting concoctions several times every day. Each meal becomes an anticipated event. Not long after finishing one meal our mind is already planning the nextand this is not because we're hungry! On a simple raw diet, this kind of nearly constant stimulation is gone. Some people struggle to cope with a resulting heightened awareness of an underlying sense of boredom with themselves and their lives. Many of us live in fear of actually making contact with our true selves.
Lifestyle Master eBook 1.0 The Campaign for Aging Research
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