Craving Your Way to Power with Food

Every year, I read and hear about “this year’s diet”. The name of the diet changes from year to year, but the intent is the same: You want to lose weight, or detoxify your system—And you are willing to sacrifice pleasure and flavor to reach your goals. Sure enough, last year, three weeks after you started “the diet”, you were back to your old ways—only then you felt guilty about it. Not to worry though. After a few bites of your favorite “guilty pleasure” comfort food, the feelings of failure and inadequacy just faded away. Oh well, there’s always next year.

What happened? Although you had good intentions, your body’s innate nutritional and emotional needs are being managed by your hormones and endocrine glands. You cannot quickly change the tastes and textures your body naturally craves. The secret of success in achieving your health goals AND mastering the process lies in knowing what your body is truly craving and satisfying it immediately.

Yes, you can have your cake and eat it without guilt—if you satisfy the real cravings you have soon enough. What is unique about the Craving Category approach is, it encourages you to listen to your body and put a time, taste and texture to everything you eat. That's the way the body works, that's the way the mind works. By taking charge of your cravings, your life will run better. It will eliminate frustration and you will be happier and more at peace with yourself.

How to find your Craving Categories
Step 1
On a two-column page or spreadsheet, make a list of your favorite foods of all time, and a list of foods you eat on any two or three days (it is not necessary that the days be consecutive). For example: Bacon, eggs, an apple, a chicken sandwich.
Step 2
Next to each food item, jot down a brief description of the taste and texture of that food (or how you think about that food). For example: An apple is crisp, semi‑sweet, juicy, easy to eat, and it's not messy.
Step 3
Take your list of tastes, textures and descriptions and write the list in one column of a second two-column page or the 3rd column of a spreadsheet. For example: 1-Crisp, 2-Semi‑sweet, 3-juicy, 4-easy to eat, not messy.
Step 4
In the second column of that second page, make a list of all the foods you can think of that fit in each category. Foods that are crisp: Apple, grapes, crackers, pears, watermelon, toast… Foods that are easy to eat--not messy: Potato chips, grapes, apples… Foods that are semi-sweet: Dark chocolate, cantaloupe, pear salad.
Step 5
With your craving categories, rearrange your list from most to least-healthy. Crisp: Apple, pear, grape, watermelon, toast, crackers… Easy-to-Eat—Not messy: Apple, grape, potato chips… Semi-sweet: Pear salad, cantaloupe, dark chocolate…

We've got one list of categories that we extrapolated from our original food list, and we may have 10, 15, 20, 30 or 50 categories of food that we select from throughout our lives that we can put all the food we eat into. We've got another list of all the foods we like. What we should have done by now is take the food we like and put category designations for each food. What about the next food? How would you categorize a hamburger?

By listing foods this way, you will be able to develop your shopping list and your everyday list of foods easily. Let's say you're going over to someone's house, and you want to help them prepare a great meal for you. Say, "These are the foods that I love… Can you make something kind of savory, sweet and chewy, but not greasy?". Shazzamm! Barbecue grilled chicken, marinated overnight in the family secret-recipe of sea salt, molasses, olive oil and Jerk seasoning, slow cooked to perfection! Now THAT’S what I’m TALKIN’ about!

You can post your list with a magnet on the side of your refrigerator, so when you go shopping, you can use it as a guideline for yourself seasonally, or you can have someone else make up the shopping list, because they know what your categories are. For my clients, Ed and Rosalie, she does the shopping, and, because she has a list of Ed's categories, she can just pull Ed's craving category list out and take it shopping with her to make sure that he has food at home in each of his categories. Because she makes the selection, she's going to also pick the healthiest foods for each of his categories.

Here's another way to consider your Craving Categories: Roxanne has two lists from which she selects her food. One of her headings is, "Reward Foods" and " Comfort Foods That Make Me Feel Good About Myself”. Her healthy shopping strategy is to always shop from the second list. On particularly stressful days, she will stop and pick up a small piece of her favorite gourmet chocolate, which is on her “Comfort Foods” list. She never keeps more than a small portion of comfort food at home.

Take a look at all your Craving Categories and, based on the information that you have been gleaning from your nutrition books, you can begin to rearrange the order of the foods on your lists. You can rearrange them according to how easy each food is to get. Put the easy ones at the top and the logistically cumbersome things to get at the bottom of the list. You can also categorize them from the most healthy to the least healthy.

The foods I eat during the week are different from what I eat on the weekends. During the week, I'm on the go and I need to eat foods that are easy to prepare. On the weekend, I eat more sit‑down meals because I have an hour or so to eat. When I go out for fine dining, I ask the server what’s on the menu that is kind of savory, sweet and chewy, but not greasy. Then I let them surprise me with their interpretation.

You can categorize foods in whatever way is significant to you. You can make up a list for every part of the country you're in. If you're in the South and you like gumbo or some other set of southern dishes, they fit in different categories for you, or maybe they fit in the same categories that you can only use while you're in another country. You can carry your list or have it in mind as you order your food, shop or when someone else will prepare food for you.


Use your Craving Categories list until you have a working command over the food selection process. Soon, you'll find that you can truly have your cake and eat it too. Bon Appétit! ˜˜˜--Aaron Parnell

Reposturing Dynamics-- New Prices for the New Year

The time has come. As Reposturing continues to grow, it's incumbent on me to extend the opportunity to offer Reposturing services to more and more practitioners. At the Vitality Center, you'll meet Sharon Caren who has been working with me for ten years, having taken a thousand hours of training, assisting, and study with me. You'll also meet Hensl, who has completed an intensive study of Reposturing series for every area of the body and is also certified as a Reposturing Fitness Trainer.

What this means is, I will no longer be taking new clients after December 31, 2007, except at a higher rate and a new service structure. Clients who begin with me between now and the end of December, will be served at the current rates throughout their time with me. Your rates and service structure will not change after the beginning of the year.

Starting January 1, 2008, sessions for new clients will be 90-minutes, including a 45-50 minute treatment of Reposturing followed by a 30-minute relaxing massage immediately afterward.
The 90-minute session with me will be $400. Initial sessions will be 2 hours and $600.

Meanwhile, new clients who begin after the New Year will have the opportunity to be served by either Hensl at $100 or Sharon at $120 per session.

So if you want to work with me personally or you have been thinking about sharing Reposturing with your friends and associates, act now to book your first session before December 20, 2007.

Minimizing Job Stress Before It's Too Late

Minimizing Job Stress Before It’s Too Late

Here you are, minding your own business, doing a great job, then someone asks you to perform what amounts to a professional miracle. They have no idea that what they want will require the [insert your job here] equivalent of leaping through flaming hoops, doing backward flips while juggling three apples and eating one of them in mid-air.

The good news is, you come through. You make it work and you deliver the goods, on time and just a little over budget. The "not so good" news is that, just as you're about to exhale and recover from the job-gymnastics routine, three other people call or come over to you and say: "Hey, you're pretty good! Can you come over and do that for me, too?" Only, I need it a little sooner and a lot cheaper."

There is a phrase in Spanish that loosely translates: "By mistake, I killed a dog once-- Now they call me a dog killer." They don't have a phrase for when you work a miracle once. However, if you find yourself in a quandary of how to think about this, Lao-Tzu had a phrase: "If it doesn't kill you first, it will make you stronger."

If you are time-crunched and have to go work another miracle right now, the quick-view, bottom line solution is, pick one of the following choices:
1) Do it superbly, name your price, including number of days off to recover and recharge.
2) Decline it, just say no, you can't do it under any circumstances and maintain personal and professional integrity.
3) Deflect it; don't automatically take their bait. This is to make them look good - not you!
Or
4) Let THEM delegate it to the three other people who should be doing it, even though they aren't as good at it as you are.
Thanks, it's been great. Call me if I can be of any support in the mind/body department. See ya--

If you have a little time, let’s have a deeper discussion about this phenomenon of being a miracle worker.

Deciding to Do the Miracle
Most of us like to do our best work every time, no matter how much time and money it takes. However, often, we find ourselves challenged by time, money, talent, technology or all of it. Here is where you say to yourself, "This is an opportunity for me to grow and learn. Working through this will get me closer to self-mastery. And that's good.

The key to this step is: Just do it –but on your terms, at your price. Then reward yourself for what you learned and accomplished. Take quiet time to self-reflect, for it is in the quiet spaces that the inner self recharges and re-calibrates itself for great contribution next time.

Declining Opportunity.
Don’t do it. If you're having trouble with this part, it may imply that you're new in your career and you're not sure if this one time is going to be the opportunity that could make or break your career, reputation or both. The bottom line is "just say no, can't do it. You don't even have to give a reason why.

If your commitment is to excellence in your work or your job, to say "yes" to this opportunity is also a vote "yes" for mediocrity at your expense. The more you exercise the "no" muscle, the better you will get at it.

Deflecting Opportunity.
Your colleague comes to you and begins to moan and whine about how they're so busy and so swamped, or so professionally challenged that their life is being made miserable because they don't have what it takes to do as good a job as you could do in the amount of time they have. Woe is them…..

That's your cue to say, "Aw, gee, that's too bad. I'm sure that something will work out for you. Thanks for the conversation. See ya later." This opportunity is to make them (your whiner) look good. It's rarely a good clean chance to make you look good no matter how much of a hero they make it sound like you will be if you rescue them our of their predicament.

Lastly, Let THEM delegate this project to the three other people who should be doing this job, even though those other people are not as good as you are or as experienced as you are. Don't make the mistake of agreeing to make sure it gets done, which only means that you have now accepted work that got dumped on you that you either have to do poorly at your expense or delegate it.

Consider the possibility that the reason why more opportunities exist is so more people can take advantage of them, not so that highly competent people can be taken advantage of. If you are a miracle worker, when you do say "yes," make sure it's on your terms for doing excellent work, including your requests for preparation time, ample talent & budget resources, time to do the job, and the opportunity to recover and rejuvenate yourself after a job well done.

Reposturing Classes at the Living Well Expo

Hey Friends!

For those of you who wanted to know if I ever teach Reposturing exercise classes-- I will be leading the Reposturing Yoga workout at the Living well Expo in San Jose on September 8 and 9 starting on Saturday at 3:00pm and Sunday at 2:00pm.

I could use some help in the booth, would you like to join me?

Join us at the Wisdom Festival

Please join us at the Wisdom Festival where we will be giving mini-Reposturing treatments and postural assessments. We will be there on Sept 15 and 16 at Fort Mason Center's Herbst Pavilion.

Dear Vitality Man,

There is a lot of talk about meditation to reduce stress and for general health. What exactly is meditation? How does it help? How do you meditate?
-Sam in Palo Alto

Dear Sam,
Throughout the centuries, cultures throughout the world have used some form of quieting the self for various purposes. The reasons can range anywhere from to pray for rain, to connect with the inner voice of one's deity, or to just take a breather away from the stress and noise in our daily lives.

Most meditating cultures have rituals surrounding their meditation, such as washing the face, hands and feet, or singing a song, or chanting a verse or mantra. I've even seen people close their eyes and meditate at parties.

I've come to the conclusion that there's no rule for why, what, or how to meditate, or how long under what circumstances. However, here are some guidelines that might be helpful as you consider meditation for yourself:
(1) Ask yourself: "If I had a quiet voice that could tell me something that would be helpful, under what circumstances would I best be able to hear and understand the messages from that voice?" (2) Ask yourself: "How long would I need to go offline to hear that voice, at least for that situation." (3) Ask yourself: "How often do I need to do this, given my lifestyle, workstyle, and priorities." (4) Finally, don't make any rules or consequences around taking time to go offline to connect with that quiet voice.

In my opinion, ideally, one's daily life and livelihood should reflect the nature of their inner self and spiritual journey. Hence, the less your lifestyle and workstyle are attuned to your highest expression of self, the more you would "need" to meditate to retune yourself with your inner guide.

Conversely, the more your life and workstyle allow you to truly express who you are inside in a way that makes a meaningful difference in the world, the less you need to take separate time out to "meditate". In an ideal world, our meals would be a "meal-meditation", our walking would be "walking-meditation", and our work would transform into "working-meditation" and so on. And the world would be a better place for all of us for generations to come.

SenSpa Review

A couple of weekends ago, Alicia and I took an afternoon and went up to enjoy our time at Senspa. Senspa is a relatively new day spa in San Francisco in the Presidio located right across from Lucas Studios. The surroundings once you walk inside are immediately grounding. It was as though I had gone through the experience of all the stress and anxiety to catch a plane and when I finally get seated-- I exhale. When I arrived in Senspa, I exhaled, letting out all the pent-up tension and stress of pushing deadlines, projects, and plans forward at The Vitality Center.

After we arrived, the attentive staff gave us a tour that made us feel comfortable and very much at home. The surroundings are serene with earth tones and with open quiet spaces. There is a feeling of opulence without the ostentation. Other guests I encountered in the waiting areas were friendly and unpretentious.

By the time we took a 10-minute steam and showered in the high-tech 5-point shower, I was ready for my deep-tissue body work session. On the spa menu of services, there were at least half a dozen different types of treatments you could get. I received a session called, "Legs, legs legs", where the therapist focuses on the lower body. That's something I've never seen on any other spa menu. It was certainly pleasurable and made my legs tingle with new circulation all weekend long. Alicia got a different treatment that helped her relax from her busy time at Que SeRaw SeRaw.

In every nook and corner, there were small Zen messages that remind guests of how important it is to take care of the inner you with healthy thoughts, healthy choices, and healthy food. They even have exotic tea and healthy munchies in the cooling off area after the treatment. All-in-all, I give Senspa 4.5 out of 5 stars. The other half star would have been valet parking.