Live, Beloved, Live

Wellness Begins Inside, Live, Beloved, Live came from years of witnessing far too many of my family and friends succumb to food-borne diseases and ill health. After a while, I realized that eating is not random; what we eat is a learned behavior. And so, even well-educated, and wealthy people ate how they were conditioned. Moreover, they did not see the connection between what they ate and their life aspirations. Health was a game of chance and not choices.

Today, emphasis, however, is placed on the food choices of lower socioeconomic status. Yet I saw the same unhealthy food choices among higher-income or educated individuals. Food choices didn't change even if they had access and the financial resources to eat healthily. If we're raised on processed foods, we eat the way we learn. And so, access, money, and even knowing better did not necessarily translate into a healthy living style. I wanted to know what was going on. It wasn’t food, but our experiences.

Of course, medical doctors and nutritionists write most books on health. Yet, my disciplines in psychology, yoga, and energy cooking transformed my perspective on food and health. Deeply inspired and sadden by the diseases I saw, I reflected on my personal experiences. Afterward, I felt compelled to share "Wellness Begins Inside, Live, Belove, Live." But unlike books where the writer tells the story as an outsider, Wellness Begins Inside shares from the inside- its personal.

One of the problems surrounding health is our lack of awareness. We're not even mindful or conscious of our eating behavior. And so, obesity, elevated cholesterol, blood pressure, and prediabetic blood glucose levels become chronic rather than transient. As a witness, I saw that even when my brothers' life depended on a change in their eating habits, they didn't. But there's was more; when you watch death taking away the lives of people you love, you realize that an autopsy doesn't tell the whole story, for example, that conditioning, grief, anger, neglect, impoverishment, and unstable childhoods, all go into our food choices.

It's our unresolved emotions and misunderstood life experiences that become our entree. Although we can live for some time off grief and disappointments, eventually, it takes its toll. Our health is not separate from how we feel and think, from our memories and past experiences. We eat what has happened to us until we transform it and let it go.

At the writing of this book, our unhealthy approach to food is further compromised because we've been living with a pandemic that has drastically altered our lives. Some of us have suffered the death of family and friends. At the same time, most of us have been on edge through the quarantine with the threat of death. Wearing masks and social distancing has forever left us mistrustful of others. Jobs have been lost. Fear has set in, with COVID-19 ranking as the third leading cause of death, disproportionately affecting minority communities.

Even though many of us are suffering from comorbidities like high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity, our food choices did not enter the equation as a response to combating COVID-19. Interestingly, with all the dos and don’ts, the COVID-19 guidelines rarely mention food as a way to mitigate the spread. Despite this reality, we've not only gained weight and suffered economically but experienced grief, social and emotional distress, and stress-related health problems that compromise our immune systems, triggering stress eating. In this book, we will explore how to diminish, if not eliminate, the effects of the comorbidities and heal.

Because Wellness Begins Inside, it’s an awakening. In my awakening, I realized that health is a gift to be cherished. And that being healthy goes beyond our bodies- it starts inside. Health happens when we become conscious of our unresolved emotions, thinking, feelings, and childhood instabilities, and understand them. Besides, even if we eat healthy, on a cellular level, the over-all power within our food is not optimized, without healing.

In my life, mind and spirit awareness brought forth the necessity of meditation, energy checkups, and yoga practice (inseparable from my food experience.) With my direct experience, I delve deeper into understanding the root causes of genetic diseases with a yearning to heal. Food, when understood, is a formidable weapon against diseases. Health is wealth.

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Wellness Begins Inside invites us on a delicious wellness journey. We will discover food, but more importantly, healing as a way of life that transforms us so that we fulfill our purpose. Any endeavor we want to do in life depends on our health. We can sabotage it with ice cream, sugary drinks, pizza, chemically altered, overeating, processed high saturated fats, and other salty foods. Or we can take care of ourselves by realizing Wellness Begins Inside, Live, Beloved Live.