Weekly blogs as food for body, mind and spirit.
Last summer, I read an article in Vogue magazine about a wellness clinic in Austria called Viva Mayr. The article was so intriguing, and I was so desperately in need of a complete physical overhaul, that I contacted the clinic immediately and booked a week’s stay.
Over-weight, sluggish, aching joints, a flabby midriff, depressed and deeply disappointed in life were the symptoms I took with me. It was not a pretty picture. I’d just had a birthday, one of those “big” numbers, and the future looked bleak indeed.But seven days of restricted eating, cleansing, massages, holistic treatments and remedies, fresh mountain air and plenty of rest turned the tide. Two months later, I’m 20 pounds lighter and nearly two dress sizes smaller, with more optimism, focus, spring in my step and a resurging passion for life.
This is just the beginning. I’m not completely out of the woods yet. Sometimes the voices at 3:30 a.m. kick my round rump. But it is getting better.
One of the secrets to this dramatic turnaround – slow chewing. The core philosophy at Viva Mayr is that most of our ailments start in our polluted guts. We eat too much of the wrong foods, in the wrong combinations, too late in the evening, and we barely chew any of it.
Slow chewing, at least 40 times per mouthful of food, allows us to savor each taste and gives our saliva a chance to begin the process of digestion in the mouth (as it should) instead of overloading our stomach and intestines with undigested food.
These blogs are called Slow Chew because that’s what I’ll be doing…taking thoughts, ideas and life’s little and big occurrences and mentally masticating them slowly, so that we can extract all of the nutrition from them, digest what we need and eliminate the waste.
Gaze out of your window, read the headlines, listen to the shout sessions on the cable shows, heck, look at your bank balance – the times feel tough as hell. There seems to be a severe lack of money, jobs, opportunities, leadership, safety, peace of mind, joy. A lack of love and, most sadly, a lack of hope.
Slow Chew is where we can talk about it frankly each week, where we will begin to shape a new and empowering vision, and carve out a brighter reality for today and tomorrow.
