Are you wondering why my name is Live Food Louisa? Or what is live food for Louisa, and who in fact is she actually? I can tell you that I want to live life to the full, and feel my highest potential each day. I want energy to run my body and carry out the fullment of all my dreams and goals, that I came into the world to create into being. I’m just beginning to suss it out that eating ‘live’ food for a ‘live’ body is the key.
My name is Louisa. And I love, and live on ‘alive’ raw foods with a vibrant passion and energy, which I’m told gushes from my big smile. I enjoy practicing what I preach regarding food because I see it as the best way to really inspire others to create the personal health changes in their lives that they might want to make. I also love teaching, and I love people – especially engaging in the array of subjects concerned with high vibration foods, healing, human revolution, personal growth – and all the spiritual growth that naturally goes with that.
I teach people with a very down to earth, very relaxed approach; holding onto my fundamental heart-felt desire to help encourage, inspire and empower individuals to use simple but profound truths, and practical knowledge that will lead to personal health and well being. Food is a very personal thing, so I believe it should be enjoyed. It should be tasty, nourishing, and it should serve to heal your body too, from one meal to the next and to the next.
Don’t you just love watermelons, creamy avocados, durian, jack fruits, dark red grapes, mangos, pineapples, fresh figs, juicy pears, mangosteens, jelly coconuts, custard apples, organic ripe vine tomatoes, olives, cucumbers, crispy dark green leafy vegetables, and banana…don’t forget the staple bananas… and…and…and…
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What’s underpins life for me?
Our brilliance.
And I think
Our innate power
To be
Activating
The healer within.
Healing from the inside out.
Treating causes,
Releasing symptoms,
Respecting the process of
Transformation.
To create value with the life we have
And become the
Creator
We came here
To be…
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Let me tell a little bit more about me
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THE BEGINNINGS
When I was younger I was very interested in creating plays and acting, and becoming an actor when I grew up. Despite being 13, pretty shy and very self-conscious, I went for it anyway, along with some friends, even though it meant extra classes after school and lots and lots of stage fright. I was also very interested in nutrition, but it never occurred to me I would one day become a nutritionist in the future. I did enjoy reading health food articles from time to time, in some of the women’s magazines, especially the health magazines and sporty health & fitness articles around well-being & eating for energy. Images of fit muscular people (as opposed to skinny models), colourful plates of salads, and streamed vegetables looked beautiful to me. Not that I applied the information enough to lose my chubbiness that I carried with me throughout my teens, and which I inwardly worried about quite alot. Looking back on my school days and college years, I probably would be remember as the girl who always has a lump protruding from her face, from the constant sucking on boiled sweets lodged in my mouth. As I eat lots of sweets daily, I clearly was addicted to refined sugars but I never gave myself the chance to give them up long enough to properly notice it as that. I also snacked on crisps, chocolate, biscuits and gelatine type sweets.
EATING, BINGEING, CHANTING
My meals at home consisted of Nigerian cuisine: white rice, yams, sweet potatoe, plantain, pounded carbohydrates (fu-fu), a large tomatoe or green vegetable stewpot, with some meat every day. (Drinks would be occasional Coke Cola and blackcurrant squash). Occasionally too I would as the 15-16 year old that I was, have moments when I would just suddently take stock and wonder whether I wanted to continue eating cows tongue, cow’s foot, kidney, tripe, goat meat, chicken, and bony fish, but would take no action on it. It wasn’t until shortly after I left home for a drama college to explore the world of theatre and the potential of making a living out of being an actor, that I consciously thought things through and became a vegetarian. I also seriously dieted then like never before. I lost a lot of weight, but also during this time gained a unbending stoic determination around my restricted eating and shifted into a disordered-eating kind of mentality (bingeing and purging basically). That stuck around for a number of years, like a big destructive craving that sometimes controlled me instead the other way round. Eating disorder imbalances affect lots of young women these days, and also more and more young men now too. Fortunately for me, much later on, that eventually resolved itself when I started practicing Buddhist chanting every day. Within a year of a regular practice my meditations quite organically help me develop an inner self respect within. It just started quietly building and that enabled the behaviour to just fall away. This happened much later on after some years of struggle with it, but the process showed me my first conscious self-generated healing experience, and through a spiritual practice at that. Fortunately too, it was through the Nutritional Healing philosophy I discovered later also, that I started to really understand how the body develops the ability to manifest dis-ease, even diseases like eating disorders, on a cellular level, and also why. Knowledge is power. When we understand what is going on, because it means we can then unwind things, and really heal ourselves. For what the cell creates it can also uncreate, that is its potential.
EXPERIMENTING WITH FOOD
Being a nutritionist today, I see with hindsight that all of my food experiences are now small treasures that make me more qualified to understand ordinary people, and understand more fully the dramas that often go with eating – the factors influencing diet. To help control my eating imbalance, I explored simpler diets like vegetarianism (with lots of cheese), macrobiotic diet (brown rice, pulses), and veganism (TVP, tofu, quorn) – the latter for several years. This was before arriving at the beginnings of a raw food diet 6 years ago. My diet was better than the typical standard SAD diet but I had health issues non the less. Yo yo weight, fatigue, candida, brain fog, anxiety, colds, and for a short while nauseating, spinning vertigo. When I went to my doctor about the latter, and asked if the dizziness of vertigo was in any way diet–related she said ‘no, not at all’ and gave me a prescription. I walked out of the surgery feeling as if I had been lied to, for how can this not be food-related. Does not my body use food as its primary source of energy? Is not my body and cells made up of the food I put in it? It was time for me to take responsibility – so the first thing I did was chuck away the prescription, and drink more water. This resolved the vertigo in days. Another self generated healing experienced, simply by hydrating.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
Several books were really influential and life changing to me that I discovered after finishing college, and these included: Fit for Life, Fit for Life 2 – Living Health, Raw Energy, Why You Don’t Need Meat, Living Foods for Health, Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management, Your Body’s Many Cries For Water, Juicing, Spouting, and Fasting. I actually first discovered the Raw Food diet whilst surfing the internet (my new hobby once I’d got my head around operating a computer). I was very intrigued by the uncooked diet, but not quite believing someone could permanently live on foods that were all raw. Still I was very interested and I was full of questions, wanting to meet a rawfooder in the flesh, to see how they looked. To see if they looked healthy or not, to see whether they had great skin, and especially to see whether they were ‘skinny or what?’. I soon discovered raw food magazines, learned of the a huge community of rawfood individuals abroad in warmer places like in the States. I went to several potlucks (bring and share food parties with like-minded people) locally in my town, evening seminars, did a weekend course with Doug Graham and Rosalind Gruben, discovered delicious exotic fruit favourites like durian, jackfruit, jelly coconuts. And of course made new friends – one who went raw with me, making us raw buddies to each other.
TRYING IT RAW
My friend and I went as 100% raw as you could get for as long as we could, starting in the height of winter for some odd reason, the drive and attraction was so strong in us at the time. For me I ‘lived’ it for a full 1 year, shortly follow by another 6months. The physical transformation was incredible: 4 stone weight loss, increased energy, fatigue gone, candida improvement by 75%, lighter symptom-free periods, needed less sleep, refreshed immediately on waking (springing out of bed like young children do early in the mornings), great bowels, great skin, and more positive outlook. I felt like I was healing from the inside, and the glory of it was being expressed on the outside for others to see. Watching my body find its own ideal weight was just magic. Where it choose to settle was just perfect, and I saw that the body is truly very wise. Body weight never usually was an issue eating fresh ripe raw foods. I know now from experience the body’s potential to regenerate, if given the right conditions, is an absolute innate gift, and is also a natural occurrence – so expect it, it happens. Raw Food and internal cleansing gave me what I needed to have a nutritional healing experience, because they allow the body to detoxify, and be nourished at the same time, enabling my cells to let go of the acidity they were holding on to.
LOOSING MY FOOTING
Perhaps I was seeking a kind of purity and simplicity about diet that was also attractive and special, and that is what I did find in eating raw foods. Still I started going back and forth with my eating for chunks of time, between eating healthily and eating cooked processed snacks, like abit of a dance, which inevitably slowed down my cleansing. Not good practice. Clearly our attachments to things that can hold us back should benefit from being looked at squarely in the eye just as much as the dis-eases we may be manifesting, don’t you think? Although I lost my way off this path for some time after due to folding into cravings mainly. And pressures around working and touring away from home, temporary stays in new towns I didn’t know, pressures eating out socially, a new relationship, and the cold weather, I always hoped it would amount to just a short break off my path, and that inevitably I’d soon get back on track. It took quite a while however to stop the tooing and throwing.
LISTENING TO MY INNER BEING
Last year whilst chanting, I sent a wish determination out into the universe. My wish was simply this:- “I WANT to enjoy eating fruits and vegetables, and eat healthy WITH CONSISTANCY”. And over a period of a just a day the desire for the Raw Food diet just welled right up from inside me, like something waking up from sleep. The next day I took myself off to the shops and bought bags of organic plants foods. Over the following week I blending them, cut them, shredded them, sprouted them, juices them, most importantly ate them – all of it, without the usual throwing things away. The physical transformation began all over again from that day. And I really feel that I have now come home, that this is how my body actually wants to be nourished – with consistency, and how it heals the best. This time too, I’m far more relaxed and flexible about food, without the raw food dogma tone of the past (that made it sometimes feels like a religion I have to fit into). I no longer feel the need to listen to raw food gurus over listening to my body. I’ve ignited my raw food flame again, and it’s burning brightly. And I confess live food is still such a liberating way to eat food, and that is the real heart of it. I’m even more passionate and clear about it now than I was those 6 years past, with more recipes up my sleeve to keep me interested and creative. Sooooo, living on live food, is that really possible? It certainly is! And so is it possible, with all the extra energy you can generate eating raw, that you be the Creator that you were born to be for this life-time.
A NEW AWARENESS IN THE AIR
I am now teaching the subject of Raw Food joyfully, to whose you want to listen, and am happy to go where ever people will have me go, to inspire and encourage others. It is said that we teach what we need to learn, is that not so? I certainly like to think that that is very true. I cannot believe how the raw food scene has grown, expanded and changed since I first discovered it 6 years ago. Hundreds more books and websites are about, have you noticed? Less stigma also coming from people, family and friends; and more importantly, many, many, many more people expressing an almost instant hunger or awaking when they hear information about living foods for the first time – as a way of eating and living. It’s as if the collective consciousness is shifting before our eyes. Keep watch and take notice.
My respect for living fresh foods, is loud and clear. If you want to find out more about raw foods from someone who’s really excited about it, give me a call – and come to a workshop. It should be fun.
Much love to you.
Louisa xxx
Healer, Teacher, Artist, Durian Fruit lover…
Louisa, you are truly inspirational!
Lisa x