Detox Your Life in 7 Days Course GETS MORE BUZZ

When Nwenna Kai was suffering from chronic illness in her early twenties she knew something had to change. “I had complications with my thyroids, I had migraines, I was constantly tired and suffered from depression and anxiety,” she says. Kai decided to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and incorporating juicing. “Along with the other ailments, I had chronic constipation. I decided to start eating mainly fresh fruits and vegetables not realizing I was eating raw. I also juiced and incorporated herbs in my diet, I started to feel better. I realized that the body can heal itself.”

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To register for next month's Detox Your Life in 7 Days Course, visit www.nwennakai.com/detox-program

Food Addictions & Cravings That Drive You Crazy

Most of us will have food addictions and cravings that are not so healthy for our bodies, however if we can minimize them, take the stick out of our asses and get over it, tell them the truth about it, and deal with them, we could actually heal them in a much lighter way. Some of us are afraid to even tell the truth about what we crave. One of my vegetarian clients just revealed to me that she still has cravings for bacon. I had to laugh and just tell him thank you for telling me the truth.

Here are some common food addictions and food cravings that we have, what they mean, and what you can do about them.

The Bread/Pasta Addiction/Craving
The Metaphysical Meaning
Having bread and pasta addictions from a metaphysical sense means that you are spiritually empty. We use food as a filler for being spiritually empty. Work on your spiritual practices. Fill yourself up with meditation, prayers, and writing gratitude lists. Get present to being empty. Enroll a prayer partner and become a prayer warrior.

Food substitutions - whole grain or wheat pasta and vegetable pastas like zucchini, jicama, beets, carrots, various forms of squash. (You need a spiralizer to make these vegetable pastas). For bread try Manna Bread which is readily available in Whole foods and health food stores.

The Sugar Addiction/Craving
The Metaphysical Meaning
You are missing the sweetness in life. You probably do not have much joy in your life and you probably do not deal with stress too well. Focus on what activity can you do right now that doesn't cost any money or require a lot of time that would feed your joy right NOW. It could be watching a funny movie, talking to a funny friend, watching a goofy YouTube video, or hula hooping with a child.

Food substitutions - agave nectar, maple syrup, honey, stevia, yacon syrup, lucuma powder, and sweet fruits

The Salt Addiction/Craving
The Metaphysical Meaning
You are undernourished and you probably have a feeling of being unappreciated. Craving salt can also mean that you have a thyroid disorder which stems from a mineral deficiency as most table salt lacks minerals. Minerals are in the soil, in the earth and the earth does what for us, She gives, she nurtures, she nourishes us with everything our bodies, minds, and spirits need. So craving salt could mean that you are craving nourishment for your body, mind, and spirit so ask yourself what would nourish you? Reading a book, writing a poem, praying, spending time with family members, etc.

Food substitutions - seaweed, iodine supplements, celtic sea salt, himalayan sea salt, herbamare, etc.

The best thing you can do for food addictions is to detox and cleanse the body regularly by doing herbal detoxes, raw food detoxes, vegetable juice cleanses, etc. The more you cleanse and empty the body, the mind, and the spirit the more you will see how you start to crave the spiritually fulfilling, sweet, yet good salty foods in life and you won't miss the breads, pastas, and artificial sugar and salt.

Check out my Detox Your Life in 7 Days Course to learn more about food addictions and cravings.

Embracing a New Food Paradigm

On the back of my book, The Goddess of Raw Foods, I quote, The Revolution starts at the Dinner Table. And it does. When we transform our food paradigm, we transform not only our health and the health of our families and our communities, but we transform the health of the planet and its environment and we as well transform a global economy.

Food is our Medicine, not our poison and it should not be used as a weapon. It is the building block of all of human life. We eat food for nutritional reasons, but we also eat food for comfort, nourishment, and for social reasons. We gather around the dinner table and eat and socialize and its a way that human beings love and serve each other.

Food is an essential culture component of the human experience, but it has become a weapon of choice for many of us.

A revolutionary way of transforming your health and your health habits is to embrace a new food paradigm. What does that mean?

Well it means giving up the old food paradigm that dictates to us what is sufficient amounts of protein, what is a refined grain (as if Mother Nature herself didn't make our grains refined), what is the sufficient amount of caloric intake for our bodies, the fact that consuming milk from an animal and feeding it to our children is both insane and counter intuitive of the nutritional supremacy of a mother's breast milk and also of the fact that there are other ways to get milk like from nuts, seeds, and grains.

Embracing a New Food Paradigm also means perhaps eating seasonally, so eat the fruits and vegetables that are in season as this not only benefits your health and delights your palette as the fruits and vegetables that come up in that season are juicier, taste so much better, and contain the nutrients that the body craves for that season, but it also transforms an economy that offers its devalues the health and well-being of the consumer over dollars.

Embracing a New Food Paradigm calls for collective action on the part of conscious individuals who firmly believe and commit themselves to valuing their health and their natural environments over everything else. It also means creating meals differently. Eating watermelon for dinner and just having a bowl of papaya for breakfast is not only filling, but highly nutritious. There is not need to eat eggs from a chicken and sausage from a pig to feel full or to get your daily nutritional value.

Learning how to read labels and read between the lines is extremely important in embracing a new food paradigm as there is nobody better to be an authority on what you should be eating other than yourself. Of course, there are people like myself and others who have studied, researched, and experienced how food either heals or depletes the body, but you are the ultimate authority on that choice. So that means, your doctor who is only required to take one nutritional course the entire time he or she is in medical school even with a half a million dollar education is also not an authority on what you should be eating.

What you can do now as an individual is support small and local businesses like co-ops around the world who support small organic farmers and other food vendors who do not sacrifice the health of their consumers for the sake of a dollar.

Other ways you can embrace a new food paradigm is to eat only food that you recognize and can pronounce, buy only organic and/or local, learn how to grow food outdoors or in indoors, and
quit giving in to pleasure over your health and quit making excuses about how you can't give up chicken. You're grown.

7 Things You Should Know Before You Turn Your Passion into a Business

Design your life around your passion.

Now this is the gold. In other words, make your lifestyle your business. I quit TV producing to open up an organic raw vegan restaurant in Los Angeles because I wanted to eat and live a more holistic and natural lifestyle. I did a four year run with the restaurant and there were times, I would be at the beach while my employees handled my restaurant. That's the lifestyle I wanted. I wanted to be able to go to the beach and still make money. So figure out how you want your life to look like and design your passion and your business around it.

Be Authentic.

Authenticity is like the new sexy. When people are authentic, they will buy from you, they will support you, and they will follow you wherever you go. Consumers are smarter now more than ever and we want to know where our dollars are being spent, so work on your authenticity. What is authenticity? According to Norma T. Hollis, America's Leading Authentic Voice Doctor, authenticity is the key to finding your life's purpose and communicating it with extraordinary power.


Stay in the conversation of who you are, what you are doing, and what you are want.

The wealth is in the conversation, not the conversation we have via text, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Even though these are wonderful opportunities to market and advertise your business and events and projects, the wealth is in the conversation you are having with people, so stay in the conversation of who you are, what you are doing, and what you want in life. And be authentic about it.





Keep money on the mind.

Cultivate a wonderful relationship with money now. If you don’t you will surely not make a good living doing what you are doing. Cultivating a good relationship with money means you realize what money can do for you and your business and for the world. It gives you spending power to re-invest in your business, to offer more services and products to your consumers, and to live the lifestyle that you desire which makes you a happier person and people want to buy from happy people.

Know your partners. (not your competition)

Passion cannot compete, so I don’t look at what people do in my field as competition. They are teachers, lessons, people who I can network with, partner with, create joint ventures together with, etc. Know who they are and meet them. Have a conversation with them. Tell them what you are up. They might refer a client to you or a business opportunity or give you some advice.

Reach out to your Community.

From time to time, reach out to your community and get an idea of what they want or expect from you. It’s a humbling experience, but one you might want to practice from time to time.

Invest in yourself.

Attend trade shows, networking events, hire a coach, take a teleseminar, whatever it takes to keep educating yourself and learning. Learning doesn't stop with school and for an entrepreneur it is always evolving. Enlist a team of mentors, coaches, friends, etc around you who consistently offer you advice, suggestions, knowledge, resources, and information.

Nwenna Kai is teaching an online workshop on Turning Your Passion into a Business Workshop, on Tuesday, March 1st, @ 6 pm PST, 9 pm EST.

To register for the workshop, visit www.nwennakai.com/workshops/

Raw & Living Foods for Beginners: Get Started! Part I

It's a New Year and spring is coming upon us. Its a perfect time to take on a new diet and lifestyle and learn how to do it easily, quickly, and inexpensively.

Join myself and some newbies for The Raw & Living Foods For Beginners Workshop. Get answers to all those questions that you have about eating raw.

Raw & Living Foods For Beginners: Get Started! Part I
Tuesday, February 22nd - 6 pm PST, 9 pm EST

Lecture is 45 minutes followed by a 30 minute Q&A

Learn what The Raw & Living Foods Philosophy is all about

Learn how to set up a Plant-based diet Kitchen on a budget

Learn all about recipe development & menu planning tips & tricks

Learn how & why to eat according to the seasons

Learn the do's and don't's and myths of a raw foods diet

Register for this class @ www.nwennakai.com/workshops/

Investment - $35

What's Really Eating Us? Black women & weight

When I came across the statistic that by the year 2034, 100% of black women will be overweight and obese, a bundle of emotions came across me as I felt embarrassed for black women, I felt sorry for us but mostly I felt compelled to write about it, talk about it, and take it on as a part of my platform in healing women.

Obesity is a symptom of something much deeper than just food and a sedentary lifestyle. As with any imbalance in the body, there is an imbalance in the mind/spirit as well which lends to the question, What’s Really Eating Us?

Anytime a large group of people who have identity factors in common with each other such as race suffer from a similar symptom such as obesity and thus a similar disease, then the question becomes what is going on with this group of individuals in which they share a common experience that is affecting them and producing a symptom as large as obesity. According to statistics over 70% of black women in America now are considered to be overweight and/or obese. I’m not going to put much weight on the statistics because I do my own personal accounting. Besides that I’m a skeptic when it comes to statistics especially since we have to be wary and conscious of from whom and from where this information is being disseminated? However, when I run my daily errands, when I look at my family, when I look at other black people’s families, when I hear brothers talk about black women’s weight problems, I don’t need a statistic to tell me what is really going on. In my family alone, I have a host of aunts, great-aunts and first and second female cousins who are overweight and/or obese. When I first took on this weight issue, I would run my daily errands and count the amount of black women who were overweight and/or obese and the numbers would run anywhere from 50-75 in a few hours of my day.

Too often western modern medicine dismisses the metaphysical, historical, political, and economic factors out of the picture when it comes to diagnosing and healing disease. While this form of medicine works to care for the symptom, it doesn’t aim to heal the entire person and look at what’s really going on?

We all want to blame obesity on food, but if that were the case, with the billion dollar weight loss industry, everyone who goes on a diet and loses the weight should be able to keep the weight off, but they don’t.
So again comes the question of What’s Really Eating Us?

ECONOMICS

We all know that the more money that you have, the more healthier you are. Why? Because if you have more money, you obviously live in a neighborhood that has healthier eating establishments, and options for sourcing organic, fresh, and healthier food. Also if you have more money, you value your health as you know that if you are healthy you have more energy and more energy means more money. Poor people who have a poverty consciousness eat cheap food. Its real simple and basic. People who are health conscious and who value their health over other material items will pay the few extra dollars that it takes to eat healthier. People who have more money are also more educated about their health. They seek knowledge and most of these people will read food labels, question where their produce is coming from, and they will read articles and books about health.

When you look at a working to middle class predominately black neighborhood in an urban city, look at the types of supermarkets in that area, the number of farmer’s markets in that area, and look at the conditions of that supermarket. Detroit, a predominately black populated city is considered to be a supermarket desert. A 2003 University of Michigan study of Detroit supermarkets showed there were only five grocery stores in Detroit with over 20,000 square feet. At the beginning of the recession, major large chain supermarkets fled the city leaving Detroit’s citizens to buy groceries from convenience stores.



THE MEDIA

In the media, we see black women celebrities who have struggled with weight: Oprah Winfrey, Star Jones, Jennifer Hudson, Kelly Price, Monique, Queen Latifah and more. Some of these women even have gone so far as to say how healthy, beautiful, and big they are thus giving black women permission to think that you can still be overweight and healthy. On top of that in a celebrity craze culture, we believe what celebrities dish out without any analytical reasoning of their messages on our part. Therefore this leaves a population of overweight black women believing that they are healthy in spite of carrying hundreds of pounds of weight.

DNA? ITS IN OUR GENES…..

As I talk to black women, many of us still believe the old concept that we are naturally bigger women. But if that were true, how would that explain, black women who are sizes 10 and under?

Is it in our DNA? Absolutely not! But many black women believe that because their grandmother, their mother, and their aunties are big, that they will naturally gain weight as well. There’s this unconscious agreement that goes on with black women in families where the mother is overweight and therefore her daughter must be overweight too especially if the mother is passing down her food and lifestyle choices to her children.

CHILDBIRTH

Women still believe that with childbirth comes excess weight. But many white and Asian women successfully lose weight after childbirth. So what’s so different about their bodies from our’s?

DIET

Now let’s get down to diet. One stipulation about the black community is that we usually eat like our ancestors or elders eat despite the health issues that it creates. When I first became vegetarian, the struggle was not in staying vegetarian and avoiding the temptation of meat, the struggle was in getting my family to understand and respect my new diet and lifestyle. The Standard Black American Diet is one that is rich in fried foods, meat, dairy products, processed foods, sugar, and fast junk. It is junk that clogs colons, creates diabetes, hinders the heart from beating, raises blood pressure, and shortens life spans and in spite of the abundance of knowledge everywhere black people still eat the junk of our elders and then turn around and laugh at the ignorance. So knowledge really isn’t power, is it?

LIFESTYLE

When me and my black girlfriends used to go hiking every Saturday morning in the Canyons when I lived in Los Angeles, we didn’t see other brown-skinned cuties on those trails besides us. We saw 80-year Russian grandmothers and Botox overdosed Beverly Hills housewives turning red from too much overexposure in the sun while hiking those long trails.

What are the lifestyles like for black women across the country? And how does that reflect the growing weight problem among us?

So the question What’s Really Eating Us? has a number of different solutions and possible answers, but we must go beyond the obvious factor of food and take a deeper look at the health of black women from a holistic perspective incorporating the mind/body/spirit connection.

The Yoni Diet: A Womb Wellness Class

Join myself and others in a powerful, health and life-transforming class about The Yoni Diet. Learn how to eat for your womb so that it is strong, supple, and soft.

Our Wombs are the most powerful force inside of our bodies. Our state of health stems from how healthy it is. All women need to eat life-giving foods that nourish and sustain the Yoni Body.

Learn how in this Womb Wellness Workshop!

The class is online.

Tuesday, February 15th – 6 pm PST, 9 pm EST
Lecture – 45 minutes followed by a 30 minute Q&A

Learn what foods are best to keep a strong, supple, and soft womb

Learn what 7 herbs are a woman’s best friend

Learn how disease is created in our womb-man bodies

Learn how to release fibroids, eliminate menstrual cramps, and shorten long cycles

Learn the proper way to detox and cleanse The Yoni Body

Investment – $35

Register for the class at www.nwennakai.com/workshops/