Book Review: "Crazy Sexy Diet" by Kris Carr

     Kris Carr is a cancer survivor turned wellness coach and motivational speaker.  She is witty and I enjoyed parts of her book.   She promotes a vegan diet as it is alkalizing and anti-inflammatory.   She takes nutrition and lifestyle farther than I think is valid, however.  She promotes juicing, (nutritional, sure, but wastes all the vegetable fibers and is expensive), fasting, enemas and colonics, and supplementation.  I don't think eating vegan and healthy should be so complicated; it should be simple, just eating real food.
     Points I do like:
          1) She starts by asking if you are sleepwalking through your life, are you among the living dead?
          2)  Nobody knows your body like you do, and waiting around for someone else to fix your woes is playing a risky game of roulette.  We can all be kick-ass wellness warriors.
          3)  We now talk about nutrients instead of actual foods.  We've lost sight of the forest for the trees, the kale for the vitamins.  We're greater than the sum of our parts, you, me, and the broccoli.
          4)  What is happening to our bodies is a mirror of what is happening to the planet.  We're all one organism.
          5)  A helpful exercise:  Picture yourself when you were five...even dig out a photo of yourself at that age and tape it to your mirror.  How would you treat her (him), love her, feed her, nurture her if you were the mother of little you?   She thinks you would protect her fiercely while giving her space to spread her itty-bitty wings.  Little you would get naps, healthy food, imagination time, and adventures into the wild.  Extend the same compassion to your adult self. 
          6)  She recommends meditation at least daily, also yoga (when the great swami stretchy people created yoga, they weren't interested in a rock-hard middle).
          7)  When you are living like you mean it, you're a force of nature.
     I especially loved the advice to nurture itty-bitty me, and her comment about the great swami stretchy people!  She's right in that we are all wellness warriors, and I want to be a great swami stretchy person.  Health is more than the absence of disease, it is the presence of vitality.   We can all live like we mean it and be forces of nature. 
     This week, fiercely protect itty-bitty you and give yourself space to spread your itty-bitty wings!

 Itty Bitty Debby,  I will fiercely protect her and help her to grow.

Updates:                                              
In Dr. Weil's daily blog today  (http://www.drweilblog.com/) he quoted research that confirms what the book "Healing Through Exercise" (see previous post) stated.  Researchers at the Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis did a 15 year study, showing those who exercise daily or near daily for at least 10 years have the lowest risk of dying from colon cancer.  Research by Harvard School of Public Health and Univ. of California done over 18 years showed those walking briskly 90+ minutes/week had a 46% decreased risk of dying from any cause;  those with greater than 3 hours/ week of vigorous activity had a 61% lower risk of prostate cancer death.
As Dean, my husband, concisely reviewed "Healing Through Exercise":   Exercise=Good.