Reine de la Rose

Take control of your Energy - Move it or Lose it!

2009-08-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

Day 16 – 85 days to go

When I met my husband it was love at first sight! Little did I know that I had fallen in love with the man who would become my greatest teacher in matters of self-discipline. For Nico, adopting good habits comes natural. Take exercise for instance. Going to gym is not an existentialist question for him. For me it used to be.

To gym or not to gym? That was a question that I seemed to agonize over for years. It wasn’t that I needed to lose weight, but I just knew that sitting the whole day in front of a computer, in meetings, on highways, in airplanes, in front of the tv and in coffee shops wasn’t going to give me the energy and body shape I wanted! But avoiding going to gym seemed to bring out my most creative side.

This had been going on for years. Nico would pick up his little ‘hippy-looking’ patchwork backpack, put on his faded red cotton shorts, grab two towels and head out to the gym. Unlike me, he was never one to worry about appearances. Also, he had long since given up to invite me to come along. He knew the whole list of excuses already: too much work, too tired, not having the right shoes, not having the right colour towels to match my tracksuit, not having a proper swimsuit…

After I finally once joined him, I complained the whole way home about the change rooms. How they were cold and uncomfortable (they weren’t), how I didn’t like to see all those other fat, naked women (they were actually in pretty good shape, but reminded me of my own shortcomings), how I was worried that the air-conditioning would give me a nose infection (like the horrible ones I tend to get in airplanes)…

The fact that Nico never shouted at me:”Enough, already!” is truly a miracle. Instead, he simply stopped asking me to go with him. I was a hopeless case!

The benefits of fitness are extremely well known: we look and feel more glamorous, we have higher energy levels, better fitting clothing, a more dynamic personality and a fit body seems to be a greater attraction to members of the opposite sex. Exercise is also an excellent stress management tool, creates a healthy heart and lungs and builds higher self-confidence. We’ve all heard how a ‘healthy body houses a healthy mind’. This is because physical exercise can help us to cultivate a happier disposition. On top of all that, imagine how good you would feel if you had smoother thighs, stronger calves and could graciously climb all and any stairs and mountains. Best of all, we have no more embarrassing short-breath-moments when trying to catch up with someone else… But none of these excellent arguments seemed to have any impact on my willingness or ability to take up regular physical exercise.

So, understandably, Nico was not only surprised, but also sceptical, when about a year ago I insisted to go with him to gym. “But I thought you don’t like gym?” he asked. It was true: I had never liked going to gym. But something had changed.

Actually, I had changed something. I had changed my mind.

I had decided to ‘choose’ a healthy body. And I just knew from everything I had read and from all the people I’d met, that in order to be really at the peak of your energy or health, you need to work out. And if I wanted to reach my goals I simply had to be fit and healthy.

I had also realized, that there was really no excuse not to take up regular exercise. All excuses were simply in my mind. And once I made up my mind to take up exercise regularly, the excuses simply disappeared! It is true, that a modern gym environment is not my ‘ideal’ space for exercising. I’m more of a ‘yoga girl’. (I don’t like any exercises that make any parts of my body bounce). But I knew that by hitching my exercise programme to that of my man’s, the chances would be so much greater that I actually stuck to it. Simply because for him it is not a question of ‘whether’. He started his regular exercise programme while still in his twenties, and knows that he has back problems when he stops, so all he is interested in is ‘when’ and ‘how often’. Also, he holds me accountable: if I said I would do something, he won’t allow me to back out!

Because of our responsibilities in both the city and a farm, where we assist a charity, it is not always possible to stick to a routine. But then I found another opportunity to make sure that I do exercise: I included an exercise class into the daily routine during the youth workshops that I would lead at the rural development project. In this way, I would be the yoga teacher and this would also ensure that I did not ‘skip’ my training. So this is my next suggestion to you: if you’ve enjoyed a particular type of exercise, try to start a class or form a group in which you are the leader. In this way, your conscience will help you to get going, because you cannot let your students down. By being a rolemodel to others, we are really able to be on ‘best behaviour’ ourselves.

The other opportunity for exercise I use is in my daily life. When I walk, I walk fast. When I climb the stairs in our home, I try to do this as fast as I can. When I do housework, I make a special effort to stretch and bend, while breathing consciously. When I go to meetings, I choose the stairs instead of the lift. When I park my car to go to the shops, I no longer wait until I can get the only parking right next to the door! All these little habits have helped to get my energy and fitness levels up.

Now, if you don’t have a man in your life that you can convince to go to gym or join a tennis club with, and you have no idea how to find a class to teach, then mobilize one or two of your friends with similar schedules to you, and make a point of getting fit together, at least three times each week. Why three times? I’ve found that if I only go two times, my muscles are constantly in ‘beginner’s mode’, so it becomes much more difficult to stay motivated. However, if you do exercise three times each week, you start seeing a difference and this encourages you to even try doing physical exercise more often. And if you don’t have any friends, see taking up a form of sport or exercise as an opportunity to make some friends again!

There are so many different exercise options to choose from. One will definitely suit you best. But to get started, the only ‘muscle’ that you need to move is inside your brain: change your mind and choose to become physically fit!

Ok – got to go – am off to yoga class!

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Day 15 - Take control of your Energy - A Fat Surprise!

2009-08-19T05:45:00.000-07:00

Day 15 – 86 days to go

Health is Wealth. Anyone who has nursed a cancer patient or who has suffered from a debilitating illness themselves will wholeheartedly agree. Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to observe the behaviour of very successful people, when they became ill. I also know my own behaviour when a migraine strikes! When we’re sick, nothing much else matters any more. This is why I encourage everyone to better understand how the food that we fuel our body with influences our wellbeing. In doing so, it may come as a surprise to many that there are, in fact, good fats that we need to stay healthy.

I can’t remember ever being told as a child that there was ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’. In fact, I can’t remember being told ever anything about ‘healthy food’ or ‘unhealthy food’. This is probably because, growing up on a farm where practically everything we ate was ‘home grown’ and sweets and white bread were small luxuries for special occasions, this was not at all a topic that ever came up for discussion.
It is only when I started becoming responsible for my own meals as a student that I realized the incredible impact that food was having on my mind, my body, because of that, even on my relationships and ultimately, on my spirit. Instead of knowing that I needed to look at food as a fuel and not as an emotional crutch, I found emotional comfort in sweet and fatty foods in times when I was generally feeling uncomfortable in my skin.
I did not understand that sugar is addictive or that fat can have a good or bad impact on your body. Sure, I knew eating too much fatty foods resulted in skin outbreaks and overweight, but for the rest I simply did not have the facts about fat, because no one spoke about them.
I do remember that the word ‘cholesterol’ suddenly became fashionable in the 70’s. And that, in addition to the home-made butter that my mom made as a matter of course, a pretty looking plastic container of soft margarine made its regular appearance on our table. Because it was good for the heart, as the many advertisements on television were quick to explain.
It was only in the 80’s when I discovered the book that has since become my ‘guideline’ on eating, ‘Fit for Life’, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. I followed the advice given in the book and have benefitted ever since. At the time when I found the book, I was in my early 20’s and had increased by three dress sizes from my normal size 10 to a size 16. Also, my skin was a constant source of embarrassment to me, because it was never without a spot or three. This, and some other emotional issues, had resulted in me withdrawing from my usual circle of friends, who at the time were all showing off engagement rings and planning lavish weddings. This was a time during which I felt very lonely. And I felt that being fat was really the main culprit for my sudden lack of confidence.
My personal experience in finding the ‘Fit for Life’ book, then actually seriously following the advice because it made so much sense to me, really emphasized for me the fact that we human beings can take knowledge we read about it and apply it to our lives successfully! When I left school, I started studying medicine, because since I was a toddler I had wanted to ‘help people’ and being a doctor seemed like the ‘ultimate’ way of helping people. But during my time as a student I became so disillusioned because of the arrogant and materialistic attitude of so many of my lecturers and fellow-students towards patients, that I lost all interest in pursuing this field of study. While initially, I was rather confused about which path my life should take instead, I have never regretted this, because I instinctively felt that much of what I was being taught at medical school was very biased towards the ‘material’ and ‘physical’, while I knew that there was so much more to human wellbeing.
Don’t understand me wrongly: I am sincerely grateful for every medical doctor and every progress made by the pharmaceutical industry, to help minimize so many of the diseases that used to kill or deform millions of human beings over the ages, especially children and for life-saving surgery. But for me personally, I was keen to take a ‘broader view’ of helping people in a more holistic manner. So when I found myself at a loss in having become a victim of over-eating, especially unhealthy foods, it was an incredible relief to be empowered through the knowledge offered by the book ‘Fit for Life’. Obesity is simply not a problem you can fix with a pill, no matter how many claims are made to the contrary. The only thing that really works, is changing our eating habits. Following the advice in ‘Fit for Life’, I lost 8 of the 13kgs of pure fat that had bulged my body out of shape and the remaining 5kgs I lost slowly over a longer period. For the last 20 years since then my weight has been stable, more or less, and best of all, my skin just went back to ‘normal’.
One of the things that this way of eating taught me was to discern between ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’. While it is practically impossible to avoid ‘bad fat’ completely, because so much of it is hidden in processed foods, a great rule of thumb is to cook or bake ‘from scratch’ at home, instead of relying on ‘convenience’ foods, so that you are the one that chooses which fat to add to your food. But when you visit people or go out to eat in a restaurant, don’t bore everyone around you with tales of ‘good fats’ and ‘bad fats’. Just enjoy whatever you’ve chosen from the menu. Our bodies are able to deal with lots of bad food, as long as we eat it in moderation.
What I also learnt is that ‘good fat’ is actually critically important in your diet, because our bodies need this and cannot produce it on its own. In ‘good fat’ you find essential fatty acids (EFAs), namely linoleic acid and alpha-linoleic acid, which your body needs. Also, fat carries vitamins A, D, E, and K - known as the fat-soluble vitamins - into and around the body. Fat is necessary for keeping your skin healthy, making sure babies and kids develop proper eyesight and brain development. A layer of fat is also positioned around all our nerves in the body, keeping us calm and better able to handle stressful situations. This is why skinny people with exceptionally low body fat are often perceived as ‘nervous’.
So why is fat seen as ‘Public Enemy Nr. 1’ when it comes to obesity? Because it has more than twice the energy (calories or kilojoules) per gram than either carbohydrate or protein. So even a small amount of fat can cause you to gain weight, especially if you’re not used to moving a lot. But similarly, eating too much protein and carbohydrates can cause too much body fat, even if you cut out dietary fat completely!
Over-eating anything is what makes us fat, not any particular food. Stuffing ourselves with too much food will always have an impact on the scale.
However, in looking at ‘bad fat’, there is a well-documented link between fat intake and heart disease and stroke risk. If you eat a lot of saturated fat (animal fat) and trans fat (processed fat - hydrogenised) this may increase the amount of cholesterol in your blood, which in turn causes your arteries to clog. Cholesterol sits like a layer on the inside of our arteries, narrowing the opening through which oxygen-rich blood can flow to the heart, muscles, organs and brain. As a result, the body becomes sluggish and the brain also struggles to function at ‘full power’. This is why it is important to reduce fat that causes cholesterol levels to rise, but continue to use ‘good fats’ that are necessary for the body.
This means that when it comes to the fat we eat, quantity and quality count. So avoid the following fats as much as possible:

• Saturated fat found in meats, butter, cream, or ice cream, and other foods with animal fat. Highly saturated vegetable fats include coconut oil, palm, palm kernel oil, and cocoa butter are also unhealthy. They're widely used in packaged foods including milk chocolate, cookies, crackers, and snack chips.
We don’t need to eat saturated fat because our bodies make everything that it needs. But you don’t have to avoid them completely, just make sure it is a fraction of all the fat you eat.
• Trans fat, a man-made fat found in some margarines or packaged baked.
Similar to saturated fat, trans fat can cause your arteries to get clogged up. But what makes it worse, is that it has been linked to certain cancers, including breast and colorectal. Most of the trans fat we eat is as a result of a process called ‘hydrogenation’. Sadly, hydrogenation – meaning adding hydrogen to oil resulting in some of the unsaturated fat in the oil to becomes saturated. While this process converts oil into a firmer, tastier product with a longer shelf life, partially hydrogenated fat -- trans fat – is harmful to humans. As a result it is gradually being removed from most packaged foods. But it's still found in some stick margarine, shortening, fast food, cookies, crackers, granola bars, and microwave popcorn. So check those labels!
All this really means is that try to avoid saturated and trans-fats, and instead, include so-called ‘unsaturated’ fats in your diet, because they can reduce the risk of clogged arteries.
While foods tend to contain a mixture of fats, monounsaturated fat is the primary fat found in:
• olive, canola, and sesame oils
• avocado
• nuts, such as almonds, cashews, and pistachios; peanuts and peanut butter
Polyunsaturated fat is prevalent in:
• corn, cottonseed, and safflower oils
• sunflower seeds and sunflower oil
• flaxseed and flaxseed oil
• soybeans and soybean oil
• certain types of tub margarine
• seafood
There is one type of fat that is really good for you. This is called omega-3 fat. This fat is found only in seafood and is apparently very important for a child’s brain development, eyesight and heart health. Human bodies can make this type of fat from alpha-linolenic acid, found in foods such as walnuts and flax, but research seems to prove that less than 10% is actually converted. As a result, it is a good idea to eat fatty, cold-water fish, such as salmon, sardines, and tuna, all of which are rich in omega-3 fats.
Overall, there are three easy ways to avoid bad fats, including trans fat:
1. Avoid ‘convenience’ or processed foods when possible. Keep them in stock for an emergency, but as a rule, cook and bake ‘from scratch’.
2. Eat sources of protein that are ‘lean’, such as, low-fat dairy foods, whole grains, legumes -- such as garbanzo beans and black beans -- and fruits and vegetables.
3. Use healthy oils such as olive, canola, and sunflower oil, and small amounts of tub margarine for cooking and flavoring foods.
Also, keep an eye open for unusual oils like sesame, grapeseed and avocado and start experimenting with them. Usually, you will use much less of these oils, while still getting fantastic taste results.

PS: Most of the facts in this article I found validated by the informative website http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/nutrition-labels-9/good-fats-bad-fats?page=3.

PS: This section on fat is the last one about food in the 100-Day Action Plan series. The next section is all about keeping fit!

PS: By becoming more conscious of what you eat, you can really release the energy to fulfil your dreams. By starting an online business, you can get better control over your time. With these two critical steps you can start shaping your life towards more love, greater beauty and increasing abundance. For a highly professional ‘virtual franchise’ opportunity for an Internet Business, visit http://www.reinedelarose.com.

Day 14 - Take control of your Energy - Change your diet, change your life!

2009-08-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

Day 14 – 87 days left

It’s a pity that human babies don’t arrive with a ‘user manual’ in this world! Every piece of equipment we buy comes with a ‘user manual’, so that it may be cared for appropriately. But babies don’t: they are completely at the mercy of whoever God sent them to. Or are we overlooking something? Read on to follow me on a ‘mind-race’ from breastfeeding, to the time when women were considered part of the ‘spoils of war’ to right across the vegetable garden!

Looking at technical equipment, the more sophisticated it gets, the more ‘intuitive’ it is and the less you need a user manual. Since human beings are the ‘crown of creation’ they are obviously the most sophisticated piece of ‘equipment’ ever created by anyone. So maybe it makes sense that they are handled intuitively, and not with a user manual. The Afrikaans language which is a European language, grown on African soil, has a way of describing things in very down-to-earth idioms. So the question of how to care for a human baby, is answered with: ’Keep wet at the top and dry at the bottom’…

While, in principle, this is true, in practice the ‘what to feed a human’ is a critical part of the equation. ‘Nature’s way’ is really ‘God’s Way’. Just looking at mother’s milk and reading at how carefully this has been formulated, makes me stand in awe of God’s incredible wisdom. So, in principle, feeding the human baby is not the challenge: God generally delivers the food together with each baby. Even more fascinating: because mother’s milk feeds the baby in a different manner than formula does, babies feeding from the breast need milk more often than those feeding from the bottle – so in this way God is ensuring that human babies get a lot of intimate attention from their moms, which in turn helps develop their brains too!

But what about grown up humans? What were we designed to eat?

I only realized later in life that the Bible is really God’s ‘User Manual’ for human beings and that, if we refer to it often, it actually gives us an incredible amount of information on how to lead healthy and successful lives. Just looking at the story about when human beings were created, after telling them what is expected from them, in Genesis 1 verse 29 God explains what they should eat: seed-bearing plants and fruit with seed or in modern shorthand ‘grains, nuts, fruit and veggies.’ I had never taken the Old Testament of the Bible with its many laws very seriously, since as a Lutheran Christian my focus has always been on the New Testament, on the ‘summary’ of all God’s Laws – love God above all, love your neighbour as you love yourself – and the gospel of salvation through grace. But as I have learnt to better understand how to read the Bible, I realize that in the Old Testament there is so much wise and wonderful knowledge that can be applied to our benefit, even in this modern day and age. I’ve also learnt that the various translations of the Bible are always ‘coloured’ by the culture and times for which they were intended, and that often this ‘cultural bias’ results in some misinterpretation, which becomes clearer when one starts comparing different translations.

‘What on earth does this have to do with learning to master your energy?’ you may ask!

Everything, really.

Because in focusing our attention on the ‘ideal’ menu for human beings, God is pointing us right in the very first chapter of the Bible to the foods that scientifically have been proven to have the most easily digestible vitamins, minerals and other nutrients for the human body. He knew that having food is one of the most important things in a human beings life.

Since that time, human nutrition has always been of main concern throughout the ages. In times of hunger and war, just about anything would go. In times of peace and abundance, the focus would be on weight-loss and the negative impact of food on health. With mass media shaping our opinions of beauty since the advent of the 20th Century, and industrialization focusing on processing and producing ‘fast-food’ food for the masses, the focus during the previous century was more on either marketing highly processed or ‘fast’ foods, or on remedying the ill effects of this type of diet through ‘scientifically researched’ chemicals sold as ‘diet meals’ or ‘meal replacements’. To counter the effect of this artificial diet, vitamin and mineral supplements have hit the supermarket shelves in a big way. While this certainly makes sense if our diet consists mainly of artificial and processed foods, these pills are a sign that we are moving further and further away from ‘nature’s way’.

As in all the ages before our own, war had a most devastating impact on human behaviour. After millions of men were forced into war and too often lost their lives in the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th Century, women were drawn into the workplace, producing army supplies. Once the wars were over, these women were instrumental in rebuilding their countries, because their husbands, fathers, brothers and lovers had fallen in the wars. Compared to the centuries past, where women were generally considered ‘loot’ by the victors of war and often dragged off into faraway lands by their conquerors, this mass modern exodus of women away from their households and families into paid employment has certainly brought more power and independence to women. But when we look at the statistics of broken homes, ‘fatherless’ children, dysfunctional families, deserted elderly in old-age homes, increasingly obese kids, teenagers that ‘escape their life’ into media and drugs, and other issues our modern society is faced with, it is easy to see that throughout the 20th Century Western society was still recovering from the ill effects of those two terrible wars.

But now we are in a new era. We women can raise our heads from our working desks or factory production lines and ask ourselves the question: ‘Quo vadis?’ (Where to from here?).

And that is why I started writing this series on ‘Taking control of your life’ for women. And it is the reason why I am starting this series by focusing on the first basic human need: food.

The impact of our food on our wellbeing is immense!

By committing to eating as many fresh fruit and vegetables as we can, we are able to start turning the wheel away from the self-destructive and environmentally destructive habits of the 20th Century towards a more conscious lifestyle to create more love, greater beauty and abundance in the 21st Century.

I am just comparing my lifestyle with that of my mother’s, my grandmothers’ and my one great-grandmother that I still had the privilege to encounter as a small girl. They were ‘20th Century’ women who had managed to avoid the ‘draft’ into the workplace and were proud managers of large farm-based households.

I certainly have a life which has given me fantastic opportunities for self-development, but while I was travelling the world through lucrative consulting assignments, I increasingly felt that there is a missing piece: the homemaker piece. I associate ‘abundance’ with the extensive vegetable gardens, fruit orchards and home-baked bread and cakes that I remember from these women’s lives. No visitor would leave their homes empty-handed: fresh vegetables or fruit in season, plant seedlings, freshly cut flowers, a loaf of home-baked bread, a bottle of home-made jam…

And then I ask myself the question: why can’t I have both – the fascinating, successful career AND create the abundance these amazing homemakers did?

Someone once said:”To change a person, change their diet.” We all have the ability to ‘shift our shape’ towards a new way of being. Changing our diets to replace some of the stodgy carbohydrates and meat overload to more fresh vegetables – raw or lightly cooked –gives a huge boost to our energy levels! Reminding our minds that veggies are chock-full of vitamins and minerals that help to maintain our organs, brain and muscles, is a good way of convincing ourselves to take this step. Teaching our tongues to loooove vegetables is a great way of waking up our consciousness in general. And by ‘waking up’ in this way, we may just see the door open to a new lifestyle which includes everything we have ever dreamt about…

I’m not saying that we all need to go back to rural lifestyles and plant our own vegetables. No, if we would just put more of those fresh veggies into our supermarket trolleys and walk past the canned and processed food sections, that already would be a huge improvement on our lifestyles, because it forces us to focus on the food we put into our bodies, since we have to prepare it personally.

So in starting to take control of your life, start to take control of your diet. Make sure that as fruit forms your breakfast, vegetables form the largest part of your other two main meals every day. You’ll be surprised at the snowball effect this will have on the other areas of your life!

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Day 13 - Take control of your Energy - The Better Protein

2009-08-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Day 13 – 88 Days left

When someone says ‘Protein’ chances are that you are thinking ‘meat’. And yes, meat has become the main source of protein in diets influenced by Western culture. But at what cost? And why? There are some fascinating findings about the impact that high meat consumption has on our society and on our earth. Fortunately, there are lots of other sources of protein. The challenge is simply to start introducing them into your diet for variety. You don’t have to give up meat. Just eat less of it and substitute it with other protein, coming from plants.

According to some of the latest research available, livestock production (cattle, sheep, chickens, pigs, etc.) contributes to the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. In fact, it is estimated that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport. Apparently, expanding population and incomes worldwide, along with changing food choices, are causing a fast increase in demand for meat, milk and eggs. Now already, grazing for cattle uses a quarter (26%) of the land surface of the Earth easily accessible by humans ! Think about what that means as populations increase. Existing land available for human settlements is not enough. So then more forests are cut down, which in turn affects our environment negatively as well. While this problem may not be visible to us, because we’re living in cities, it is important for all of us because it affects our environment. In addition, about one third of all land used for agriculture is used to grow feed crops for livestock. On top of everything, about 70% of land in dry areas of the world which is used by cattle, goats or other livestock has become degraded because of overgrazing, which results in soil erosion. This means that even the land that used to be good for grazing or planting, is slowly becoming desert.

Scientists estimate that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of all transport (cars, SUVs, buses, trains, ships) combined. For those of you who don’t know this: greenhouse gas is the type of gas that is heating up the atmosphere of the world and changes our climate. Also, the sheer quantity of animals being raised for us humans to eat also poses a threat of the Earth’s biodiversity. About 20% of all animals alive are already livestock, and the land area they now occupy was once habitat for wildlife. By increasing livestock, to meet our human demand for meat, we are reducing the land available to wild animals.

Another environmental reason why we need to increase the amount of plant protein we use, compared to animal protein, is that livestock uses so much more water to produce the same amount of protein, than plants like soya and beans, that are high in protein, do.

I thought I’d add this information to this piece on protein, just to give everyone a bigger picture! Also, I want you to understand that – apart from the negative effect that too much animal protein has on our health – this is the reason why I encourage everyone to shift slowly to using more and more plant protein.

I’m not saying that you must stop eating meat. All I am saying is that we women have a huge impact on the food choices of our families. So we can reverse the negative impact of a diet high in animal proteins over the next couple of years, to help Earth and our bodies recover.

The meat industry is currently under a lot of pressure, because of the criticism against it, both because of the impact of cattle on increasing greenhouse gases, as well as because of the killer-diseases afflicting people living the ‘MacDonald’ lifestyle. Plant and animal protein are both made of essential amino acids, but diets high in animal proteins have been linked to an increase in cancer, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. However, you don’t need animals to get plenty of protein in your diet. There are plenty of plants that can be eaten to ensure you get ample amounts of protein each day.

As women who want to create a world where there is more love, greater beauty and more abundance, it should not be our intention to cause strain on anyone. However, if we slowly but surely change our shopping habits to include one portion of animal protein less and instead add one portion of plant protein into our shopping baskets every week, we are informing the market to change. In this way, cattle and other livestock farmers will have time to shift their production to include other products over time, without causing them economic distress.

I’m not going to talk about the forms of animal protein available in detail. You know them all: meat, chicken, fish, eggs and dairy products like cheese. Instead, I’m going to focus on talking about plant protein, because this is an exciting new discovery for many of us!

Soybeans
Soya is known to have the highest content of protein per 100g, even more than any source of animal protein! I saw soya for the first time about 20 years ago. At that time it had been introduced as a ‘cheap-and-nasty’ meat substitute. I ate it once or twice, when my mom tried cooking it, but didn’t like the taste or the texture. Now I know that the brand that was available then was adding a lot of artificial flavouring to the soya to make it taste ‘like meat’. The next time I ate soya was in a vegan restaurant, while I was a student. There was tofu in my salad. I didn’t know that this was soya and had never tasted anything so tasteless and rubbery! Needless to say, the word ‘tofu’ filled me with apprehension ever since that experience.

But things have come a long way since then!

In China, the soya bean has been cultivated and used in different ways for thousands of years. Soya beans are very versatile: soya beans can be used as whole soya beans, soya sprouts, or processed as soya milk, tofu, tempeh, soya sauce, miso (soup condiment). You can read more about this online at www.soya.be.

The soybean is quite amazing: Soya is also used as ingredient for non-food products, such as candle wax and biodiesel! Soy candles are becoming more popular because they burn longer and healthier.

I started seriously using soya as a protein in our diet about a year ago. Before then, it had been difficult for me to find it or use it. But then I had the amazing opportunity to visit a vegan community in Israel, that had started using soya as the base of their diet about 40 years ago. I’ve never seen such healthy, energetic and beautiful people! Their medical records have been carefully kept ever since they changed to a vegan diet and there is not a single case of cancer or high blood pressure among the community members that have been living on soya for almost 40 years now, despite the fact that those members are now in their 70’s. The children that have never eaten any meat are absolutely gorgeously healthy. This really convinced me to move from a vegetarian towards a vegan lifestyle over the next couple of years. What was also highly inspirational was the incredibly creative approach to using soya to create all kinds of delicious dishes, including soya ice-cream! Through trial and error, the women in this community especially have now invented ways of spicing soya and presenting it in such a way that they create any substitute for animal protein that you can think of… chicken casserole, roast beef, scrambled eggs… you name it, they’ve got it.

It had not been easy until last year to find soya products in mainstream supermarkets in South Africa, but just as I returned from Israel, products from a South African producer of soya products showed up on the supermarket shelves across the country. During my recent visits to the USA I’ve been on the look-out for soya products and was absolutely stunned by the variety that is already available, although mainly in shops specializing in organic and health foods. But overall, there is really no excuse in many parts of our beautiful world, not to switch to a meat-substitute made from soya at least once a week. You’ll find these products easy to use: just cook them as you would normally do the type of meat they are substituting. I do suggest, however, that you carefully read the labels on the packaging. Avoid anything with artificial colouring and flavouring or preservatives!

Lentils
Lentils have been around since Biblical times and earlier. It was apparently one of the earliest plants that was domesticated in the Near East. Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, tells us that a variety of lentils exists, with colors that range from yellow to red-orange to green, brown and black. Red, white and yellow lentils have their skins removed. There are large and small varieties of many lentils (e.g. Masoor Lentils). Lentils are sold in many forms, with or without the skins, whole or split.

Learning to cook more with beans and other pulses like lentils does mean getting into a ‘rhythm’ and planning ahead. These foods sometimes need to be soaked overnight or cooked for quite a long time. But the fact that they cost relatively less than the same weight of meat and don’t have a negative impact on our health, bring other important benefits.

In the age we live in, we are truly privileged to have so much information at our fingertips through the Internet! I searched the ‘net to confirm some facts I had, and also found lots of interesting recipes for all the plant proteins I am suggesting here. So, if you’ve never cooked lentils, just google ‘lentil recipes’ and you’ll see what I mean.

Peanuts
Most of us eat peanuts as peanut butter or as salty snacks, sometimes combined with raisins. Using peanuts in cooking is really not common in homes with a Western culture. Southern cooking in the USA features a lot of peanuts, however, as do oriental recipes. Peanuts can be used in many different ways, although they are mainly used for peanut butter in the USA. Peanut oil can be used in cooking, lighting, fuel and as a food constituent. Peanut oil has a better keeping quality than soybean, corn, and safflower oils and is a good source of Vitamin E. Peanut oil is the most popular use of the ‘groundnut’, as it is also known, in other parts of the world, outside of the USA.

Beans (Broad, Kidney, Red, Chickpeas, etc.)
All beans are an interesting mix of plant protein and carbohydrates. This is why it makes sense to eat beans together with carbohydrates, even though they are a protein: they can be digested by the same stomach juices as carbohydrates are. In fact, beans alone are not complete proteins, but combined with a grain are complete as a meal. So it is important to eat beans with other grain products.

In switching away from a diet dominated by meat, beans are our best friends! They are hugely versatile and can be prepared in many different tasty ways. The Internet is full of delicious recipes, many being traditional recipes from across the world, which adds some excitement to your kitchen!

I found a suggestion that, as you eat more beans, you need to increase your water-intake, in order to properly handle the higher fiber content in your diet. So there is another added benefit of beans: they will encourage you to drink more water. And water, as we know, is the ‘elixir of life’.

Seeds (including pumpkin and squash)
Seeds are generally not a main meal, but can be added to practically every dish, salad or baked item we make. Seeds are a rich store of energy, some have good protein levels, vitamins (especially vitamin E), minerals, and protective phytochemicals. Apparently, our ancestors who were ‘hunter-gatherers’ would follow seeds according to the seasons and ate every seed that was worth collecting, grass seed, legume (bean-like, pea -like, peanut and others), and any other seeds that were sustaining and productive, or big enough to be worth bothering with.

Thousands of years later, I am thrilled to see an ever-increasing selection of seeds on our supermarket shelves! Seeds are highly concentrated foods, so we need very few of them to add some taste to our other meals. Follow the example of our ancient ancestors and add seeds to your cooking, changing with the seasons to keep things interesting!

Nuts
Nuts, together with fruit and salads, are my favourite foods! Why? Because I don’t have to cook them. I just love the fact that these foods can be eaten ‘live’ – no fuel used on cooking them, all the natural nutrients ready for the taking, no vitamins or minerals lost. A handful of nuts, together with raisins, is my favourite (non-chocolate) snack. I know the protein and oils in the nuts are good for my muscles, organs and nervous system, while the iron in raisins helps to keep my blood healthy to take up oxygen.

Did you know that, biologically, nuts are a fruit-and-seed in one? And that some types of ‘nuts’ are really seed, because they have to be extracted from the fruit, like cashews?

I could spend hours on the Internet learning more about the foods we eat so thoughtlessly… It really is important to know where our food comes from! This makes me think of a television programme I once watched in Germany, about ‘Spaghetti Trees’. It was a documentary, showing the ‘Spaghetti Plantations’ in Italy, where women painstakingly had to pick the ‘ripe’ spaghetti strips from the trees and lay them out in the sun to dry…. The programme was shown on April 1. April’s Fools’ Day! Of course all of us know that spaghetti doesn’t come from trees – or do we??!

As a human race we have become so far removed from the source of our food, that we really need to get in touch with the ‘food cycle’ again: seed, plant, fruit, harvest, compost, and so on. Make an effort to learn about where food comes from and teaching the members of your family the same. Understanding the value of food hopefully will help us to again respect food in the way it used to be respected by our ancestors, who had to spend hours looking for seeds and nuts to eat…

Mushrooms
I think edible mushrooms are God’s secret for meat-lovers, who need to stay away from meat for health reasons. Large, juicy brown portobello mushrooms can be ‘spiked’ with garlic sticks cut from fresh garlic and grilled on the fire just like meat. Or under the grill in the oven. Fried white mushrooms can be treated with the same spices one would use for chicken livers and enjoyed as such. Sliced mushrooms can be used together with onions and cream or soy milk to create a creamy sauce for pasta. Sprinkled with black pepper they are certain to satisfy any gourmet’s taste.

Besides being a rich source of protein, mushrooms are the only natural fresh vegetable or fruit with vitamin D. New research suggests that the ultraviolet light found in sunlight may boost levels of vitamin D in mushrooms. Apparently, we can boost the natural process of “enriching” mushrooms with more vitamin D by briefly exposing mushrooms grown in the dark to sunlight for 5 minutes before cooking or using in salads!

Often grouped with vegetables, mushrooms provide many of the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables, as well as nutritional elements more commonly found in meat, beans or grains. Mushrooms are low in calories, fat-free, cholesterol-free and very low in sodium (salt). Still, they give us different nutrients, such as riboflavin, niacin and selenium, which are typically found in animal foods or grains.

For thousands of years, Eastern cultures have recognized mushrooms’ health benefits. Studies conducted over the past two decades—mostly in Asia—have suggested mushrooms or substances in mushrooms may support the immune system. Traditionally, most of this science has focused on shiitake and maitake mushrooms, but this seems to be a common characteristic for all mushrooms.

Take some time to search and find all these interesting facts and delicious recipes for mushrooms on the Internet. A whole new world will open to you, as it did for me!

Just on a closing note, some of the fascinating facts I found while researching this article today, is that oats and sun-dried tomatoes both are high in vegetable proteien. On the other hand, human milk – God’s food for babies – has very little protein! In fact, the protein found in human milk is equal per 100g as that found in bananas and carrots. So maybe we don’t need so much protein after all… Makes you think, doesn’t it?

PS: Much of the useful info I found came from www.wikipedia.com. But just using Yahoo or Google to search each of the plant proteins mentioned and adding ‘nutrition’ or ‘recipes’ will unlock an amazing world of knowledge for you. Have fun!

PS PS: Managing your energy by eating the right food in the right quantities and prepared correctly is critical if you want to achieve your dream! However, managing your time also is. And being your own boss, while working from home on the Internet can really help you take control of your own life. I found a great opportunity to do just that. You can too. Just click on http://www.reinedelarose.com and keep on reading.

Day 12 - Take control of your Energy - Know your Daily Bread!

2009-08-12T04:36:00.000-07:00

Day 12: 89 Days left

Isn’t it amazing how little interest we show into the food we eat? Except that we care how it tastes like. Having our daily bread is a privilege most of us take for granted. But how much do we know about carbohydrates or ‘starches’ and how they affect our bodies? For those of us who have heard the Bible story, food was the Devil’s first weapon to tempt us into self-destruction. And if we don’t learn to understand carbohydrates, this staple food can be deadly for your figure. Handle with care!

I love bread. I always have. Especially the fragrant, home-baked, whole-wheat bread with a golden crust that my mom would bake. When I lived in Germany, first as an Au Pair and again later as a trainee journalist, the bakers on every main street would tempt me with a huge variety of rolls, each with a different name: Lausbub, Milchbrötle, Vollkorn, Dreikorn, Roggenbrötchen, Salzpretzel. Absolutely delicious. But I soon paid the price: my normally slender body started picking up weight at the speed of bite!

When I came back home, no one recognized me. And I had nothing to wear! This is when my quest for knowledge about food started. Now I am a fervent proponent of teaching nutrition in Kindergarten. Because it looks like modern mom’s don’t really have the knowledge they need to teach good eating habits to their babies and toddlers – especially not the most modern, scientific information. This is such a pity: every human child should know what food is good for its body and which food isn’t – regardless of taste.

How much our culture influences our choice of food is something I learnt especially since I’ve become involved in a charity that operates two boarding schools for teenagers, mainly from deep rural South Africa. The kids that attend these schools – one for boys, one for girls – come from homes where they have been taught that a meal without meat is no meal, just a ‘snack’. And that you have to stuff yourself with maize porridge (known here as ‘phutu’) in order to say that you are ‘full’, before you stop eating!

If I look at the rest of the parts of the world where I have been travelling to – the cultural paradigms are different, but the end result is the same: far too much carbohydrates and fat! In the USA, kids grow up on cereal with milk and MacDonald Burgers. In Europe, far too many are now also resorting to similar eating habits. Just a few weeks ago, in July, when I visited my godchild in Germany, his father was lamenting the fact that mothers in his daughter’s swimming class would come to him and sternly admonish him that his daughter was too skinny! He remembers from his childhood that all kids were wiry and athletic. Now the majority of primary school children is already showing signs of obesity!

Yes, we certainly need carbohydrates in our diet. This is the fuel for our muscles. So, especially if we are highly active, physically, we do need a lot of this type of food, in all its different forms: bread, cereals, pasta, and so on.

Children have much more energy than we do, because their bodies are not yet burdened with the bad eating habits that we as adults have adopted, usually from our own parents. Looking at the history of food, and just understanding my own ancestor’s eating habits, over-eating was simply not on the order of the day. Something happened after World War II, when it comes to our diets. Suddenly, all kinds of new artificial foodstuffs entered the mainstream: colouring, flavouring, preservatives. And television brought all of this ‘wonderful’ new food and these new tastes into our homes. So, of course, our diets changed!

Having white bread from the bakery in town became a special treat for us farm kids, who were used to the whole wheat bread baked by mom at home. If it had stayed a special treat, that would have been OK. But with urbanization and becoming further and further removed from the source of our food, white bread – wheat – has become the staple food of far too many human beings across the world.

There is nothing wrong with wheat – if you eat it in moderation. Like with most other things: if you don’t overeat, you’re generally fine, health- and weight-wise.

But when it comes to wheat, especially white wheat flour, there is a BIG ‘However’.

White wheat flour – like any other type of ‘refined’ grain where the healthy fibre, vitamins and minerals has been practically ‘surgically removed’ – is actually nothing but a slightly different form of sugar. Now imagine eating solid pieces of sugar, like we eat slices of white bread or rolls…

I didn’t know this, until I started researching the impact of the different food types on our bodies, mind and emotions. And yes, even on our spirit. Drugs affect our spirit. But that is a story for another day…

Today I just want you to become very aware of the fact that ‘refined’ wheat has the same effect of ‘refined’ sugar, if not treated in moderation. It makes the blood sugar levels shoot up high, resulting in more and more Insulin being released from our Pancreas (remember this organ from Biology class?) and in this way over time affects our bodies ability to regulate its sugar levels, too often resulting in adult-onset diabetes!

If you are a labourer who needs to do heavy manual labour, or if you are an athlete or go to gym every day, you can eat quite a lot of carbohydrates each day, because your body burns this ‘sugar’ as fuel to keep your muscles going.

However, if you are someone who spends much of your time sitting or just do moderate physical activity, you need to be careful with the amount of fuel you put in your body. Because every little gram of carbohydrates that you do not use on that day is turned by your body into sugar and from there into fat. Fat on our bodies is nothing but a ‘storage area’ – a ‘larder’ – for those days when we may need to fall back on this reserve. However, with our current blessed lifestyles, the chances that we will not have food tomorrow, has really shrunk to a minimum, so we also don’t need to store huge reserves of fat on our bodies. The problem with fat is that it causes excessive weight on our bone structure, pulling us down even further than gravity normally would, and also placing a lot of strain on the heart, which now suddenly has to feed a whole new layer of bodymass (pure fat) with blood. Fat sits directly below our skin, so if the heart is not able to work properly any longer, the blood struggles to reach our skin, and this has all kinds of effects on the well-being of our bodies. Just do some of your own research on this on the Internet and you will be amazed at how important it is to keep the fat layer under our skin at a lower range.

The other thing that we should become aware of is that wheat contains a material called ‘gluten’. Gluten is a form of proteien, that is easily digestible for most people, but over the last couple of years – probably because of humans over-eating wheat – an increasing number of people are becoming intolerant to this food, with a variety of symptoms ranging from chronic diarhoeaa and ongoing tiredness. The biggest problem is that in these instances, the gluten prevents the digestive system from properly absorbing nutrients, like vitamins and minerals, resulting in malnutrition.

I’m not suggesting that you rush off to get a Gluten allergy test. I am, however, encouraging you to learn more about carbohydrates and how you can ensure that you and the people you prepare food for, can enjoy the benefits of carbohydrates, without suffering from the disaster of over-eating them.

Also, I am recommending that we all shift away from a wheat-dominated carbohydrate diet to including more different types of carbohydrates, because in this way we can have the benefit of different types of minerals and vitamins.

Let carbohydrates form the ‘backbone’ of your weekly menu for your family, then choose suitable vegetables and proteins to serve together with carbohydrates at lunch and dinner.

Here is my suggested ‘Menu Plan’. Except for sticking to the ‘Fruit First’ rule, you can change the order as you wish. I am just adding a few ‘variations’ for each type of carbohydrate, so that you can start thinking about this. The basic menu plan is always the same:

- Breakfast – Fruit only until 12h00
- Lunch – Preferably 12h00. Ideally, eat only the daily carbohydrate with vegetables or vegetable protein. Soups in winter with bread and salad in summer, using bread or grains in the soup. If you’re not working from home, make something the night before, pack it for all your family members and take it with to work. Lunch packs for kids can always include sandwiches and cut vegetable slices, like tomatoes, celery, carrots, etc.
- Late afternoon – Around 15h00. Any form of carbohydrate (e.g. cookie or biscuit) with any type of caffeine-free hot drink or water.
- Dinner – Around 18h00. Preferably protein with vegetables or a vegetable protein with a carbohydrate. Eat protein in moderation and a large portion of salad with your dinner, to fill you up. Over time, you will notice that you need less and less food.
- Late evening snack – Around 20h00, not later than 21h00. Any type of snack – e.g. nuts or cookies, but just a tiny portion to satisfy your tastebuds. Even better is to just drink your favourite herbal tea at this time, before you go to sleep.
Now you can make your life a lot easier and healthier by choosing your daily carbohydrate for lunch from among the following:

Mondays – Wheat

This includes any type of wheat bread, pastry, pasta, and couscous.

Tuesdays – Sorghum/Spelt or any other ‘exotic’ grain

Visit your local health-store section in the supermarket to see what’s available and try out new recipes.

Thursdays – Potatoes

This is such a versatile food: mashed, boiled then fried, boiled, baked, chips, potato soup, croquettes

Wednesdays – Oats

Porridge, muffins, crunchy granola biscuits, sautéed oat flakes in salad or as a topping on soup

Fridays – Rye

Rye is known best as bread, but look for recipes for other interesting things to do with rye. There are different types of rye bread too!

Saturday – Corn/Maize

This is ideal for family gatherings. Corn-on-the-cob, nachos, maize bread and other traditional ways of using maize. Combine with beans, like the Mexicans do, avoid meat.

Sunday – Rice

There are lots of different types of rice, so there is already some variety. But then, of course, you can use rice as is, rice cakes, rice dishes, rice-and-soy milk soup with cinnamon and steamed dried fruit. Let your imagination fly!

The main secret that all of us living in the 21st Century need to know is that it is very easy to over-eat on carbohydrates, because they are a form of sugar and sugar is addictive. So learn more about how you can rid yourself of this addiction and start on a fresh page. Your body will be grateful!

PS: If you’re really keen to pay more attention to the food you are giving your family or for your own body, but your career prevents you from doing so, consider a career switch. Become a business owner of an online, Internet-based business that you can run from home. Have a look at www.reinedelarose.com. This is a great business opportunity that will allow you to do just that!

Take control of your Energy – Choose the Perfect Food!

2009-08-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

Day 11: 90 Days left

“Isn’t this just the most incredible invention?” asked Hanno Tauschwitz, a senior journalist at the newspaper in Germany where I was completing my internship. “You can just pop it into your bag in the morning, go to work, pull it out, eat it, know that it is a fantastic food for your body, and then get rid of the packaging which decomposes, leaving no rubbish behind. No mess, no fuss – and it’s simply delicious!”

Hanno was talking about a banana, which he had just taken out of his bag and started to peel while praising its virtues. This was 1988 and bananas were a hot topic in Germany: the two halves of the country were being united and people from East Germany were experiencing the taste of bananas for the first time in their lives. Unlike Harro. He was born and raised in the Western part and was something of a health ‘nut’. But he was really good looking and an excellent writer, so everyone forgave him.

For me, listening to Harro rave about a banana was an eye-opening moment. I’d never thought of fruit that way, specifically not bananas, which – having grown up in South Africa – I’d always taken for granted. But he was right: fruit really is the perfect food! You don’t have to cook it, which saves energy. You can eat it ‘straight’, so it’s really nature’s own ‘fast food’ or you can cube it, slice it or juice it. Eat it separately to truly taste each individual type of fruit or tantalize your tastebuds with an endless variety of fragrances and flavours by mixing different fruit together. And, when you’re done, you can throw it away mindlessly, knowing that it will decompose and return any left-over nutrients into the soil.

The thought of anyone never having eaten a banana really did come as something of a surprise to me. But I think that in this world of global trade, we do take so many things for granted! While I had been used to having all types of fruit ‘Made in South Africa’ because of the amazingly varied climate zones in this country, walking through the supermarkets in Europe is for me still a lesson in Geography: oranges from Israel, apples from Poland, grapes from the Cape, bananas from Brazil. The choice facing us nowadays is truly endless. Apricots. Litchis. Tangerines. Kiwis. Guavas. Watermelon. Raspberries. And have you ever heard of Persimmon or Custard Apples?

The colours! The shapes! The textures! Fruit is certainly ‘designer food’.

And what have we done? Gotten ourselves addicted to chips-cookies-candies: all high-sugar and high-fat content foods, that attack both our teeth and bones and result in acidic levels that keep us open to infectious diseases. Of course we’ve all been taught that fruit is healthy, but somehow this message gets overpowered by all the media with its glamorous or funky ads tempting us to sink out teeth into sugary treats and soda drinks.

Just because I’ve been interested in nutrition ever since I had my own ‘fat scare’ in my early twenties, I found a lot of information about food in general and fruit in particular. And I’ve started wondering why we humans are not taught about the effects of food on our bodies, minds, emotions and energy levels even when we are still small! Instead, we’re kept quiet (initially) with a piece of candy and then have to go through the terrible ordeal of getting our teeth fixed later. Also, the wave of ‘attention deficit disorder (ADD)’ kids that suddenly appeared on schoolbenches across the world strangely coincided with high sugar intake diets, causing hyper-activity and concentration issues. And then we feed these poor kids drugs to get them back to normal.

What is happening? Are we insane?

We are living in a time when never before, in the history of humankind, there been more knowledge available to help us make good choices and develop towards the next level. But instead of using this knowledge and applying it to improve our lives, we choose to ‘dumb down’, watching fictitious people’s lives on television, who have problems we certainly do not want to have! We feed our minds with this ‘junk’, we feed our bodies with ‘junk’, we fill our homes with ‘junk’ and then we wonder why we’re tired all the time…

Conscious living. I wish there were a simpler word to explain ‘conscious’. Aware. Awake. Alive! Ever noticed that ‘live’ spelled backwards is ‘evil’? Whatever doesn’t bring more life, more love, more beauty and more abundance into our lives, is not good for us. We’ve been living unconsciously for so long, that we really need to take stock of our lives, here and now. And answer the simple questions: What works? What doesn’t work?

Let me quote* a few reasons why fruit work as food, while many other types of food don’t:

• For the largest part fruit consists of water just like the human body does;

• Fruit is 100% bad-cholesterol free. Cholesterol acts like padding to the inside of your veins and then other waste material gets stuck into this padding. The padding means that your veins have less space on the inside for pumping blood, which increases your blood-pressure and makes your heart work too hard. Then enter a blood clot that can’t get past a cholesterol-waste obstacle in the vein and … lights out! Don’t let this happen to you or your loved ones.;

• Fruit stimulates the memory – the sugar in fruit is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and goes to fire up your brain. But there are other reasons too, which are still being scientifically researched. Bottom line is: your brain votes for fruit!

• Fruit is relatively cheap food – you get much better nutrition for every dollar you spend on fruit, than on any other type of food;

• The miraculous healing effects of fruit – silly enough, we all love to read books about people who became ill with cancer and then started eating white grapes and got better! Why not just eat the white grapes and avoid the cancer in the first place?;

• Fibers: I think you’ve all seen enough bran cereal advertisements to know why this is critical for your health!;

• Fruit makes you feel better: Don’t take my word for it. Try it! You’ll see for yourself.;

• There are ethical reasons to eat fruit: they use less energy and water to produce than other foods and because you can enjoy them raw, you can save electricity or gas because you don’t need to cook them. So overall you’re acting responsibly towards the environment, when you choose food above other fruit;

• Fruit is the most natural food – no preservatives, coloring or fake flavouring needed!;

• Fruit juices – squeeze those fruits! The taste comes through and it’s a way to get in more fruit, instead of eating it piece by piece.

Fruit simply is the perfect food for human beings: A healthy diet should consist for a great deal of freshly squeezed fruit juices, raw fruits and vegetables. Some tips:

- A good start is to eat and drink more fresh fruits; it’s as simple as that. Before you know it you will feel much better;

- Don’t forget to eat fruit on an empty stomach, not after other meals and;

- Inform yourself about the stuff that goes into processed foods and non-organic farming methods and you’ll soon be convinced that fresh fruit, ideally from an organic farm, is the best food ever!

If you want to change your world to create more love, greater beauty and increase abundance for all, you’ll need a lot of energy. Fruit is the food that will fuel you to achieve your dreams.

* Read more about fruit on http://www.thefruitpages.com/

PS: Choose a 21st Century Lifestyle – be informed, be aware and use the knowledge and systems available to you. Choose to use your time wisely and effectively. Don’t waste precious life time and pollute the environment by commuting to a job that does not allow you to fulfill your personal goals. The Internet is a new tool that you can use to earn your income. For more info click on http://www.reinedelarose.com

Take control of your Energy – Cleverly combine your Food!

2009-08-04T01:23:00.000-07:00

Day 10: 91 Days to go

The old way of planning a meal was to start with the meat, then add potato or rice and three veggies. And of course, to start the day with cereal and milk and fill the gaps with fruit and bread. Well, it’s time for a mindset change! Enter the 21st Century and new knowledge: the way you put your meals together and what you eat when makes a huge difference to your energy levels, health and weight.

Funny thing is, the new way of eating has been introduced into health spas all over the world more than 50 years ago already. Now what’s the point of filling up with food the wrong way and growing extra layers of fat, and then spending tons of money at a health spa on getting rid of that fat by doing things the right way? Why not simply do things the right way from the start? Indigestion, overweight, cholesterol, heart attacks, sugar diabetes, cancer: this is the price we pay for ignoring the very simple principles of a modern, healthy diet.

The irony of the matter is that the modern, healthy diet is probably very similar to the way in which the original human beings managed to survive thousands of years. The meat-potato-and-three-veg and the cereal-and-milk menus are very much a product of the past 100 years only. Ever heard the saying: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? Of course you have! And it is true – if you were a factory worker in the early 1920s that had to get to work early and not have a lunch break. If you hadn’t filled up with some carbohydrates (porridge or cereal) before you started work, chances were that you might faint on the job and get your hand chopped off! So, definitely, breakfast in that time was the most important meal of the day.

But think about the traditional, rural lifestyle that most of our ancestors lived: you got up early in the morning and started working, while the sun was still in hiding or not yet so hot. Then you went back to the house at noon for a break, some food and a nap. You certainly didn’t fill up with a huge ‘farm breakfast’ before then: digesting all that scrambled egg and bacon or sausage would sap your valuable energy right away, making it really difficult to attend to the labour-intensive early-morning chores. Maybe you had some coffee or a cup of tea and a slice of bread, but certainly not more than that.

The problem is that since most of us nowadays live urban lifestyles, we get completely out of touch with both nature’s and our bodies’ rhythm. I first was made aware of the importance of this through a diary published by a small independent ‘green’ publisher years ago, which sadly was a once-off effort. In this diary two very useful pieces of knowledge were pointed out to me:

- Obey nature’s rhythm – learn to listen to your body again. And adapt your lifestyle, including your food, every year to the seasons.

- Build your daily menu around grains, not meat.

The issue about rhythm is something that is quite a challenge in a time when our body has been out-of-rhythm for so long and in fact our tastebuds and blood-sugar levels have been ‘perverted’ and confused through our eating habits for years. This is really the main reason why a week at a health spa is a very good idea: through fasting under medical supervision you allow your body to find its own rhythm again and get rid of so many of the toxins that cause it to act in an ‘unnatural’ way, for instance craving for sugar. So if you’re serious about reaching your dream, start with four days of fasting. I won’t go into details here, but there is so much information available about the benefits of fasting. You can do it from home if you’re generally healthy, but do follow the medical advice on fasting before you start!

The second point about using grains as the basis for meal planning was a very novel and welcome idea for me, especially since I had chosen to become vegetarian. But even for people who love meat, shifting away from ‘meat’ as the basis for menu planning at least during weekday meals is a first step into a healthier way of eating. The other thing about shifting to grains as the ‘core’ of our main daily meal is that we suddenly rediscover that there is life beyond wheat! Wheat has become the dominating grain in Western diets and this is not a good thing at all. Wheat has a high sugar content and especially white flour has hardly any fibre or vitamins or other nutrients left! Making sure that you include a variety of grains in your family’s diet is a way to ensure that meals stay interesting and that a range of vitamins and minerals are included in the diet. I won’t mention other forms of grain here, just because I want you to brainstorm them! I bet you’ve forgotten most of them… Fortunately, there is the Internet to help you with your research on grains!

Just to show you how easy life becomes, when you build your daily menu in this way:

Breakfast: Pure fruit juice, salad or pieces of fruit. For kids mid-morning snacks pack carbohydrates: sandwiches, biscuits or granola bars.

Lunch: Choose any proteien with salad or starch with fresh vegetables. In winter, choose soup & bread. Try to eat lunch at 12h00 if you’re working from home or can adjust your working hours in the office. If you wait until 13h00, your blood sugar levels may trick you into storming the buffet or chomping away on a chocolate bar.

Late afternoon: Eat a carbohydrate with your herbal tea – wholewheat biscuit or similar.

Dinner: Choose a grain as your main meal, then add vegetables and salad to it. Pasta and mushroom sauce, with a salad is a good example. Or, on some evenings, use meat as your core, but again serve it with veggies and salad, not starch!

If you follow this pattern, and keep your portions reasonable, even having a late night chocolate won’t cause an earthquake on your scale!

But the secret is the correct combination of food. Modern science – and this may not be what your doctor has learnt! – teaches us the following rules about how to best combine our food:

1. Fresh fruit – eat them on their own! Don’t mix with anything, not even yoghurt. Why? Because as soon as the sugar in fruit gets into contact with any other food it starts fermenting in your stomach! This means ‘blowing up’ your tummy, causing discomfort. It also means that it takes longer to digest, diverting precious energy away from your brain to your digestive system. Finally, the fermentation process affects some of the vitamins and minerals in fruit, meaning that you do not get the full benefit of these nutrients once they enter the blood stream. This is why eating all your fruit for the day – at least 3 pieces – makes more sense in the morning. The sugar in fruit is very easy to digest for your body and will directly feed your brain’s needs when you have to concentrate at work or studies in the morning. In fact, it takes only 30 minutes to digest fruit, if you keep it ‘pure’. If eating only fruit seems to leave a ‘hole’ in your tummy, because you’re used to feeling full after a bowl of cereal and milk, then have a grainy snack like wholewheat biscuits in mid-morning with your (preferably herbal) tea. Just by following this one step you will already notice benefits to your health and weight.

2. Starch and Animal Protein – keep them apart! Why? The answer is quite simple science: because to digest starch, your body needs alkaline digestive juices and to digest animal protein, it needs acid. If you mix them, these digestive juices compete with one another, trying to neutralize each other. This causes bloodflow away from the brain and muscles to the digestive system to provide the oxygen for this internal ‘tug-of-war’. As a result, digesting your food takes a very long time and keeps your energy and concentration levels continuously low, making you feel exhausted, even early in the morning!

But how to make the switch? Firstly, start making it a habit to think about food in the form it comes in: is it a starch? Is it a protein? I remember a comic strip with Hägar the Horrible, after he had been admonished by his doctor to lose weight. The cartoon showed him picking up a wild-boar’s leg, asking whistfully: “Is pork a fruit?” So make sure that you know the difference between a protein and a starch. Also, don’t think ‘meat’, think ‘protein’ and a whole new world will open up to you! The question I’m asked most when people find out that I’m vegetarian is: ‘But what do you eat instead of meat, is it cheese?” Well, there’s a whole selection of proteins, even if you exclude dairy products from animals. The whole gorgeous selection of beans; soya – which can be textured into most animal products; mushrooms and nuts.

The joy is that vegetarian proteien can be digested by alkaline stomach juices too, so you can use these proteins like you would have used meat, normally. But when you do serve meat, focus on preparing a really tasty piece of meat or meat dish and serving it together with non-starch vegetables and salads, which get digested by either alkaline or acid digestive juices. In this way, you are giving your body a chance to easily digest the meat, since there is no competition! Keep the potato-and-meat dishes for family reunions, when everyone expects a ‘traditional’ meal and no one has to hold highly intelligent conversation during the post-lunch afternoon slump.

3. Learn to looooove vegetables – we teach our tongues to like what they taste. Teach your tastebuds to love vegetables, especially fresh ones. And teach your family to do the same. Learn to eat with your ‘mind’: see food as fuel, don’t build a relationship to it! You are, after all, what you eat. I must confess, at some points in my life I was pure chocolate! But, once I learnt how food affects my energy levels, my emotions, my brainpower and my health, I always managed to get back on track and let good fresh food take over again.

Remember what Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you want to change the world, change yourself.

PS: If you’re ready for a change away from your current job, so that you have more control over your own time, or if you want to increase your opportunities working from home, do visit my business website http://reinedelarose.blogspot.com

Take control of your Energy - Master your Tongue!

2009-08-03T02:32:00.000-07:00

Day 9: 92 Days to go

Hmmm! Delicious!!! Food is one of the true pleasures in life. The tastes. The smell. Mouthwatering presentation. Just another mouthful... Stop! Wake-up! Are you sure you want to put THAT into your body?!

Our bodies are magnificent ‘machines’ that are designed to run smoothly. They are the container for everything we are: our physical body, our mind, our emotions and our spirit. Sadly, few people know that when God created us, he gave a few basic instructions on how to use this body. Check out Genesis 1 v 29. Later, he realized that we’re not yet quite figuring it out and he added what is known as the Ten Commandments. They are described in Deuteronomy 5 v 6-21. In fact, the Bible is really nothing but a ‘User Manual’ for being human, the way our Maker planned it.

All the laws that were created in the Old Testament were aimed at helping people to live healthier, more conscious lives and to keep the environment intact. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ summarized all these different laws into two simple laws: Love God above everything else. Love your neighbour, as you love yourself. (Matthew 22:36-40).

In caring for our bodies, and in making sure that they have the maximum energy, ‘loving ourselves’ is critical! We have to love ourselves enough to make choices that are healthy for our body.

When I grew up, food was nothing you really thought about. It was there in abundance, growing in the vegetable garden. I also have vivid childhood memories of seeing a chicken being be-headed and running around headless! Our lunch... My mom rarely had to go out and buy food. Fresh home-baked, whole-wheat bread was the norm and therefore rather boring. Soft, white bread from the local shop was a major treat! If I'd known then what I know now, I would have proudly avoided the temptation of that white bread. All jams and cookies were home-made. Rows of bottles of peach preserves and apple sauce were regularly standing all over the kitchen table, waiting to be closed. The same approach was taken in the boarding school I attended at Primary School. Farmers would regularly bring loads of fresh fruit and veggies to donate to the hostel kitchen. Meat was available too, but carefully rationed when I was a child. It's only when I became a teenager and there was more money to go round, that endless 'braais' (barbeques) on weekends with lots of meat and beer became the norm.

Needless to say, I and all my fellow kids at school, were really healthy. No chubbiness in sight. We didn’t have to think about what we ate, because everything available was fresh, straight from the garden or farm.

When I got to university, my relationship to food changed. I had never learnt about nutrition, because good nutrition was just plain common sense where I came from. In the city, this was different. Processed foods were new and exciting and took less time to prepare. Chocolate bars were tempting at every street corner. On top of that it was quite ‘uncool’ to drink tap water. Soft drinks were the norm instead. I didn’t do it consciously, but I was certainly busy messing up my figure. At the end of that year I had gained 10kg – almost one kilogram each month!

Suddenly the word ‘diet’, that before I had only read about in magazines which were describing a world so far removed from my farm-life upbringing, became reality to me. My older sister, who had gone through a similar ordeal, by then was an ‘old hand’ at dieting. Crash diets. Fad diets. Food supplements. I think most of our money was spent on ‘diet foods’ and our weight played see-saw tricks with us!

In my second year as a medical student I started working to help pay my way: two nights a week in the academic hospital linked to the university; two nights a week waitressing in a Steak House. This had a huge impact on my diet. The fact that the Emergency Ward and the Steak House kitchen were smelling the same put me off meat for life! But despite going vegetarian, I still gained weight, because I was following my tastebuds when shopping – I didn’t know any better!

Things got worse when I went to Germany as an Au Pair. I now really learnt what the term ‘comfort food’ meant. Homesick and lonely, I ate up all the cookies of the poor kids I had to look after. Maybe that was a good thing, because both of them stayed normal and have by now grown into very healthy, gorgeous young people. I, on the other hand, was paying the price for my greed! By mid-year I could only fit into one last pair of jeans that I had borrowed from my sister and that had been loose when I arrived in Germany. And even then I had to lie down to pull it on!

When I came back from that year overseas I did what I have always done since then, whenever I faced a challenge. I stormed into the nearest good bookshop and started looking for a book. This time I wanted one on losing weight. Fortunately, destiny guided me to find ‘Fit for Life’ by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. This has been my yardstick for healthy eating ever since then.
Their focus was on energy, not on weight loss. But true enough, after following their guidelines, I started losing weight at a rate of 13kg in 8 weeks. The rest I lost over time, but since then my weight has stayed more or less in the same normal range. And my energy levels have been higher than anyone else’s I know, ever since then!

It really is worth it to read the book, but here are the main principles:

Our bodies function according to a ‘Body Clock’. They have a rhythm, as should we:

From 06h00-12h00 – the digestive system prefers to rest and heal itself. During this time bloodflow to the brain or muscles is at its peak, because we’re busy concentrating or working hard.
From 12h00-20h00 – it is ready to take in food again. But a light lunch makes it easier for the body to digest the food. Bloodflow to brain and muscles is still needed for concentration and physical work.
From 20h00-02h00 – it digests food best, because all blood can be directed to it.
02h00 – 06h00 – the digestive system cleans itself and gets rid of all waste material. This is why we sweat during the night, have a bad taste on our tongues in the morning and need to run to the loo when we wake up: our body is cleansing itself through the skin, tongue, kidneys and gut.

If we want to optimize our energy levels AND help our bodies to keep us healthy and slim, we need to respect this rhythm. It’s as easy as that.

Now, the most modern nutrition studies are proving a few things, that we can use to help our body function optimally.

Firstly, we need to know WHY we are eating WHAT:

Fruit & veggies (preferably fresh and raw): for vitamins and minerals to keep all body functions in tip-top working order and to repair our organs continuously. They also contain lots of water, so they help to keep us hydrated and humming along at top energy levels.
Proteien (animal and vegetable): to build our muscles and also growing our organs when we’re young and keeping them maintained when we’re fully grown. We need very little proteien to keep us in top shape once we’re older. Animal proteien sadly causes acidity in our bodies. So avoid as much as possible. Beans, mushrooms, soya and nuts are much more useful for our bodies.
Carbohydrates (starches): for physical movement. These are all types of foods that turn into sugar, and if we don’t use them, they are the ones that turn into fat! This includes all forms of grain and all sugars.
Fat & Oils: the only fat we benefit from is the fat that helps to form a shield around the nerves in our nervous system. All fats that are solid at room temperature are not healthy for us! Cold-pressed vegetable oils like Olive oil are great. Processed oils using heat (most other oils, including Peanut Butter) are not the best for us. The only animal ‘fat’ that is useful to our body is oil from certain types of fish. All other fat just messes up our digestive system and clogs up our veins with cholesterol.

Secondly, we need to know that, unless we are marathon runners or do heavy manual work, our daily menu should consist of 70% fruit and vegetables, 15% carbohydrates, 10% proteien and 5% fat. Meat and Potatoes just aren’t suitable for a modern, mainly sedentary lifestyle! Overweight and heart disease is the result.

Thirdly, we also need to understand that our body needs to have an alkaline PH to be healthy. If we allow our bodies to become acid through our diet, we must not be surprised if we fall ill! Stress already causes acidity levels to rise, so our job is to counter that through food that keeps acidity levels down and exercise. Veggies and fruit are alkaline, except when cooked. Then some of the veggies and all fruit become acid too! Sugars (carbohydrates) and Proteien (animal proteien) cause acid. We need to balance our diets to have MORE alkaline foods.

Fourthly, as you know our digestive system produces digestive juices (enzymes) to break down our food into a form that our body can use. Now, to break down proteien, our body produces acid stomach juices. And to break down carbohydrates, it produces alkaline juices. This is all good and well, but what happens if you add lemon juice (acid) to tea (alkaline)? The two neutralize one another! This means that if you eat meat and potatoes at the same time, you are really draining your bodies energy, because your digestive system is pumping more of both: the acid juice tries to digest the meat, and the alkaline juice is trying to break down the potato. They are getting in each other’s way! As a result all blood flows to the digestive system to bring more oxygen to provide the energy for this tug-of-war inside you. This is why, after a good old-fashioned Sunday lunch, everyone wants to have a nap. And, if you mix these two during workday week lunches, you’ll find that you have hardly any energy left in the afternoon.

The trick is: eat salad and bread for lunch or soup and bread and keep your protein for the evening, again together with veggies. Here’s a secret: if you have a vegetarian proteien, you can happily mix it with carbohydrates, because it is digested by either acid or alkaline and still function on optimum energy!

So, there it is: your perfect food plan for maximum energy! I know, because ever since I discovered this knowledge and applied it in my life, I’ve had more energy than anyone I know. Try it out – you’ll simply feel better. And teach everyone around you to do the same. If you’re creative, your family won’t even notice the difference on the daily menu. They’ll just start losing excess weight and become more energetic too, starting with hubby...

Apparently Plato, one of the famous Greek Philosophers, said: ''Master your tongue (tastebuds and negative speech) and you master life."

I can certainly vouch for that!

PS: Click on this link to order your copy of 'Fit for Life' Fit for LifeFit for Life from Amazon.

PS PS: Once you’ve taken control of your diet, take control of your time and finances. Learn more about an Internet Business opportunity that will help you do this at www.reinedelarose.com

Day 8: Take control of your Energy - Drink more Water!

2009-08-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

Day 8: 93 Days to go

Water. How thoughtlessly we open our taps and let it run and run and run. Not realizing how precious every drop of this life-giving element is! Water is the most important fuel for both our body and our brain. Wake-up to how water is at the centre of energy in our world. When last did you think about water? Those of us who are blessed enough to have access to the Internet hardly give water a second thought. We take it for granted: We drink it. We wash with it. We water our gardens. We wash our two or more cars. We run a deep, hot bath every day…

Do you ever think about the fact that water is the cause for some of the major wars going on in our world right now? Not having water is a huge problem for millions of people in Africa, India, China and other parts of the world. In fact, if you follow some of the discussions online and in the media, you will soon pick up that the need for water is the greatest potential for conflict in the next fifty years.

Before I talk about the importance of water for our energy levels, I first want to tell you two stories about how water affects people’s lives and the way people from different cultures and social levels relate to water.

The first story is just a snapshot that stuck in my mind when I was working on a consulting contract for a bank in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2004. I describe Lagos as ‘New York without the infrastructure’. The same kind of incredible high level of human energy that you find in New York, you will experience in Lagos. But Lagos has an edge, a sense of the sheer vulnerability of humanity, that you won’t find in New York. When I first got to Lagos, what made the most impression on me is the fact that so many people are living their lives and carrying their businesses out on the street. No one really knows how many people live in Lagos, but the government estimate stands at 17 million.

Lagos itself is potentially one of the most beautiful cities on earth: it is spread out across a number of islands in an inland lake that connects to the Atlantic ocean. The islands used to be connected by a number of bridges. Seven, if I remember correctly. These bridges were built in the ‘70s mainly by engineers from the USA, when the oil boom struck Nigeria. When I was there in 2004, only two of these bridges were still in use. The others had collapsed under the sheer weight of traffic: cars and pedestrian.

So imagine that picture with 17 million people on these islands and not having any shared services. Well, there is a government electricity service provider, but the way the electricity is distributed must make it impossible to run that operation effectively. The streets are lined with electricity poles sticking up into the air and from each a nest of ‘informal’ wires taps electricity off the main line, creating a netted ceiling between the maelstrom of people on the streets and the blue sky above.

If you have money in Lagos, you live like royalty. And the bankers I was working with were among the local ‘royalty’. So I had the benefit of being driven through this sea of human bodies in a car with blacked-out windows. I initially assumed that this was for security reasons. But then I realized that it was to help the ones sitting inside the car to avoid the begging eyes of the masses outside! Young guys who had lost the ability to walk because of childhood Polio were criss-crossing the packed highways and roads on skate-boards, reaching up to the car windows and trying to sell mobile phone airtime cards. This was no mean feat, knowing that the bridge and other highways which were built for three lanes, were packed with five to six cars navigating nimbly past one another’s side mirrors! Other people – mainly young men, but also a few women – were forming a never-ending mobile, human supermarket: walking in between the cars and carrying everything from an ironing board to the hugely popular Made-in-Nollywood DVD movie series.

If you are wealthy in Lagos, you don’t rely on government or the city to supply you with anything. You simply organize your life. Every beautiful mansion I was invited to had its own boreholes, filter-system, sewage recycling system and generator. The ‘masses out there’, however, had to walk next to open sewers running along all streets. These sewers wash across the roads when the rains come. Individual traders next to the road or even at the huge markets each carried their own generator along. And water is sold in little sealed plastic bags on every street corner. Everywhere the eye could see were people selling things, jumping on and off the ‘Motorbike Taxi’s’, where you hitch a ride on the back of a motorbike for a couple of cents and generally going about living on the street.

In the middle of this human beehive my mind suddenly took a snapshot of a beautiful little girl, four or five years old, in a muddy red dress, running barefoot across the road, gingerly avoiding the oncoming traffic, a number of large potholes and some sewage lying on the road. In her hands she was balancing three small sealed plastic bags filled with … water. The sun was shining from behind, so the water-filled plastic bags shone like over-sized diamonds in the little ‘princess’’ hands… It was this image, more than anything else I saw in Lagos, that made me feel as if I had just been hit in the gut! This little girl had just risked her life to fetch what amounted to probably about one litre of water. I saw her running towards a woman huddled against the side of the street, nursing an infant in the middle all this. Maybe her mother.

This picture has stayed with me ever since: the daily reality of so many million people, especially women and children, who are generally tasked with the burden of fetching water – whether in a busy city or walking miles across rural farmlands.

The other story is about the group of unemployed youth that I started working with in a remote part of deep rural South Africa. The non-profit organization I assist had received a grant to pilot a youth leadership and entrepreneurship programme, which I was going to present. Before the first group of youth came to the ‘Youth Camp’ facility owned by the non-profit organization in question, I emphasized to the two Youth Development Officers, that were coordinating the registration of the participants to please make sure that every young person brought an own towel. The ‘Youth Camp’ had bedding, but no towels.

On the first morning of the first group arriving, I asked the youth at breakfast to go to their rooms to fetch their towels and to meet me on the lawn in the sun outside the main workshop hall. I wanted to start the day with some stretch-and-strength exercises, which required lying down on the grass and the grass was still wet from the morning dew. I was met with apprehensive looks. ‘What is the problem?’ I asked. The one Youth Development Officer came to me and whispered: ‘I think they don’t have towels.’

‘Why didn’t you bring any towels?’I demanded to know from the group. ‘We said we will provide everything else, all you needed to bring were towels! What do you use for drying yourselves after having a shower then?’ Again, my eyes met with puzzled stares. At last one of the youth explained : “We use our facecloths.” Immediately it dawned on me what he had just said: in their homes, water was a very scarce resource. No hot water running from taps there! Water would be heated in a pot, then poured into a bucket for washing. Using a facecloth, the body would first be washed, then, with the facecloth wrung dry, it would be dried. That is why they didn’t need towels! I hadn’t told them that they should bring towels for the exercise session. They simply assumed that they were necessary for the showers and then they didn’t need any.

I felt deeply humbled, but also my respect for these young people, who were all very well groomed and well dressed immediately rocketed!

Why am I telling you these two stories? Because they have something in common. Both the little girl in the red dress in Lagos, and this group of unemployed youth in my workshop had learnt to use water wisely – something all of us will have to do over the next couple of years. They already know that water is the most precious resource God has given us on Earth. Without water, there is no life!

Now let me just summarize some of the statistics about water, that you probably have learnt but forgotten already:

Roughly 70 percent of an adult’s body is made up of water. At birth, about 80 percent of the baby’s weight is really the weight of water in its body. Our bodies need to be hydrated enough if we want them to perform at peak.
If we want to stay healthy, we need to drink enough water. If we want our brains to function properly, we need to drink enough water. If we want our energy-levels to be consistently high, we need to drink enough water. What is enough? That depends on your own body. But drinking a glass of water, or herbal tea every hour is a good idea!
Avoid coffee, tea and soft drinks: while made up almost entirely of water, they also contain caffeine. Caffeine can act as a mild diuretic, preventing water from travelling to necessary locations in the body. Also, the temptation of taking sugar and the sugar in soft drinks is where many diets fail, many teeth are lost and the acid created by sugar in our bodies is the reason for far too many diseases. Appreciate and enjoy pure water!
Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. Wherever it travels, water carries chemicals, minerals, and nutrients with it. This is why water is so important to our brain function: if we want to remain alert and have our full power of concentration, we need to make sure there is enough water in our body, so that the necessary minerals and vitamins can reach our brains to function. Water is the fuel of the brain. You don’t fill up a petrol car with diesel. Our body needs water, not alcohol or caffeine. Fill up with the right fuel!
The earth is a closed system, meaning that it rarely loses or gains extra matter, unless some ‘stars’ drop from heaven. The same water that existed on the earth millions of years ago is still present today. But the number of people living has increased from 791 million people worldwide in 1750 to 6.775 billion in 2009 and is growing daily. That is why water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Treat it with respect.
The total amount of water on the earth is about 1,335 million cubic kilometers of water. Of all this water, humans can use only about 0,3% (4 million cubic meters) of this water. Such usable water is found in groundwater aquifers, rivers, and freshwater lakes. But currently, highly industrialized nations use up this water at an alarmingly high rate and new deserts are growing across the world. Get informed and make a choice to save water and energy by switching from full, hot baths every day to short, cool showers. Keep the hot bath as a special treat once in a while!
Flushing the toilet actually takes up the largest amount of the water that people living Western lifestyles use. We are literally flushing our most valuable resource down the drain! Install water-saving devices to use less water. Or if you need to renovate your bathroom, choose a toilet with a water-saving option. In most cases, placing a brick in the cistern will reduce the amount of water you need for flushing considerably! And while you’re at it: save water by making sure that there is not a single leaking tap in your home or garden.
The weight a person loses directly after intense physical activity is weight from water, not fat. Stay rehidrated and keep on moving. Eventually you will lose the fat you want to lose and your body will be much healthier because of the higher water-intake!
Water contains no fats, no proteins, no carbohydrates and therefore no calories or kilojoules. So you can drink as much as you like!
There are no health advantages to drinking expensive bottled water instead of tap water from the public water supply. Save your money for other, more important things.

I’m making you aware of this information, because I hope that you will become more aware and make everyone around you more aware of what it means to open that tap: imagine every drop to be a drop of expensive French Perfume. And use water with the same sense of reverence.

Just a last note: Nico, my husband, is an architect who used to be responsible for planning health facilities (hospitals and clinics) for South Africa. He had a large budget for this – more than a billion South African Rand per year. At some point he said that he would rather spend all of his budget on ensuring that rural, poor communities have access to clean drinking water and most of the diseases would disappear and with them the need for expensive clinic and hospital facilities!

The same applies for your health: if you drink enough water, your body gets cleaned inside-out and you will avoid most diseases that result in expensive hospital bills. Again, water is life!

In teaching the unemployed youth I work with, I encourage them to carry with them at all times a plastic bottle of water and to drink this whenever they are thirsty. If we do this, our level of energy remains high and we can be much more alive, confident and productive!

So, from now on, in your journey of creating more love, greater beauty and increasing abundance for all, start with keeping yourself beautiful inside and out: don’t just have a shower in the morning, also drink a glass of water immediately when you get up. Make it a habit to keep a bottle of tap water in your handbag and drink water whenever you feel tired, have a headache or low energy. Don’t take an aspirin or buy a chocolate bar: just drink your water. You’ll be surprised at how much better you feel!

And then make it a habit to treat water with respect and teach everyone around you to enjoy water to drink throughout the day and to respect it too! If you know that access to water is a problem in a neighbouring community, try to find a way to help. Making sure there is clean water and that people know to boil water before using it for drinking or cooking is maybe the best contribution you could make to improving the lives of poor communities in your area.

Read more about water on the Internet. Here are just three sites:
http://www.water.org
http://waterwars.pulitzergateway.org/
http://www.allaboutwater.org

PS: If you want to focus your energy on making money from home, so that you can create more time with your family and do more charitable work in your community, learn how to use the Internet to generate an income at http://www.reinedelarose.com. Just sign up to get inside the site and I’ll be in touch to help with any questions you may have.

Day 7: Take control of your time – Respect others’ time!

2009-07-31T01:07:00.000-07:00

Day 7: 94 Days to go

Just another five minutes... Whatever the reason, keeping others waiting is probably one of the quickest ways of losing their respect in Western culture. In African culture, however, leaving a conversation with one person in order to rush off to a meeting with another is seen as deeply disrespectful to the relationship with the first. So, what is more important: relationships or time?

After having worked with so many people in Africa I have really come to appreciate the value of relationships. Relationships matter. In Africa, if you want to do business, you first must have a relationship. Without a relationship there is no respect. Without mutual respect, there is no will to purchase or will to collaborate. Over the years billions of development funding dollars have brought few development results: hundreds of empty clinics, broken boreholes and neglected schools tell the story of insufficient investment in relationships with local communities.

Why? Because in the West, time is money. And while this may be the case in Africa too, the value of money is traditionally regarded much lower than the value of relationships. Wealth comes and goes. Relationships stay. So if a Western Aid organization thinks that it can use the approach of veni-vidi-vici (we came to Africa, we saw the problem, we conquered it with our money), it is sorely mistaken.

Interestingly enough, in looking at the Internet and at the incredible emphasis it places on relationships, the ‘African Way’ may just become the ‘High Way’! On the Internet, you first have to build a relationship with countless individuals, one person at a time, before you can start suggesting your services or products to assist them in their own quest in life. The consumer in the new economy is ‘calling the shots’ and does not allow him or herself to simply be bullied by in-your-face marketing. The consumer in the new economy is no longer going to buy something, just because the girl in the bikini holding the object is cute. Even eleven-year-olds now go on-line to research as much information as they can about a new toy – usually a computer game – they want, before they actually ask mom or dad to buy it for them. Information and word-of-mouth – those are the trends in the new economy.

So if relationships are so important, where does time come in? And what about punctuality?

In the Information Age time has become our most valuable commodity. If we work for someone else, we are paid for our time and the employer wants to make sure s/he gets his or her money’s worth. If we work for ourselves, we want to make sure that we get most out of the time we are working, so that we can enjoy more ‘free’ time to spend with people we love, things we like doing and travelling to exotic places.

The skill all of us have to learn is how to juggle time AND relationships. Masters of both will know how to ensure that they show up punctually for every meeting, while having left the last person they met with feeling as if they really had the full attention and benefit of the time they spent with this ‘Master’.

Similarly, on the Internet people don’t want to have to wait for slow downloading websites or have to click a hundred times before they get what they want. Here, building a relationship at the speed of a click is what counts!

Juggling time is particularly difficult for people – like me – who simply l-o-o-o-ve this beautiful world and the incredible people, ideas and knowledge that continuously are creating it. My mind is on a constant journey of discovery and I tend to get carried away by the ‘Wandering Spirit’ of African mythology, which carries me off into a new wonderland, forgetting all about the here and now, if I let it!

Sometimes it’s easier to learn what choices to make from knowing what NOT to do. So here is a list of behaviours that Nico, my husband, has been kind enough to point out to me, which have made it extremely taxing for him – a punctuality-guru! – to live with me over the years:

Don’t be late for meetings, including meetings with your husband, children and friends. Keeping others waiting, no matter what the excuse, is showing a deep disrespect of their time, and most will also experience this as a disrespect of themselves. It takes a lot of hoop-jumping and a lot more time to earn back the trust that you lose in this way!
Don’t let others emotionally hook you into staying in meetings longer than you had scheduled to stay. This used to be one of my key challenges: in meetings with especially people with a deep rural African culture I did not want to be rude and jump up to run off in the middle of a new point of discussion, which I’ve often seen especially people with a German culture do. But I’ve learnt that in every meeting it is possible to state up front how much time you have for this particular meeting and that, if there wasn’t time to discuss everything to the detail it needed, you would make time at a later stage again. In this way you are in control of the time of that meeting and you earn the respect of the people you are with, because they know you take the issues seriously enough to give them time, even if this takes a little longer.
Don’t forget to look at the clock! I’m allergic against metal and I don’t like plastic watches, so I don’t wear a watch on my wrist. Instead I use my mobile phone to check the time. Problem is, that means digging it up from the depths of my handbag. And then, of course, I forget to do that! Enter a new trick mobile phone companies have thought of to help people like me: set an alarm or a meeting reminder to at least 15 minutes before you have to leave for the next meeting.
Don’t underestimate travelling time! Plan enough time in your day to travel to your meetings. Rushing headlong into traffic is never a good idea and you will still inevitably be ‘just 5 minutes’ late. On top of that, imagine the monthly full-body massage you could spoil yourself with, if you didn’t have to budget for speed or parking fines all the time!
Don't underestimate how long a certain task will take! Rather ‘over-budget’ time for individual tasks or projects. I’ve tried squeezing more ‘lifetime’ into an hour by trying to complete a day’s work into two hours. It doesn’t work. OK, I have managed to complete huge assignments in a ridiculously short time, but at what cost? Something or someone always gets hurt in the process. So take it easy, but take it.

In Stephen Covey’s book on the ‘8th Habit’, he mentions how his son came up with the phrase ‘Nothing moves as fast as the speed of Trust.’ I can certainly personally vouch for that!

Where trust exists, miracles happen. And punctuality – respect for other people’s time – helps to build that trust.

So, are you ready for a miracle?

PS: I decided to take charge of my time by investing in one of the most successful Internet businesses available which I can do from home, in my own time. If you want to do the same, visit www.reinedelarose.com.

Control your Time - Keep Distractions Out!!!

2009-07-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Day 6: 95 Days to go

Procrastination is the greatest thief of success. And the easiest way to fall victim to this thief, is to allow yourself to be distracted. Ask me. I’ve been a master of procrastination through ‘worthwhile’ and quite hysterical distractions. But there are some tips and tricks that can force you to focus!

When I first got to move from the farm as an 18-year old to start going to university in the big city – in this case, Pretoria, South Africa – I felt as if I had arrived in a huge, live Christmas Box, full of new gifts of ideas and new people that were there purely for me to discover! I came to study medicine, but instead, I ended up studying all kinds of fascinating things beyond that. I discovered new tastes (olives), new sounds (jazz), new knowledge (horrorscopes, yes!), learnt that were new lifestyles (gay), learnt a new language (French) and of course, met lots and lots of new people.

Having grown up in a very closely guarded, but also very loving farming community, I was used to knowing everyone, at least from ‘sight’: the kids and their parents at school and the teachers and pastor were all as close as ‘family’. All the people living on our farm and the neighbouring farms of my uncles were known to belong to a particular homestead nestled in among the hills and forests. Every person I saw on the street in the little town where we did our weekly grocery shopping was a known person. If there was a stranger, it was very easy to figure out to which known person this visitor ‘belonged to’ or if it was just someone passing through. Strangers really didn’t come to this town, unless they knew someone there, sold stuff into the shops, or were lost.

When I got to the city, after a while I experienced a ‘distraction disorder’: in the sea of unknown people I would suddenly identify someone from the back that walked just like so-and-so. I would start running to meet them, only to find that when they turned around, they were someone else. Then it got worse. I would start panicking because I saw all these people walking with their backs to me and I would never know how they looked like from the front! So I’d start running to see if I could catch up with them, just to see their face, once. I was seldomly fast enough. Needless to say, this type of distraction didn’t help me in reaching my goal, which after all, was to study medicine!

My imagination has always been my greatest ‘distractor’. My childhood and teenage years were filled with very little ‘outside’ entertainment, and so, instead, my imagination was my own personal ‘virtual reality’ home entertainment device. Television only arrived in my life when I was already twelve years old in the form of a tiny black-and-white tester screen. My dad, who was known as ‘Prof’ around town, would install everyone else’s television sets, before he could afford an own one. But he was also highly innovative, and so we spent weekend nights driving around in the rebuilt Merc on the farm, with the tester TV on the dashboard, and my dad’s arm stuck out of the window, holding a television antenna that he had custom-built out of an old washing machine drum. I’ll never forget the excitement of watching the first children’s programmes on that tiny, blurry black-and-white box.

For the rest I had acquired my mom’s taste for reading (I started reading on her lap as a three-year old) and could easily sink away into a world of someone else’s make-believe that would jump into reality as I turned the pages of one more incredible book. This blurring of imagination and reality was most evident when one day, in the early 1980’s as a 16-year old, I was submerged in the novel ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoi.

I was reading about a riveting war scene when I looked out of my bedroom window and saw our wide expanse of lawn strewn with men in uniform. I had such a fright that I dove (is ‘dove’ really a word?!) right under my bed, my heart beating wildly…

It took some time, before I was able to rationalize myself into reality again:

This was the time in South Africa when the Apartheid government had convinced all of us ‘whites’ that the Communists were busy brainwashing the ‘poor blacks’ into taking over our Christian country so that they could rule. Since there was a war raging on South Africa’s borders, and ‘terrorists’ had made their appearance in rural farm areas, the local ‘commandos’ (volunteer farmer-soldiers) were staging inspection visits to every farm to see if the homestead was secured against ‘terrorist’ attacks. So the men in uniform on our lawn were part of one of those commandos that had earmarked our farm for inspection that day!

Needless, to say, our home was redlined as perfectly ‘terrorist-friendly’- we had no security fencing or window guards whatsoever; my parents regularly forgot to lock the doors at night and we all slept with windows open to allow in fresh air. Our ‘watchdogs’ were my beloved ‘Goldie’ – a toy-pom who couldn’t catch a ‘terrorist’ even if she had been fed steroids and ‘Rommel’ a mangrel mix of something and the other, who unlike his German general namesake, would run to hide under the kitchen table if any stranger should turn to look at him.

And just to clarify what I wrote above about ‘communists’ and ‘terrorists’: we all now know that the ‘poor blacks’ were in factly deeply wronged and fighting against Apartheid out of their own accord and true moral right and that what we (highly patronizing) ‘whites’ were made to believe were ‘terrorists’ were really ‘Freedom Fighters’ who have liberated South Africa from a terrible, racist regime. When I came to discover this a few years later in 1986, while in Germany, I felt as if I had been living on the wrong side of the Matrix up to that time of my life!

I digress…

But purposefully. I wanted to tell you this story to illustrate how easy it is to let ourselves be distracted by our imagination and the incredible mass of information around us. And that is not even counting the incredible convincing powers of a whinging child or a tempting husband… And then, the desk full of bills and cash slips that create a dull throbbing in your head each time you lift your eyes from your work…

Respect your time!

And teach others to respect it.

You only have a limited resource of time and you cannot ‘catch up’ on time ever. Time wasted is time lost.

I fully understand that an 18-year olds’ understanding of time is markedly different from that of a 40-plusser. But that is why I am writing this blog and why you are reading it: to share a better understanding of how to achieve your goals, regardless of your age.

And if you want to fulfil your dreams you will need to wake up to the reality that time is a key factor. During the time that you have set aside to work towards your goal, whether this is to study or to work from home, stick to the following rules:

Switch off the television set. If you just can’t live without your favourite shows, then schedule time in your daily plan for them, but keep the TV switched off in between.
Set you mobile phone to ‘Silent’ and ask people to send Text messages instead of leaving messages on voicemail. Then call back in the hour you’ve set aside for phone calls in your daily programme.
Log out of Facebook! Don’t keep it open while you’re working. Log in for a scheduled time, do what you need to do and log out again.
Close your email Inbox. This is the biggest time-killer of them all. Just open it on one or two specific times a day, prioritise the influx of mail (Delete, Read or Action). The more you delete, the less you read and the sooner you get into a habit of setting aside a specific time for taking action, within your daily programme, the quicker you will become the Master of Email instead of the grovelling slave.
Ask your family to ‘get with the programme’: Sit down with your nearest and dearest and explain to them that, while you still love them as much as ever and still want to spend as much quality time with them as possible, you have taken a decision to take control of your time, in order to achieve your goals. And this means that they need to respect your time and let you focus on the work you need to do in order to make this happen.
Explain to them about your ‘DMO’ – your Daily Mode of Operation and that in every day there is special time set aside to spend with them, to discuss issues with them and to just be together. Also, point out that every weekend you are going to make a concerted effort to focus on them and do something that they would love to do together with you. Work out a time together on the weekend which they would prefer for this activity: Saturday morning, afternoon or evening? And make sure to calm them down about Sundays: Sundays is a day of rest and from now on they will never have to pull you away from your computer on this day again, because you will be there to have time for them and enjoy a restful day together with them.
Don’t feel disheartened if you’re met by an unbelieving stare and a snicker. Taking control of your life involves teaching everyone around you to also take control of theirs – at least as a sign of respect to you. Also, if your previous behaviour has been anything but systematic, planned and organized, you will need to earn that respect by proving through your new way of doing things, that you have adopted a new DMO!

Of course, having a plan and sticking to it rigorously also always means being flexible enough to understand when you simply have to change it to accommodate new or unknown data. Don’t become so focused on your life and your goals, that you neglect the needs of the loved ones around you. If the man or child in your life really needs some TLC, get up, make him or it a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate and be available to listen to him or her. But if this happens too often during your working hours, you will have to set aside time one weekend to talk this through until both of you are on the ‘same page’.

You’ll be surprised how much support you will get over time from your family if you keep them involved in your progress, and if they realize that actually, life has become better for all of you, because you are all now better at valuing time.

PS: If you’re in a job that takes all of your time, and does not respect your family’s or your personal needs for time, make a decision to get out of it. Look at www.reinedelarose.com for some inspiration and practical steps on how to achieve this.

Control your Time - Get a DMO!

2009-07-30T14:05:00.000-07:00

Day 5: 96 Days to Go

I just read again in a book of one of the most successful ‘inspiropreneurs’ of the 20th Century, Napoleon Hill, how knowledge only attracts money if it is organized through practical plans of action to achieve that goal. If you want to reach your dream, it’s time to get your own personal ‘Daily Mode of Operation’- DMO.

Doesn’t the term ‘DMO’ just seem to kick you into action? If I hear ‘DMO’ I somehow feel like putting on my running shoes and get going. Maybe I’ve been watching too many American action movies… but somehow the image of being the ‘superhero’ of my own life is very appealing. ‘Operation Rescue Myself’ is something many of us have to do in this time of lay-offs and debt-overload. And a DMO is just the thing to get us going!

The day you accept that you are not going to wait for a ‘hero’, but that you will BE that hero yourself, is the day that your race to personal and financial success starts. Of course there’s nothing wrong with enlisting the moral support from your nearest and dearest, but even if this is not forthcoming, you CAN do it! For yourself. On your own.

The secret lies in the three words ‘Daily’, ‘Mode’ and ‘Operation’.

Daily
Someone once said that success is not about what you do, but about what you do daily. Just read the stories of any top performers or successful people in any field of life and you will pick up the same pattern: they have chosen to adopt good habits to which they stick on a day-to-day basis. This is what you have to do. You have to choose those daily habits that you believe will make your dream come true and then simply start doing them day by day. Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com) is one of many personal development specialists that suggests following a 30-day plan to adopt a new habit, but he goes one step further and suggests that you follow this new habit ‘on trial’ for 30 days. By ‘trying out’ a new habit, instead of committing to it from the first day, he believes that it becomes easier for you to start with the change. Anthony Robbins (www.tonyrobbins.com) is another ‘inspiropreneur’ who teaches that it is much easier to adopt a good, new habit if you replace an existing, old habit.

Consider yourself a work of art and create beauty in your life by shaping yourself through the brushstrokes of good habits every day.

Mode
Becoming aware of the fact that there are many different tools already developed by other successful human beings is the first step in adopting an own personal ‘mode of operation’. Keeping a diary to reflect on your life day by day is one of the tools that helps you to self-evaluate and improve over time – if that is the way in which you do it. But actually using a diary to plan every day, week, month and year is the standard tool for most highly effective people. Because I’ve generally relied on my creative mind to keep me out of trouble, I never really focused on writing down the things I had to do. This became impossible when I suddenly found myself juggling four large projects: I dropped so many balls, that I’ve lost count! This is when I decided to take complete control of every second of my day: I would decide when to take a phone call, respond to an email or SMS or meet anyone. This is a very different ‘mode’ than my former approach, when the mobile phone had practically become inseparable from my ear; issues were dealt with on a first-come-first-serve basis, regardless of priority and other people took over my time. Now I have a weekly plan with a strict routine working from home and focusing on specific activities. Where before I happily jumped into the car to go and see potential new contacts, I now choose very carefully whom to meet, when, where and for how much time.
Each one of us is different and has different preferences, but the secret is to copy the mode of operation of one highly successful person and just adjust it slightly to meet your individual needs. Choose a mode, then stick to it!

Operation
Of the three words, ‘Operation’ is probably the most significant key to success. You can choose good habits to do every day, you can spend hours planning your work and your life, but if you don’t ‘operationalize’ it – put it into action! – you will not achieve your objective.
As Nike says ‘Just do it’.

As a highly-successful-person-to-be you need to adopt a ‘protocol’ for your life. And your ‘Daily Mode of Operation’, your DMO is the framework for this protocol. If you have ever worked together with high-profile people, especially politicians elected by the people, as I have, you will know that neither the President of a country, nor his or her Cabinet members takes a step out of the office which is not carefully choreographed by a team of advisors, security-guards, press officers and other personnel. Reading about the life of the Queen of Britain, this intense attention to detail really forms the fabric of being in a position of authority. As the ‘Queen’ of your own life, and as you have an increasing impact on others, you need to develop and observe your own protocol: what do you do when, how to act in an emergency, what personal policies you want to adopt in order to guide your choices.

I don’t mean that you should not retain some flexibility to deal with unexpected crises or time for spontaneous action to just add some sparkle to your life. But once the particular event is over, go back to your routine as quickly as you can and refocus on your dream and goals. Having a clear plan and process helps you to focus and to act ‘out of habit’, so that even if you don’t really feel up to it, you manage your emotion and simply get things done!

PS: If you want to learn more about a DMO on how to generate the income you want, while remaining in control of your own time, visit http://www.reinedelarose.com

Time to Rest

2009-07-30T14:03:00.000-07:00

Day 5 : 96 Days to go

Today is Sunday. In most Christian churches this day was adopted as the ‘Day of Rest’, based on the seventh day of the Creation. Also, early Christians celebrated the day after the Sabbath as the day of Christ’s Resurrection and as such this day became a regular day for weekly meetings of Christians. It was later incorporated into the Western Calendar as the last day of a week.
Whichever the history of “Sunday”, biblical teaching is generally interpreted as requiring one day of rest after six days of work.

God is a God of Order. The very first thing we read about in the Bible is God creating the heavens and the earth. The very next thing he does is to ’switch on the light’ with the aim to create order on Earth, then he starts sorting things out: separating day and night, separating the sky from the water, separating sea from land. Only once he had ’cleaned up’ things on earth did he start with the creation of plants, sun and moon, all the creatures of the earth and finally our common ancestors Adam and Eve.

It took him six days to get this job done. Then, as we read in Genesis 2, he rested from all his work on the seventh day and he blessed it and ”made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done”. (Reference: New International Version on www.biblegateway.com)

After having been a workaholic for all of my adult life, I decided to go back to these biblical basics after my consulting business crashed down and I had to reinvent my life. Now I try to, once again as in my childhood and early youth, not work on Sundays. Instead, I have chosen to make this my day of rest. I’m absolutely determined to work smarter, not harder!

The only reason I’m writing this blog is to share this new habit with you and to encourage you to take some time to rest….

As you walk alongside me on this 100 Day Action Plan, you too will be learning to work smarter, not harder. So don’t worry about losing time.

Time rested may very well mean Life-Time and certainly Life-Quality gained!

In future Sunday blogs, I will simply post a thought or Bible verse that will inspire you to focus on the spiritual side of life. We all are made up, after all, of a body, mind, emotions and a spirit.

God bless!

Take control of your Time

2009-07-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

Day 4: 97 Days to go

Time. As we become more mature we realize that this is the most valuable resource we have received from God. We can’t really ‘save time’ as if we could place it in a Piggy Bank and use it again later. No – we simply need to take control of our time, every second, every minute, every hour. But if we do this we will be rewarded in ways we’ve never imagined before…

Probably similar to most children, I grew up with a sense that time was endless. It was a waterfall that would drop from the top of a mountain and disappear into the river beyond, never stopping for a moment, just simply splashing down in a huge, generous stream. Living on a farm where life was very much in sync with nature, the seasons contributed to this sense of time being something that would carry on forever.

My parents worked with time, but in completely different ways: my mother always finding another creative or charitable activity to squeeze into her day, my father choosing to generously lavish his time on other people. Once I started school, my own time was punctuated by the bell ringing in the small, rural boarding school where I spent the greater part of my childhood. This was and remains to date one of the most idyllic places to grow up: situated on a farm in the lush, green area of northern KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. All the children of the German-speaking farming community in that particular part of the country were dropped off by their parents after church on Sundays and collected again by a parent lift-club five days later. In between, the days were marked by the ringing of a hand-held bell. The first bell meant rolling out of a warm bed onto a cold floor and saying your morning prayers. The next one meant getting up, making your bed, brushing your teeth and washing your face and getting dressed. The third one meant running barefoot over the sharp, crystal gravel to the Religious Education classroom, where the Pastor was waiting to hear if you had done your homework and learnt the necessary Bible verses and hymns off by heart. The fourth one meant running to the dining hall for breakfast. And so the bright sound of the bell trained us to act on the rhythm of time, until the final bell at night. This meant ‘lights out’ and was the signal for all eight little girls in my dormitory to forgive one another and ask one another for forgiveness for the day’s sins and hurting and fall into a deep and very peaceful sleep.

Very rarely, our joyful games playing tennis or ‘catch’ or making clay figurines from the silky smooth red earth after it had rained, our day suddenly would be disrupted by the deep, sonorous sound of the church bell. This always meant that the time had come for some elderly man or woman to stop living on earth and enter into eternal life to join God in Heaven. But even then, except for awakening a sense of awed sadness in my heart, without really understanding it, I did not associate that sound with the importance of my own time here on earth.

When I was twelve I had an experience through which I suddenly saw the intrinsic value of time and how it would suddenly sweep past and have a huge impact on my life. In the year before I had been ill with an acute kidney infection, which the doctor had ascribed to going fishing barefoot too often (which I, in fact, had never done!). I’d recovered well, but was now again complaining of pain in my lower abdomen. My mom was worried that it might be a recurrence of the kidney infection and off to the doctor we went. This time his diagnosis was different. When he failed to detect anything wrong with me, he concluded that this pain was probably the beginning of my first menstrual period: of my changing from a child to a woman. In the flash of an instant I understood what this meant: it meant that the end of my idyllic childhood was about to come… It meant that that I would have to be all grown-up and responsible and that my mother and father would grow old and die… Everything would change! For my young mind that was simply too horrible to contemplate.

When my mother and I reached the car, I burst into tears. I couldn’t express in words the incredible, deep sense of loss that I was feeling, and she was trying to calm me down without success. I think I cried all the way home to the farm and then crept into bed and cried for another couple of hours.

The menstruation never started, until I was 18 and my mother took me to the doctor because she was worried that again there was something wrong with me. By then, I was emotionally ready for the physical change in my body, but I also knew instinctively that this was not a health issue. When I had cried and cried that day, six years before, I had instructed my sub-conscious mind to resist the impact of ‘time’: I had demanded of it to extend my childhood for as long as I chose.

I’m telling this very personal story for two reasons: I want you to understand that while time keeps on running, we do have the ability to exercise control over both the actual time we have been given, by using it wisely, as well as train our subconscious to help us in achieving our goals.
Sadly, in my case, I only interpreted this lesson in a positive way many, many years later. When I was 18 I simply I felt exhilarated by the fact that I, not time, could decide what would happen to my body and when. And in a sense I think that is also what caused my hugely careless attitude towards time during the years that followed.

When I first left the protected and regimented environment of boarding school life and moved to university and the ‘freedom’ of choosing what to do with my own time, I came face-to-face with the challenge of never having understood how to exercise self-discipline with regard to time. Without the bell ringing, I thought I had the ultimate power. But in reality I was lost. I found it extremely difficult to plan my own day and stick to the time I had allocated to specific activities. In fact, I found it a terrible drag, since my creative mind simply got carried away with whatever I was busy with at that point in time. ….

Interestingly enough, many years later I learnt about the African philosophy of the ‘Seven Spirits’ that live inside each one of us human beings. For the first time I had a visual image that I could understand easily to explain my lack of time management. According to ancient African tradition, one of the ‘Seven Spirits’ is the ‘Wandering Spirit’ – the spirit that possesses anyone who is carried away in an obsession of one type or another. Our challenge as human beings is to manage these spirits (or call it attitudes) that dwell inside us. I needed to manage the’Wandering Spirit’ inside me…

But during my time as a student I certainly did not consciously understand the meaning of ‘managing’ anything, really! I was in a paradise of new knowledge and experience and on a quest to follow with wild abandon any new thing that I found interesting at that stage. Needless to say, this lack of focus resulted in me going through four different courses of study in six years, at the end of which I – to the great relief of my parents – had finally managed to complete a first degree.

Later, when I became a young entrepreneur and also during the time that I worked in other organizations, I never really bothered about the importance of keeping time, since I simply went overboard and worked longer hours and harder than anyone else around me, thereby earning the acclaim of my clients or superiors and with that the dubious ‘right’ to always be a little late. In fact, at one point in my career, in my early thirties, when I was heading a division within the Office of the Auditor-General of South Africa, and was 15 minutes late for a meeting once again, I responded very cheekily to my grey-suited auditor-colleagues who were grumbling about this: “I may be late, but once I’m here I add more value than all of you combined!”

I now cringe when I think about this arrogance. Fortunately, the guys were very good-natured and just laughed…

Getting to grips with time became an insurmountable challenge during the past couple of years, when I tried to combine serving a highly demanding consulting client with rescuing a drowning, rural non-profit organization, growing an own book publishing business and – to top it all – doing all this from two different places that were based four hours of driving apart! I ended up feeling like a ping-pong ball, which was banged around at the will of the different parties I was serving: clients, international donors and crisis issues at the non-profit, and employees in the publishing business. As long as I had the cashflow from my consulting business, I could somehow keep this mad pace going. But when suddenly this rug was pulled out from under my feet, the whole house of cards came crashing down…

During the months of introspection that followed, I heard the bells of my childhood ringing in my mind: I simply HAD TO take charge of my own time! I could no longer allow my time to be at the beck and call of everyone else, or otherwise I would never achieve the goals I had set for myself. But this time round, I was the one who had to decide when the bells should ring…
Fortunately, Providence sent me a teacher to serve as a daily role-model to me: my husband. Nico is an artist of routine and a master of habit. He instinctively appreciates the importance of rhythm in daily life. Now, we’d been together for a dozen years, but during these years I always had a reason why I would not learn from him: we were simply too different from one another. In my mind, I saw Nico as being someone who was content with the ‘little life’ of daily habits and routines. I, on the contrary, wanted a life of adventure, excitement, the extra-ordinary and certainly no routine. I did not want to be ‘held back’ by the fetters of time!

It has taken all these years and all these experiences combined, as well as the listening to and reading books by numerous motivational and ‘how to’ motivational authors and speakers, to finally come to my senses and realize that the only way to become a master in any field is to master yourself first. And that means mastering – among other things – your time. Just like Nico already did!

So:-
- if you’re also plagued by the ‘Wandering Spirit’ that draws your attention away from the here and now ‘on the wings of inspiration’ to whatever has caught your fancy at that particular point in time, or

- if you’ve become a play ball in the hands of others, being thrown around based on their needs, day and night,

Then, dear friend, I suggest that you do the wise thing and learn from your own and my mistakes and personally take control over your time.

One technique which I picked up from one of the coaches I have been working with, is to draw up a schedule for every day of the week and then use my mobile phone alarm as a ‘bell’ to mark the time when ‘time’s up’ for one activity and when I need to start with the next one, regardless if the first one has been completed. It simply will have to wait for the next period of time allocated to it. I now feel as if I have my own, personal ‘bell ringer’ in my pocket to help get me into a routine of habits that will set the scene for my ultimate success!

Another technique I’ve learnt is to observe and adopt the habits of the person who has achieved what you want to achieve. Your goal may be different, but I realized that if I want to make all the dreams I have come true, I will have to become a billionaire! Now, you probably have heard the ‘urban legend’ about Billionaire Bill Gates, namely that timewise it would be cheaper for him to continue walking to a meeting, than to stop for a second to pick up a 100 dollar bill that someone had lost… At his current worth of 58 Billion Dollars, every second of his time is valued at $1829.-

I’ve never liked the saying ‘time is money’, and money is not the only reason why you should follow my (and all successful people’s) example of taking control of your time: scheduling time with your loved ones is worth more than all the money in the world.

But the bottom line is, if you want to be successful – whether this means being a world-class Golf Player, a Millionariess or a Billionairess, you have to start treating your time as if you were hugely successful already… adopt the habits of someone who already has what you want; – someone who understands the incredible value of his or her time.

PS: If you want to have ultimate control over your own time, spend less time on earning money and more time with your family, follow the example of other successful individuals as explained on www.reinedelarose.com

The first step to a new you!

2009-07-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

Day 3: 98 Days to go

The first step to a new you is to make your choice. It’s that easy! Choose to change. Adopt an attitude of success. Have faith. The only one that can take this first step is you.

Taking the first step is usually the most difficult step. Making your choice to change your life from the comfort-zone of the known to the adventure of the unknown is daunting for most of us. But one thing is for certain: unless we choose our future, our future will choose us!

Over the years I have been using a simple symbol as a blueprint for planning: the mandala. As you may know, a ‘mandala’ is a symbol used in many cultures: a circle divided by an equal-sided cross. I’ve always loved the interpretation of this symbol as being a symbol of eternal perfection – the ultimate goal. The circle with no end and no beginning symbolizes eternity. The equal-sided cross inside is synonymous with perfection.

When I teach the unemployed youth I work with I use the body as a way to remember the significance of the mandala. I stand up, legs together and arms outstretched to either side to form a cross. I ask them to imagine a circle around my body. Then I point out the meaning of the mandala:

The feet – that is the bottom of the cross – represent our body. This includes our health, our roots, our culture and our family.
The left hand, closest to the heart, represents our emotions. This further involves our relationships to others, our attitude, as well as our contribution to society and our own community.
The right hand, which most people use as their ‘main hand’ symbolizes our mind: our creative ability, our means to earn a living, everything that has to do with making money and finance.
The head refers to our spirit – it is our connection to God, to whom we can communicate in prayer and rely on in faith. Spirit is also about leadership, vision, inspiration and motivation. I always point out that the fact that the neck is so short relative to our arms and legs should serve as a constant reminder that we cannot truly be successful and content as human beings if we are not connected to God. It is through this connection that we are able to fulfil our true purpose in life.

The message of the mandala is that, if we want to live truly happy and successful lifes, we need to ensure that all four areas – body, emotions, mind and spirit – are in balance. This is what we constantly need to strive for. While it seldomly happens that all four are in harmony, our personal task in life is to work towards that perfection.

In making your choices about the life you want, use the mandala as a guiding pattern. Take a piece of paper and divide it with a horizontal and vertical line into four equal sections. Now place the headings ‘Spirit’, ‘Mind’, ‘Emotion’ and ‘Body’ from left to right at the top of each section.

The next step in your personal planning process is to brainstorm the things you want to achieve or change or simply want to continue growing under each of the four sections. For instance, under ‘Spirit’ you might write ‘Make time every day for prayer’, and so on.

If you want to, you can also start this exercise by listing all the things, habits or people that are already important to you under each heading and taking a moment to consider this in a spirit of thanksgiving!

Similarly, if you don’t know what you should choose, it may be helpful to take another piece of paper and write down the things, circumstances, habits or people that you believe are having a negative impact on your life and then, on a new sheet, translating each of those into a positive course of action. For instance, if under ‘Body’ you have noted a tense relationship with your mother, on the new sheet you could list one thing you could do to improve that relationship or deal with the situation better.

This simple technique of writing down your choices can really help prepare you for your 100 Days of Action towards creating the life you want and fulfilling the dreams you have.

Remember: our subconscious is the garden in which we sow the seeds of our dreams. By being clear about our choices, meaning our dreams, we are helping the subconscious jump into action to make this come true.

PS: If you want to choose a new way of earning a living, do visit http://www.reinedelarose.com

Enough is Enough

2009-07-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

Day 2: 99 Days to go

Enough is enough. At some point in life, each one of us achieves a point of ‘enough is enough’! This is the point of Zero Tolerance which forces us to take a decision about changing our life. Have you reached that point yet?

I did. A couple of months ago. Up to that point I had very much given up control of my life to external circumstances. I was treating ‘life’ as if it were the ‘master’ and I was its ‘servant’: jumping to address every issue that came my way, regardless of what I was busy with at the moment or what I had planned to do during that time. If this is the state of life you are finding yourself in, listen to me: having what Stephen Covey calls the ‘locus of control’ of your life outside of you, will turn you into the play ball of circumstance. And at the end of it all you will be standing with nothing in your mind except excuses. Excuses, why you’re dead broke. Excuses, why your relationships didn’t work out. Excuses, why you have a terribly flabby and unhealthy body. Excuses, why you’re faced with a mountain of debt. Excuses, why you never learnt to keep time. Excuses, why you never found your destiny nor fulfilled your potential. Like an abused woman that always returns to her abuser, letting ‘life’ or circumstance dictate your response is the surest way of all-round self-destruction.

Becoming aware of this behaviour is especially important for us as women: we are often raised to believe that we are, in fact, the ‘lesser gender’. Our men and our children are always put first. And if we don’t have a man or children, we are often made to believe that we are selfish and as a result respond to this criticism by going over the top in serving others around us. It’s time for all of us women to adopt the mindset of a ‘Reine de la Rose’- a Rose Queen. A ‘Reine de la Rose’ knows her worth, her self-worth. And knows that her time is her greatest asset, to be spent wisely in order to achieve all the various dreams she has decided to follow.

Make a choice to adopt the attitude of a ‘Reine de la Rose’ today: take your power back and make sure that the ‘Locus of Control’ is inside you – not driven by an external force. Choose today to become the ‘master’ of your own life and use life and circumstance as your ‘servant’ towards creating a world of more love, greater beauty and abundance for all.

God has given us humans three critical levers of control with which to steer our lives:

Choice – our life is a sequence of choices – actions and consequences. As a Reine de la Rose, you will always have a compass to help guide you in your choices. This compass is a simple question:”Will the choice I make now help to create a world of more love, beauty and abundance or not?” The answer should be your guiding light.
Attitude – no matter what the circumstance, we can always choose our attitude towards that circumstance. I learnt this far too late in life! While I’ve been generally blessed with a positive attitude and outlook on life, I never realized that I can choose my attitude every morning in the way I choose my outfit for the day – and how, even in the course of the day I can CHOOSE my attitude in how to responde to circumstances or events. I don’t have to have a knee-jerk reaction! The power in this particular choice is incredible.
Faith – the ability to believe, against all odds, that things will always turn to the better for those who believe in Him. At some point in my life I decided on my position with regard to faith: either I believe there is a God, and then act as if there were one; or I choose to believe that there is none, and then act accordingly. To say that we believe in God, and then act as if He doesn’t exist simpy doesn’t cut it. As a Reine de la Rose you must create a sense of clarity about who you are, what you believe in and what you stand for. There is no space for ambiguity. Doubt, on occasion, is human. But even then, if you want to be a true ‘Queen’ choose faith.

On Day 2 of your 100 Day Action Plan, take the following steps:

Decide on your ‘Zero Tolerance’ issues: what are you no longer willing to accept in your life?
Think about choices that you are facing in life at this point in time and test them against the critical question: “Will this choice help me to create a life and a world of love, beauty and abundance?” Only make choices that will contribute to this goal.
From today onwards, become aware of your attitude and choose a positive attitude, every day, like you would apply your moisturizer or make-up every day, without fail.
Choose to have Faith – even if you cannot yet see the way or the bigger picture or have no personal vision, have faith that if you ask God for this everyday He will show it to you clearly, when you’re ready for it!

PS: For those of you who are standing in front of a choice about whether to stay in the same financial doldrums or to move to a new level of prosperity and control, visit my business opportunity website at http://www.reinedelarose.com

Are you running on empty?

2009-07-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

Day 1: 100 Days to go

‘Running on empty’ – these words have been echoing in my mind for longer than I care to remember. At least a couple of years now I had been feeling like my life is a car that is barely moving ahead, because the fuel tank is always close to empty! ‘Running on empty’ is how I could describe almost all areas of my life at one stage: no time for my loved ones; no money to keep even the basic needs covered; no regular income and when it comes, it disappears simply too fast; you may live from paycheck to paycheck and have the same feeling!

Running on empty means you have an increasing mountain of debt that seems impossible to overcome; you’re so tired that you’re getting up in the mornings feeling as if you should go right back to bed, because all your energy is depleted. And then the house: everything seeming to break down, just when you’ve fixed it! And the family: just when you thought things were humming along nicely, another personal drama strikes and you don’t have the time or the energy to deal with it! And your health is just not what it should be: you seem to catch every virus that makes its rounds in your neighbourhood and are challenged with an endless stream of minor infections that just serve to irritate you and keep you in the doldrums. All in all, yes, you’re simply running on empty.

Is this really what life is meant to be about? Dragging your feet through the mud of everyday existence?

Surely, after having lived for thousands of years, humankind must have ‘seen the light’ and found some knowledge and tools to ‘tune up’ our bodies and enlighten our minds?

Well, here’s the good news: never before in the life of humankind has there been so much knowledge and such incredible technology to help us lead the best lives we can ever imagine!
This is not a science fiction story: all this knowledge and all this technology is available now, and at a minimal cost too. In fact, as the Internet and other technology evolves, it will become possible for every human on earth to have access to this knowledge and to this technology.
So why are so many of us women waiting for better days, when in fact, we already have everything we need to create our own lives as ‘Rose Queens’, as a ‘Reine de la Rose’?

I am one of the privileged women, who has ‘had it all’ at some point in her life. I had the privilege of University education. I had the privilege of travelling, living and working overseas in very interesting countries. I have a wonderful man in my life, someone I think is a ‘dream husband’. Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with some of the top leaders in our country, right up to the President’s Office. I have an ‘extended family’ of children and youth that form part of my life. I’ve always managed to find work or create own businesses that have been both creatively and financially fulfilling.

The only thing I’ve never had is true ‘control’ of my life: my time, my energy, my emotions and my money – all of these things always seemed to be directed by external factors. Clients that demanded immediate attention, regardless of what I was doing. Employees and clients that sapped my energy, because of either them not meeting my expectations or me not meeting theirs. Associates that really put me in the doldrums because of the fact that we had no shared vision or values. And bookkeepers and accountants who never really had my financial interest at heart, making neglectful errors that have cost me literally thousands of dollars in taxes and fines.
So, despite the fact that on the surface I’ve been living an exceptional life, my health started suffering because I was constantly running on empty!

Then, during the past year, I felt as if this ‘house of cards’ was coming down. I had to deal with an incredible amount of stress, related to a difficult working relationship, which had been a huge disappointment. Just when that was starting to become resolved, I lost my only consulting client overnight. This eventually led to me having to lay-off my whole team of employees. On top of it, the financial impact of this situation caused me to have to run into terrible debt.

I must confess that it took me a couple of months to get my head around this situation, especially because I was just constantly forced back into bed with flu and fever. But this, really, was also my ‘saving grace’: I’ve always had my best ideas in a horizontal position, half-awake, half-asleep…

My husband, Nico, was quite amazing during his time. We both were affected financially through this whole situation, but instead of pressurizing me to go out and look for new consulting contracts, he took charge of the ‘little things’ like the household and practically spoiled me back to health, bringing endless cups of South Africa’s national drink – Rooibos Tea. While he was also shocked by the sudden disastrous state of our affairs, he simply expressed his continuing faith in my ability to eventually ‘get it all together’again.

I didn’t know yet what exactly to do, but I did know that I was NOT going to try and rebuild the life I had, because it was that life that had brought me to this unhappy state. The words that were guiding me in this is the saying I’d read somewhere of some wise person who said: “The definition of insanity is continuing with the same behaviour and expecting different results!”

Initially, my mind was only able to think about what I didn't want:

I didn’t want to take on a new consulting client, because then again I would lose complete control over my time and have to be at their beck and call 24/7. This was quite a big decision, since strategic consulting is what has brought in the ‘big bucks’ for me during the past 10 years!
While I love working from home, I didn’t want a business again where I had to supervise and manage a team of employees. I had even employed family members in order to try to ensure a common vision and values, but because I was always pulled in three directions – my business, my consulting work and the charity I assist – I didn’t have enough time to truly mentor and guide them. As a result, my business started turning into more of a ‘family’ get-to-gether over long smoke and tea-breaks. Enough of that too!
One of the things that had really caused much of my stress was the fact that I was constantly moving between my business office in the city and the rural non-profit organization that my husband and I were trying to help transform. While the driving and having two homes was still OK, the biggest problem was that inevitably we would leave some critical document or file or other piece of work at the ‘other’ place, which we then desperately needed when we were in the first one! This resulted in so much frustration and wasted energy and time, that I simply had to find another way of doing business.
And finally, the most pressing issue was both my personal and business financial matters, which I had left in the hands of others and were clearly in a terrible mess. As a businesswoman I had to accept the fact that no-one can look after my own money better than I! Instead of taking time in the past to really get a handle on my money matters, I had paid expensive training courses to get family members trained up to handle my bookkeeping, after the elderly lady that I had employed for years had made a critical mistake in tax calculation that cost me thousands of dollars. I had also contracted a professional financial services and auditing firm to work through all the past accounts and review the tax matters, and to guide my own in-house bookkeepers. But every time they got stuck on issues that only I could resolve; questions that only I could answer. But because I was so busy running to earn money and attending to the needs of my clients and the non-profit organization, I didn’t take the time to focus on the most important part of any business: my money. I’d made all the archetypal mistakes in financial management and I could write a book just about that. The end of the story is that, despite the fact that I had been generating an income of literally millions of dollars over the past decade, I had nothing to show for it, except some property. And even that still has a mortgage.

The irony of the matter is that during the past two years I had been doing what I love most: training young, unemployed youth how to ‘master’ their lives. And as I was lying between the sheets, so to speak ‘in hiding’ of the harsh reality out there, the words I had been teaching them were echoing in my mind. Master your Personal Life. Master your Business Life. Master your Community Life. Master your Global Life. Most of the principles that I had been teaching them, I did apply in my own life. Or at least, I had applied successfully during the past. But I realized that there were a few crucial gaps. Still, it was very clear to me that the key to my ‘renewal’ was lying in exactly what I had been teaching these young people.

Have you ever heard the saying that the ten people with whom you spend most of your time are an illustration of who you are or who you will become? Well, it certainly had become true to me. At the age of 44 I had become an ‘unemployed youth’! While the real unemployed youth are generally handicapped by lack of skills, I was now handicapped by a huge mountain of debt. So, in essence, we were equal. We were all ‘running on empty’.

Now the reason I am telling you all of this is because I want you to know that no matter what your life situation, you can change around your life from running on empty to a life of love, beauty and abundance. In my case, I’m on the road of going from ‘minus a million to a hundred billion’! Whatever your dreams, you can turn them into goals. Whatever your goals, you can turn them into results. Whatever your results, you can turn them into success.

When God allows us to hit rock-bottom, it is only because He already has put in motion a plan of helping us to help ourselves to get out of the situation, while lifting up others in the process. That is our true purpose: love one another, help one another. In doing that we can all shape our world to a place of love, beauty and abundance.

So today, one Day 1 of your 100 Day Action Plan, sit down and write down all the things that you don’t like about your life, including your body, your family, your general situation. And then draw comfort in the fact that you WILL change all of this. One day at a time.

’Our greatest work is working on ourselves’- Anonymous

PS: If you’re eager to ‘jump the gun’ and find out how I am turning around my financial situation, you’re welcome to visit http://www.reinedelarose.com

Woman, YOU are ‘Reine de la Rose’

2009-07-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

‘Reine de la Rose’- Queen of the Rose.

I received this name in my mind more than 10 years ago already. At the time I thought it would be a great brand name for a fashion and home décor range. It was one of those ‘one day’ ideas: one day I would start an own fashion and home décor business, working from my favourite little town of Wakkerstroom, in the Mpumalanga mountains of South Africa, overlooking the Wetlands Reserve, while visitors from all over the world made the trip to Wakkerstroom especially to stock up on their very own, precious and luxurious ‘Reine de la Rose’ fashion and home décor items, flowing from my inspiration…

It is a lovely dream, but has very little to do with the reality of the life that I’ve been living since the words first arrived in my consciousness. But in the last couple of months I realized that ‘Reine de la Rose’ is not about things! Well, not only about things. Instead, ‘Reine de la Rose’ is about a mindset that we women standing at the entrance to the 21st Century need, in order to shape our own world of love, beauty and abundance.

You and I and every single other woman on earth deserve to be treated like a Queen, now more than ever. When God created woman, she was the ‘crown’ of His creation: the very cherry on top! Now, thousands of years later, human beings have evolved and developed to what we are today. In a sense, each one of us alive on Earth at this beginning of the 21st Century is the summary of the best human genetic material and strongest survival instincts, the highest intellects and the most knowledge developed over all these thousands of years, ever since Eve first opened her eyes. And with society and the economy changing, women in particular have more opportunities now than never before. But, as you may well have learnt by now: opportunity brings with it responsibility. You and I and every single other woman on earth has one main purpose: to create love, beauty and abundance. Rediscover the inspirational words in the Bible, Proverbs 31, v. 10-31 and you will understand what I mean.

Too many women, myself included, have been misled by the myth of ‘gender equality’. We’ve been ‘playing with the boys’. And some of us have become very good at that. But the fact is, we are different to men: equally worthy, equally intelligent, equally gifted. But the key difference is that we bear children: the asset of our collective futures. And even if we do not have a child of our own, we have the gift to create life: through love, through beauty and through abundance. This is what our focus should be! Since I came to this realization, I’ve learnt to appreciate the thinking of Prof. Mandivamba Rukuni, an African thinker-academic who explains the basis of men-women-relationships in traditional African culture as being ‘gender balanced’: each one has a critical role to fulfil.

Let us strive to become masters of our own destinies – not like men, but like ‘Queens’: loving, beautiful and through creating and sharing abundance.

With these words, I offer you the ‘mental Crown’ of the Rose Queen: from today, YOU are ‘Reine de la Rose’.

The rose is a symbol of love. Accept love for yourself. Grow love within your family. Share love in your community.
The rose is also a symbol of beauty. Radiate your own inner beauty. Help your family discover the beauty of everyday life. Create beauty within your community.
Red is the colour of blood, of life. Red is also the colour of energy and abundance. Bring more red into your life. Energize your home with the colour red. Communicate with others and grow your sphere of influence through using the colour red.
A Queen is a symbol of dignity, nobility and power. Master your life through making choices as if they matter! Master your time: it is the most precious non-renewable resource you’ve been given by God. Master your energy: learn how to optimize your health so that you may enjoy life to the full! Master your wealth: become a model of abundance and generosity. And, of course, master your emotions: in them lies the key to your unlimited success.

Accept this Crown. And with it the responsibility of your first Term of Office.

Don’t be overwhelmed: To guide you on your way, I have put together a 100 Day Strategy for you. And then we’ll take the next step together.

Now, if you are like many other women, you enjoy doing things together with others. So mobilize your friends and invite each one of them to also accept the ‘Crown’ of the Reine de la Rose. Accompanying one another will help you to all grow in royalty and dignity, while walking – step-by-step – towards your own Dream Goals.

For those of you who are particularly interested mastering your wealth, you’re welcome to visit http://www.reinedelarose.com in the meantime. See you behind the ‘Red Velvet Curtain’…