Eat Dance Live

Thank you Gina for your amazing post today for what I didn't even know was National Love Your Body Day! For those of you who are too busy and/or lazy to click on that link, here are the two main take-aways from that article I think everyone including myself should listen to: 1) "Our bodies are always talking to us and it's up to us to actually stop and listen to what they're saying." I totally agree with this and I think that this is the most important thing of all. We think we know our bodies but half the time we are too busy listening to our egos to figure out what are physical bodies are actually asking for. Most people ask me why I went vegan, and even more people ask me why I went raw... the honest answer is, my body told me to. There's nothing more to it than that. I just woke up one morning and knew that's what I had to do. It was only after I became vegan and more recently raw that I looked into all the additional environmental/health/ethical/phys...

We just got back from the DC Green Festival and boy did we have an awesome day! I woke up so giddy to go this morning I felt like a five year old on Christmas or a kid in a candy store (a raw organic candy store that is!) Ready to stock up on food, energy and life awesomeness, we set out early in the morning to get there as early as possible. We got in pretty fast thanks to complimentary tickets I won from a VegNews giveaway (they're awesome because they now have online subscriptions to stop killing trees! Gotta love companies who walk the walk...) First stop was Pangea Organics of course. The mother of all organic care products. If you start a Pangea regime, you will honestly not know what hit you. My mom taught me early on that your skin is your biggest organ so you should take care of it. Moisturize every day and what not, but the other steps (exfoliating, cleansing, weekly masks, etc.) are just as important to keep you radiant and glowing. Plus, if you wear organic b...

So I know most of you are probably thinking "bla bla bla, enough with the philosophy and organic brainwashing, where's the food?"... and I totally understand, so here I go shaking off my foodie laziness to blog about food again. It's fall so that means it's time to experiment with yummy pumpkins and squash again! There's something that really excites me about this particular change of season. One thing I've realized about raw 'cooking' is that y ou really don't have to pay attention to measurement as  much as much as when you are doing something as chemically complex as baking. If you have a problem with a raw recipe you  can always tweak it a bit and there is only so wrong you can go. Given my first post , it would seem raw food is perfectly suited to the way I cook anyway! Here's my latest creation and it's unfortunately not 100% raw. I still haven't fully figured out how to manage using squash/pumpkins without steaming the...

When people go to workshops, be they dance or otherwise, we have a certain conception of what to expect, and what we want to get out of the experience. We tend to want to "get out money's worth" or get the most bang for out buck. For dance anyway, we've become stuck in this paradigm that we need to learn lots of new combinations and dance moves, master a new choreography, and/or feel the burn by having a crazy intense workout with everything from yoga, warm-ups, drills, isolations, ab work, leg work, arm work, chest work... the list goes on and out need to achieve never ends. This weekend that paradigm shifted when I attended a two-day Rachel Brice workshop hosted by Sahara Dance Studio right here in DC. Like 99.9% of the tribal dance community, Rachel is something of my dance hero (read: total girl crush). After seeing tribal for the first time ever in Canada, my second exposure to the style was through her Tribal Fusion: Yoga Isolation & Drills DVD...

As I've mentioned before, I'm one of the DC interns for the Organic Consumers Association . The best working perk of my life is that my awesome boss has taken me to the OCA's newest offshoot, Via Organica ("the Organic Way") in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for the week. Our director, Ronnie Cummins, is truly the most inspiring figurehead of the organic revolution that I've met. He and an amazing team of activists here launched Via Organica about a year ago to bring organics to a new level in Mexico. Continuing the OCA's tradition for grassroots activism, VO has begun a number of projects to help San Miguel's compasenos reclaim their land and dedicate it to sustainable, organic farming. VO also has a fully operational farm on their land through which they partially supply the Via Organica store and cafe in downtown San Miguel. In addition, they hold workshops and classes to teach local compasenos about everything from affordable green buil...

After the storm that Food, Inc. has caused since its release, here's another quick video about an upcoming movie that'll keep your mind on organics: And check out their super cute website !

One of the major draws of coming back to the DC area was knowing that we could be close to my parents' place aka. that we would have access to their garden to get back into some serious veggie planting. Throughout my childhood, my family has always stuck to the simple herbs, tomatoes, and sweet peppers side of gardening as those are usually fairly low maintenance plants and are pretty fail safe. But this year? Noooo. Andrew and I decided that this year would be our serious gardener year, our first year of really gardening together, and that we would go big or go home... and it's worked out great! Organic gardening is both a lot of hard work and very little effort all at the same time. It blows my mind how many people (ie. my entire extended family) think that organic gardening comes with all this extra effort, that our garden will be torn apart by bunnies, infested with pests, and grown over by weeds. You know what? When I see 'conventional' gardeners spraying their gar...