10 Day Sugar-Detox

Heather Dane

About Heather DaneHealth Coach and 21st century medicine woman, Heather Dane combines ancient wisdom from her Native American lineage with holistic health, epigenetics, and nutrition training to offer the most cutting edge prescriptive remedies for your health. She has co-authored two books with Louise Hay: Loving Yourself to Great Health and The Bone Broth Secret: A Culinary Adventure in Health, Beauty and Longevity. Heather is a regular contributor to Mind Body Green, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal, HealYourLife.com; and she has a Hay House Radio show, Loving Yourself to Great Health, that airs on Tuesdays at 12 noon Pacific Time.

Find out about coaching with Heather.

Find out more about Hay House Radio.

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The Sugar DetoxEvery year I get a few messages that go something like this:

“I ate too much of my kids’ Halloween candy and now I don’t feel well. Plus, I have a lot of sugar cravings now. How can I detox the sugar from my body?”

There we are...many of us in the middle of the fall season, with our clocks turned back and less daylight. This already reduces the amount of serotonin (happiness, calm hormone) in our brains. A lack of serotonin can sometimes create cravings for sugary carbs because it’s the starchy foods that send serotonin to the brain.

On top of this, we have the holidays coming. For many, this means an abundance of stress (preparation, time with family, travel, parties) and an abundance of sugary foods. Madison Avenue takes advantage of this with scare tactics of the weight gain that will surely come during the holiday season (officially, Halloween through New Year’s and interestingly, the darkest times of the year with the least serotonin!).

So I decided it would be great to do a 10-Day Sugar Detox. For the next 10 days, I’ll share tips on how to detox sugar from your mind, body and spirit. This will include natural kitchen remedies and easy practices you can do on your own or with friends.

Let’s get started!

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Day 1 - Cravings

For today’s tips, let’s talk about soothing your body out of sugar cravings, along with some gentle detox tips.

Nutrition Support

Consider eating a high tryptophan protein breakfast and lunch (tryptophan is an amino acid that is broken down from protein foods and is the precursor to serotonin), while having a serotonin-boosting snack at 10:00 am-ish and either 3:00 pm or at dinner. If you are 5-6 pm snacker, a 3 pm serotonin-boosting snack would be ideal. If you are a night snacker, a dinner would be ideal.

Examples of High Tryptophan Foods

• Pumpkin seeds (recommended: soak overnight in water first - see instructions)

• Walnuts (recommended: Soak first)

• Sunflower seeds (recommended: soak first)

• Fish – tuna (yellow fin), halibut (chinook), salmon (sockeye) and snapper tend to be higher in tryptophan.

• Chicken

• Turkey

• Eggs

Starches That Help Boost Serotonin

• Red skinned potatoes

• Butternut squash and other winter squashes

• Gluten-free seed/grains - quinoa, millet, buckwheat, amaranth, rice

If a Sugar Craving Strikes

Consider a glass of water with some squeezed fresh lemon (1/2 fresh lemon) with 1/4 tsp sea salt and if you need a little sweet taste (some do, others don’t -- find out what your body needs!), a few drops of stevia or a teaspoon of honey. Drink this anytime a craving strikes. If you have many of them during the day, make sure to use the sea salt in only 2 of the drinks per day.

In this lemon water drink, the water is hydrating, the sea salt adds minerals and aids hydration (plus adds a nice boost for the adrenals) and the lemon can help cleanse your liver. The sour taste (if unsweetened) is one antidote to sweet cravings and may work for some people. For others who really need the sweet taste, the stevia or honey can satisfy that need.

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Day 2 - Effects of Sugar

There’s all kinds of science about how sugar affects us humans, but how does sugar affect you, personally? Let’s take a look...

First, the Science

Studies show that sugar is as addictive as cocaine and heroin. This is because sugar lights up the dopamine pathways in the brain, where we feel pleasure, motivation and reward. It’s so addictive that many scientists and food activists are calling for sugar to be removed from schools. The longer one eats sugar, the more solid those addictive-reward pathways become in the brain.

Here’s What One Study Concluded

“From an evolutionary perspective, it is in the best interest of humans to have an inherent desire for food for survival. However, this desire may go awry, and certain people, including some obese and bulimic patients in particular, may develop an unhealthy dependence on palatable food that interferes with well-being. The concept of “food addiction” materialized in the diet industry on the basis of subjective reports, clinical accounts and case studies described in self-help books. The rise in obesity, coupled with the emergence of scientific findings of parallels between drugs of abuse and palatable foods has given credibility to this idea. The reviewed evidence supports the theory that, in some circumstances, intermittent access to sugar can lead to behavior and neurochemical changes that resemble the effects of a substance of abuse.” (Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2008; 32(1): 20–39.)

How Sugar Affects You

Science aside, sugar has a unique language in your body. All of us have different genes and different microbiomes (gut bacteria), which means we all respond differently to what we consume (food, thoughts, lifestyle).

It can be very powerful to recognize how sugar affects your body, mind and spirit, so that you can take charge of how you nourish yourself.

Here Are Some Things to Ask Yourself

1. How did you feel before you realized you had a craving?

Was there something building inside of you before the craving happened? Some stress, upset, discomfort, fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, loneliness or other emotion? Were you feeling rushed, stressed or like you have no time for yourself? Do you feel like you never get to do what you want to do?

2. Are you energetically sensitive/highly sensitive/psychic/empathic or intuitive?

For many people, energetic sensitivity messes with blood sugar. Most often, it sends blood sugar downhill fast, which has all kinds of symptoms. These symptoms can be emotional (overwhelm, lack of willpower, sadness, anger, irritability, fear, thinking about food without real hunger, etc.) or physical (shaky, cold hands and feet, cold nose, difficulty falling or staying asleep, hunger, pain, headache, nausea, etc.). Or even spiritual, where you just feel like something is “not right” and you can’t put your finger on it.

Furthermore, these symptoms may not even belong to you -- they may be signals you are picking up on from others. Write down what you notice and keep notes on what you learn over time. (Where are you when it happens? Who are you with? What symptoms/signals are you getting? When you tune into the signal, is it yours? Does it belong to someone/something else?)

3. Have you eaten lately? Have you ignored a hunger signal?

If you skip meals, go too long being hungry before eating or have any of the symptoms in #2, your blood sugar has likely dropped. If it drops too much before you eat something, your body may go into emergency mode. Keep in mind that your BRAIN is in emergency mode as well. What can happen is similar to a migraine. If you keep ignoring signals and don’t take a rest before the migraine hits, you can be in

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bed feeling awful for hours. However, if you notice the precursor signals to a migraine coming on, you may be able to stop, rest, give yourself what you need and stop it from coming on.

The same is true with voracious appetite...if you wait too long to feed your body when it’s in a low blood sugar emergency, your body and brain has pulled the EMERGENCY ALARM and it may take hours before your body recognizes that you have fed it. In this case, you eat, it takes between 20 - 40 minutes (if your digestion is healthy) for your body to absorb the food. If the emergency alarm has been pulled, you may feel an insatiable hunger for hours, which can drive you to keep on eating. This is the set up for bingeing. And it’s a vicious cycle.

4. How is your digestion?

If you have symptoms of poor digestion, you may experience the cycle of bingeing described in #3. In this case, it will be important to work on healing your digestive system while giving your body easy-to-digest meals, possibly in small quantities (several small meals per day instead of 3 big meals).

Symptoms of poor digestion could include: constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, GERD/acid reflux, diabetes, leaky gut, candida, SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth), parasites, slow motility, malabsorption, gallbladder issues, bloating, gas, foggy thinking, fatigue, memory challenges, poor sleep, etc.

5. When you eat sugar or sweet foods, what happens?

Do you feel satisfied? Do you crave more? Does the food feel like a magnet, where you can’t stop thinking about it until you have some? Does it set off bingeing or other cravings? Do you feel foggy, fuzzy or agitated? Do you feel like you can’t get out of your head or an inability to concentrate?

6. Who are you with when you feel sugar cravings? Is there a pattern you begin to recognize?

I invite you to keep notes with answers to these questions. Find out how sugar affects you. Build rapport with the energy and language of sugar in your life.

This will support you in recognizing where to go from here, which we will cover as we go through the 10-day challenge!

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Day 3 - Detox Remedies

We started this sugar detox on Facebook because several of people said they had done so well giving up sugar and then along came Halloween candy or a dessert out at a restaurant and bam, sugar cravings came rushing back. Along with feeling “yucky.”

Anyone who has given up sugar and then eaten it again can relate to these experiences.

I have had these experiences in the past and I don’t know about you, but I would beat myself up about it. The most important “rescue remedy” tip for today is: non-judgement! If you indulged or overindulged, it’s OK. It happens. We humans love sweet things.

In Chinese medicine, the sweet taste is considered a major life force of our bodies, fueling the body to do its thing. When we eat sweet wholefoods, the natural sugars are balanced with fiber, vitamins and minerals. Refine sugar is a whole different animal because it’s separated from its nutrients, therefore losing its life force and creating an imbalance in the body.

Because taste is a “perception,” we may have a subtle sense that something is out of balance and then seek foods to balance us. This subtle sense can be right down to the cellular level because our cells, when depleted of life force or nutrients, begin crying out for more nutrients. In other words, more food.

Before my recovery, I was very aware of this kind of process going on in my body, but I had no idea what was happening physiologically. So I just kept craving and looking to food -- at the time, more sugar or processed food -- thinking I was broken because I could not stop eating or control my appetite.

Once I realized that it was a normal process happening in my body, it was easier to support my body with rescue remedies -- I’ll share those with you today and I would love to hear from you about what works for you!

Sugar Detox Rescue Remedies

These tips take into account ways to bring the body, mind and spirit back into balance by harnessing the physiology of your body...here we go:

1. Non-Judgment

This is not a time to beat yourself up! Have compassion for yourself. You have just participated in a physiological process that the body automatically goes into -- everything from taste receptors to brain receptors are involved in a vicious cycle.

You are not weak or broken -- remember, we are wired for the sweet taste because it helps the body do its thing! You CAN make adjustments to nourish and support your body to regain balance, eliminate cravings and maintain your balance.

If you judge yourself and beat yourself up, it will only create more stress and a “contractive” (crunched up) state, that in Chinese medicine needs more “expansive” (opened up) things to make you feel better. Guess what’s expansive? SUGAR! Judgement and self-blame only fuels the vicious sugar cravings cycle.

Instead, affirm: I love myself. I am using this experience to listen to my body and see what it really needs. I know how to adjust. I am safe.

2. Antidotes to the sweet taste

The sour taste, salty taste and bitter taste are great antidotes to the sweet taste.

Here are some examples of remedies:

Lemon water (we talked about this in the day one sugar detox post) - sour taste. If you sweeten it with stevia or honey, it can give you a gentle sweet taste that is balanced with sour. If you use sea salt, you get a little salty taste and balancing minerals to boot. This can be very satisfying to the body, along with

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adding hydration (which can reduce dehydration and acidity that leads to cravings).

Salty - If you have overeaten sweet foods, having something salty can bring your body back into balance. Processed food manufacturers know this (e.g., think of the movies with soda and popcorn). Make sure that if you choose a salty food, you use a true salt (sea salt, Himalayan salt). For example, sprinkle sea salt on some nut butter or seed butter. Almonds have a naturally sweet taste, so a handful of almonds or scoop of almond butter sprinkled wit sea salt is a great example of a balancing food. Seaweed is also a great option - naturally salty from the sea and full of minerals. I love soft dulse and have found it to be helpful to kick coffee cravings too. TheSeaweedMan.com website has wonderful beyond organic soft dulse that you can buy in bulk for snacking or recipes. I went to his seaweed farm years ago and spent a day touring the farm, interviewing him and tasting the seaweed. Yum!

Sour - Fermented foods are wonderful antidotes for sweet cravings. Make sure to choose raw cultured vegetables with no white vinegar or sugar on the label or make your own at home! Cultured vegetables like sauerkraut, are my favorites because most people do well with them (not all people though -- some with chronic gut issues may have challenges until their gut heals). Other examples are kombucha, young coconut kefir and milk kefir. Each of these can create symptoms in sensitive people, so listen to your body if you are trying these for the first time. Most people will have some digestive response in the first two weeks of eating any fermented food as gut bacteria are getting cleaned up by the probiotics in fermented foods.

1 tablespoon of cultured vegetables or a small glass of a fermented drink can really help reduce or eliminate sugar cravings. I love having these in my home. I eat cultured vegetables regularly because they aid digestion.

Lemons, limes, apple cider vinegar, cranberries, tamarind and lemongrass all add a sour taste to your diet.

Bitter - We have more bitter taste receptors on the tongue than other taste receptors, so it’s a great tool! I love bitters, like Swedish bitters and citrus bitters best (learn more here). You can spray some bitters in your mouth or add them to water for a

great balancer.

Other options are: dandelion greens (or dandelion tea), arugula, kale, collards, broccoli, organic coffee, organic raw cacao (chocolate), parsley, horseradish, turmeric, watercress, lettuce, jicama, cilantro, Jerusalem artichokes.

3. Greens

Green powder, green blended soups, green smoothies and other cooked and raw greens not only add the bitter taste, they are very balancing and cleansing for the body. While green juices may work for some, others must be more careful with them because the juice can enter the bloodstream very quickly, raising blood sugar and potentially triggering a blood sugar imbalance (possibly kicking off cravings). People with a history of hypoglycemia, diabetes, eating disorders and alcoholism may want to avoid using juices as a remedy and instead, look for fiber-rich options like green smoothies or blended soups.

A great, gentle cleanse could be a full day of green soups or smoothies. If it’s winter time, a blended green soup would be fantastic to get the body back into balance. Remember, keep your blood sugar strong so that you don’t kick off a hunger blood sugar imbalance.

Recipes

5-minute cleansing soup or try these other options

Smoothie

4. Balancing Teas

Any tea that cleanses your liver and boosts minerals are great options! Examples are dandelion tea, holy basil tea, schisandra tea, Mother’s Milk tea (the one with fennel and cardamom lowers allergy responses in teh body), nettle tea.

And of course, my favorite tea of all for cravings, stress and blood sugar balance - burdock root tea.

OK, that’s the lineup for today. Please share what works for you or any questions, comments or stories you want to share!

Let’s all affirm: I nourish my body with love.

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Day 4 - Blood Sugar Balancer

Years ago, my father, a Native American elder, visited the reservation for a ceremony to receive his Native American name. When he came home and gave us the phonetic spelling of his name, he said it sounds like this: Sky u lattie. It means “the other side of the clouds.” He wrote down the proper spelling of his Native American name on a piece of paper and promptly lost it.

At the time, two things were happening...

(1) Starbucks was just spreading across the country; and

(2) My husband, Joel, was learning graphic design on his computer and could replicate any letterhead he wanted. We used this skill to write funny, official-looking letters to our family members from various organizations.

So we sent a letter to my father from the “Oneida Nation Indian Reservation” declaring that since he lost his official name, he was being renamed “Chai Latte” because it’s popularity at Starbucks would make it easy to remember. Everyone in the family got a kick out of that letter. We still laugh anytime someone orders a latte today.

When it comes to sugar cravings, balancing blood sugar matters. The more stable your blood sugar is, the less you will want to grab sugar for the quick fix to solve a low blood sugar emergency. Coffee drinks at Starbucks or at home can be a challenge if drinking them stops the normal signals of your appetite (which they are known to do). If you are drinking coffee or lattes and skipping meals (like my husband was early on in his corporate days), you may not realize you are hungry until you are in blood sugar emergency (headaches, fatigue, shaky, irritable/angry, forgetful or feeling so hungry you aren’t sure anything will solve it).

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Energizing Chai Hot Chocolate or Latte for All Day Energy

Here’s a wonderful re-made Chai Latte that Louise Hay and I formulated as a blood sugar balancer in our new book, The Bone Broth Secret. It also enhances digestion and can be helpful for weight loss goals because it is grounding, balancing and satisfying with just a touch of sweetness.

Here’s the recipe:

• 1 cup water

• 1 cup coconut milk

• 1 teaspoon unflavored Vital Proteins gelatin (optional as a source of collagen)

• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon

• ½ tsp. ground cardamom

• ¼ tsp. ground ginger

• 1⁄8 tsp. ground cloves

• Optional: Honey or stevia to taste

• Optional: ¼ tsp. dried orange peel or 1 drop Urban Moonshine Citrus Bitters

• If you want a Chai Hot Chocolate - add 2 - 3 TBL raw cacao

Blend up in your blender, then simmer in a saucepan on low heat for a few minutes. Pour into a thermos and allow to steep until you are ready to drink, shake well before drinking.

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Day 5 - Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth

I don’t know exactly when I started carrying dessert in my purse. It probably started years ago. When I first began eating wholefoods for my recovery, I did not have any sweetened treats. I ate mostly vegetables and followed what could be considered an anti-cadida nutritional protocol. This involved no fruit or sweeteners. I was very surprised that my cravings for sweet changed into cravings for salt (sea salt -- the real thing -- that is).

However, after some time, I began to feel deprived. I loved desserts and sweet treats. One year, I went home for the holidays and my parents had the most beautiful cake and pies and after banishing sugar cravings from my life, they came roaring back. Because the desserts looked so good. Because everyone else was enjoying them with such delight. Because it separated me from everyone else. For the first time in months, I felt like I had to work really hard to avoid those desserts. And it made me feel sad. It brought back those old feelings, “why can’t I just be normal, like everyone else?”

Then It Struck Me...What Is Normal?

It’s certainly not the abundance of sugar we have on the dinner table today. It’s not all the processed foods in our diets today. I realized that the vast majority of food on hand today is not “normal.” It’s simply convenient. Being manufactured, it contains very little of Mother Earth.

It does not give our body and brain what it needs to feel energized, strong and healthy. It requires no participation in the process of nourishment. It

requires no time...and it’s very abundance seduces us into thinking that taking time for our nourishment is ludicrous. It satisfies us on the surface (taste buds and a temporary abatement of hunger), but robs us at the deepest levels of nutrients, calm and cellular satisfaction.

So I decided to create a new normal. I decided that if I could create a dessert recipe I loved, I could have my own deeply nourishing treats and participate in the dessert portion of the meal with my family.

The next year, I returned home with my first-ever healthy dessert recipe: Halva. Packed with nutrients, it was tasty enough for my family (and even kids!) to enjoy. Thank heavens I made enough to share!

This is probably what started it. I decided I wanted to have a good snack and treat with me for dinners out, road trips and at friend’s dinner parties. I began to bring extra so that I could share the love and nourishment I had created with my friends and family. It became a big joke: “What do you have in your purse today?”

Over time, I found that having sweet treats really took my health to the next level. It’s when I started realizing that eating is meant to be a pleasurable, fun experience.

So here’s the question: Is your nutritional protocol enjoyable and satisfying? Do you feel like your meals are fun? Are you giving yourself the time to make nourishing foods and treats for yourself?

How would you like to plan ahead for the holidays?

Here’s my halva recipe -- it’s fast and easy - 5 to 10 minutes and you have a nourishing treat.

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Day 6 - The Buddy System

More than 10 years ago, my husband (Joel) and I decided to go on a raw food vegan protocol to meet some of our health goals and to experiment to see if the raw vegan diet would work for us. At the time, I was working with one of the top nutrition teachers in the industry. We added a fourth to our group -- a certified raw foods teacher. Together, we created a nutritionally balanced plan, shared a menu and recipes and began our journey. The idea was to stick together for 6 weeks, checking in once per week by phone and giving e-mail updates as needed.

About two weeks into our program, I got into the car to go to the grocery store and found Little Debbie’s Zebra Cakes under the driver’s seat. When I got home, I asked Joel about it. He sheepishly replied that he had sugar cravings and didn’t want me to know he was eating Little Debbie’s! I immediately told him that he didn’t need to sneak treats and that if he wanted them, he could feel free to have them without clandestine smuggling in the car! We had a good laugh over that.

As we began talking about the Little Debbie’s incident, Joel told me he was feeling bouts of anger quite a bit since going on the raw food vegan diet. We called our buddies and learned that when someone gets angry, they are typically protein deficient. We realized that Joel needed some cooked animal protein, so I adjusted his protocol to 80% raw vegan and 20% cooked animal protein. Within a day of eating animal protein, his bouts of anger and the sugar cravings disappeared! We were amazed.

We got another report from the nutrition teacher.

She told us that while she never had sugar or chocolate cravings, she found herself at the grocery store opening an organic chocolate bar and eating it right in the aisle! She couldn’t believe it. This was a sign to her that it was time to make some adjustments to her protocol as well. She began adding 20% cooked gluten free grains into her protocol.

The four of us learned a lot from this experiment. Most of all, we learned that having a buddy system helped tremendously. When one person had a challenge, the other was there for support. We enjoyed sharing the menu planning and reporting out our results. Most of all, we appreciated that no one judged each other and that we could laugh about our experiences, along with making compassionate adjustments to meet the unique needs of our bodies.

Whether you are giving up sugar, starting a new health or fitness protocol or doing a cleanse, it helps to have a buddy system! I know that not everyone will have this kind of support -- I was fortunate because I’ve been in the natural health industry.

So I’d love for you to feel like you have a buddy system on my Facebook page! I’ve noticed how many readers jump in to support one another, and I am there for you too.

If you have questions about your Sugar Detox journey, know that you will be received with love, compassion and non-judgment. Along with support and plenty of much-needed laughter! Y

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Day 7 - Sugar and the Highly Sensitive Person

At first, I thought I was just sensitive to sugar and certain foods. Over time, as I addressed my sensitivity to food and my sensitive physical symptoms, I had to face facts: I was extra “sensitive” or a “highly sensitive person.”

You may be highly sensitive if:

You find yourself reacting to the foods you eat, especially sugar, alcohol or processed foods. The response is often very quick.

Any substance, light or sound may affect you more than others around you

You are hypervigilant - always scanning for potential dangers or feeling like you are highly aware of anything happening around you

You may feel what others are feeling - symptoms, emotions

You may know what’s going to happen before it happens

Your energy may feel zinged around or drained when around others

Perhaps you have some forms of ESP or just “know” things-

People may have accused you of being “too sensitive”

Environments make a big difference to you (rooms, homes, buildings, work spaces, even pieces of land or neighborhoods)

You may feel sensitive to touch, clothing fabrics, bedding and objects being “just so”

It may feel like a lot of work to be around people

You feel more balanced or more like yourself when you are alone

You may feel things in your body more acutely (e.g., the doctor tells you there’s no way you can feel what you are feeling - or perhaps you have symptoms like IBS with no cause, but you are told you feel things more acutely than normal)

Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) or chemicals in the environment may have a strong effect on you (or you feel them more acutely than others)

Addiction, migraines, autoimmune symptoms are not uncommon

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experienced things. On this last day of class, I was hungry and as I sat in the metal framed chair, a helicopter was going overhead. And I felt the sound of the helicopter in my intestines. Talk about freaky. I could feel the helicopter’s vibration in my body. It was uncomfortable. I began to eat my breakfast and the feeling went away. It was like I was raw when I was hungry (low blood sugar) and then grounded once I ate. Freaky.

At this point, I began to pay attention to energy and my blood sugar balance. Over the years, I asked my energetically sensitive clients (90% of the people I work with are HSPs-intuitives-energetically sensitive). They all reported that they experienced a drop in blood sugar when sensing energy. Or being more zinged around by energy in low blood sugar situations.

Over the years, I realized that the key was to keep my blood sugar stable and my nervous system strong. In addition to eating regular meals and snacks (to keep blood sugar stable) and carrying snacks for situations where my blood sugar drops (if I pick up energy), two of my go-to nervous system strengtheners are: vitamin B12 and minerals. You can learn more about them here, along with tips for energetic sensitivity.

A highly sensitive or intuitive person often has a nervous system that is “on alert” and picking up more “data” than average. In other words, your nervous system is doing more work than average, or put another way, your body is under more stress than usual.

In Chinese medicine, the back of the body -- our nervous system -- is where we pick up energy from the outside world. And the front of our body -- mouth and digestive system -- is where we take energy/fuel into our bodies. So we fuel up to ground our bodies, so that we can anchor our nervous system. They type of fuel matters. In Chinese medicine, if we don’t balance the front and back of our bodies, our eating can get very out of balance.

I find this interesting because it wasn’t until I learned to deal with my energetic sensitivity -- and really ground my nervous system with a balanced diet -- that I was able to recover my health.

One day, I was sitting in a Chinese Face Reading class, taught by Jean Haner. I was learning about the 5 types of physical-emotional-spiritual wiring that people have. As I was coming to terms with how my system was wired in Chinese medicine, I got a very clear signal. We had spent the previous 4 days steeped in understanding how we felt and

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Day 8 - Listen to Your Body

I became troubled by my roller coaster emotions in high school. I remember walking through the halls and all day long, I’d swing from feeling happy and optimistic to sad and low-energy. I thought there was something wrong with me until I talked to a nutritionist and learned that it was my blood sugar levels that were on a roller coaster, pulling my emotions and my energy along with it. She explained how important it was for me to eat snacks throughout the day, so that I could feel my best.

In high school, that meant breaking the rules of eating in class. So she wrote me a note and I began bringing snacks to class. That was the same year I took my first trip into a health food store. Decades before Whole Foods revolutionized health food stores, the one I walked into was dark, dusty and many of the boxes of food were past their expiration date. And still, I was intrigued. I had no idea what I was doing back then, so I just started looking for better options than the regular grocery store foods I was eating at the time.

While I learned to keep my blood sugar stable that year, I still didn’t know anything about how certain foods affected my body. I learned to listen for blood sugar balance (hunger, low moods, shakiness, low energy), but it would be almost 2 decades before I’d learn how to truly listen to my body.

Here’s the thing...if you have a symptom, instead of just accepting it as if there is something wrong with you, the symptom is the perfect time to stop and listen. If you are highly sensitive (see day 6), the

symptom may not even be yours! And if it is your symptom, your body wants you to know something. Symptoms are your body’s language.

I used to run away from them because they were painful. Or just berate myself for having them. Now I invite their message to speak to me. In the past 16 years, I have learned more about myself, my true desires and what is right/not right for me just by listening to the call of my body.

How to Listen To Your Body & Intuition

This article may help, if you want to learn more about listening to your body

Today’s Exercise

Listen to every symptom mood and signal you get as you go through your day and write it down.

Instead of suppressing a symptom or accepting it as something wrong with you, stop and listen. What does it feel like, in your own words? Is there an emotion you are feeling? Does it connect you to any self-talk? Ask your body what it wants you to know.

Write down what you learned.

If you want to see how food affects you, write down everything you consume and notice if you see any patterns in symptoms, signals, cravings and moods.

What are your questions about the signals your body is giving you? Or how to listen?

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Day 9 - Time Honored Remedies

Many years ago, I began studying macrobiotic cooking and healing techniques. I used many of them to help heal my digestive system. However, I found the recipes to be rather bland and unexciting. As I contemplated this, I learned that a percentage of people felt very unsatisfied on the macrobiotic diet because of the blandness of the recipes. This often led to overeating, cravings and downright bingeing.

However, there were some incredibly healing principles in the macrobiotic diet. Many of these principles were grounded in thousands of years old healing traditions of Chinese medicine, like eating with the seasons and the food-mood connection.

I found that many of them worked wonders to create balance in my body, so I started to tweak them a bit by bringing in the Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine principle of balance of tastes with spices. It took me awhile to learn to use spices for flavor and medicinal value as part of my healing process.

What I learned is that bringing in flavor and balance with spices adds a whole new level of healing and enjoyment of food!

Here is a time-honored macrobiotic-inspired healing remedy for sugar detox...tweaked with spices for flavor and medicinal value.

Back on Track Remedy for Digestive Upset or Sugar Over-Indulgence

Ingredients:

1 cup water

1 green Granny Smith apple, peel off the skin, core and cut up (if you want to leave the skin on, use an immersion blender, blender or food processor to blend up at the end)

2 Tablespoons kuzu (a flavorless white root starch made from roots of the kuzu plant) - or, if you are avoiding starches, use 2 - 3 teaspoons ground dried burdock root

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

Pinch sea salt

Instructions:

Add kuzu to 1 cup room temperature water (if using kuzu). Kuzu is lumpy and needs to be dissolved in water. If you find kuzu in the market that is not lumpy, it’s likely been changed somehow. Allow kuzu lumps to dissolve. If you’re using burdock root instead of kuzu, skip to the next step.

Add all other ingredients into a saucepan and heat on low, until the apples are mushy and all ingredients can be blended together. Mash with a fork to blend everything up well. It should be relatively thick like a pudding. It will be thicker if you use the kuzu root, which is a thickening agent.

Serving Suggestions:

Add a little tahini, coconut oil or a touch of honey to taste.

My personal favorite, from a taste perspective, is the burdock root pudding remedy. Both kuzu and burdock root tone the digestive system, aid and soothe digestion and have an alkalizing effect. Since sugar steals minerals from the body and creates an acidic effect in the blood, an alkalizing remedy can bring the body back into a state of balance. The sea salt also helps to alkalize the body. Both kuzu and burdock root strengthen and vitalize the body. Kuzu can help relieve diarrhea and both can help calm an upset stomach.

Today’s Exercise

Try this grounding food and really pay attention to how you feel. Does it feel grounding for you?

I’d love to hear remedies you use or things your parents or grandparents taught you growing up!

So, please join me on my Facebook page.

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Day 10 - Trust Your Body

Somehow, in spite of my hippie roots, where I learned to levitate people and tables at my neighbor’s house when I was 3; my Native American background in nature healing; learning to access universal wisdom and ESP in a 3-day Silva Ultramind workshop when I was 18 (my mother’s pre-college gift to me so that I wouldn’t have to study so hard) and being taken on ghost hunts in lost graveyards with my grandfather, I still forget sometimes to trust the unseen.

Because another part of me loves research, case studies, evidence, proof and the solid stuff I can touch. This is the part of me who wants to fit in. To be accepted. And the part of me who wants to see all sides. The seeker in me who loves to find the answers written down by scholars.

And yet, when any of us looks deep into our hearts, hearing the words, “the answers lie inside of you,” we know this is truth. It’s not just truth for our spiritual health, it is truth for our physical, emotional and mental health. This is not to say that doctors and health practitioners can’t guide us. They have special skills and knowledge we can benefit from.

At the same time, having been a medical mystery for most of my life, I also believe very deeply, that we hold the answers for our health. And so we must be on our own team. Our health starts with us. And we seek support from others who have special skills as part of our team. Never discounting your inner truth, your intuition or your inner guidance system.

As a highly sensitive person, it was not fun to be in my body most of the time. Most of the time, I got carried away with cravings, symptoms, emotions and pain that was actually just information I was receiving from the world around me. The unseen. When the part of me that wanted evidence, case studies and proof finally surrendered to the part of me that listened to and heard the unseen, I began to trust my body to heal. For me, the unseen plays out through my body...through symptoms.

When something isn’t right for me, I can feel ill (mostly in my intestines). Once I stopped blaming

myself for feeling uncomfortable all the time and started listening, I began to trust my body. I began to trust my appetite, instead of judging myself for eating when it was not the “proper mealtime.” This allowed me move into a natural slim mode and stop counting calories, a prison I had anxiously lived in for decades. I began to understand the language of physical pain, emotions and cravings as I listened to them as information, instead of suppressing them (controlling) or allowing them to carry me away in autopilot.

If you have been reading my posts, you are likely sensitive to food in some way or have experienced some sense of food imparting a healing language in your body. You may have found that your body is doing things you don’t understand. Maybe it feels bad or tired or uncomfortable. And so when I say, “the answers to your health lie inside of you,” I’m actually asking you to go deeper into your pain or discomfort. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard this “truth.” Because for eons, spiritual leaders have taught us that the only way out of our pain is through it.

So here’s today’s invitation...go into your body, your emotions...go into the discomfort. Feel the fear of letting go and trusting it to guide you. Your body is like an energy antenna. It’s where your intuition lies. It knows, better than anyone else, better than any study or any “proof” what you uniquely need.

When Will You Start Trusting It?

Today, let’s affirm: “I let go and trust my body to guide me. I am safe.”

I’d also love to hear your stories of how things shifted as you listened to your body’s guidance or your intuition!

Celebrate every signal, every symptom and every day that you decide to get up again and practice listening. In a world that values the seen, celebrate trusting the unseen. Some of the most beautiful miracles happen when we do this. Y

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