food and love: a really personal blog entry, part 1 of 2

I always talk, when I speak in public about my whole-foods lifestyle, about my research. It’s published in full in The Green Smoothies Diet.

One of my biggest surprises was discovering that 54% of people who drink green smoothies regularly, in my study of 175 people, report a more positive, stable mood. Also, 20% experience higher libido.

(The sex-drive statistic, to me at least, relates to both energy and interest in a very intense, personal connection with other people. You might say it’s just making your hormones balanced and healthier, and that’s a good point, too–I believe a high libido is a natural state.)

Less surprising in my study is that 80% experience better digestion. What do all these things have to do with each other? That’s the subject of today’s and tomorrow’s blog entry.

I have been thinking a lot about love lately in philosophical and personal ways. I am reading the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I adore this book. Highly recommend it. Julia Roberts had better do it justice in the movie!

Just like me, the author got a painful divorce, then rebounded into a painful long-term relationship that didn’t work out.

She spent a year in Italy, India, and Indonesia seeking pleasure, then spirituality, then wisdom, and the book is her memoir. It’s the story of “one woman’s search for everything,” the cover says.

I want everything! Don’t you?

I’ve been reading a few pages and then THINKING about what I just absorbed, for days. Consequently, it’s taking forever–which is annoying a couple of my girlfriends who are waiting to borrow my marked-up copy.

The next book I plan to read is Mastery of Love. I want to love in the most pure way possible–never thinking of the person I love as an object. Never “measuring” what I get back in exchange.

I want to love just for the sheer joy of it. Because it’s the best thing we experience in life, love is, the most natural and pure state. I have been observing the way I and other people love and making mental notes, for a while now.

How do you love? (This question is offered for self-reflection purposes–you don’t have to answer it here.) Is it needy, desperate, anxious? Measuring, giving only as much as you’ve historically gotten back? Is it calculated rather than given happily, organically, wholly? (Does needy/anxious love even qualify as love, anyway? It is certainly passed off as such, in daily life.)

So I have been reading and thinking about how I have loved (and been loved) in the past. Who I have loved and why. When I have felt a loss of “self” and just given myself over to God as well as what is divine in me and others.

I’ve been asking this: why I have been more able at times, and less able at other times, to recognize the divine in myself and others and respond appropriately?

Part 2 on this tomorrow.

Posted in: Mind/Body Connection