Letter from the editor.

Five or six years ago, you couldn't have convinced me that I would ever eat sugar again, to say nothing about the occasional bit of cheese or wheat. For years I was on what is known as a "candida diet," a diet designed to help me avoid all of my many food sensitivities. This diet offered me salvation from my long list of symptoms that conventional medicine had no name for. As I adhered for years to this superhuman deprivation diet, I reaped the benefits as my symptoms began to fall away, one by one.

Thanks to this diet and natural supplements (under the care of a competent natural physician), treatments with other healers, and the blessings of personal growth that my life has given me, I am now a healthy person! Now I can enjoy the good things in life (like chocolate!) without suffering for it. But like many people, I still work to eat with consciousness, to find a good balance with my food. One benefit of focusing on food sensitivities for so many years is that I'm able to tell whether a food is good for me or not, often before it leaves my fork.

Here are a few good exercises to bring up your level of food consciousness:

1. Give thanks before you eat. Thank the ingredients that grew and lived and gave themselves for your nourishment, and thank the Earth from which it grew. Thank the farmers who grew your food, the companies that delivered your food, and thank the people who prepared the food for you. Feel the food growing from the ground or walking over the earth. That energy will become a part of you with each bite.

2. If you've made guidelines around your eating, first check in to make sure that those guidelines are a way of helping you and being kind to yourself, not a way of using food (or lack thereof) to punish yourself.

3. Once you've established compassionate eating guidelines, keep your commitments. If yon can't keep your commitments to yourself, who can trust you? If you make a mistake, apologize to yourself and recommit to your goals. If you keep making mistakes, check in again to make sure your goals are realistic and compassionate.

4. Feel the blessings of the food you're eating. If you've chosen to eat a healthy salad, enjoy the crunch of the carrots, the smoothness of avocado. If you've picked a decadent dessert, relish each bite to the fullest, completely giving yourself this rich reward. If you fully enjoy your food, it satisfies you and you don't need to keep searching for food fulfillment.

To go along with the gift of good food that this issue offers to our readers, I'll give you yet another recipe. This is my own personal granola recipe (from an original Granola!). It's a good balance of health with a touch of sweetness, and it goes great with soy milk, rice milk, or yogurt.

New Life Granola

This recipe makes a double
batch.

  1 cup oil (I use organic safflower
    or sunflower.)
  6 cups rolled oats
  3 cup nuts (pecans, walnuts,
    almonds, hazelnuts--any
    combination, either whole or
    chopped)
  4 Tbsp sesame seeds
1/2 cup each flax seeds, wheat germ, and shredded coconut
1/2-1 cup agave nectar (or honey or rice syrup)
  3 cups dried fruit (raisins, currants, cranberries, cherries, chopped
    apricots)

For each batch, use one 13x9 inch baking dish with medium-high sides.
Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Put oil in baking dish in oven for ten
minutes. Stir in oats and bake, stirring twice, for fifteen minutes.
Mix together nuts, seeds, wheat germ, coconut, and agave nectar. Mix
into oat mixture in baking dish and bake, stirring once or twice, for
fifteen minutes.

Remove from oven and stir in dried fruit. Store in an airtight
container for up to one week or in the refrigerator for one month.
Enjoy it in good health!

Erin Everett

Editor/Publisher

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