Lindsaya is a Wellness Warrior and member of the Wellness Collective. After years of study and personal transformation, she developed Conscious Consumption Strategies for physical, emotional and spiritual health. These strategies enabled her to overcome chronic health and obesity issues, mental health challenges, and infertility. Over the last 17 years, Lindsaya has built an organization and shared what she learned in personal, group, and online events. She has been honored to have been part of over 400 families adding more plants into their bodies daily, helped multiple schools and even more homes grow gardens year-round. She is a multi-passionate creative force who will blow you away with creative solutions, simple strategies, and collaborative spirit.
What do you see as the key factors of good nutrition?
To me, the most important thing is returning to our connection with the power of plants. Our bodies are meant to be consistently fueled by as many different plant varieties as possible. There are many appealing ways to find and consume these varieties…I teach in terms of good, better, and best options. Eating whole raw food is the best. It is good to get plants that are grown close to home and better if they are organically grown and ideally regenerative. These factors keep us more aligned with the kind of food sources and energy sources we are meant to consume.
In what ways is nutrition relevant to health and well-being?
We are what we come from and what we consume. We cannot change what we come from, but we can change or modify what we consume. Thinking about food as fuel and realizing that plants are the best fuel is a pillar for maintaining health. Plant food brings us power by connecting us to the earth and to universal energy.
How does food relate to Chakras?
There are seven earthly or body chakras and each chakra is an energy force. Food needs to be consumed in all its natural forms and variety to fuel and maintain a balance of energy among these chakras. We can look to the rainbow of the seven bodily chakra colors to see the spectrum of plant foods each energy source requires.
I encourage people to learn about the chakras and how they embody our life experiences. You can feel how trauma or ailment is manifested in a certain part of your body and related to a chakra. Anything emotional is going to impact heart chakra and that region of our body, for example.
The foods that you consume to fuel a chakra will energize the other aspects of your life---that is the belief. For me there is no question about the correlation and the ancient practice has been more universally used than most other forms of medicine available today. When we select what to eat, we can ask ourselves what the best form of fuel is for releasing something that may be locked up or hindering us, and it can be wise to lean into a specific chakra that we are fueling. Overall, however, we want to maintain balance and go back to the importance of the rainbow. The colors of the chakra are a rainbow and so if we are keeping them all fueled, it means we're eating all the variety of colors every single day in as many meals as possible.
How does sound energy relate to Chakras?
Sound is everything—it is our instrument. Whether you call it God, higher source, or evolution, it is literally what we were given to connect. Our tool is our voice, it is how we communicate. We live in a world in which vibration matters both in tone, and in sound resonance. You know you respond to something musical, but you also respond to someone's voice or the breeze through the trees on a mountaintop. These things create alignment. They bring a knowing because as a species one of our most ancient ways of being in the community was in song and dance. Sound is where we celebrate, where we come together where we have our oldest form of community. Sound is where we remember, and any form of sound healing can initiate that remembering. There are so many ways in which we can do this all with our own instrument of our voice and our body to that of external instruments that were able to play or simply be on the receiving end of experiencing.
What expectations do people have about your offerings, and what surprises them?
The biggest hurdles are in learning new information or reprogramming. We have all been misinformed. The number one hurdle that I hear—in fact, I heard it this morning in our gathering from a dear friend—is to question whether there would be enough protein in his plant diet. This person is an active life-changer who has great positive impact in the health products he offers, is a personal trainer and much more. He is committing to going plant-based although he had never considered it because of the influence of our wellness community. I encourage people not to worry about a protein deficit problem that I've literally never seen occur for anyone who consumes whole plant food. Here is the problem, we’re talking about plants not processed foods. If we gave ourselves the chance to eat it for 7, 10, 15, 30, or 45 days, it would not be called into question because you energetically shift. We've been trained to count calories and other macros and so I invite them to count some real wellness related things and watch their health change.
What kind of response or feedback do you get from your customers/clients?
One of the obstacles that people mention all the time is the concern that it is hard to shop for and prep for plant food meals. They do not know what to cook and they do not know what to eat. And so, this is when it is so valuable to bring community together and show, for example how to assemble and keep a week’s worth of salads in mason jars. The goal is to bring people together to show the simplicity of powering ourselves with plants and as we continue, we will feel the vibrational shift because the more plant food that you eat the more that you change.
Can you share any favorite or “Aha” moments that you have witnessed?
Oh, my goodness, the “Aha” is watching a baby eating or a toddler eating salad for the first time. Another rewarding moment is someone sending me a picture of switching out their dairy milk for organic almond milk— that just happened this week. Another person just this week sent me a photo of their plant-fueled dinner on their 33rd day of eating exclusively plants. Another person just completed 7 days of plant-based eating and feeling so good she's continuing forward and only adding back eggs that she herself has from her own backyard. These are just a few of the joys from continuing to walk in the way the Wellness Warrior. I have had this great opportunity to have impact on people and inspire them to eat more plants.
What would you like people to know or understand about your work?
People sometimes think the Wellness Warrior way of eating is hard to do. All that is needed, however, is to re-awaken people’s awareness of options so they can make simple adjustments even if they don’t make major changes. Remember the Good, Better, Best concept. Yes, canned beans aren't ideal—they don't live in the best category, but they do live in the better category. Better can mean getting organic beans, those in BPA-free jars or cans, or even better ones which are in glass jars. There is always a step forward in the right direction and it doesn't mean perfection. We can’t hold ourselves to these standards if we are working with someone who is eating at McDonald's 5 days a week—getting their miraculous compliance to a plant food protocol would be as likely as winning the lottery. So instead, we need to focus on how could we help that person…what could we do for that person to help them do a little better for themselves? Because the Wellness Warrior way is not a firm set of rules, it is the next step that you're loving on yourself enough to start practicing… so that you can amplify the Wellness Warrior that lives within.