As the seasons change so does our body and its needs. Spring is a time of awakening and renewal inside us. As you know, there is a tradition of "cleaning house" in spring and we must learn the importance of shifting our diets in this season so that our body may successfully perform its own spring cleaning.

After working with so many of you we know that an important issue is that we provide you with recipes that are easy and quick to prepare. We also know that it is easier for many of you if recipes include familiar elements or if they are versions of meals that are already familiar to you and your kids. This spring we have taken our strong background in the research and development of healthful nutrition practices and combined it with the knowledge Maria brings from her latest studies at the Kushi Institute to be able to provide you with Macro-Mediterranean versions of familiar foods like Spaghetti with "Wheatballs", Pizza, Enchiladas, Veggie Burgers, Burritos, Falafel as well as Mediterranean traditional Paella, soups, creams and salads.

We have created these recipes according to macrobiotic principles to help facilitate your body's natural cleansing this spring and to support your liver, which is the most active organ in the spring cleansing process as your body transitions away from the heavy and dense foods that have sustained it throughout the cold winter. Through these recipes you will learn about the specific cooking styles, grains, vegetables, proteins and flavors that will help your body change as nature changes, harmonizing with it, and begin feeling lighter,  more active and energized.

We have also designed recipes to help your body discharge accumulated methyl-mercury in fish and other heavy metals that are a common detriment to health. Heavy metal accumulation is an inevitable product of contamination in some of the foods we eat as well as increasingly poor air quality due to deteriorating regulations of the emissions of these substances in industry. To further strengthen your body, some of the ingredients used in the recipes are known to help reduce the effects of your body's continual exposure to radiation from computers, cell phones, wireless networks, etc...

Some of the ingredients we use are very powerful aids in lowering cholesterol naturally, which is one of the keys to health and a big issue right now in the west. Although organizations like the American Heart Association recommend levels under 200mg/dl, the latest studies tell us that 35% of heart attacks occur in individuals with cholesterol levels between 150 and 200mg/dl. These studies report that only by maintaining a cholesterol level below 150mg/dl can we truly avoid heart disease and that this goal is achievable through dietary modification alone.

To facilitate your eating healthfully despite a busy lifestyle, we have combined these recipes into our weekly meal plans that provide balanced nutrition and meet the most up-to-date dietary recommendations for frequency and amounts of proteins, sea vegetables, nuts and seeds, fermented foods, etc.. to be included weekly in a healthful eating practice. We are able to offer this to you as a direct benefit of Maria's time in and continual contact with the macrobiotic counseling community and the Kushi Institute.

These meal plans can be modified to meet your personal needs and if necessary, help you achieve weight loss, support healing or improve your personal condition. As you practice and gain a greater understanding of the principles upon which these meal plans are based, you will learn to design your own meal plans and adapt the recipes you find to the principles we teach. This way you may take full control of your practice to promote your own health, quality of life and longevity.

For those of you who haven't worked with us, we began our research into healthier ways of eating eight years ago and since then have been evolving a system to meet the challenge of designing a healthful diet while spending the minimum amount of time on weekly food planning and preparation. As we did our research, we began to find testimonials demonstrating the prevention or support in  healing disease through diet with macrobiotics.  These findings shed new light on the possibilities of healthful eating, but we had trouble finding cookbooks with simple, easy and delicious meals that fit the requirements. We wanted to improve our diet but found that most recipes were both time consuming to make and in the end not very tasty. Our frustration with this has caused us to spend the past eight years creating and perfecting our own recipes to make ones that are easy and that taste great. Once we got a lot of recipes we decided to come up with a system to organize them so that we could make sure to meet the body's requirements, such as recommended intakes for iron, calcium, protein, etc.. on a weekly basis. This system consists of weeks of recipes that combine into a nutritionally complete and varied diet all organized into a rotational calendar and include a pre-made shopping list for each week to save time on all the repetitive tasks associated with meal planning.

We would like to share with you how lucky we feel to have found this way of living that gives us more direct control over our health and well-being. There are so many people who live in fear of a day when they will suddenly discover that they have a disease and must face treatment but are not aware of many things that they may unconsciously do each day that could contribute to their decline in health. If there is one thing we have learned through all this it is that most serious diseases don't strike suddenly, they tend to build up inside us over long periods of time and that there are many things we can do each day to prevent or at least reduce the effects of these diseases. We have also learned through our research that many of the most feared diseases today were actually not that common just a century or two ago. These diseases have become much more prevalent as we have shifted our diets away from the balance, dictated by nature, that was upheld in our traditional cultures since the beginning of time. The work our cultures must do now is really to find ways to return to these principles that can be practically combined with a modern lifestyle. This is the challenge that we address each day as we develop our tools so that we may help make this return to the wisdom of traditional eating easier for everyone. Having the opportunity to share this knowledge with others continues to be our ultimate goal when working with clients and has truly been the driving force behind, and our mission when creating this profession for ourselves.

Thank you to all of you who have contributed to make our work possible.