Angela Stanford - Nutritional Miracle Worker

I want to give a personal report on the exceptional abilities of Angela Stanford, the “Best of the East Bay” nutritionist and why you should strongly consider registering for her New Year’s Cleanse Series coming up at The Yoga Fusion.



I decided to put Angela to the most severe test I could imagine:  helping me improve my own eating habits.  Mind you, I eat pretty well and am reasonably conscious about what I eat and how often.  However, all of my good eating habits are the result of a daily visit to Whole Foods Market and spending an outrageous sum of my hard-earned money on their prepared foods.  For me, portion control is not a function of how much I think I should eat, it’s a function of whether I really want to buy more Whole Foods Italian Chicken Salad on their 6 months, no payments, no-interest financing plan.



Everybody has some sort of inadequacy in their eating habits, something they know they could be doing better.  Angela’s genius is that she helps each and every individual she works with find the strategies to make the necessary corrections.  Equally, or even more important, she helps inspire you to implement these new strategies and practices so they become second nature, the new habits of eating that result in a transformed relationship with food.  



The “less than optimal” habit I asked Angela to help me with was preparing my own food.  For me, preparing my own meals is completely foreign to me. I just never even considered it, nor did I think I would ever really change this deeply ingrained habit.  Habits around food are some of the most deeply imbedded habits we own, having been imprinted during our earliest years and very rarely being subject to any sort of conscious change.  The Yoga Masters called these deeply ingrained habits “samskaras”, which means “rut” or “groove” in the brain, and there can be no better metaphor to use when it comes to how automatically and unconsciously I operate until it comes to putting food in my face.



Angela said she could help me with my hopeless habit and inclination to never prepare any meal other than to dump one carton of Whole Foods into another carton of Whole Foods.  I was skeptical, but since The Yoga Fusion features Angela and touts her skill as nutritional guru, I figured I would trust to see if she could work her magic on me.  Angela told me we were going to perform a miracle: she was going to teach me to make soup.



Inwardly, I scoffed.  Angela has no idea what’s she up against with me, I thought.  Together, we decided we would trade a float in my isolation tank in exchange for her mentoring of my soup-building capacity.  Leading up to the big day of instruction, my enthusiasm began to wane as the stark realization dawned on me that I would have to turn my stove on and do [some sort of] cutting-chopping-measuring-combining-timing-complexity thing that almost certainly would result in a massive tension headache and a soup that would probably taste so bad I would have to dump it in the creek behind my cottage after Angela had left.  This was how confident I was when I heard Angela knock on my door for my training regimen.  I was thinking of escaping out the back door and disappearing into the woodlands behind my house, but I was pretty sure she saw my car in the garage and knew I was home.



Thus commenced the miracle.  Angela, with the enthusiasm and self-assured confidence that only the most knowledgeable possess, strode into my kitchen and set down three carrying bags, holding everything I would need to make fool-proof and delicious soup.  My excuse to get out of the ordeal was going to be that I didn’t have the necessary tools or ingredients to make anything other than pre-packaged Top Ramen noodles, but she anticipated that and brought everything!  A true cooking angel.  In her bags were fresh, organic vegetables, all the necessary spices, chopping knives, various broths, even the pot necessary for making the soup.  She even instilled in me the courage to go next door and borrow a chopping block from my neighbor!  We truly do still live in the age of miracles.



Angela set before me something called a “recipe”, something I had never encountered before.    This complex document outlined the exact step-by-step instructions for building a terribly complicated sounding soup, far beyond my understanding, called “Red Lentil and Sweet Potato Stew”.  Somehow, the hopeless task of constructing such a delicacy seemed slightly less impossible.  A glimmer of hope, if not a spark of giddiness began to course through me.  This was not only a recipe for soup, it was a recipe for empowering my transformation with food. 
 


The coolest thing about Angela is that she’ll meet you exactly where you are in your experience and habits with food.  The greatest teachers are like that.  They understand exactly how to find the point where you personally need help and to design a regimen that lifts you over the hump.  Not only does this instill a new ability on the part of the student, it does something vastly more powerful:  It instills confidence on the part of the student he or she can learn, improve, make progress, and even better, have fun doing it.  This is where Angela excels.



Before I knew it, I was having a gay old time chopping, crying (onions, who knew!), measuring, sautéing, timing, pouring, scrolling down the previously impossible “recipe” document with relative ease and, dare I say it, cockiness?  Angela was my Soup-Coach and we were rocking together!  Amazing aromas began to waft around my previous scent-barren kitchen.  A  soup-like mixture began to simmer in a previously foreign to me object called a “4-quart container”.  Woo-hoo!  I was indeed actually cooking with fire now.  Garlic was being pressed, ginger was being sliced, lentils were being washed, sweet potatoes were disrobing their hidden inner treasure; it was a 3-ring circus of activity and I was actually managing the entire affair without freaking out, with the help of the Soup-Goddess carefully watching over me.



Before I knew it, in just a few minutes, a gorgeous pot of soup was simmering and all that was left was to correctly time the simmering, about 25 minutes.  At this point, a panic overcame me...I owned nothing to time the simmering with!  So close to soup victory and now the entire enterprise was doomed to horrible boiling failure.  All the work I had done with Soup-Coach was consigned to boil away endlessly until the entire batch of soup had evaporated into nothingness.  Red lentil and sweet potato gas dispersing out into the atmosphere, lost forever until it cooled and rained designer soup showers over the Sierra Nevada.  All was lost. 



The best teachers always find a way to overcome the student’s greatest challenge and once again, Angela came through.  Rather than allow me to boil my soup into acid-rain, she reminded me that my iPhone had “an app for that”, a perfectly good timer for timing all things, especially a hard-fought soup that was in danger of extinction.  After setting the soup-timer on my phone, Angela went off to simmer in my float tank while the soup on the stove did the same. 



Twenty-five minutes of unbearable anticipation...how would the soup turn out?  The waiting was excruciating, the anticipation overwhelming.  I was going to give birth to the first thing I’d ever cooked.  Not being a father and never having had the experience of the birth of a child, I knew this might be the closest I would ever come to such a hallowed moment.  How I wanted the experiment to be a success; how I feared clandestinely dumping the mutant soup into the creek behind my cottage if I had created a soup monstrosity.  Soon the proof would come, I’d be counting soup fingers and toes.



By the time Angela emerged in one hour, I had finished the simmering and had eaten two huge bowls of the best soup I’d ever eaten, much less made on my own.  The soup was delicious on its own, but it was made all the more so because of the pride and satisfaction of doing it on my own, under the careful tutelage of my Soup-guru.  I can’t tell you the eagerness and enthusiasm for creating new soups that has come over me; I’m actually looking forward to it.  A whole new spectrum of living has emerged for me, an entire new hobby, healthy, creative, and fascinating.  Cooking is a Yoga unto itself and a beautiful mode of meditation and single-minded purpose that I can now practice every day and reap the host of rewards that accrue from preparing the exceptional menus that Angela left for me to consider.



Now, I know my food dilemma was rather unusual, probably unlike yours, but that is irrelevant.  What mattered was that Nutritional Goddess Angela Stanford knew exactly how to meet my challenge and she designed a near-perfect strategy for helping me overcome my food dilemma.  Now I have the interest, the confidence, and the enthusiasm to build entirely new habits of diet, food preparation, and fresh food consumption.  Angela opened up a new world to me, the world of healthy eating and creative cooking and for that, I am forever grateful.



I am just one of countless testimonials to Angela’s prowess at bringing out the best in her dietary students.  I feel very fortunate to host Angela and her upcoming Cleanse Series in January, “Nourishing You - A 28 Day Cleanse”.  Whatever your dietary concern, issue, habit, or dilemma, I am absolutely certain that Angela will exceed your expectations as she so thoroughly did mine.  Angela is a complete delight to work with and she makes healthy eating and cleaning up your relationship with food the most utterly enjoyable affair.  Angela will change your life for the better and I personally guarantee you, she has the recipe for your happiness.