Cleansing time

Spring is the perfect time for cleansing and renewal. It's as if everything is being born again. The energy of it can be so palpable, even people who've lost their touch with nature can feel it. What better time than now to reinvent the body with a change in diet?

One of my favorite cleanse books is If the Buddha Came to Dinner: How to Nourish Your Body to Awaken Your Spirit: Hale Sofia Schatz, Shira Shaiman The messages is lovely and so spiritual, the recipes are so great, I wish there were more. I still refer back to this book time and time again and make many of the recipes.

There are so many ways to cleanse, you can find one that suits you. Give up meat for a week. OR - cut out flour, dairy, and sugar. OR - Go raw. OR - Try macrobiotic. Alkalize. Drink you meals as smoothies and blended soups. The possibilities are endless! If you're feeling less than optimal, try something other than what you are currently doing, but something that resonates with you, and isn't so different and weird your sure to stop on the first day. The best part about a cleanse is that it has a start and an end. Which makes it easier and gives you that little bit of release to make it through. And maybe, just maybe, you'll feel so good you want to continue feeding yourself foods that make you feel great.

Spring is here....I can feel it.

For one thing, I'm in a Walt Whitman kind of mood:

"The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me."
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

OK, it's still a little cold to go running off into the woods naked, and I'm not likely to do it even when it's warm. But I am started to crave GREENS, and WALKS. And I am MAD to be back in contact with my slumbering body. It feels like it's been asleep all winter. I normally love the winter, I snow-shoe, cross country ski, walk. But not this year, for various reasons. But I can feel myself coming back to life and it feels good.

There was was a month this winter where I was eating all cooked foods, and not very good ones at that. Luckily that didn't last long. My health feels so much better doing some raw. So why not all raw, one might ask? Well I've done 100% - and to be honest, I didn't have the experience of feeling better, or off the charts with my energy. Staunch raw-foodist would say 'well you haven't given it a chance' but if I ate junk food for that amount of time they would say 'the toxins are why you don't feel better'. Or if I got sick on raw food it would be 'you're detoxing and cleansing' but with cooked food the answer would be 'it's the food being cooked that making you sick'. See the double standard? I can say that I have experienced not having any raw, and feeling worse.

But is it the fact that it's raw, or the fact that you are eating more fruits and veggies? Or when you eat raw, you aren't ingesting certain things? That, my friends, is another post for another time.