Robyn Randolph is a nutritionist, therapist and award winning chef. From her home in the Lake District she coaches and mentors people with food-related issues. She believes a raw diet can change lives, but realises the raw-route isn't for everyone.
Robin Randolph
How does she strike the balance?
I grew up in Beverly Hills and let me tell you, that was no picnic.
No, the picnic ended in fourth grade when I began drinking Siego diet drinks so I could join the ranks of girls over-focused on outward appearances. After all, wasn't that the real learning that was taking place, at my famous Beverly Hills High School?
Going to a high school that later would become the focus of a Hollywood TV show, "90210", says it all! In my years of high school I must have tried dozens of fad diets. The goal was always the same…get skinny no matter what it takes.
My parents were both born in London and when we moved to the USA when I was four, they were delighted to discover all the new "fast foods". We went from eating scones, clotted cream and fish and chips to McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Swanson TV dinners.
My dad taught us to think about or eat food, almost all the time. If it wasn't a meal time, it was snack time or tea time or time for a cigarette break. He eventually ate his way to diabetes and colon cancer, and sadly died an obese man.
I was raised eating a pathetic man-made diet of fast foods, additives and preservatives. Aged ten I was already receiving Demerol injections to combat the debilitating migraines I was suffering. I was constantly sick with all kinds of immune issues and by the time I was eighteen, I was addicted to nasal spray and nicotine. Next I developed hypoglycemia, where at times I would lose my vision and hearing or even pass out. Sometimes I needed to eat as many as three times in the night just to make it through to morning. I have had glandular fever, chronic fatigue, extreme candida and also suffered with severe anxiety attacks.
When I was forty, I got poisoned by the off-gassing molecules of an oil-based paint. I was taken to the hospital by ambulance, spent six hours on IV and sent home with fistfuls of pills. At times, people had to feed me and I couldn't even open my eyes. For months I could barely make it through each day, each hour and minute.
Something had to change, radically and fast.
I had no role models and simply had to learn how to eat raw foods in order to survive after being poisoned. A harsh lesson learned the hard way, but I have more than victoriously recovered from all those debilitating illnesses.
That's why I'm where I am now…to help others, hopefully with slightly less radical food issues!
Modern society with a 'time poor' culture has been driven towards more 'convenient' foods and quicker fixes for the resulting poor diet. Processed foods with a longer shelf life tends toward a cocktail of preservatives and additives, most widely used is sugar - even worse, it's refined sugar. The sugar addiction needs to be addressed, as does the habit of pumping yourself up with bad things such as caffeine and metabolic stimulants like grains, bread and pasta.
The courses I run and the teaching I do today are driven by my own experiences with food - I don't consider this a job, it's a passion which allows me to bring my years of training and experience to bear on the process, as a nutritionist, chef and Hakomi psychotherapist.
If you need the top 3 things to remember when thinking about changing your attitude to food and realising your life ambitions…here they are:
1. Never give up on your dreams 2. Always stay open to possibilities 3. When you love the body you have…you will have the body you love.