Guest: Margaret Floyd, author of Eat Naked Now and The Naked Foods Cookbook

It is to be loved, celebrated, anticipated, and welcomed as a gift of love and nurturance to you. Can you envision pleasure with food with this much potency? So, how to get out of the stressed-state (the battle) and in the pro-active pleasure state of eating? Let’s get practical: 1. Slow way, way down. Relaxation and slowness are key to increasing attentiveness, sensuality, and pleasure. This then optimizes your ability to truly taste, digest, and set up the proper hormonal cues for pleasurable satiation (in contrast to feeling bloated and engorged from unaware-hurried eating). 2. Notice fearful thoughts and/or body sensations. Pause and send some thanks to these thoughts and feelings. They are your cues for you to get on track to joy, peace, and pleasure again. But, in no way are the fears going to drive and determine your actions this season. Instead, breathe into them instead of fighting them. Then try some gentle challenges to shift the energy…”Is this really true?”, “What is that I do want?”, “How do I want to feel?” 3. Eat food with increased sensuality. Pick up one holiday treat, find a beautiful plate, sit down, and look at it for awhile. What is happening in your mind and body? Smell the treat, take one bite, set the treat down, and chew it as sensuously and slowly as you can. How does it really taste? What is happening in your body? Breathe deeply and chew some more. Pause and look at the treat again. Notice how enticing it is. Take another bite. 4. Trust. Your body was designed for pleasure around food. This is a primal mechanism designed to help you find that which your body needs. The cues get distorted with all the food and lifestyle chaos around us. But the internal cues of pleasure are still there and can be fine-tuned the more we slow down and heed them. About Margaret: My name is Margaret and I eat naked. That’s really all you need to know about me, but if you’re curious to know more… I love food and everything about it: growing it, cooking it, eating it, healing with it, talking about it, understanding it, relating to it. Food is such an integral part of our life. We have to eat it multiple times a day just to survive and, as one of my teachers said, “We are, at our most basic level, walking food.” True that. I had my first powerful experience with the fundamental importance of food in my mid-20s when a change to my diet resolved a chronic skin condition I’d struggled with for years. At the time I was deeply immersed in the world of social ventures and business consulting, first with the boutique consultancy Spark Strategies and then as VP Member Development withCanadian Business for Social Responsibility. Fast forward a few years and I realized my true calling was food and health, and, more specifically, using the former to achieve the latter. I became a Certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) and Certified Nutritional Therapy Consultant (NTC) at the Nutritional Therapy Association (a school I recommend highly if you’re considering a career in nutrition) and then drew inspiration from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition where I learned from some of the top minds in the field (personal favorites were Sally Fallon of the Weston A Price Foundation, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way). Since then, I’ve become a Certified GAPS Practitioner, a Certified Healing Foods Specialist and also studied with the incredible Mark David at the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. www.eatnakednow.com