Britta GreenViolet Wellness

Sweet and Simple. 

If you haven't bullet-proofed your coffee yet, what on earth are you waiting for? You have more energy, more clarity, more focus and less hunger to look forward to. 

I love Meditative Mind. Their recordings are perfect for focusing, writing, meditating, making a mindful meal, making love, cleaning house, taking a walk... 

I also love Ganesha. We all need help removing obstacles. Why not ask the timeless deities for support?

I love our planet. Nature is my church, where I feel most at home, most at peace, most inspired and fully in communion with all that is. 

YES!

Tara Brach is one of my favorite dharma teachers. 

And this talk on The Sacred Pause is SO relevant and helpful for slowing down, relieving stress, being present and handling our own inclinations to react in difficult situations. 

Experimental gastronomy: Breaking all the dinner party rules...

Ooooooooo, I’m excited about this! 

I am a big fan of Mark Hyman, and I love the sound of this podcast...

A music video for eating greens?

YAAAASSSSS!

“Whatever you do, don’t skip your greens!”

We just performed this song at our the inaugural inCourage Chorus Spring 2018 concert!

Written by the ineffable Laurence Cole of Songlines Community Choir in Washington state, this song celebrates life from the perspective of an 80-year old man who skinny dips in the frigid Puget Sound each morning!

TRUTH BOMB!

This is a good nugget of wisdom to hold onto in relation to our wellness goals!

its one thing to “want to lose weight”. 

But WHY do you want to lose weight? - To feel sexier for your man or woman? - To fit into your favorite pair of jeans? - So you can keep up with your kids out in the yard or playground? - So you will still be alive by the time your grandkids are born?

Yup, these are all realities. And honestly, if you aren’t grounding each of your goals in the rich soil of your WHY, you will lose your resolve. 

Most smoothies you find, even though they may not contain refined sugar, will still cause a blood sugar spike. That's because they are usually loaded with high-glycemic fruits, and bc they are digested so quickly it can lead to a serious energy dive 1-2 hours after consuming. 

Next time you’re craving a smoothie, try this instead!

Ingredients: - 1 small Persian cucumber (washed, preferably organic, peel on) - 1 big handful of kale - 1/2 cup of frozen or fresh organic spinach - 1 T fresh lemon or lime juice (or both!) - 1/2 can of coconut milk or cream (full-fat, organic) - handful frozen coconut chunks or a spoonful of coconut mana/butter - 1/2 an avocado - optional additions: 1 T “Vitamineral Greens” powder, 1/2 t Macha powder, 1 t Maca powder

Brilliant article. 

“Your life doesn’t get more sensational when you have more followers... That’s not what you ought to be keeping score of.”

 By Nicole Lippold

"Eating a high fat diet will make you fat and give you heart disease. If you want to lose weight, you need to exercise more and eat less. If you can’t lose weight doing this then you’re just not applying yourself."

If you’ve been alive and eating sometime in the last 30 years, this message is impossible to miss.

It’s considered so universally true that questioning it doesn’t ever bubble up to consciousness.

Well, what if it weren’t true? 

What if you tried it for several decades and it never worked for you? 

What if you looked around at everyone you knew and saw that it didn’t work for them either. 

Would you be willing to question it then?

In 1977, the US government came out with their first dietary guidelines, presumably to support the health and well-being of the entire country and to encourage the social and economic benefits that come along with a healthy, disease-free, trim, active and happy population.

Their recommendation was that cutting fat and increasing exercise was the way to go for health and weight loss... So the 1980’s birthed a boom in low-fat everything, and new exercise forms popped up every year (ie, spin classes and booty boot camp). 

I was obsessed enough with my own weight that I taught group exercise classes for over 20 years. In all that time of pounding my body, I never felt in control of my weight and I never ever saw anyone successfully and/or sustainably lose weight by exercising more and eating what they always ate, just less of it. In fact, fatness and disease exploded. We Americans are fatter and sicker than ever.

So maybe, fat’s not the problem.

If you think about it, there have been moments in history where a given belief, having been around for generations, turns out to be wrong, forcing the population to wrap its brain around a whole new way of looking at things. The world being round instead of flat, for example. Or the earth traveling around the sun instead of the other way around.

Maybe fat doesn’t actually make you fat. Maybe, just maybe, fat is actually good for you. How weird would that be???

I stumbled upon this as a truth when I gave up sugar on January 1st, 2017. I was enormously resistant to the idea of succumbing to the seemingly inevitable creep of weight gain as I aged, so I thought I’d try to give up sugar and go from there.

As fate would have it, a book called The Case Against Sugar, by investigative journalist Gary Taubes, was published just days before new years day. I listened to it as I ate my last ever pint of Haagen Dazs mocha chip ice-cream and proceeded to have my mind blown.

Turns out the fat-is-bad idea was just an unproven hypothesis. 

Any supporting evidence was based on faulty, outdated science pushed into prominence by egoically driven personalities and a sugar industry hell-bent on deflecting attention away from itself.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Carbohydrates do... In particular, refined carbohydrates like sugar and anything made from grains like bread and pasta. 

Carbohydrates break down into simple sugars that are shunted into your fat cells by the hormone insulin. And there the fat stays until you reverse this process by reducing the amount of carbohydrate you eat.

That may be a daunting realization given the ubiquity of yummy carbs that are as American as chocolate chip cookies and apple pie. But like any belief that crumbles, it opens up a new space filled with the opportunity that propels human evolution forward. 

When I gave up sugar, I also gave up grains. I struggled for weeks wondering what I was going to eat and what I was going to feed my family. Slowly the light of a new world began to show itself to me. I discovered, gratefully, that there were a bunch people already in the know doing a lot of the hard work for me. The mind-changing research is out there on YouTube, and more recipes than you can cook are just a google search away. 

The truth, it turns out, has been hidden in plain sight for years.

Fat is your friend, people. Your body needs it, which is why you have been craving it for over 30 years. The wisdom of the body prevails. Not just in craving fat but also by reducing carb cravings when you stop eating them.

Does any of this resonate as truth for you? Listen closely to your intuition. 

If these ideas stick with you, notice when they show up again in your life. Because they will. Slowly but surely more and more people that are worn down by never being able to lose weight will understand the biochemistry behind how carbohydrates fill fat cells and they will be willing to open their minds to a new way of looking at the world.