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February 16, 2015 Hi {!firstname_fix} Spring is starting to make itself heard. Many crocuses, a few daffodils, and all the trees look like lace rather than just sticks. Mostly it is the feeling in the air, a sort of tension of wanting to push up to the sun. My neighbor is a master gardener. I stop in front of her house every morning to see what is happening. She has the 3 daffodils on the south side, and many little shoots of things not yet identifiable. The sky is that New Mexico blue, deep, intense, brilliant. I can feel spring humming underneath. No classes will be starting for a week. I am taking time off to do some research and thinking. I will be in the San Francisco area this week. I know there will be green grass down at the Stanford Shopping Center, :) so I think I will just have to travel on down there to remember the days I would go down with the dogs and they would run and run. I will have a chance to visit with my middle son, Ted, who has moved back to California to start a new phase of his life. We are going to try again for a luncheon on the 21st. So if you are around, come over to the Radiant Northern California list and share in the planning. I will start classes up again the last week in February. A number of you have asked me how the classes work. Check the class list page for more information on this. And please go read the questions and answers before you write to me. If you have trouble getting through the process, write the tech forum. Be sure to visit our Radiant Recovery website and Community Forum regularly. Warmly, Kathleen **********************************************************************
**Quote From Kathleen ** The cornerstone of your healing, your food journal, is also the first step in creating a relationship with your body. **********************************************************************
**Testimonial of the Week ** I've been detoxed now for a little over a month, and I noticed something extraordinary this past week. In working with my clients, I am always VERY focused but never relaxed (due to a general anxiety I feel around people). This week I experienced being focused AND RELAXED, which actually allowed me to be present to them in a whole new way. It was a totally new experience for me and I've spent the week just savouring it and being amazed. It seems like such a GIFT and I don't know where it could have come from unless it's related to doing the food. Anyway, I thought I would share it here to let people know what happened. Maybe someone else has had a similar experience? Love, Kathy (in London) **********************************************************************
**Notes from the Forum ** I can relate a bit. I did two "Don't want to!!" episodes. One was pushing the part of breakfast that said, on time, every day. I wanted erratic. It was much more dramatic. Then I was NOT going to be told what to do on step three. I didn't realise that no one was telling me to do anything.  I was making up the drama of internal conflict when I didn't have to have any there at all. When really all the choosing was entirely up to me.  Kathleen had posted something that I always remember. It was something like - there's so much energy there. All that energy going into the conflict and drama. (And I much preferred the beta-endorphin kick from drama to actually doing breakfast as written.) Just think how amazing it would be if I could harness all THAT energy onto breakfast itself. So that is what I keep in mind. Where to choose to direct my energy. And doing the food helps my choice/which helps me doing the food. Yay!! I still stamp my foot occasionally and don't wanna, LOL, but I recognise now where that's biochemical and can smile at it a bit and know what to do. So I really like your healing voice! And love how you are listening to that one.   Mosaic **********************************************************************
** Radiant Recovery® Store ** 
Well, I went and did a literature search on my beloved bud, Pycnogenol. I was stunned at the research that has been done. This week I am including it because drinking alcohol reduces immune function and Pycnogenol reverses that effect. Pycnogenol also helps keep extra fat out of the fat stores. I like this idea. I decided to carry it in our store because I had heard about its great anti-oxidant effects. I had NO idea of the range of what it can do. Good stuff!
Life Sci. 1996;58(5):PL 87-96. Related Articles, Links Immunomodulation by pycnogenol in retrovirus-infected or ethanol-fed mice. Cheshier JE, Ardestani-Kaboudanian S, Liang B, Araghiniknam M, Chung S, Lane L, Castro A, Watson RR. Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson 85724, USA. Pycnogenol is a commercial mixture of bioflavonoids that exhibits antioxidative activity. The effects of dietary pycnogenol on immune dysfunction in normal mice as well as those fed ethanol or infected with the LP-BM5 murine retrovirus were determined. The ethanol consumption and retrovirus infection caused abnormalities in the function and/or structure of a broad array of cells involved in humoral and cellular immunity. Pycnogenol enhanced in vitro IL-2 production by mitogen-stimulated splenocytes if its production was suppressed in ethanol-fed or retrovirus-infected mice. Mitogenesis of splenocytes did not show a significant change in mice treated with pycnogenol. It reduced the elevated levels of interleukin-6 produced in vitro by cells from retrovirus infected mice and IL-10 secreted by spleen cells from mice consuming ethanol. Natural killer cell cytotoxicity was increased with pycnogenol treatment. Phytother Res. 2000 Sep;14(6):472-3. Related Articles, Links Inhibition of lipogenesis by pycnogenol. B Hasegawa N. Department of Food and Nutrition, Nagoya Bunri College, Nagoya, Japan. hsgwn@nagoya-bunri.ac.jp The influence of pycnogenol on the adipose conversion of 3T3-L1 cells by insulin was studied. In week 3 of culture with insulin, pycnogenol was found to inhibit significantly the expression of glycerophosphate dehydrogenase (p 0.01). This finding suggests that pycnogenol inhibits the accumulation of lipid droplets in adipose tissue. Copyright 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Please send questions and suggestions. I love hearing from you and truly want to help you do your program better. **********************************************************************
**Radiant Kitchen ** Chicken Potato Kugel
Grate potatoes with skins (food processor recommended) and squeeze out any liquid. Grate onion. Mix potatoes, onion, eggs, salt and pepper until combined. Pour potato batter over the chicken. Bake for 40 minutes or until golden brown and crispy.
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**Radiant YLD ** Our approach to weight loss is based on my book, Your Last Diet! This is weight loss for real people. Your Last Diet! is the only weight-loss program especially for sugar-sensitive people. It addresses YOUR unique body and brain. The first part of Your Last Diet works on healing the addiction to sugar by balancing your blood sugar and raising your serotonin and beta endorphin (brain chemicals associated with addiction). This extraordinary text describes a process that means you will NEVER diet again. The program heals the reasons why you are overweight. It walks you through a four-phase process to lose weight permanently and totally stop the pattern of yo-yo dieting. The 4 phases are:
This membership gives you everything you need to succeed at weight loss. There is NO failure in this program. There is no pressure, no stress, no yelling in your face. We think of this as a program for The Biggest Winner! Your program will include:
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**Radiant Living ** The special Radiant Living membership program is all about support for learning how to *live* as you move towards radiance. The stability of your food and the steps will form a foundation to bring you into a new way of living. We will talk about emotional sobriety, finding passion in your life, disarming things that get in the way, program maturation and, of course, spirituality. When we are caught in addiction, we stop growing, we get stuck and stay stuck. Our commitment to doing life without addiction has catapulted us into something unexpected. Radiant Living will allow you to share a dialogue with others – people who are asking the same questions and exploring answers boldly and with the humility that comes with doing the food. These conversations will help you transform fear and give new tools for healing. We look at topics such as grief, crisis, trauma, emotional healing, revitalizing your program and stepping into your big self. So the dialogue will be about the big picture and the practical ideas for daily implementations of the changes you are seeking. The dialogue will meet you where you are and offer ideas that you may not have heard before. Let go of old thinking that growing up has to be hard or painful. This is about joy, discovery, fun and creativity. And, of course, LOTS of laughter. There is no step requirement to participate, only honesty, willingness and openness. Your membership will give you what you need to master this new way of being. Your membership will include:
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**So What About Cravings ** Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.
I have been reading a lot of posts on the issue of what to do with cravings and I thought it might help to say a little more. Cravings come from beta-endorphin withdrawal. If you had something sweet, when it wears off, you will crave. If you have a big event that spikes beta-endorphin (a fight, a joy, a lot of sex, dancing all night, getting a job, not getting a job), when it wears off you will have cravings. Sometimes the *wearing off* effect takes 4 days, so you do not make a connection between let down and craving. So the key question, is what to do when you have them ? First of all, entertain the idea that it is possible to have a craving and not *do* anything. Now, when you are just starting out, this is hard. Not doing anything is called impulse control. If you have low serotonin, you may not have much impulse control, so you get a craving and you do something right away. One strategy is to simply work the steps and allow your biochemistry to heal and imporve your impulse control. Another strategy is to start right away and learn to recognize this phenomenon and simply practice waiting. Cravings by nature are simply your brain calling. If you start to get antsy and scared, it calls more. If you do something else, you can overide the call. So, bottom line, sort out ways to reduce the BE priming - this means having your sweets with meals or always with protein. This cuts down the *hit* effect. Use your journal to mark when to expect the whispers or yelling to come...Mark 4 days down the road when you have a BE spike. Being prepared for the edginess helps. Do the food. When you get to step 7, cravings go away. Kathleen Ok this is great Kathleen. I got it till I got to the last sentence:Sure :-) As your brain heals, the beta-endorphin receptors don't scream so much. If *life* creates a spike, you have skills to not react in the same way. So it is a blip not a flood. The more you heal, the more you up the normal level of beta-endorphin. Let me see if I can describe this... When you start, you have low level BE. Imagine it at a 2 out of 10. Something happens that spikes it to an 8. So when it drops, you have a 6 point gap with big screaming and big fallout craving. Over time, you heal. Now your normal BE runs at 7. Something spikes it to an 8. It drops back to a 7. The BE receptors say, "Um, did you notice that?" And you laugh with them. Make sense? Kathleen **********************************************************************
Thanks for reading! If you know someone who could benefit from this, feel free to forward it to them. Not a subscriber yet? Like what you have read? Sign up to get future issues delivered straight to you: http://www.radiantrecovery.com Until next time!
Here are the folks who are helping put the newsletter together:
Gretel, our webmaster, puts it all together. David runs the Radiant Recovery® Store. mosaic contributes to the Notes from the Forum column. ©2015 Kathleen DesMaisons. All rights reserved. You are free to use or transmit this article to your ezine or website as long as you leave the content unaltered, use this attribution: "By Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D. of Radiant Recovery®", and notify kathleen@radiantrecovery.com of the location. Please visit the Radiant Recovery® website at http://www.radiantrecovery.com for additional resources on sugar sensitivity and healing addiction. You are getting the weekly newsletter from Radiant Recovery® in response to your signup. A copy of this newsletter may also be found posted on the web at http://www. radiantrecovery.com/weeklynewsletter |
