Hi {!firstname_fix}

I have returned from my week in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It was really fun. I met a lot of people. And almost everyone we spoke to was excited about the program and possibilities for implementing it.

I have an interesting sidelight. I heard that 20/20 did a show on sugar. Apparently they dismissed the idea that sugar can be a problem for kids by holding up a copy of Little Sugar Addicts. They are also conducting a poll on whether sugar is related to hyperactivity. I am thinking that some of you might like to participate in the poll or offer your thoughts on whether sugar is a problem for kids. Here is the link:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/

This is a chance for your voice to be heard.

Now that I am home, we will be resuming classes this week.

Using Community Resources
Learning About Depression
Beta Endorphin - Week 1

Using Community Resources is for you new folks. If you want a guided tour through the community, this is the class for you. Actually, even if you are an old timer, it is a fun thing to do. Everyone has reported learning things they didn't know.

The Depression class is a great overview on the chemistry of depression and why this program works so well in healing it.

And the Beta Endorphin class is THE most loved class we do. Everyone loves it. Beta Endorphin is the heart of our healing...come learn great stuff.

We have posted a schedule of the classes for the next month. So you can go ahead and sign up for what you want to join.

A number of you have asked me about how the classes work. I conduct them via email through Yahoogroups, so it does not matter where you live or what time zone you are in or whether you can get to the computer at a specific time. After you register for payment, you will receive an autoresponder email from me with instructions on how to get to the class. Please be sure to click on the link in the email that will take you to Yahoo to sign up

If you come right now, sign up, then immediately return the autoresponder email to join the Yahoo group through which the class will be conducted, we can fit you in... Just click on the links above.

Also, I would like to thank all of you for your continuing input on the classes. It is VERY helpful to me and I think it means we are creating a real resource that suits your needs.

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.

A copy of this newsletter may also be found posted on the web at http://www. radiantrecovery.com/weeklynewsletter. If you wish to unsubscribe, use the link at the bottom of the page. Do not email me, do not get mad at me, just click on the link and you will be forever removed.

And be sure to visit our Radiant RecoveryŽ website and Community Forum regularly.

Warmly,
Kathleen

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April 25, 2005
** Quote From Kathleen **

Nothing is ever lost in your process. Every slip, every derailment is in your service.

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** Testimonial for the Week**


Hi,

I found step 3 to be absolutely frightening and definitely the hardest of all the steps. I had never eaten on a schedule during the week, let alone on weekends! (smile) So, with a lot of help from the lists, I baby stepped my way along this step. I started out with just trying to make sure I ate lunch every day at about 5 - 6 hours after breakfast. I didn't worry about snacks or dinner or after dinner. Just learned to eat lunch.

Then, I worked on dinner, which was even a bigger challenge for me. Learning to eat dinner at around 6 pm was HUGE for me. I was still eating a mid morning and a mid afternoon snack at this time.

Once I got the timing of lunch and dinner steady, and that took quite a while, then I slowly moved the morning snack to lunch and then the afternoon snack to dinner. As I did all of this, my body started helping me remember when to eat - and that included weekends as well as week days.

Now, when we have weekend plans that will make dinner later than usual, I eat a good planned snack and enjoy the evening. Or, if it is something really casual, I may eat dinner before we go and then just sip a lovely sparkling water and socialize.

Vicki G

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**Recipe of the Week**


I brought this dish to Easter dinner with my husband's family. It went wonderfully with lamb and everyone asked to take some leftovers home. I figure it'll be a great dish to bring to barbecues, picnics, and other potlucks, especially since it requires no chilling or reheating, it's best at room temperature.

Heather

French Lentil Salad

Serve at room temperature For Dressing Place lentils in a large pot covered with water. Add the one carrot chopped into four pieces, plus the celery cut into four pieces, and the bay leaf. Bring to a gentle boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer until lentils are tender, but not falling apart. Make sure to watch water level while cooking and add more as necessary. Drain lentils when done, remove bay leaf, carrots and celery.

Cut bacon into 1/2 inch pieces and sauté until soft. Add the bacon to the waiting lentils, but save grease in pan. Using this pan with the grease, sauté the carrots and the onions until soft, adding the garlic and shallots about half way through. Add to the waiting lentils.

Mix dressing ingredients, this should be more then enough, you will probably not use all of it. Toss into lentils a little at a time until the desired amount of dressing is reached. Can be made the night ahead of time and kept in the fridge overnight. The dish is best at room temperature, perfect for pot lucks and picnics!

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**Your Last Diet: More Than What You Think**


I will be starting the new weight loss class series next week. Come to chat to hear my current thinking about having different levels - a class for those who are steady and ready to go, a class for the desperate (smile>) and a class for the confused. Help shape our directions.

For those of you who are not yet YLD members, Click here if you are ready to change your life or just plain ole have fun.
 


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**David's Corner **





Ok, since I was just up in Wild Rice country I thought I would say something about this sacred food of the Ojibwe people. Their tradition tells of the time when the people lived in the East and were told of having to make a great journey in order to survive. They would know they were *home* when they came to the place where food grows abundantly on the water. The rice is actually a seed of a plant that grows in the lake waters of Wisconsin and Minnesota. So the seed carries the energy of those waters.

It is gathered by hand when two people take a canoe out into the lake. One person poles, the other bends the stalks over the canoe and hits them with a special knocker pole. Think of a few seeds per grass stalk and you will get a better sense of what it means to gather what we eat. They work until the boat is filled and then bag the rice and take it back to be dried. One hundred pounds of gathered rice makes 50 pounds of finished rice.

After it is dry, they put it in a kettle to parch it to separate the husks from the seed. Then they put the parched rice into a bucket, change shoes to soft-soled moccasins and dance on it. This continues the process of separating the rice from the chaff. It is called *jigging* and is slow and tiresome.Then they put it in birchbark containers and lightly toss it in the air so the chaff blows away.

And we have the opportunity to purchase the real thing. We get it from a coop dedicated to preserving the sacredness of the rice. When I eat it, I bless all that made it possible to have it. I feel as if I am participating in a sacred journey. And, as you know, our work is now going to the Ojibwe people to offer hope and healing for the ravages of addiction. The rice comes back to all of us.

I mix it with brown rice and eat it often, cooking it in my little $9 rice cooker from Walgreen's. And this morning, I ground some in my coffee mill and put it in my shake.

I hope you will join me in buying the Wild Rice from our store in support of the White Earth Coop.

Kathleen

Please send questions and suggestions. I love hearing from you and truly want to help you do your program better.

Thanks
David

And of course, we have something for everybody in our store


 
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**Our Online Groups**


Hi I am Ann the geo coach for the Radiant Big Apple group. We are a fun group of people from the New York and New Jersey area, who are following the steps to a radiant recovery. Sometimes we actually can coordinate our busy schedules and have a meeting at a local restaurant. At those meetings it is always fun to meet face to face and discuss food, recipes and our life. We would love to have you to join us. Living in New York or New Jersey is not a requirement.

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** Featured Topic**
The C57 Story Continued
Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.


Let's translate what I wrote last week and play a little. Replace the word C57 with a sugar sensitive person and replace the word morphine with sugars.

Let's go through the list again.

1. We all know some people who act like DBAs. They are the ones who say to us, "Why don't you just......say no.." They are the ones who decide to diet and do and then lose ten pounds in a month. They are the ones who give up chocolate for Lent and never look back, the ones who carried a little orange pumpkin at Halloween. They are the ones who would eat the chocolate chip cookie only if they were hungry. We know immediately who they are. Since society tends to recognize and value DBA behavior, we will judge ourselves against their standard. We carry the message that "DBA behavior is good, C57 behavior is bad."

2. And we also know that WE are the C57's. Intriguing to think why we can feel connected to the C57 mice so well. We are often children of alcoholics. We feel deeply, struggle with self-esteem issues, are sensitive, creative and impulsive. We may do rage or depression. And we all share the deep feeling language whether we are male or female.

3. When we feel defeated and overwhelmed, we assume the fetal position, lie still and don't move, and tell everyone is not our fault. Now, we may not do this on the outside. On the outside we may be doing big theater and having everyone believe that we are absolutely in control. But inside we are holding on by a thread and feeling horrible.

We may be "lying still" way inside our hearts but we absolutely know this pattern. And we see our DBA friends who when faced with the same crises, get mobilized and energized. We take Prozac; they change jobs and get a promotion. We hate this "injustice" and have not a clue how biochemically mediated it is.

4. Sweet foods give us "energy". That means they get out of the lethargy of beta-endorphin withdrawal. Sweet foods can give us "motor mouth." We become engaging, funny and self confident. Sometimes our friends wonder if we have been drinking.

More often, we chose other C57s as friends, so we go out for "coffee", have cake and REALLY enjoy our social times. And having coffee with the sweet roll feels like heaven. We get clear, focused and relaxed for about 30 minutes. We LOVE that feeling. And those cold frosty coffee, sugar drinks (you know which ones I mean) are the BEST because they make us feel so energized. Our DBA friends enjoy their coffee (they have the plain bagel), but they do not live for it.

5. We see these same behaviors clearly in our children and grandchildren. Give a three-year-old C57 a piece of birthday cake and he will be the life of the party. Give a two-year-old a twelve-ounce can of Sprint on the plane and she will be bouncing over the top of the seat for two hours. The more work we do with our program, the more clearly we see this profound shift in behavior pre and post sugar.

6. When we detox from sugar, we kinda sits around and waits till its over. We hunker down with our discomfort. Immobile. We literally feel as if our cells are made of lead and/or are all screaming. We feel the effect of withdrawal in our gut, our skin, our brain - wherever there are beta-endorphin receptor sites.

The Patterns Are Powerful

Pretty interesting isn't it. For many years we have struggled with learned helplessness, with self-esteem that fades in a moment. We vacillate between hyperactive clarity and lying on the couch in a stupor. The Dr. Jeykll/Ms.Hyde syndrome is very close to home.

Beyond Mood Swings

But now, I am pushing us beyond the idea of mood swings. I am inviting you think of yourself as a big C57 and to connect with the enormity of what these mouse studies mean for us. Those things which we have considered "character flaws for all this time are a function of your sugar sensitive biochemistry.

Our alcohol, sugar, fat, white things literally get us mobilized, make us brave, funny, self confident for a little. But we only remember the feeling okay, feeling brave. It's why so many people who come to the forum lament that they cannot imagine giving up the sugar. It's the "only" thing that makes life worth living. This is addiction. This is being caught in a place that kills us. But we don't see it.

The Power and the Disappointment of Beta Endorphin

The beta-endorphin hit wears off and we crash. Then it's horrible. And we become more immobile, hopeless, demoralized, overwhelmed and tearful. But we don not make the connection to withdrawal. What we remember is that when we "use" we feel okay. And so we are willing to trade 30 minutes, then ten minutes of feeling okay for the rest being horrible because we are so desperate to feel okay. We will do ANYTHING not to experience the horror of the withdrawal.

Ironically, many sugar sensitive people are very intolerant of alcoholics and drug addicts. But alcoholism and drug addiction are only the more intense forms of what we ourselves experience - a life driven to feeling better, terror of the withdrawal, and a life centered around getting our "fix."

Putting the Story Together

And along comes the Potatoes Not Prozac food plan. Suddenly things start to make sense. The vague "knowing" we have had for a while (and we are intuitive people!) gets a name, It makes sense. We don't have to think of ourselves as hopeless, depressed and out of control. We are sugar sensitive. But Potatoes Not Prozac is only the beginning of the story.

We create stability. We heal the brain. We take out the foods like sugar and white things that prime us. Sometimes this spooks us because when we take out the stuff that has made us feel "good" in the past, we enter an uneasy space. We feel better overall, but hardly confident. After all, our core brain is a C57, not a DBA.

Raising Beta Endorphin Naturally

This is the magic of all those things we affectionately refer to on the www.radiantrecovery.com forum as BE raising activities. Mozart, laughter, exercise, yoga, meditation, prayer, pups, babies, grandbabies, good sex, rollerblading, and great movies. What is not to like in the list? Do these things and create beta-endorphin. Slow and steady beta-endorphin. They wash us with feeling self-confident. And it grows on us. The more we feel it, the more we want to do these things.

Many of us have been listening to the voices on the forum. We can see these patterns as our friends in the sugar sensitive community make changes with the food. The voices of our "newbies" are very different from the voices of the "old-timers." When our food wobbles, we wobble. We whine, we munch, we get cranky. We go into beta-endorphin crash. We retreat, we isolate, and we crouch, get defensive and withdraw. Beta-endorphin crash.

Claiming Our Birthright

And miracle of miracles, when the food is steady, we are steady. We are funny, compassionate, tolerate, patient, resourceful and willing to hang in there and find solutions. Same bodies, same brains, same biochemistry. But under the influence of a different way of eating. Balance brings our birthright home.

ŠKathleen DesMaisons 2004.

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 gathers the recipes
JoAnna, the liaison for Rolling Hills gathers the testimonials
Terri, the liaison for Ambassadors sends over the ambassadors quote
Marie, the liaison for diabetes gathers the info on the online lists
David, who runs the Radiant RecoveryŽ Store talks about what new products we have.