Love Diet

Shonali Sabherwal

Description

Can foods really affect your moods?Can they also boost your sex life? From the author of The Beauty Diet comes a unique book designed to cultivate love and improve health and vitality for a happy and blissful life. In The Love Diet, Shonali Sabherwal, India's leading nutritionist, presents a refreshing approach to eating by sharing: Food secrets that can make you more caring, loving, and giving Tips to enhance sexual appetite in men and women Magical food and lifestyle factors needed for better sex and specific food plans and recipes With insightful notes from clients and expert practitioners, The Love Diet is your go-to book for advice and solutions on how to feel happy and sexy.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)
• Cooking

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 26 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184005653
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Ek parvaaz dikhai di hai
Teri aawaz sunai di hai
Phir wahin laut ke jana hoga
Yaar ne aisi rihai di hai

G ULZAR

Published by Random House India in 2014
Copyright Shonali Sabherwal 2014
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184005653
To Mona Schwartz who taught me to follow my dream
And bought me to love Macrobiotics
To the man who taught me to love, and loved me unconditionally:
My father
To all the men I have loved and still love; who have made me explore higher levels of myself and get to self love
And to you, reader-may you find the answers to what it is to truly love
Contents
Introduction
Part 1
Men, Women, and Evolution
Men and Women Speak Up
Sexual Dysfunction in Men and Women
Part 2
The LOVE Diet
Conclusion
Part 3
Recipes
Source List
Nifty Fact Sheet
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Introduction
Love is the law of God. You live that you may learn to love. You love that you may learn to live. No other lesson is requwired of man.
M IRDAD
T HE LOVE DIET IS BEAUTIFULLY summed up in this quote by Mirdad-a spiritual teacher and counsellor. Mirdad goes on to say: And whom, or what, is one to love? Is one to choose a certain leaf upon the Tree of Life and pour upon it all one s heart? What of the branch that bears the leaf? What of the stem that holds the branch? What of the bark that shields the stem? What of the roots that feed the bark, the stem, the branches, and the leaves? What of the soil embosoming the roots? What of the sun, and sea, and air that fertilize the soil?
You are the Tree of Life. Your roots are everywhere. Whatever be the fruits upon that tree; whatever be its boughs and leaves; whatever be its roots, they are your fruits; they are your leaves and boughs; they are your roots. If you would have the tree bear sweet and fragrant fruit, if you would have it ever strong and green, see to the sap where with you feed the roots. 1
To me, Mirdad s thoughts echo the central thought process of my book. I extend his analogy of the Tree of Life (you) having strong roots, leaves, boughs, and fruit-coming from its sap (blood) which is clean and not festered. Unhealthy blood will not attract love for another or take you to a place of self-love , but will cause you to only repeat the dramas surrounding love.
What makes for clean blood is the foods you eat. It is the thoughts you harbour because of the foods you eat, the air you breathe, and the lifestyle you choose to follow.
How did this book happen?
Love has many forms, but the kind of love that makes you selfless is born out of self-love. Sounds corny, right? But that s just the way it is. Self-love is the result of years of self-work and human evolution. My life has not been very easy. Relationships require a lot of hard work and learning how to self-preserve from heartbreak and pain. Still love is so wonderful; it s something we all want in our lives-we don t stop seeking it though we get hurt time and again and go through countless break-ups. When we fall in love again, we give the relationship all we ve got, and are willing to stake our faith all over again. Ask yourself, can you love on a plane called the universal plane , where there are no negativities towards anyone-only pure love? I am not referring to only romantic love but all kinds of relationships.
The Love Diet is about this frame of mind and satisfied space that I find myself in after many years of emotional struggle and healing through the right kinds of foods. My friend Kamal always told me be an island unto yourself . This was in the nineties and today I am just that-an island, green and rich with its calm waters around me; inviting only those relationships and people that bring in happiness. By this I don t mean to imply that relationships are a bed of roses; they are not meant to be. But do your relationships hurt you to the point of no return or do you look at them as learnings which help you evolve into a better, stronger person? That is the question you have to ask yourself. This book is a story about that space of universal love . What makes you love every moment of your life and the people that come into it with intensity and a compassion that comes from the core of your being? What makes love unconditional with everyone you come into contact with?
Men and women, both married and single, are facing more issues today than they did in our parent s times. You see more divorces than before-6 out of 10 of my friends are divorced. Single men and women in their late 30s and early 40s-some wanting to get married and not finding the right partners and some not wanting to get married at all. Married couples joking and laughing about how much intimacy there was in their marriage in the beginning and how it goes out of the window later. Divorced men and women not wanting to marry again, and on the other hand, some divorced men having more successful second marriages. And then there was me in all of this trying to figure out where I stood-married once for 10 years to my childhood sweetheart, divorced, and then single because I could not find the right partner. What was going on?
I tend to sort any conundrums in my life by taking to the literature written on it, and there is a lot out there which sends you in different directions. Also, along the way, I started writing for a men s magazine on subjects like relationships, intimacy, and the resulting issues between men and women, and this lead me to a book that explores the dimensions of intimacy, love, and sex through food and lifestyle for men and women.
You re probably wondering what food and lifestyle have in common and how are they related? Food and lifestyle go hand in hand and are the most essential ingredients in whipping up love in your life. Sadly, we don t pay enough attention to food habits and lifestyle in our lives. The thing is we have become so obsessed with being thin that being healthy has taken a backseat. While a few of us do recognize this fact, that percentage is very small compared to the rest of us living in complete ignorance as to what works for us in the areas of love, intimacy, and sex.
In the book When Food is Love , Geneen Roth says, Eating is a metaphor for the way we live; it is also a metaphor for the way we love . She also talks about self-love and how it should be foremost in any relationship. For a lot of men and women, focussing on the wrong foods, or emotional eating as it is termed today, takes them away from actually focussing on themselves and each other, thus evading issues of love, trust, and intimacy. Geneen Roth says sometimes men and women would much rather lose weight than be close to another human being, or focus on their bodies than being loved. It s safer as they know where the pain will come from. Diets never work, as they can make you eschew the important foods and that hinders love and intimacy.
My book is about self-love first. It is about how your food through good blood condition and a cleaner body help you find the love in your life and keep it alive.
My story with love
My first recollection of love is seeing my mum and dad kiss each other when my dad left on a flight (he was flying with Air India). I must have been 6-years-old. I always saw my parents interacting with each other in the most loving ways. I never saw them argue or fight. And now that I m an adult, my mom tells me they did have fights-just never in front of the kids. They had the ability to laugh at themselves, and a sense of humour. My mother has always had a mind of her own, so she was always having these healthy arguments with my dad. My dad use to say to me, No need to go to Prithvi theatre to see a play (we lived next door to Prithvi in a suburb called Juhu), we have a live act going on in our house every evening. The best gift I think parents can give their children is a loving home and an awesome fun-filled childhood, and that s exactly what I got. Unfortunately, this kind of love was to last only till I got married in my early 20s. I married my husband after dating him for 8 years. What went wrong in our marriage that lasted 10 years? In retrospect, I have only have one word to describe it-karma. I ended my marriage with a lot of love (universal love). A full-blown relationship only in my mid 30 s-as my mum always says I lost out on my youth and to have ever know what it is to be truly loved by a man. But this particular relationship gave it all to me and I finally knew what it was to have my soul reflected back to me in his eyes. At the time I was in the peak of health and my food habits were all cleaned up. This technically meant that I was shining from inside which reflected outside. This relationship lasted only for 18 months, and yet I loved like I never did before, even after a 10 year period of sheer misery with love.
However, I look back at these years as a great learning experience. I have grown a lot as a person, and I left with a lot of love towards everyone involved in the marriage, including my ex-in laws and husband, and most of all towards myself. While I was married, my eating patterns were erratic, I had a stressful life, and I coped with compulsive eating sometimes to replace the love that was missing in my life. I knew my ex-h