Cultivate Radiant Living and Nourish Your Soul
How can we empower food to work in favor of radiant living and soul nourishment? Nutritionist Sue Van Raes shares practices that can help us understand what satisfies our true hungers. We can learn to trust the wisdom of the body’s signals for self-care and building resiliency.
Sue Van Raes is a functional nutritionist, food psychology specialist, and wellness expert who is dedicated to helping women who are stressed out about food finally make peace with their plates. She is the founder of Boulder Nutrition where she offers many programs to support nutrition for the body/mind/spirit. Sue draws on her personal and professional experience providing a body, heart, mind, and soul approach to stop stressing and start living. Sue’s insight on nutrition, food psychology, and yoga has been featured in numerous publications, including People Magazine, The Chopra Center, The Sacred Science, and the Elephant Journal. She is the author of the book we are discussing today, Food and Freedom: Discover Your Personal Recipe to Eat, Think and Live Well
THE YOGA HOUR TEAM COMMENTS: I really enjoyed this conversation between Sue Van Raes and Dr. Trujillo. They spoke about hunger in its different forms, physical, mental, heart hunger and soul hunger. Sue’s extensive knowledge of how hunger works in our bodies and her spiritual understanding supports us in being able to nourish ourselves in a healthy balanced way. Most of the program was spent on mental, heart and soul hunger. Physical hunger was described in Sue Van Rae’s previous appearance on The Yoga Hour.
I appreciate how she said that we often get these other hungers confused with physical hunger and try to satisfy these hungers with food which doesn’t address our core desires. An important piece of advice she left the listeners with is to simplify. Trying to do everything and perfectly just increases our stress levels and throws us off balance. When we feel more balanced in all ways we can make conscious choices about all areas of our lives, including food, and everyone benefits.
DR TRUJILLO’S COMMENTS: This conversation with Sue Van Raes about her book Food and Freedom asks wonderful questions about how we nourish ourselves at the level of the body, the mind, the heart, and the soul. In addition to reviewing the hormones leptin and ghrelin, which control hunger and satiety in the body, I appreciated the information that Sue shared about how stress impacts our eating, along with some breathing practices that can help relieve that stress. I enjoyed our discussion of “glimmers" which are the opposite of triggers, and are something that we can look for whenever we claim a mindful moment in our day. We discussed how emotional eating can be a teacher for us, and the importance of self-compassion as we work to try to improve our diets. I highly recommend this conversation for anyone who is curious about how to better nourish themselves fully.