On this page you can find profiles of raw food teachers and experts who offer great courses, support and understanding of the dietary needs and concerns of people of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage; many of whom appear to be still unknown to the main stream raw food community.
Please feel free to email your suggestions to me at: sistahintheraw@googlemail.com
CAROLYN AKENS
is a certified raw food chef and instructor, nutrition consultant, and lifestyle coach based in Atlanta, GA. She holds Alissa Cohen’s Living on Live Foods Chef certification, and has acquired additional training.
Besides creating delicious recipes and passing on this knowledge and information by teaching others, her goal and passion is to assist those who deal with weight and food-related health issues learn the importance and benefits of raw and living food to nourish and help maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Chef Carolyn teaches raw food classes at both campuses of the North Georgia Homeschool Enrichment; and is also an ongoing participant in various health seminars at local schools.
Chef Carolyn’s goal is to coach others dealing with weight problems, food-related health problems; and to teach raw food chefs to prepare delicious raw and living foods that not only satisfy the palate, but nourish the body.
Dr. ARIS LATHAM PhD
Food Scientist, Linguist, Gourmet Chef & Educator of the SUNFIRED FOOD HEALTH INSTITUTE, Jamaica. Sunfired House of Life, Norman Manley Blvd, P. O. Box 3393 Negril, Jamaica. Tel: 876.441.0124
SUNFIRE CULINARY INSTITUTE and SUNCUISINE ORGANIC RETREAT & SPA @ Coyaba Springs, River Gardens and Falls in Shaw Park Ridge Estate, Ocho Rios, Jamaica.
The 2004 Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America acclaims: ‘…the raw food movement owes much to Aris LaTham, a native of Panama, he is considered to be the father of gourmet ethical raw foods cuisine in America. He debut his raw food creations in 1979, when he started Sunfired Foods, a live food company in Harlem, New York. In the years since he has trained thousands of raw food chefs and added innumerable recipes to his repertoire…’
The Sunfired Food Health Institute run by Dr. LaTham, provides retreats and training in Jamaica. A special SUNFIRED FOOD CERTIFICATION course is designed for everyone (including health professionals,caterers, chefs, “health conscious” families, etc.) who want to awaken their dormant creative culinary energies and to have fun not cooking, naturally.
Dr. Latham ‘The Sunfired Gourmet’, was the Master Chef at the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida. He has been a vegetarian for 38 years and a living-‘raw’ foodist for the past 32 years. He was voted one of the top vegetarian chefs in the USA by Vegetarian Times Magazine. He has been featured in Essence, Jamaican Eats, Vegetarian Gourmet, Health Quest, Upscale, UK’s Balance, and Japan’s Tarzan Fitness Magazines. He has served as an Executive Food Service Consultant to the Island Outpost Strawberry Hill Resort in Irish Town, and catered to the Kingston Hilton Hotel in Jamaica. He is currently engaged in the training of vegetarian and raw food chefs for other major international resorts and hotels. He currently host CTV’s cable show “Healthy Lifestyles” on line at www.brokencurve.com
DERIN BEPO
Email: admin@healthrestore.net or call 0845 458 5487 (UK)
One of the UK’s foremost raw food specialists. Derin is a natural healer and anti-aging specialist. He runs HealthRestore, Natural Health consultancy, Healing and RejuvenationProducts, Raw Food Specialization, Internal Cleansing.
Derin is a specialist in natural healing and rejuvenation, a health mentor and coach. He is a raw food specialist and runs, does intensive weight programmes on a diet of pure raw foods.
JENI COOK
is a Health Educator, Raw Food Chef & Lifestyle Coach. Jeni is a graduate of The Living Light Culinary Arts Institute, a world premier in raw food culinary schools. She is also a certified Alissa Cohen Living on Live Food Chef/Instructor.
Offers:
* Monthly raw food preparation classes that can be incorporated into everyday lifestyles.
* Food preparation for private functions.
* Personal raw food coaching in the comfort of your own home.
* Nutrition/wellness consultations.
* Informative talks at health forums, retreats, health stores and book stores.
* Weekend Raw Food and Yoga Retreats in the UK & Spain (coming soon!)
PATRICIA FERGUSON
BSc (Hons) Herbal Medicine, Consultant Medical Herbalist, runs Greenleaves Herbal Healthcare is based in South Norwood, South-East London. (UK)
Also a Raw Food Chef incorporating raw food preparation classes into her practice. Patricia offers monthly talks held on the last Sunday of the month; support with raw nutrition and health; raw and living food demonstrations and preparation classes and monthly raw and living food buffets.
LOI NATALIE LAING
is from Jamaica and runs Laing Wellness where she is an integrative nutrition coach and certified Health Counsellor by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. “My particular areas of expertise are in natural foods cooking, plant-based whole food nutrition and green living/sustainability.”
TANISHA MARSHALL
is a Certified Alissa Cohen, Living on Live food chef. Having worked directly with Alissa Cohen has been a great benefit to Tanisha and has given her the tools to teach and coach other people. In addition to training with Alissa Cohen Tanisha has also trained with Raw Food Chef and restaurant Owner Mehmet Ak in Chicago Illinois. Tanisha is currently completing the Ann Wigmore’s Advanced Nutritional Specialist Certificate.
CHANTEL SELMAN
is a traditional healer (Bush Doctor) in the modern era, revitalizing old traditions born from these lush and exotic surroundings of her base in Barbados. Chantel Selman is an Iridologist with ten years experience on the natural path, including live food nutrition, Herbal (Bush)medicine, Reflexology and hot stone massages. She established the Light Body Wholistic Clinic in 1997. Then in 1998 developed a health store and live food juice bar, called Organic earth to compliment the clinic and provide for her clients educational and nutritional needs. Chantel’s has hosted health expos over the passed six years to expose her community to the earth friendly products and service offered through out the Caribbean and for practitioner to keep our oral traditions alive. he also has a weekly radio show called “Organic living” to showcase the importance of living close to nature.
RAW MENTORS
If you’ve been struggling to go or stay raw then today I’d like to share with you one small but potentially VERY powerful tip that could make all the difference.
As the title suggests, we’re talking about mentors here and to be clear this might be someone you actually work with or know, someone you learn from from afar via books, DVDs, podcasts etc, or someone who lives or has lived but you have never met and who greatly inspires you whether they have been prolific or not.
The power of having a great mentor, or mentors, cannot be overestimated. Usually people chosen as a mentor have a huge amount of experience in a particular area and totally walk the talk. They know as much about the lows as the highs, they know what they do inside out and when you think of them, see a picture of them or even meet them face to face they leave you feeling “wow”, effectively showing you that there is so much further to go on your journey and inspiring you just by their very presence that it is worth pursuing your journey so you can be like they are, too.
In general, I recommend that every person chooses a different mentor for every area of their life. For example you might choose one for any or all of these: raw food, fitness, relationships, parenting, finances, personal or spiritual development – the list goes on. What’s important is not that you choose a large number necessarily but that you choose the right ones for where you are right now and what really speaks to you and your desired goals or destination. Also know that as you evolve and progress in your own journey, your choice of mentor can and will change as you change – and that’s a good thing. This way things can never get stale.
Today we are talking specifically about choosing the right raw food mentor, or mentors, and you can choose them for different areas. For example you might choose one to be your food teacher, someone whose recipes you love, you love the way they are in their kitchen, how simple/ delicious/ quick/ artistic/ impressive/ nutritious their recipes are. It would be great to have one of these wouldn’t it? Well you can! You just need to be clear on your criteria first. While you could certainly choose more than one, I believe there is more power in singling one person out at a time and then giving full attention to learning from that person until you feel that you have outgrown them or what they teach is no longer relevant to you. This person could just as easily be a raw food friend as someone more high profile – that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they inspire you to go to the next level and beyond and that what they have to share really excites and moves you.
Then there is the area of health and radiance. Perhaps there is one person into raw food who for you totally embodies vibrant health in all its aspects. If you are a female you’re more likely to choose a female and vice versa, but this isn’t a given. Even if you’ve never met this person but believe or consider them to be incredibly vibrant, then find out more about them. What do they do differently to other people and other raw foodists? What are their secrets? What are their beliefs? Make it your mission to find these things out because the findings can be truly fascinating and potentially take your life in a number of exciting and lifechanging directions.
Next on the list could be fitness. While fitness is not necessarily on everybody’s raw food agenda, it really should be. In this instance you would choose someone who you know to be super fit to the level you aspire to be and/or maybe someone whose body you consider to be totally amazing (one that you’d love to have) and just by looking at their abs/ biceps/ flat tummy/ gorgeous legs you are inspired to get your butt to the gym or your feet to the road!
Although there are many other directions you can go here depending on what your own personal interests, values and priorities are (like peace, environment, veganism, weight loss, healing yourself of a particular condition or disease, spiritual inspiration, or even a raw business person), the final suggestion I am going to bring to the table is “all round great raw person!”. Is there one person who you just have fallen in love with in some way? (Not literally I hasten to add, although I guess you might!). Is there someone who embodies all of the things that you aspire to be that just by seeing them or seeing a photo of them you are massively inspired by who they are in a heartbeat and brought back to pursuing your journey and own limitless potential?
Chances are that as you read through these ideas one or some people are already jumping into your mind. Again, these may be people who aren’t famous in raw food, or they may even be deceased (Ann Wigmore or Norman Walker, pictured above, are two amazing individuals who spring to mind for me – it might even be the Essene Community of centuries ago). It doesn’t matter who you choose so long as you choose the right person or people for you. You have to really feel as if there is a big space between where you are and where they’re at (or you perceive they’re at), so that you have sufficient and abundant reasons to be inspired and a sense that there is still so much left to pursue, learn and transform into – with their help!
When you have chosen your one or more mentors, I highly recommend that you grab some card, scissors and glue and create yourself something we’ll call a Raw Mentor Vision Board (for more about vision boards and another FAB idea for one to create, click here). This will be incredibly powerful on many levels just in the actual creation of one but having it to look at every day can be even more powerful still as you’ll see in a moment.
To get started simply find pictures of your chosen people (on the web, out of books or magazines etc.), and perhaps some other pictures of things that you associate with them or “power words” that hit the spot and paste them onto your card in a way that really speaks to you. What you are aiming for here is a captivating pictorial reminder of these people and why they are so inspirational to you. You want them there by your side so you have that inspiration to draw on whenever you are lacking.
So why would we do this?
Because this kind of information often never makes it beyond the subconscious and therefore its power is limited. For example in the past you might have thought “Wow, she really looks great/ healthy/ fit” about a raw foodie you’ve met or seen, but it never became more than a thought. By bringing that thought to your conscious mind and taking it to the next level – such as “Why does she look great? What does she eat? How long has she been doing it? What other things contribute to her looking so great that aren’t about food?” and so on, you can then potentially open up doors that previously were not even visible.
As for the Raw Mentor Vision Board, well hopefully this speaks for itself. With something as inspiring and beautiful as this pinned somewhere in your home or kept in your bag or wallet you can use it for a number of purposes:
1) As a visual and inspiring reminder of who you’ve chosen and why
2) As inspiration to get reading one of their books, ask them some questions, get on their web site or whatever else feels like the next step
3) As a reminder that real people can become inspirational – and so can you!
4) To give you a sense of “I have so much further yet to go” which can actually be incredibly powerful as it can make you get out of comfort zones like nothing else (as in “wow, I’ve lost 6lbs but look at her, she lost 40!”) This can really be a wakeup call if you’ve been setting your sights too low.
5) And perhaps most useful of all: When you’re faced with a question or dilemma about your raw food journey, you can ask yourself “What would s/he do in this situation?” or “What would they say?” It is AMAZING how you get an answer that is likely to be way beyond what you might have come up with “alone” and yet it really does seem to have come straight from them as if by magic! (Try it, it’s very cool!)
And finally a powerful reminder: There is a popular saying in the personal development world “You become most like the five people you spend most of your time with” and I really do believe this to be true.
The good news is, you don’t have to physically be around these people. It doesn’t matter where they are on the planet. If you’re reading their books, watching them on YouTube or on a DVD, going to their events, reading their web site and so on, it’s entirely possible that at least one or two of those mentors could be one of those five people you spend most of your time with! Just think who you could become with one of those guys or gals almost permanently at your side!
© 2009 Karen Knowler
Karen Knowler, The Raw Food Coach publishes “Successfully Raw” – a free weekly eZine for raw food lovers everywhere. If you’re ready to look good, feel great and create a raw life you love get your FREE tips, tools and recipes now at www.TheRawFoodCoach.com.
