Jessica Simpson’s Aphrodite Attitude

Jessica’s confidence and beauty shines through regardless of what the scale says, and THAT is an Aphrodite Attitude!

I remember back in 2004, I saw Maxim’s countdown of the “Maxim Hot 100” on VH1 and I loved that Jessica Simpson took the number one spot. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is that makes me so drawn to her. Scratch that… I know EXACTLY why I love her so much, but I’ll let you see why:

She epitomizes the Essence of an Aphrodite Attitude, not because she’s blonde bombshell, but because she UNABASHEDLY LOVES who she is NOW!! She admits that’s she’s not always following her “diet” perfectly because she’s only human and she wants to enjoy her life.

An Aphrodite Attitude can and will have many faces; Jessica’s just so happens to be more focused on healthy eating habits and being happy and in love with herself, despite what a scale might say.

I want every woman to have the same confidence that Jessica has.

How Hypnotherapy Helps You Succeed!

Hypnotherapy audios help illuminate your strengths.

With my last post, I hope that I was able to elucidate that hypnotherapy is NOT the sorcery that some ultraconservatives would have you believe; rather, it serves as a means of self-empowerment. Hypnotherapy is just one method of meditation that you can use to begin your journey to building a solid and healthy Aphrodite Attitude.

I am a firm believer in the power of hypnotherapy because it has yielded consistent results since my first experience with it back in my junior year of high school. I can’t remember exactly why, but my social studies teacher said she wanted to reward us with a relaxing exercise. I think she saw the stress of the college application process was starting to wear on us (and to make matters worse, we had just experienced the unsettling events of September 11, 2001!). We began by closing our eyes and taking several deep breaths. Then, in a hushed tone, she told us to let the stress from our feet, shins and calves melt away – I’m assuming that the exercise itself only lasted for maybe five minutes because it was so effective that I actually fell asleep! When she was done, it felt as if I had been in a deep sleep for about an hour and I had this incredible sense of peace and determination that made every other responsibility I had seem easy.

I would love it if we all had the freedom to set aside about 20 to 30 minutes every morning (just after you wake up) and every night (right before you go to bed). Those are the ideal times because you are the most receptive to the messages of empowerment – remember that hypnotherapy is not meant to put you to sleep, but place you in a deep enough trance that its messages of empowerment sink in most effectively.

However, I know that life gets in the way (usually when we try to do anything to improve ourselves). I guess that is the universe’s way of testing your dedication to yourself and you can get around that test by starting small. If your life is unusually hectic right now, you can listen to an audio once a week and build up to making it a daily habit. Remember that Rome was not built in a day, so finding the perfect cornerstone for you is worth the time and effort.

Here are some free hypnotherapy audios that can help you see that no matter what your circumstances are, you CAN AND WILL break through them!

1. I found Ray Sullivan via Google search; I listened to his first audio when I was having a really stressful day with school and finding a new job and it was just what I needed to get through the rest of my day.
2. I’ve listened to a few of Joseph Clough’s audios over the last five years and I really love how extensive his collection is. Another great thing about him is that his audios are usually nine or ten minutes long, so they can fit in to any hectic lifestyle.

Another important thing to remember is that hypnotherapy is the most effective when you have a coach you trust and that will take some time. I must note that great hypnotherapists, you can truly connect with, can prove that they’ve been certified in the process (and when you’ve found someone you connect with, I highly suggest you see if you can make them your “mindset success coach”).

I’ve been listening to various hypnotherapy audios for about five years. At first it was very sporadic because I was trying to find the right coach for me; that changed in June 2013 when I found my mindset success coach, Jenn August. Her audios genuinely resonate with me because she asks me to visualize golden staircases, doors and suns – my class at Wellesley College renamed ourselves “The Golden Class of 2007” because we weren’t fond of our class color: Big Bird Yellow.

I listen to one of Jenn’s audios, in the morning and at night, at least three times as week. If life gets too hectic and I skip it for a week or two, I can absolutely notice a change in my outlook. It’s not that I lose faith in myself – It’s just that society’s proclivity to be so pessimistic can be overwhelming (especially since I’m known as the happy-go-lucky one in my social circles).

Once you’ve found your mindset success coach, you’re ready to move on to the last, and probably most important step in reinforcing your new meditation practice: doing at least one thing every day to remind yourself that you deserve to treat yourself as the goddess you ARE!

Again, you can start with the things we have to do every day and eventually, you’ll want to find other ways to pamper yourself. A good place to start is by improving the tasks we do on a daily basis anyway: eating, bathing, and sleeping. In my next few posts, I’ll share some of the small adjustments I made that completely changed my life for the better!

Daily Meditation and Your Aphrodite Attitude

Meditation and hypnotherapy audios are two INCREDIBLE methods to erase the Negative Nellies in our lives and rebalance our focus.

If you are ready to join me in building a healthy Aphrodite Attitude, I’ll give you the cornerstone of the new mentality we’ll build together: daily meditation.

Remember the examples of the “acceptable” milestones we are bombarded with incessantly from a very young age? Well, to erase those you need to have a new recording ready to play at a moment’s notice (especially when the haters will do their damnedest to knock you down!).

The way I broke through those stupid boxes was twofold: I had a picture of a woman dressed as a queen taped to my wall (above my bed) and I found a daily hypnotherapy audio I could play in the morning and just before I went to bed. I know some of you might be a little wary about hypnotherapy because mainstream society views that as “hocus pocus,” but if you think about it, you’ve experienced hypnotherapy many times in your life (and if you’re a mom or older sibling, you’ve actually done it as well!).

Remember when you were a child and you had a bad dream? What would you do? I ran into my parents room and clung to my mother and sobbed uncontrollably. Without fail my mom would hug me and let me know I was going to be OK. After a few minutes, she’d take me back to my room and stay with me until I fell asleep again. She’d help me fall asleep by singing my favorite lullaby in a very hushed tone. It’d only take 10 or 15 minutes before my eyelids got heavier and heavier and I eventually fell back into a peaceful, deep sleep.

That is all hypnotherapy is; using hushed tones and positive messages to relieve stress and replace negative thoughts and messages from the world at large with messages of empowerment.

Don’t worry about whether what people would think of you if they knew you listened to these incredible audios because YOU are the focus. I know I felt a little weird when I first started to include audios in my daily routine, but after a couple weeks, I noticed a huge change! Before I started listening to the audios, I’d take every criticism to heart and I’d dwell on it for days. After the audios became an integral part of my routine, I noticed that it was so much easier to tune out the negative people in my life and the different tactics they’d use to bring me down.

Again, reprogramming your mentality will take some time, but every little bit helps.

Let’s Build a HEALTHY Aphrodite Attitude

As I’m sure you all know, I’ve loved Greek mythology for as long as I can remember, especially Aphrodite because of her unshakable confidence in her beauty and sex appeal. After I wrote my last post, I thought of another goddess I admired, Psyche; I loved her because of her steadfast determination to fight for what she wants. When she lost her love, Eros, she happily completed the labors Aphrodite assigned to her, regardless of how demeaning and in the end, she married Eros in a great celebration blessed by all of the other gods and goddesses.

In today’s society, Merriam-Webster gives two distinct definitions of the word “psyche.” The first relates to the English translation of the Greek word, psychē, which refers to a person’s soul, personality and mind. Definition #2 refers the way everyone (especially clinical psychologists) have a proclivity to “anticipate correctly the intentions or actions of [someone.]” On the surface, these definitions seem to be polar opposites, but in truth they are interconnected.

A well-respected journal of psychology, “Psychology Today” does an excellent job of melding the two definitions. In my last post, I detailed the three critical aspects of a HEALTHY Aphrodite Attitude, the most important being an understanding that we are inherently flawed, but our flaws are NOT fatal. In fact, they are just as, if not more important, to defining who we are as our strengths. When properly understood and harnessed, your flaws can and will become strengths.

Many women have a broken psyche as a result of the many pressures we face from society. Think about some of the boxes we’re bombarded with from infancy:

1. You have to be a certain dress size or you’re fat and ugly,
2. If you don’t get married and have a family by this age, you’ll be relegated to the life of an unwanted spinster,
3. Follow this career path and keep your opinions to yourself or you’ll be known as a bitch, and so forth.

Whenever I start to feel defeated by the pressures of society, I visualize two trees, one broken and a grand old oak tree. Every once in a while branches break off in a big storm, but that DOES NOT stop the tree from growing. Rather, the tree takes the time to get to know its wound and heals it the best way it knows how. When it is given enough time, the tree will replace that broken branch with two stronger, more beautiful branches. This is a tree after a massive storm:

Dove recently released a sad statistic: only 4% of women in the world consider themselves beautiful

If you’re willing to go on this journey with me and rebuild your Aphrodite Attitude, I want to make your psyche look like this:

An ancient oak studies its injuries and takes all the time it needs to grow stronger, more beautiful branches.

Our goal is simply this: do as an oak tree and absorb whatever criticisms are directed at us and use them to our advantage. It NEVER frets over a broken branch… it studies it’s faults and then takes the time to not only heal itself but grow two bigger and stronger branches in its place. And just like an ancient oak, this will not happen overnight; it will take dedication, but EVERY step you take is important.

Aphrodite Attitude Redefined

Embracing your inner goddess means honestly contemplating whether all three parts of you (mind, body and spirit) are truly in harmony on a regular basis.

A few days ago I had a webinar from one of my business mentors playing while I was cooking my lunch and at the time I didn’t fully understand why. Then, just as I was starting to tune the audio out, she mentioned how she almost lost the rights to use one of her tag lines in a legal proceeding. The slogan she referred to reads as follows: “Remove your blocks so your business rocks!”

Unbeknownst to me, playing that webinar was the best thing I could have done for myself and for y’all. I’ve been pondering why the tag line resonated with me as much as it did, and I realized why: I’m ignoring a major block of my own!

While I absolutely LOVE helping y’all learn about the amazing healing properties of food, I understand now that that is not my only mission. To serve y’all to the best of my ability, I know that I have to stay true to myself and embrace EVERY aspect of a complete Aphrodite Attitude, especially the mental component! I could give you advice on infinite external tools you can use to improve your self-esteem, but if I continue to be negligent in acknowledging that we need to discuss the mental component as well, I am not fully honoring my mission.

From this point forward, I want to use this blog to help you embrace, develop and maintain your Aphrodite Attitude. In order to do that, you have to want to examine the following:

1. Your willingness to acknowledge that a HEALTHY state of mind allows you to admit you’re flawed (and that your flaws are just as beautiful as your strengths, just like Aphrodite),
2. Examples of strong, confident women who have the the courage to break down and eradicate the societal compulsion to force every aspect of your life into a perfect box, and
3. External tools that will reinforce our stronger senses of self-worth, including (but not limited to) balancing your psyche, proper nutrition (weight loss/gain is a bonus!!) & skin care/makeup.

Brow Revive SAVED My Eyebrows!

A miracle in a tube!

Back in January, I wrote a post about a FANTASTIC eyebrow regrowth serum called Brow Revive. This serum is incredible because it undid my faux-pas of waxing your eyebrows way too often and way too thin.

To get a full understanding of how awesome this serum is, you need to see what my eyebrows used to look like:

This IS reversible!!

This is what they looked like as of January 22, 2014:

This incredible regrowth took about 10 months of solid use of Adonia’s Brow Revive Serum.

And here are what my eyebrows look like after I got them waxed at my favorite spa (these are completely bare — I didn’t use a pencil or powder to fill them in AT ALL 🙂 ):

I never thought they’d look this amazing again!

My results are better than I could have ever hoped for, but I do have to warn you that your eyebrows respond as well to the serum as mine did; since they are 100% ORGANIC, I highly recommend that you give them a try!!

Let me know what you think about my results and fill me in on what kind of results you get when you start using Brow Revive.

Food Can Bring Out Your Natural Beauty!

The yummy foods you eat also enhance your beauty!

Last Friday I tuned into Bethenny to see what she would discuss in terms of her “Diet Debate” segment, but what interested me more was her segment where she tested our beauty knowledge. Like me, Bethenny is a firm believer in using what you’ve got to improve your life, and it turns out that several common kitchen items can bring out your natural beauty and/or heal a specific health concern.

These three remedies impressed me the most:

1. Turmeric is traditionally used in Indian food, but it works wonders on acne. One of turmeric’s main ingredients is called curcumin and it works so well because of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. You can either mix some turmeric in a glass of water or make a paste and let it sit on your skin for 10-15 minutes.
2. Strawberries make delicious preserves and jam, but did you know that they are also an effective sunburn treatment? The anthocyanins, the compound that gives the strawberries their gorgeous red color, have awesome anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. To get the most of this treatment, mash some fresh strawberries and spread it on your sunburn like a salve. Let it sit for 15-20 minutes.
3. Mint has been shown to be an excellent way to reduce the puffiness under our eyes. The flavonoids help increase the production of antioxidants in the skin under our eyes. Those antioxidants, in turn, help fight the free radicals that give us the dark circles and puffiness we hate. To use mint, crush some fresh mint leaves and make a paste and leave it under your eyes for 15-20 minutes.

I’d love to hear about how well these remedies have worked for you!

The Natural Cure for Diabetes

Y’all know I love to give you the scoop on the incredible foods nature has to offer us, and I’ll continue to do so, but I think I’ll start finding other sources of evidence besides articles on the web.

Over the weekend, I went to a screening of a documentary called “Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days,” and to say was good is the understatement of the millennium! For the film, they found 5 subjects with Type 2 diabetes and 1 subject with Type 1.

All of the subjects met with a Dr. Cousens who introduced them to the raw food lifestyle and had them eat only raw for 30 days. As I’m sure you know, it wasn’t an easy thing to do because of all the sugar we Americans have in our diets: the average American consumes approximately 150 pounds of sugar per year!

One man’s story really made me want to break down in tears. Kirt was a 26-year-old African American man from Baltimore, Maryland. He shared a story about how one time he went to the emergency room and the doctors told him his blood sugar level was at 1200; the normal range for blood sugar is between 80-100!!

Kirt impressed me further when he adhered the most to the diet – he gave those 30 days 110% because he knew that that was what was required if he truly wanted to cure his diabetes.

On day one of the program, his blood sugar was about 346 and he was taking 4 to 6 insulin shots a day. By day 30, not only was he able to STOP his insulin, his blood sugar was down to 73! At the end of the movie, Kirt went to his doctor to get the results of some blood work and he was surprised to find that his doctor had reread his file and was going to rediagnose him as a type 1 diabetic and had plans to give him an insulin pump! I’m sure you all know that people with type 1 diabetes produce very little or no insulin – but after a strict 30-day diet of raw foods, his body was totally healed and started making its own insulin!

My moral of the story is, although many doctors mean well, they are definitely undereducated about the power of the food we have available to us. Granted, they take the Hippocratic Oath upon graduating from medical school, but the better musing from Hippocrates is “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.”

Awesome Oatmeal

From time to time I get into a food rut. Basically, this is when I’ve found healthy food options that I enjoy (and I’m pretty picky because I have a little bit of a sweet tooth) and I buy them on autopilot, I guess.

Lately, I’ve been having just French toast, pancakes and egg whites for breakfast. Then one day I remembered how my mom would make old-fashioned oatmeal (I thought instant oatmeal was all that and a bag of chips!). So I went to the grocery store and bought a big container of store-brand whole oats.

It could be the middle of the summer and my mom would still make oatmeal for breakfast. After doing a little research I completely understand why. According to Mother Earth Living, oatmeal can do incredible things such as lower cholesterol, stabilize blood sugar and lower the risk of you developing diabetes. These three attributes alone are worth all the diamonds in the world to me because both heart disease and diabetes run in my family.

It’s surprisingly easy to make, but what astonishes me even more is how I can add the most seemingly random ingredients and it always tastes incredible. At first, I only added spices like ginger and cinnamon; then I’d add honey. I can’t wait to go to the grocery store and get a bunch of raspberries, blueberries, cashews, pecan and almonds and see how they can make the oatmeal even better than it always is!

Good thing I listened to my gut and gave the old-fashioned oats a try 🙂

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is an incredible spice that not only brings zesty flavor to your favorite foods, it’s also believed to be a powerful antidote against multiple ailments, including arthritis, diabetes, headaches/migraines, and LDL (bad cholesterol).

Western medicine has yet to commission detailed studies on how this ancient Chinese herb can improve your health, but there are fabulous resources, such as GreenMedInfo, that focus on alternative medicinal therapies like spices and herbs. GreenMedInfo does a fantastic job of differentiating between the two main variants of cinnamon, Cassia and Ceylon.

Most cinnamon available in the United States is Cassia (milled mainly in China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Vietnam); this is the weaker of the two but is still an awesome source of manganese. Manganese helps to build healthy bones and increase your carbohydrate and fat metabolisms. Cassia cinnamon should be avoided if you are taking blood thinners like Coumadin because it contains higher traces of coumarin, a natural blood thinner.

Ceylon comes from India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Brazil and the Caribbean. This variant is considered the “true cinnamon” because it is sweeter, lighter and more refined than cassia.

Long story short, both kinds of cinnamon will adequately flavor the dishes you use it on, but it’s important to heed the warning about cassia consumption.