‘Sarah Best Health’ interview with Natalia Rose

by natalia | Apr 25, 2015 | Health & Wellness, Personal Development

Renowned clinical nutritionist Natalia Rose, author of The Raw Food Detox Diet, was plagued with anorexia and bulimia during her teenage years, and with related challenges during her early twenties. I interviewed her last year and in part one of that interview she talks about the wisdom she has picked up on her journey of physical and spiritual healing.

“I was raised not to share this kind of stuff,” Natalia Rose tells me at the start of the interview during which she has agreed to talk, publicly and in detail, for the first time, about her struggles with disordered eating. But she is ready to tell this very personal story now, to offer hope to the many who are going through similar challenges.

She tells me that she remembers wondering, at the tender age of 15 – by which time she was already in the grips of anorexia – “‘What’s so great about life? It feels like it’s all about food and restriction.’ I was going to an amazing school and I had an amazing future ahead of me but all I could think of and see ahead was a future of having to restrict myself.”

And six years later, having left the more dangerous forms of disordered eating behind, but still waging a daily battle with her weight, her prevailing thoughts were, “If it’s this bad at 21, what will it be like at 35? After I’ve had kids I will feel matronly and so unattractive. What’s the point when it’s only going to get worse from here?”

Well, Rose is 36 now, and she has two children – 11-year-old Thandi and 9-year-old Tommy. She has the figure you see in the photo above, and depriving herself of anything she wants to eat is but a distant memory. It’s just that, with a clean body, she now desires only clean foods.

“We’re bombarded with the spoken and unspoken message, ‘Have this slim, sexy body’ but also ‘Eat this [processed] food,’” she observes. “You can’t do both.” And on the subject of life, she now has this to say, “It’s so liberating to have the path lit up. I feel like every day is a chance to make sense of more; to log more miles on this path of discovery. Life is just really, really fun.”

Her stunning transformation was thanks not only to adopting a cleansing diet and lifestyle, but also to a parallel voyage of spiritual discovery. “Yes, I changed my diet, but there was a huge leap between there and coming to consciousness. I was trying to make the life I was living work. That life doesn’t work.

“So yes, change your diet from mainstream to natural foods. But while you’re doing that, see if you can spot all the other things that need to be changed from dysfunctional to functional. This is not just about the food – this is about bringing us back to our humanity. In my case, ultimately it was a shift, on every level, from a life-deteriorating paradigm to a life-generating one that transformed me”.

Rose was raised in the affluent Los Angeles district of Encino. Her father, Ben Barrett, began his career as a heavyweight champion and then found even greater success as a recording studio contractor who worked with many of the music industry’s greats during the 60s, 70s and 80s. He was 64 when he met Rose’s mother – many years his junior – and 69 by the time his daughter was born. “I attribute the fact I have to put a lot of effort to get the health I would like to the fact I was born to an older father,” comments Rose. “This wasn’t the springy DNA of a twentysomething.”

Nonetheless, food at home was at least healthy (relatively speaking) and Rose remembers frequent trips to “70s-style, old-world health food stores – the kind that smell of B12!” adding that she, “had exposure to consciousness about food from my mother.”

Rose suffered from digestive problems as a child, and recalls stopping on street corners clutching her mid-section, doubled over with the pain. “My mother at least knew to give me acidophilus rather than go to pharmaceutical drugs, and my girlfriends came to know me for my unusual pharmacopoeia of vitamins and other remedies.”

Rose recalls that she and her mother would spend every Saturday shopping on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. “I had beautiful clothes and a willowy figure and it was a constant fashion show. It was nice but I never took it that seriously.” It was when she went to boarding school at 13 to escape LA – a world that was by then starting to confuse her – that food first became an issue.

Back home, the only treats in the pantry were raisins and, occasionally, corn chips. But at school, much of the fare was processed, laden with sugar and salt, and pastry-encrusted. “I had fun, but after four months it was time to go home for Christmas break and I couldn’t get my jeans on,” she remembers. “School was a safe environment to be plump, but home wasn’t. I was going back to fashion central. That’s when I lost my innocence about food.

“When I got off the plane, my mother didn’t have to say anything. She wasn’t even reproachful. There was just this look of, ‘What have they done to you?’ My brother and father also gave me disapproval without meaning to. My brother was very ‘cool’ and handsome, with lots of gorgeous girls around and I felt like a pile of lard next to them. So that Christmas break I decided I don’t want this body – I want that body.”

Rose went back to what she then knew about the best way to lose weight. It was 1989, and fibre was the big thing. “There was a cereal called Common Sense Oat Bran. It was really good.” She remembers. “I got everyone in school on it. The amount of gas in that girls’ cafeteria! I focused a lot on cereal and cottage cheese, and I dropped enough weight that I could go home next break and not feel like a beached whale.”

Rose remembers an extended trip to France the following year as, “the first foray into the extremes of my personality. I told myself, ‘You are going to come back super skinny.’ That was the goal. Not to learn French or to find romance. My priority on that trip was not what I was doing but what I was eating, and when I set my mind on something, I go for it.”

This was when anorexia started to exert its insidious grip on her. “It was almost a high, realising that I had the power to push beyond limitations others couldn’t,” she recalls. “Even though that’s because they’re balanced and don’t need to, in the warped mind of an anorexic it seems like a strength.”

Before long, she was existing on an egg for breakfast and a few bites of chicken and vegetables for dinner. Her weight duly plummeted – at 5’6 she soon weighed just over six stone. “The body contracts the most the first time you do something like this,” she says. “Especially a young body that is strong and able to throw off a lot of weight. I was really proud of it and I got so much praise and validation when I returned home to LA.”

Back at boarding school, Rose started to eat again and gained some weight back. Then the following spring, her father passed away. “A few nights after my Dad died I threw up for the first time,” she recalls. “It was International Night at school and I was so sad and frustrated with everything, I was mindlessly consuming all the food I could.

“I got extremely good at purging. Like anorexia, to the person ill with bulimia it can feel like this strange power that nobody else has. What it was really doing was processing my pain in a really perverse way. I was numbing myself with the food, then purging it out in a really big expression that I needed to make, but didn’t know how else to.”

During summer break, the habit spiralled further out of control, going from once or twice a day to five times a day. “I was in the house on my own so I’d eat and throw up. Then I’d feel acidic, and food would calm that, so I’d repeat the cycle. But something happened in my senior year. I was in a good space and I got over it. It just goes to show that happy, whole people don’t need to do that.”

The following summer, Rose left for the East Coast to begin her studies at New York University. Knowing no one in the city and feeling extremely isolated, the twin demons of anorexia and bulimia again became her coping mechanism. But it was a brief relapse, and she soon banished them once and for all. “I was 19 and I accepted I would have to walk through life a little plumper than I would like,” she says. And of those who have suffered with both anorexia and bulimia, Rose was certainly one of the luckier ones – she has no fertility, digestive nor dental issues.

At 19 she was already dating her future husband, Lawrence – 15 years her senior. His was a world of private jets, lavish parties, and the most expensive clothes on the most gorgeous bodies. “I knew I wouldn’t look lean, but I tried to find things that didn’t draw attention to all my wobbly bits,” she says. “I had a smaller upper body and heavy legs. I tried to find black pants that wouldn’t draw attention to the girth in my hip and thigh area. Life became about making sure I looked the part to be his girlfriend.”

So once again, food and body image consumed her every waking hour. “If I wasn’t thinking about what I’d eat for lunch and dinner I was working out on the Stairmaster,” she says. “If I threw caution to the wind and didn’t even eat excessively – just ate what those around me ate – I would be so heavy. I was also sick all the time: bronchitis, pimples, cystic acne and chronic bladder infections. Inside was painful, and outside didn’t look good.”

She adds, “I was living a life of suffering that is familiar to so many – at the mercy of when they’re going to get the next migraine or bout of IBS. I had graduated from NYU, I was engaged to a man many girls would kill to be with, and I had a great bunch of friends. Relative to what we are conditioned to want, I pretty much ‘had it all’. But I’d reached another point of thinking, ‘Life really sucks. I feel like I’m in prison being tortured.’”

It was soon after this that the concept of the raw diet and lifestyle came onto Rose’s radar. One day, while browsing in the health section of a bookstore, she picked up Paul Nison’s The Raw Life and started reading the interview with [the colon therapist] Gil Jacobs. “This particular interview spun my head around, just like destiny,” she remembers. “I put the book down, picked it up and read the interview through again. Then I decided I just had to meet this person.”

She called to schedule an appointment at Jacobs’ Manhattan clinic Chakra 17 but he was booked up well in advance so she settled for an appointment with another therapist. “In that hour I watched vast quantities of waste matter leaving my body and I thought, ‘I get it. I think we’re onto something here’.”

With every treatment, Rose felt her body shift, and her whole way of being along with it. Five months down the line she was regarding her appearance in the mirror with amazement, wondering, ‘Is that really me?’”

She began having all her colonics with Jacobs – whom she now refers to as her mentor – so she could pick his brains. She also jumped enthusiastically into the raw diet and lifestyle. “I was having a green juice in the morning, something like date and nut balls with salad for lunch, and dinner was pretty raw, too; I’d have just a few cooked meals in the week.”

She adds: “The first few months to a year, I really got into the food preparation – the juicing, spiralising and dehydrating. I was going to Indian stores in the East Village to buy spices I’d never used before. It was very entertaining, it captured my imagination, it was fun, it was flavourful, and it was almost a full-time pursuit! I was getting excited about all I could do. There was very, very little on the market to buy at the time – temple balls and flaxseed crackers and very dry banana walnut cookies, which I’d have with salad.

“What I was eating before this was ‘correct’ according to the mainstream health magazines I used to read. Now I was eating many more calories and foods we’re told we’re meant to stay away from, like nuts, avocados, bananas and dried fruit. But it was having such a beneficial effect – I was feeling and looking so much better.”

As she devoured book after book on the topic, she soon started connecting dots. “Now, looking back at how I used to struggle with my many ailments, I realised it wasn’t just me – everyone was feeling like this, and everyone was desperately attempting to stop the decaying, premature aging and all that goes with modern life. I started seeing beyond the superficial cultural concept of ‘detox’ to the sheer depth of accumulation of waste matter. That’s when the doors of perception opened. The depth of that waste is not something you get rid of in a month, nor even a year.

But Rose’s journey was about transforming her mind a well as her body, and she cautions that the raw diet and lifestyle can only take you so far on this path. “I spent 10 years getting to the bottom not just of physical stuff but of spiritual stuff as well,” she says.

“It was almost a full-time job. I was reading 10 books at a time – everything from Sufism to Shamanism, plus all of Rudolf Steiner’s books and eventually the Derrick Jensen and Daniel Quinn books, which really transformed my consciousness and which I highly recommend. All these things have been a step along the way. I don’t think everyone needs to experience all I have, but I was as hungry to make sense of life on the planet and why we’re here as to figure out the human body.”

Rose shares that her husband and her mother often used to accuse her of being ‘negative’, and still do at times. “I’m always saying: ‘Look how wrong that is,’ pointing out our society’s life-destroying norms,’” she says. “But that whole notion of, ‘Let’s be positive and look on the bright side of life’ is just another of our cultural distractions. No, let’s look at what is and do something about it. When you start to see the world in these terms, it’s a breakthrough, and you wonder why everyone doesn’t see it.”

Rose says that the journey has been a lonely one at times; that she was “often ridiculed, condescended to and made to feel I was naïve,” and that it, “took until about six or seven years ago to really nail it. The last six years I’ve been using what I know to go even further.”

So what advice does she have for gracefully dealing with those in our life who openly disapprove of our choices? “Meet it with a sense of humour,” she says, without missing a beat. “Family and close friends know how to push your buttons and many of my clients have issues in this area – but only because they’re choosing to engage with it. People get incredibly sensitive about other people’s diet choices! But no conscious or aware person would defend eating in a way that damages their body or the planet, so if you’re challenged by someone who does, be clear that you’re just not going to collude in diet drama.”

She adds: “And once you’ve found your way, however you did it, remember that that’s just something that worked for you. Be grateful and share your journey with genuinely interested people, but don’t try to convince those who aren’t, and don’t assume that your way is the only way. Humility goes hand in hand with real enlightenment.”

Rose’s husband, Lawrence, does not share her passion for the cleansing lifestyle, nor for esoteric spiritual pursuits. Many on a similar path to Rose will routinely discount any prospective partner on those grounds, but she cautions against viewing people in such ‘black-or-white’ terms. “Lawrence has a really big heart and a love for people and animals so he naturally has this sense of interconnectedness. A lot of things I’ve personally had to raise a red flag about and put a lot of effort into learning he’s had with him all along. I go at this stuff from almost an analytical or scientific perspective; he from his heart.”

And on the subject of choosing friends, Rose has this to say, “So many of the people I like to spend time with don’t eat the way I do. If I’m going out on a Saturday night I want my friend Richard to be there. He doesn’t care what he puts in his body and could probably do with a series of 500 consecutive colonics, but he makes me laugh. You only need one or two friends that can really speak your language. If you have even one you’re insanely lucky.”

She adds that when you’re physically and spiritually healthy, “you really fall in love with people and appreciate human beings and personalities, even quirky ones. You just love people so much more and you love engaging with them.”

How else do people know they’re on the right track, I ask her. “If you’re not feeing gratitude and humility, you haven’t found a working blueprint yet. If you are still trying to impose your ideas on others, you are not whole yet and are not ready to help others – in fact you may do them more harm than good. When you find you’d rather dance than teach; that you’d rather lay under the sun and enjoy the life pulsating around and within you than talk about diet; that you’d rather enjoy people than criticise people, then you’re on the right track.”

On Navigating Uncharted Territory & the Extremely Green Detox

by natalia | Apr 25, 2014 | Health & Wellness, Personal Development

‘Eat to Evolve’ Interview: On Navigating Uncharted Territory & the Extremely Green Detox

Eat to Evolve talks to Natalia Rose.

Certified Nutritionist Natalia Rose is without question one of the world’s experts on detoxification and cleansing. Since the 2005 publication of her first book, The Raw Food Detox Diet, Natalia has been teaching the purest, most effective diet and lifestyle methods to promote regenerative health and longevity. But lately, her work has emerged from its roots in classical Natural Hygiene principles and entered a new realm of liberating, uncharted territory.

These days, Natalia views cellular purification primarily as a means to an end, a vehicle whose purpose is to carry us into the discovery and embodiment of what it means to be truly human. Fully awake, unconditioned and free, hers is a path of personal sovereignty, of reclaiming control over one’s entire being on every level, body, mind and spirit.

One of Natalia’s most attractive qualities—beyond her radiant physical beauty, of course—is her authenticity. This is a person who clearly practices what she preaches. And she has been brave enough to evolve her message, to change and to grow, in full view of her public. Each new detoxification program has developed naturally and sequentially from the one before, in step with Natalia’s own personal journey towards ever-deepening degrees of transformational self-purification and awareness.

Extremely Green Detox is the next step in Natalia’s journey. Founded upon the removal of our deepest-seated obstructions and enabling uncompromised freedom from prevalent mainstream, health-depleting ideologies, this brand new program is being introduced to the world with a unique opportunity: participation in a month-long, fully supported group cleanse led by Natalia and members of her Natalia Rose Institute team.

Complete, detailed diet instructions and recipes, bi-weekly video lectures and phone conferences, food prep demos with top chef Doris Choi, and personal consultations with senior detox counselor Joanna Novick, CN, are all included in the Extremely Green Detox package. Beginning on July 1st, the program offers all the perks of going on a luxury health retreat without having to leave home (and for a fraction of the cost!!).

I spoke with Natalia earlier this week about Extremely Green Detox, the fully supported group cleanse, and why she believes we need to turn the detox dial way up in order to prevail over the assaults of living in a toxic world.

Natalia, tell me about the Extremely Green Detox. Why did you develop this program, and what is it designed to do?

The best way to describe it is this: we are living in extreme times that are taking a toll on people’s health in a way that has never been seen before. Between the pathogens that are running rampant in everybody’s body, the endocrine system being so dysfunctional and the organs being so weakened, there’s this extremely slippery slope into illness that is hard to escape. What ends up happening is that most people are having a debilitating life experience. It’s either going to be rectified by the right protocol, or it’s going to bring you all the way down, slowly or rapidly, depending on what, if anything, you do to address it.

Essentially, we have three options for dealing with a deteriorating life experience: 1) just let it go down and deteriorate all the way, 2) try to slow the deterioration by doing a few things right, or 3) correct things 100% percent.

Option three is the only way to achieve an optimal life experience. Otherwise, it’s just various shades of doom. The Extremely Green Detox is a call for us to put aside our path of least resistance—our crutches, our addictions—and correct things 100 percent. The beauty of it is that if we can follow the protocol long enough and steady enough, we can win the war, as it were, and bring our bodies back to great strength.

Where does the Extremely Green Detox fit in relation to your other programs?

It’s definitely a progression. The Raw Food Detox Diet gets people out of the mainstream way of eating. Detox 4 Women—which I want to emphasize is also for men—pulls people out of pathogenic problems such as yeasts, molds and fungal issues. And the Extremely Green Detox brings people out of the quicksand and on to the mountaintop. It’s for those of us who want that peak experience, who want our blood to be the blood of youth, and our bones to be the bones of youth. This is what we use to get to the top of the mountain. Once you’re there, if you want to do some of the other things once in a while you can, but it’s not the daily experience any more.

I noticed that many foods you allow on your other programs—low-sugar fruits, goat cheese and baked sweet potatoes, for instance—are missing from this program. What is the reason for this?

A big part of it has to do with eliminating the pathogens that still have a hold in people’s systems. We have to kill them, and for this to happen, things like sugars, fermented foods and dairy all have to be left out of the equation unless one is a true beginner.

There’s also another piece. The key to successfully moving forward in this technocratic society, which is in decline, is to have the fewest needs possible. Of course having a sense of interconnected compassion trumps all. But the person who needs the least, who is the least dependent on outside substances, is the one who will survive with the most success.

That’s why we are focusing on the raw green foods. Green food is primordial food. It’s synthesized sunlight—chlorophyll, plus the living enzymes which you just don’t get with supplements and green powders. When the majority of the diet is coming from live, vitalized green foods like wheatgrass juice, juiced greens, dark green leafy vegetables and salads, amazing changes start to happen. For one, the palate changes. Even after just a few days, the palate starts to readjust so that you actually enjoy the taste of simple, unadulterated food in its natural state. The indigenous state of tasting is regained, and this has a profound, transformational influence over the perception of what we think we need to feel satisfied and fulfilled.

So, as the palate shifts, the craving for sub-optimum substances is reduced and addictions lose their hold?

Exactly. And when addictions fall by the wayside, you become empowered. So we’ll be dealing with this during the guided cleanse. We’re even going to look at the shadowy addictions, the ones which we may not be aware of, or don’t want to admit. Even stevia can be an addiction. But as the palate readjusts, addictions fall by the wayside.

Once that happens, if we want to dabble in the less than optimum choices, we can bring those things back on an occasional basis and still maintain balance. Somebody who does the Extremely Green Detox protocol long enough to truly strengthen themselves will be able to do what we call “safe poisons” once in a while without a problem, but it will be less of a daily experience—not out of a sense of forced deprivation, but because the desire to make it a daily experience will be gone. Once the body is strengthened, the safe poisons won’t bring you down if you just do them periodically.

So raw goat cheese, for example, is a food that can be reintroduced down the road?

Raw goat cheese is a good substance that the body can utilize. If the system is in good working order and the body is clean, something like raw goat cheese is not going to undermine the system. It’s something a strong body should be able to manage. The same goes for things like wine, or a piece of fish.

The problem, though, is that our bodies are not strong. We need to find a way to maintain the highest levels of human health at a time when the world is so acidic, and we are constantly being bathed in chemicals and radiation. That’s what the Extremely Green Detox is for.

What else is different about your new program?

One big addition is the daily wheatgrass juice, which is going to be treated like a sacred meal. And green juice is also going to become a sacred meal, consumed consciously, with a sense of “I am taking in my true nourishment now.” Both of these green drinks are loaded with chlorophyll, which makes them optimum foods for the blood, the brain and so many body systems. But the wheatgrass juice in particular has another role. It will make it easier for people to do the program, because it provides a sense of fullness and satisfaction on a subtle level. It functions psychologically as well as physiologically.

So, starting with 1 ounce a day, wheatgrass juice will be included as much as people can tolerate it—five days a week if possible. And they’ll be encouraged to build on the quantity every week, so that by end of four weeks, some will be up to 4 ounces every day. Others may still be doing just 1 ounce and making a face, but they’ll be doing it!

I know that face! Wheatgrass juice can take some getting used to in the aftertaste department, but it is an amazing healing substance.

The idea is that people will come to enjoy it as essential. This has been my experience. Your body takes on the qualities of whatever substance you take in, and as your body takes on these qualities, it begins to desire those substances more. This happens with negative substances, too. The body gets used to whatever you are feeding it, and creates a habitat for that.

So, when we take in super nutrient-rich and high vibration substances, such as the wheatgrass juice, which is pure living chlorophyll, our body becomes made of that, and it craves that. Over the past few years, I have worked up to drinking 4 ounces of wheatgrass a day. Now the experience of taking it in has become one of the highlights of my day, but it was a process to get here. So this is something we will be doing together on the cleanse that I am really excited about sharing.

Can you talk a little about the Natalia Rose Institute community, and why you decided to introduce your new program, Extremely Green Detox, within the context of a fully supported cleanse?

Our goal is to create a place where people can heal, strengthen and retain their human qualities on this bizarre stage. We need to keep on finding solutions as we navigate being a human being in a non-human world.

Ultimately, the goal of a fully supported cleanse is about giving people the ability to stand alone. The bottom line is, you wake up with you in the morning. No matter who you went out to dinner with the night before, no matter what temptations were there, how are you going to feel in the morning? Will you look in the mirror and say “I guess I gave up because everyone else was doing it,” or will you feel grateful that you honored your body’s true needs, and your deeper desires to take your life experience and your health to the next level?

As long as we don’t relapse and fall back into the false notions of what “civilized people” need, we are in new territory. That can be a little scary. With the supported cleanse, we have the guidance of the leaders, along with the built-in support of the group structure, to helps us cross the bridge to get there.

It looks like you’ll be providing a lot of support during the four weeks of the program.

In addition to all the emails, there will be group calls once a week, plus a weekly video with a live chat feature. We have a private Facebook page where people can interact, and a hotline is in the works. We’ll tackle the social-emotional-mental challenges. We’re going to dismantle all of the social pressures, like a kid who wants to dismantle a computer. We’ll take it apart. This is the power of the group.

It sounds like a fantastic opportunity! People must be getting so excited.

Every day will be a whole new experience and as a result, there will be an overwhelming sense of well being from doing this program—visceral experiential knowledge, rather than textbook. Extremely Green Detox is geared towards experienced cleansers, but we’re bringing in all levels, and making modifications for different needs, so everyone will get the best out of it. Already more than 100 people are signed up! It’s almost like a small country with a new vision.