Some Changes Around Here

Hi Friends,

I hope the new year finds you well! It’s a bit late for a happy new year greeting, but as this is the first time I’ve posted this year, better late than never, right? This blog will be a bit different than the blogs you’ve read from me before. I want to get personal and let you know of some changes as well as new avenues to share with you that will be coming soon.

I’ve had a blog about my journey with juice cleansing, health, nutrition, veganism, weight loss and healing food addiction since 2007. I began then with a little blogspot.com blog called Radical Radiance, and it was a casual hobby blog to share with others what I was learning and experiencing. I know some of you have been following my blog for the whole ten years since then. Thank you—and thank you to everyone who has followed it since.

After moving on from the retreat center I worked at for five years, I decided to continue the nutrition and juice cleansing coaching I was doing at the center and create my own business to assist others with those things as well as in more areas. Over the last ten years of nutrition being my career: five at the retreat center and five with my own business, I’ve worked with many hundreds of people, and I really love it. I love sharing information that may help others to alleviate their own suffering, including both physical suffering and soul-based suffering. As a person who has experienced a great deal of both of those kinds of suffering myself, I’m passionate doing what I can to assist others in being able to be happier and healthier.

But there are some things that I want to change about what I share with you, and how I share with you. Here are the main areas that have become issues for me and that you’ll see some changes with:

The Truth About What’s Helped Me

In my writing and public creations, I’ve always omitted sharing all the things that have helped me to go lose weight, heal my severe compulsive eating, complete lots of and long juice cleanses, and successfully stick to a vegan diet completely for more than a decade.

I’ve taken only a slice of the full pie of how I did these things and presented that just that one slice to you. I share some things that worked for me, but not others. I share some of what I believe—and have personally experienced—to be the way to health and freedom with food, but I don’t share other aspects of what I believe are part of that way.

Why, you might ask, would I do such a thing? Well, I still have a lot of fear of what people may think. I’ve always wanted to be relatively “palatable” to others. I’ve been a lifelong people-pleaser, a lifelong I-don’t-want-to-stand-out-er, and so in that place I’ve just guessed what others will find digestible and tried to adhere to that. Not too crazy, not too out there, not too off-the-mainstream. I’ve also been afraid if I’m not agreeable enough, my business won’t survive and I won’t be able to do something I really enjoy anymore.

But by living in these fears and not even experimenting with whether they’re true, I’m doing a disservice to you, because in that place I don’t share with you the full truth about what’s helped me, and so you are missing out on information that could help to change your life as much as it’s helped me changed mine.

Sharing Myself

This second area I want to change is linked to the first part, but is a bit more personal. The first part I’ve described above is about sharing the full gamut of information, approaches and truths that I believe are needed to be able to be physically and emotionally healthy. In this area it’s about sharing myself personally–me, Courtney as the person.

One of my personal issues I’ve always had—and am currently wanting to work through—is a hesitance to share myself and who I really am. I like to hide from the world; hide my personality and nature, be behind the scenes. I like sharing information and inspiration, but I don’t like infusing too much of myself in it, or not certain parts of myself. Many people have asked me why I’ve never created a youtube video over my nearly twelve years of studying nutrition. There is really just one reason: being on a video feels really exposed to me and I’m scared of it. While writing is a definite passion of mine, I also find hiding behind a computer screen and communicating by writing to be much less scary, and I can hide more.

I have a terror of being an arrogant or self-aggrandizing person, and so I often minimize what it is I know and have been able to do. But I also know that it is very rare for a person with as severe of a set of physical and mental health issues as I had, and as severe of food addictions and eating disorders as I had, to heal those things to the degree that I have. And I’m not perfectly healed in any of those areas, but I recognize how rarely significant and permanent shifts happen for people. There is a reason statistics in America are that 95-97% of people who try to lose weight don’t keep it off forever but rather gain it back.

I don’t believe that I’m anyone special inherently, I just think I’ve been lucky enough to come across some really life-changing information and processes. And, I’ve tried countless approaches, and some things have worked and other things have not, and I’ve figured a lot of it out through trial and error and my own experiments. I feel—despite my fear of being haughty in saying so—that I’ve discovered the way to heal that very few people know and fewer people succeed at.

There is so much more I want to share about what I feel is the truth about physical health about how food addiction can be healed. I want to talk about juice cleansing in much deeper terms, and discuss how it can be a tool to address compulsive eating. I want to talk more bluntly about why long-term, permanent weight loss is so rare for people with serious struggles with food and weight. I want to talk about a vegan lifestyle in a fuller scope as well.

Spirituality and God

One of the biggest things I’ve shied away from mentioning much at all is the fact that my relationship with God, and my learning God’s Truths about things has helped me to change and heal. I’m not religious, and I also don’t believe a person has to believe in God or a higher power in order to heal food addictions and health issues. I’ve always had clients of all faiths and belief systems, agnostics and atheists; everyone really. But, having a budding relationship with God and learning the spiritual truths about the soul, about addictions, health, etc., has been instrumental for me. Healing my own health problems and binge eating has required going to some very dark and sad and scary places in my soul and divine truths and the relationship with God has gotten me through those times.

About six years into my health journey, I came across material that helped me massively, and was responsible for me to be able to continue that healing. These are the teachings of Divine Truth, taught by Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which can be explored at www.DivineTruth.com and on Youtube. They teach what I believe to be the truth about physical health, addictions (including to food), eating disorders, veganism, and so many more things. There were many resources that helped me in those first six years which I’d like also to talk about more in the future, but the Divine Truth teachings were far deeper and significantly more helpful than any other resources or truths I’d come across at that point–as well as ever since then.

So while I don’t have any expectation others believe what I do, I’ll also be talking more about everything in these contexts as well in the future.

Future Projects and Other Announcements

I want to expand the methods which I share information. I’ll continue to write in my blog here, and I’ve also been working on a book for a while about healing food addiction which has nearly a hundred pages as of now. I’ll be adding more content and editing to reflect the changes I’ve mentioned above as well, as I feel it will eventually be a few hundred pages when it’s finished. I hope to continue working on it regularly so that I can get it it out completed before too long.

Speaking of that fear of making vlogs I mentioned earlier: well, I’m planning to challenge that fear and use that method! Video is such a great medium to share with, and I would like to have multiple options for you as not everyone likes reading long blogs, which has been my only medium thus far. I plan to make videos on all the topics I’ve mentioned: juice cleansing, nutrition, health, healing food addiction etc.

While we’re here I also thought I’d make mention, since I never have officially before, that a couple years ago I switched from charging and invoicing for my business to living on donations, which you can read more about here. Thank you to those who have donated; your donations go to my basic living expenses as well as to have more time to create content; whether that be working on my book, writing blogs or creating videos.

I’m so passionate about the truth that no one has to suffer forever with health issues, that no one has to forever feel trapped by compulsive eating and extra weight. I’m also passionate about how juice cleanses can be an awesome tool for health and for healing food addiction. And I’m passionate about veganism being a healthy, loving way to live and that it can be yummy and easy to stick to long term after one has had the soul-shift in that area. I am looking forward to sharing more with you!

Love,

Courtney