The Choice is Yours

The Choice is YOURS

By Nancy Telfer

Copyright 2013 by Nancy Telfer

Published by Nancy Telfer at Smashwords

Editor-in-Chief: Beth McBlain

Editor: Lily-Ann MacDonald

Design: Eddie Chan

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems, without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

ISBN: 978-0-9919329-1-7

This book is available in print at http://www.rawsomenutrition.com

DEDICATION

They say that dedicating a book is one of the most exquisite acts of love one can perform. I would argue that it is even more beautiful to dedicate this one to you without saying your name. To all of you who inspired me, and to all of you who are reading this book, this is for you! Thank you for desiring to change your life. Thank you for being the change!

ADKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No one walks alone on this journey we call life. Where do you start to thank those who joined you, walked beside you, and helped you along the path to where you are now? Perhaps this book and its pages will be seen as a thanks to all of you who have helped make my life what it is today. The success of any project depends largely on the encouragement of many others. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the people who have been very instrumental in the completion of this project. I would like to express my greatest appreciation to Beth McBlain and Lily-Ann MacDonald, from StarPoint Publishing Group, for the encouragement and assistance I received in finishing this project. A big thanks goes to Eddie Chan, the layout artist who put it all together. I can’t say thank you enough for their tremendous support and help. I am thrilled to have this team in my life.

I would like to offer my special thanks to my friend, Emma Martinez, for taking the time to read The Choice is YOURS when it was in the beginning stages. I appreciate her valuable and constructive suggestions. Special thanks go to Heather Allison for the fantastic illustrations throughout this book.

I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to my friends and family for their help and wishes for the successful completion of this project. Finally, I would like to express my love and gratitude to the man who walks by my side every day. My wonderful husband and best friend, Gary Telfer, has given me all the encouragement and guidance during the countless hours of writing and research, and has provided the beautiful photo on the cover of this book.

Table of Contents

Chapter One - Breathing

Chapter Two - Water

Chapter Three - Your Body's Cells

Chapter Four - Your Lymphatic System

Chapter Five - Exercise

Chapter Six - Digestion

Chapter Seven - Alkaline/Acid Balance

Chapter Eight - You Are What You Eat

Chapter Nine - Healthy Food Transition

Chapter Ten - Your Thoughts are Things

Chapter Eleven - Alternative Healing

Chapter Twelve - Energy Bodies

Chapter Thirteen - Our Connection to Nature

Chapter Fourteen - Listening to your Body

Chapter Fifteen - Beyond the Earthly Body

Chapter Sixteen - Raising Your Vibration

What's My Story

INTRODUCTION

This book goes beyond the concept of ‘just eating’ or ‘eating for taste’, to eating the best food to nourish your body. The interesting thing is that you will not be just nourishing your physical body with the recommendations in this book. Let me explain this: every single one of us has more than one layer - more than one body. We have our physical body (which I like to call our Earthly Body), then our Etheric Body, Emotional Body, Mental Body and Spiritual Body. These bodies have been called our ‘Aura’, or, ‘Energy Field’, by some. That affects these invisible bodies will affect our Earthly Body – so they too, need to be nourished and strengthened. For years, I have concentrated on food and the best nutrition for my body. It really goes far beyond what nutrients are in the food. The questions you need to ask yourself are: What vibration does that food have? Will that food raise my vibration? How will it affect my Energy Field? Does my body desire this?

Listening to what your body desires is something that you hear about quite a bit, but do you really listen? You can ask your body what colour it longs to wear that day, if it prefers to wear a certain necklace, and even what it craves to eat. I will go into this in detail throughout this book. It is something I was blessed to learn when I studied what is called Access Consciousness. It is believed that if we live in the question, we will be more open to the energies that the universe, and everything else, has for us. The idea is to ask a question and NOT to answer the question – an answer disempowers, while a question empowers! We will explore that later.

We are energy. We are water. We are vibration. Our thoughts are vibration. What I mean by that is your health goes beyond what we eat and what we see. To be healthy, and I mean really healthy, we need to find a balance between mind, body and spirit. We all have more than one body to take care of. We have our Earthly Body to feed, nourish and care for. But remember that we also have our Mental, Emotional, Etheric and Spiritual Bodies to care for as well.

Everything that happens in life has a different vibration and this vibration affects all of our bodies (and those around us). If you are at a low vibration, you will draw to you experiences of a lower vibration, which is generally the same as saying ‘unpleasant’. The higher the vibration, the nicer and smoother things will go, and the better your life will be.

The information that I will share is not only what I believe to be the best food ever, but also the best vibrations you can give your body. The mind needs to be stimulated by the proper fuel, just as the body needs proper fuel for energy. Not only are you what you eat, but you are what you think. The proper fuel for the mind is the highest vibrational thoughts – positive thoughts. I will explain how you can reprogram your mind to think differently about yourself and others – to think positively about yourself and everything around you. This will affect all of your bodies in a positive way.

This book will go over what I like to call the ‘BIG’ picture for your Earthly Body, and your entire Energy Field. You will gain the knowledge of what is best for your body, and then the choice will be yours to make. There seems to be an urgency in caring for our bodies. The changes in the earth are evident to the life we have been leading. It is time to heal our bodies and heal the earth at the same time. What you eat is just the beginning, and that is what this book is about. Each chapter will bring you closer and closer to living the best day ever! Ask yourself what your life would be like if you lived every moment at its best, and to be present in that moment – in the NOW. Ask yourself what else you can do on your path to being your best every day? What else is possible?

Living with a positive attitude is just as important as the food you eat, if not more important. It is the ‘fuel’ that all your Bodies will benefit from. When you choose to live your life with a positive attitude, your body will be surrounded with a light energy that will magnetically draw people to you. People who will help you attain your goals will be drawn to you. These people will be a vibrational match to your vibration.

Do you understand what is happening? You eat the best foods, the foods your body DESIRES; it will give you energy ... you have a positive attitude; then people and things are drawn to you to actually complete what you should create in this life. Everything is connected. Everything is energy – vibrations. Each chapter will talk about how to raise your vibrations, and give you tools you can use on a daily basis to begin to experience your best possible life!

At the end of every chapter, you will find a set of my recommendations. They are in no particular order, and you can choose which ones to follow. Adding changes slowly makes it easier for them to become a permanent routine in your daily activity. It is always your choice whether or not to do any of the recommendations. You can do only one, or you can jump right in and do all the recommendations provided. The choice is always YOURS.

Take your time to really read and absorb the information provided in each chapter. Some of the information, you may already know, but think of it as a kind reminder to include it in your life. There will also be information that is so new to you, you might find it hard to believe. Take what feels good to you, what feels light, and leave what makes you feel heavy. That information is not for you. In Access Consciousness, we are taught that ‘what makes you feel light is your truth and what makes you feel heavy is not your truth’. Everyone is different and what is truth for one person may very well not be to another.

I recommend re-reading this book a couple of months after making some of the changes to your life. It may be that information that didn’t feel right to you in the first place, will all of a sudden feel like it is time to make that change. I can tell you that anything you do to change your lifestyle for the betterment of your health, is the best decision that you could ever make.

Raising your vibration will be doing Mother Earth a service. Like I mentioned, we are all connected and that includes the earth. When you raise your vibration, others around you will feel the benefits of that vibration. You will start a healing process that will help Mother Earth to heal.

Shall we begin? For now, we will cover what you can do to care for your Earthly Body. Remember, when you care for your Earthly Body, the benefits will flow into your Mental, Emotional, Etheric and Spiritual Bodies.

Let’s start with breathing. We all do that, but how WELL do you breathe?

**************************************************************

CHAPTER ONE

Back to the Top

Breathing

How many of you take breathing for granted? How many of you believe that breathing is just inhaling and exhaling? Think about it for a moment! It is the first thing and the last thing we do in life. Breathing properly is the first essential step to living. You breathe all day long to stay alive, but are you using your lungs’ full capacity? Most people are using only around 10 percent of their breath capacity. I found that hard to believe. What would happen if we used the other 90 percent of what our lungs were capable of? You need to eat Raw and Living food in order to get the enzymes and nutrients from your food, but without the oxygen that proper breathing gives you, how is your body assimilating those nutrients? It’s surprising how many people are shallow breathers. A perfect saying is breathe well and you will be well; breathe poorly and you will be poorly.

If you are a shallow breather, it will affect your sleep, emotions, energy levels, performance, temperature levels and your ability to relax and handle stress. It even lowers your vibration (energy) level. It will even affect your body’s pH balance, causing your body to be acidic (see Chapter Seven for more details on pH balance). Breathing influences everything about you. After discovering that I was a shallow breather, I started researching how to breathe properly. I was amazed to find out how it actually helped many people with asthma, poor circulation, allergies, high blood pressure and many other ailments.

Diaphragmatic breathing promotes the exchange of gases that takes place at the bottom of the lungs, and therefore is beneficial to all the systems of the body. For example, skin is your largest organ. When you breathe properly, you will supply it with more health-giving oxygen and nutrients than if you breathe shallowly. Skin is also an organ of elimination, helping to rid your body of toxins. The word ‘perspiration’ literally means ‘breathing through’.

The question is, what is the proper way to breathe?

Illustration by Heather Allison

Consider this:

* inhale through your nose - it filters out impurities

* 10-14 breathes per minute

* your abdomen should be moving out while you are inhaling and in during an exhale

* your breathing should be slow and deep

Once your breath goes through the proper passage (I won’t bore you with the technical terms), the oxygen is transferred through tiny tubes called capillaries and into the bloodstream, where it attaches to hemoglobin in the red blood cells before being transported throughout the body. If you are not breathing properly, how will the rest of your body get the oxygen it needs?

By my second year of being a ‘rawfoodist’ (I will explain this later), I found out that if you are not breathing properly, your cells are not getting the oxygen they require!!! It is estimated that in 24 hours approximately 20,000 litres of blood traverse the capillaries. Carbon dioxide, a by-product of this process, is transferred via the capillaries back into the airways to be expelled from the body (exhalation). This process will not work efficiently if there is any weakness or damage in the lungs, and you may develop a weakness from not breathing properly.

The main muscle that is used in breathing is called the diaphragm. It separates the chest and abdominal cavities. When we breathe in, the diaphragm moves down, which will create a vacuum in the upper chest cavity and causes air to be drawn into the lungs.

Your stomach should protrude during inhalation. When we inhale the rib cage stretches out and then recoils when you release the diaphragm and exhale. Once the diaphragm relaxes, the stomach flattens.

Illustration by Heather Allison

The liver, stomach, intestines, spleen, kidneys, pancreas and reproductive organs lie beneath the diaphragm and also move when we breathe.

Breathing actually massages these organs making sure they receive the oxygen and nutrients they require to function in a healthy way. With shallow breathing and only using upper chest breathing these organs lose this benefit and you start to have health problems.

Try this out: make sure that you have good posture for breathing properly, as it is important in being able to use the full capacity of your lungs. You can prove this by taking a deep breath, using good posture. Now slouch over and take a deep breath. You should have noticed that you were not able to get the same amount of air when you inhaled with the slouched posture.

Relaxed Breathing

In a relaxed seated position, place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. Focus on your breathing. Exhale through your nose or mouth completely, and then relax. Now gently breathe in through your nose and think about letting your stomach rise as your breath comes in and raises your lower hand. Now feel your stomach and your lower hand drop as you breathe out through your nose. Pause after exhaling. Continue