 It's a big week. We have settled into the new year. We have cleared out the stuff and gotten back into the groove. I love this time of year. I am back at the gym, doing my goals for the new year and I like it. The classes feel good and energized as well. These classes will be starting this week: Step 4: More Than You Think is the potato class. Come learn everything you ever wanted to know about the timing, size, frequency of your potato. Learn about the best vitamins and talk all you want about them. This is a nice way to strengthen and refine your step 4. Back to Basics 2 is the continuation of the regroup and get back on track class that starts this week. Brain Chemistry: Beta Endorphin is one of our most popular classes. It will teach you the core of the science behind the program. This is the outline for a critical part of sugar sensitivity, why you act the way you do and what you can do to change it. I love this class and so do all the people who have taken it. Somehow BE rocks! YLD Weightloss 10-week and YLDfoundation classes begin. See the YLD section for more information. Hormones is a new class for women dealing with perimenopause, menopause, PMS or whatever. Let's discover what you can do to refine your program to support feeling better. I have been working on the curriculum for this class for several weeks. My, oh my, the material I have found is fascinating. The story is way more intriguing than the things we we taught. A number of you have asked me how the classes work. Check the class list page for more information on this. The classes are done online with one lesson each day. You do not have to be at your computer at any set time. Please feel free to pass this week's newsletter on to your friends and family. Don't forget to let me know what you like and would like to see me cover. Be sure to visit our Radiant Recovery® website and Community Forum regularly. Warmly, Kathleen ********************************************************************** January 9, 2006 ** Quote From Kathleen ** You will be thrilled and excited when you master the moods that have haunted you for so long. ********************************************************************* ** Testimonial for the Week** Yesterday, I took my girls to the mall. They just HAD to spend their Christmas gift cards. So they wanted to eat there too and we went to the food court. There was no questioning about where they could eat or what they could eat. There was no whining about what they can't have. They just calmly discussed their options and settled on the Mexican place. They each had the chicken taco salad with black beans and water bottles. Even little Grace knew what to have and what was good for her to eat, no fighting, no whining, just calm discussion and making postive choices. I just was so amazed! I had to write you all and tell you about it. We sat and had a nice lunch and then contined shopping. It was a great day. I sure hope what I'm teaching my girls now will stick with them when they go out on their own. My oldest daughter is a senior in high school and goes off to college next year, I sure hope she takes this with her. Janie ******************************************************************** **Recipe of the Week** This is a great one dish recipe that also uses up your leftover cooked chicken! Bean and Potato Chowder
******************************************************************** **Your Last Diet: More Than What You Think** Well, ok, we are geared up for the three new classes starting. That will be the readiness class called YLD foundation, YLD weightloss and YLD weightloss in action. Don't be fooled by the quick and simple promises of all that email advertising that started Jan 1 (smile). My mailbox is overflowing with them too. Come do something that takes time, work and willingness. Who else gives you a lifetime membership for one fee? Think about that. We have people coming back after 3 years, humbled and ready to dig in and do it. This last week we had a chat about the classes. It was so much fun to share what we have planned. I am really excited. Come and join us. Click here if you are ready to change your life or just plain ole have fun. It is not too late to get into the classes if you come right now. ********************************************************* *********** **David's Corner ** 
And their premier product is for horses. Let me know if you want me to get that. I don't know how many of you have horses. If you haven't been to the store for a while, how about just coming over and browsing. You will be thrilled to see all the changes! Please send questions and suggestions. I love hearing from you and truly want to help you do your program better. ********************************************************* *********** **Our Online Groups** Hi, I'm Connie, liaison for the RadiantBinge group on Yahoo. We talk about doing Radiant Recovery food in the context of binge eating. We have people who come in from all kinds of places, who have found Radiant Recovery through Kathleen's books, internet searches, searches through the Yahoo groups, and of course referrals from the main web site at Radiant Recovery. So we are diverse! What's interesting given all this diversity is how alike we are. Hmm, where have we seen this before!! Anyone who has struggled with bingeing knows that the sufferer can become scared, ashamed, and mystified and think that the problem is bingeing. However, as we talk about the biochemistry of sugar addiction, and how imbalance can show up as bingeing, all of a sudden it is clear and understandable. Voila, no more scared, ashamed, or mystified. As a side benefit - as we talk, we learn a lot about eating disorders in general, and how they are really just on a continuum of balanced/imbalanced sugar sensitivity. However, doing the steps to heal takes a lot of practice and two-steps-forward, one-step-back. Some of us were out of balance for a long, long time. I was for 40 years. (No longer bingeing, and haven't for a couple of years.) That's where the fun part comes in. It is very freeing and fun to "talk real" about the challenges of a clean food program, with other people who have "been there." I know my poor friends on the binge list have been very patient with me as I learn to include veggies! It's taken a while! So if you have ever struggled with binge eating, feel free to drop in or read the archives. I will paraphrase Miss Manners when she was talking about the world of propriety: "Welcome to the world of recovery from binge eating. We have much more fun here than you may have been led to believe." (smile) ******************************************************************** ** **
Science in Service Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.
But we don't really talk about what is behind it. When I was looking at this picture, I was thinking about the whole box of citations I read for the soy story. There they are, with highlighters and notes and trying to make sense of something so complex and contradictory. This is what I want most to give you - a trustworthy, informed and thoughtful response to these issues. I want to offer a way to ask questions reflectively and then to sort through understanding how to make choices. I guess we might call it empowerment. Let me show you what I mean. Many of us deal or struggle with being fat. The first level of looking at this was why. Why is it that some of us have to work so hard? Why is it that what *they* tell us does not fit, does not work? So I put up the original YLD program which was kind of an outline of the questions and the things I knew at that time. It was more behavioral, and an adaptation of the sugar sensitive story based on what seemed to make sense. Then my publisher said, *Ok, let's do a book.* I adapted that original material and wrote Your Last Diet. It was very substantive. A year of my desk looking like that picture. But it was not sexy, nor did it lend itself to sound bites. My editor left and the new person assigned to the book was slender, into exercise and not particularly invested in fat people. But we were still doing the program. I started a little pilot project. We played with some of the ideas. We dug deeper to find solutions and practical stuff. But it was really grim and really rather boring. So we didn't talk about it much. I kept thinking, there has to be more. It wasn't having *information* - that didn't grab us. So I figured I would design a class and look to the experiential to see what might emerge. We started off and I asked people to share how they felt about being fat. The stories blew me away. I have run groups for twenty five years, I don't usually get dumbfounded. But those stories were full of so much anguish, so much pain, and such consistency that I literally could not talk for days. I felt I was swirling in the pain of a people, people who do not speak this pain. people who are hidden and silent and desperate and trying each new diet. We kept going. I asked for a list of every diet. The list grew and grew and grew until we were laughing so hard it hurt. People began to see that this is not a personal story, a story hidden in shame, but that somehow there was more to it. Something bigger than we understood. Then I said, what if this list was about skill rather than failure. The class said *WHAT!, Whatever do you mean?* We began to talk about what is there underneath the pain. That is wasn't failure, it was biochemistry. We just didn't know. And now we do. And just like sugar sensitivity, the stories started to transform. Instead of spinning, spinning, we could ask, what is here to learn, how can I make sense of this? How can I understand the biochemistry of being fat and then use that to craft a way of healing? So, the research became in service to the lived experience and the lived experience became the way to make the research come alive. Instead of a bunch of mice in a lab, it became our friend, the C57s who are teaching us why we have fat stomachs and why exercise might not work for us as we expect. It is this marriage of science and life that makes this community so alive and vital. You guys make it burst from the pages into real life. You make the highlighters shine, even sing. Your stories, your truth, your lives make the citations come alive. And my oh my, is it exciting. it feels like Holy Moley, Batman, we KNOW this story, we LIVE it. Watch us rock! ©Kathleen DesMaisons 2005. Here are the folks who are helping put the newsletter together: Gretel, the liaison for the recovery list and the webmaster puts it all together Naomi, liaison for big ones gathers the recipes JoAnna, the liaison for affiliates gathers the testimonials Marie, the liaison for diabetes gathers the info on the online lists David, who runs the Radiant Recovery® Store talks about what new products we have. 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.htm. ©2005 by 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 and use this attribution: "By Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D. of Radiant Recovery®. Please visit Kathleen's website at http://www.radiantrecovery.com for additional resources on sugar sensitivity and healing addiction." Please notify me at kathleen@radiantrecovery.com to let me know where the material will appear. Banner Photograph by Geraint Smith |
