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Sherry Strong Interview

KAMAHL BARHOUSH:Welcome back everybody. I'm Kamahl Barhoush from the Executive Success Institute and PT Business Edge. Today, it's my great pleasure to be chatting with Sherry Strong, who is a food philosopher and nutritional strategist through www.sherrystrong.com. And just to let you know, before I introduce Sherry to you, if you hear any strange noises or any weird sounds in the background, I'm actually at a wonderful property just north of Melbourne at Sherry’s house. It's just fantastic to be here. So welcome Sherry and such a great pleasure to have you.

SHERRY STRONG: My absolute pleasure to be here.

KAMAHL: Sherry, I already know about all the amazing things that you do through looking at your website at www.sherrystrong.com. But for the sake of the listeners, could you tell us a little bit more about what you do and what it offers.

SHERRY: Okay. My core business of what I do on my own is really around the education, speaking, training; I run retreats, wellness retreats. So that can be a public program that the public can come along to. But I also offer it for businesses. If they have their executives and they're wanting their executives to go through their business programs that they do on retreats. I can then come in and create a wellness retreat around all the business that they're getting done. So they essentially get two conferences in one. I also do one-on-one coaching. I have programs that I put people through that help them understand the concepts and live the concepts that will bring them amazing energy and health and in many cases reverse disease.

KAMAHL: Oh fantastic! How did you get involved in the business of food philosophy?

SHERRY: Well, as I say to people, there's not an association of food philosophers. But what I did was when I first started studying nutrition, I realised that there were several things going on. One – it's a business and it's full of agendas and there are very few people actually teaching the truth based on science and nature. Two – I really felt that people were completely drowning in information. At that time, I was the Victorian Chair of Nutrition Australia. I was studying nutrition and health and behavioural sciences at Deakin. I was involved in another community called Body, Image and Health. Later on became the Melbourne Head of Slow Food. With all this kind of information, I realised that people were drowning in so much information and it's conflicting. It's conflicting because people have agendas. Often in order to make a living in a profession, you have to sell something. Selling carrots, you know something that truly heals people, there's not a great mark-up on it. There's not margins on it.

© Executive Success Institute 2011 of 24

http://www.sherrystrong.com/



What we found in the industry of food and supplements is the things that we can patent or value add so no one else was doing them were you could market those things. Then they created a lot of science. They found science to support it. I found that there was a lot of confusion. So one day people would hear that soy was this wonder food that’s going to solve all their nutritional problems, world peace, relationship problems and everything. It's amazing, right? You got to eat soy. And then the next day, you'd see a report on 60 Minutes where they're saying oh don’t eat soy, it's bad for you, it’s going to damage your children and all that kind of thing.

So I spent a lot of time in nature actually and a lot of time walking and contemplating. How do we actually sort through this? I came up with this concept. I try and remove the ego from that in saying I downloaded the concept. I was gifted this concept which I call Nature’s Principle. From that, I developed a bunch of other theories, philosophies, that really succinctly tell us and elegantly tell us how it's all meant to be working. It doesn't actually have to be that confusing. So that's how I call myself a food philosopher. As a nutritionist, I then moved away from prescriptive programs and actually developed strategies for people to find what works for them.

KAMAHL: Within those strategies, it’s very interesting, I know that . . . at the heart of it, you're still a scientist as well and I come from a science background. There is so much more information. One thing I really found is through working within the scientific community. The more we find the more we realise we don’t know. So we go on a search to find those that we don’t know and then we discover some more new things. As we discover new things, we realise there's even more we don’t know. Talking to someone else in the scientific community, we understand this concept, how do people at home who just have no exposure to sciences in their purest form like this, how are they supposed to get this message?

SHERRY: Such a great question. In the four hours we're going to be talking here, I'd like to explain it to you. But it just brings up this beautiful kind of analogy that I make. It's that there's so much information and when you drill down into the microscopic minutia of it. So when you think about a lawyer cross examining someone on the witness stand. When you go into microscopic detail, instead of looking at an overview or macro, you can actually make a lie look like the truth and you can make the truth look like a lie. The human body is infinitely more complex and we even have the capacity to actually totally understand how it works right now. As you say, the more we discover the more we learn. I remember about 10 or 15 years ago, reading something where they had realised that inner space is as expansive as outer space. So we're still exploring in a sense these galaxies on a micro level.

[00:05:40]



The thing that I find that is so amazing, that is so beautiful about nature is that even though the body and how it works and it’s relationship with what we eat is infinitely complex, the user manual, how we're actually meant to use it and function is incredibly simple. See nature actually tells us, I believe in what I've observed, what to eat and the quantities to eat it and by how and when and how easily it’s obtained in nature. So that’s which is most abundant we're meant to have the most of. Harder to obtain in nature, we're meant to have less of it. If you cannot get it in nature, not only is it harmful to the body and the planet, you don’t need it.

KAMAHL: Just a second, if I can just pause you there for a minute, are you telling me that you've actually been able to grasp the complexity of the scientific world and all of the things that we're discovering and create a food and nutrition for dummies manual in its simplest form?

SHERRY: Well, I think the dummies of course is the new word for it.

KAMAHL: Of course I'm coining a term off a very popular series of books.

SHERRY: Yes, I completely understand it. Really what it does, what you're saying fits in with this arrogance that we've had within the scientific community of actually believing that we're so much more intelligent and superior to primitive cultures. We actually call them primitive, as in primal is something not as good as we the advanced. It's actually what we condescendingly refer to as the dummies, you know the primitives, the child in the most basic, primitive culture that has a history of longevity and well being to a long age. Yet has a greater understanding than most people, I would say with degrees, in the western world. It comes to the factors that nature actually communicates to us and when we can actually have the humility to work within nature and listen to it. That’s why a child in one of those cultures has no idea what it’s recommended daily intake of vitamin C is. They have no idea what protein to carb ratio they need. And yet, they don’t have the same kind of diseases like ADHD and diabetes or childhood obesity or now we're saying children as young as six having the heart and arteries of a 50-year-old. It’s because these children that we refer to in primitive cultures are eating close to nature, in context with nature, seasonally, locally, whole food, slow food, long before they were kind of buzzwords. It's just how we did life. That's how we did food. Whereas now, we've got all the science and we're manipulating our food and we're contorting it and we're extracting macro and micro nutrients, out of balance to what they were in the full and intact state, processing the heck out of it, putting toxic chemicals into it. Not to mention after the processing, but while we're growing it. And we're wondering why we're so disconnected to nature and have no idea what we're meant to be eating.



KAMAHL: The simplicity with which you're comprehending what's going on and being able to discuss it is truly remarkable. I, certainly, and my other work colleagues that have experienced you through your public talks certainly consider you the expert in this field. I was going through some of your achievements and some of your accomplishments and I just did a quick search online and there you are onstage in Japan and North America and you're writing books and there are DVDs. What would be the combination of knowledge and experience do you consider that has led you to become the expert in this field?

SHERRY: Oh, that just sounds really grand. I kind of giggle when you're saying that.

KAMAHL: And I say that. But just to explain, I totally saw you blush. But the experience that I have with your message is that one person in one seminar picked up one thing that you said and this has happened directly in my life. And that person, who happens to be my fiancée, took that one message into her workplace and has transformed her entire workplace. So the humility is lovely. But there is a reality in that, in that what you're saying has a powerful truth that resonates right at the core. There's a combination of things that you have studied and done and believed and philosophised yourself that has led you to this point. So how would you describe that?

[00:10:00]

SHERRY: Okay, there are a few quotes that come to mind. One is because the concept that I teach, these philosophies, people have used beautiful words that I try and keep in perspective. They’ve said it's brilliant, they said it's genius and that’s why I always give attribution to downloading it. There's a great TED talk that Elizabeth Gilbert speaks on about downloading genius. With that kind of point of view, what I talk about is based on truth, science and nature. And science in its purest form is all about the pursuit of truth. Schopenhauer 10.41 had a great quote. He said 'All truth passes through three phases. First, it's ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. Third, it's declared self-evident'.

Another quote is Einstein. People said that he was a genius and his take on it was he just stayed on problems much longer than other people did. So I believe there's genius in all of us. When we're so possessed by a thought or something we want to find out and if we just persist and we persist and we explore it and refine it, everyone has the capacity to do that. I think in my walks, I downloaded nature’s principle and I just stuck with it because I knew there's this some kind of great truth in it. If I can just give people a little snapshot of how it works is if you think about . . . okay, so nature tells us what to eat and the quantities to it and by how easily and when it’s obtained in nature. So that which is most abundant we're meant to have the most of. Harder to obtain, we need less of. Cannot get it, we don’t need it. So here we go. So what is our most



primary nutrient, we're completely life dependent on, if we don’t get it within seconds we die, seconds?

KAMAHL: Obviously, the air that we breathe.

SHERRY: Absolutely. Where do you find air?

KAMAHL: I'm glad I got that right by the way.

SHERRY: You'd be amazed how many people say water.

KAMAHL: Oh really?

SHERRY: Yes. So where do we find air?

KAMAHL: Well, it's all around us, isn't it? In the atmosphere.

SHERRY: Everywhere. Our primary nutrient, we're most life dependent on, isn't it convenient that it's everywhere? Second most primary nutrient that we can't survive days without?

KAMAHL: Is water.

SHERRY: Yeah. In fact, most people don’t even think of air and water as nutrients. Try and live without them though had you'll find out how quickly we need these nourishments. It provides nourishment. We know that the quality of the breath that we have and the air that we breathe makes a difference to our vitality. We know the difference between the quality of the water we drink makes a difference to our vitality. And then the third most abundant nutrient is vegetation. But even within vegetation, there's a hierarchy and nature actually has a way of communicating what we're meant to be eating. If you think about it just from very simple terms, we've been told by nutritionists and dieticians for years that we need to have more vegetables and fruit. Nature actually tells us that because there are more species of vegetables than fruit. Not only that, vegetables, you can pick them straight up off the ground. When they're young they're the most nutritious. They're actually at their tastiest. They have the most delicious kind of flavour to them. They're at their most vital. You can eat them raw straightaway.

As they start to age and mature, they become a little bit more bitter and not as palatable and we find out they're not as nourishing as when they're young. Whereas fruit, you usually have to climb a tree to get it. So nature even says let's extend and make you work harder. But even if it's in the form of a berry, we have to pick lots of them. It still has to grow to maturity and then ripen before it’s palatable. Interestingly enough, in the ripening process, that's where most of the nutrients are infused into that fruit that you eat so you get more nourishment from it. Nature actually indicates to your tastebuds. If you just wait a little bit longer, not



only will it taste sweeter and more developed, but it's going to make you feel better as you eat it. And then I go through the whole kind of hierarchy of foods and things like that. But really what happens is when people start to eat out of context of nature, they start to become unbalanced.

KAMAHL: It really is so simple and everything you were just saying then just rings true. I was certainly picturing mankind, even one generation ago, walking through the forests and finding their . . . may be just a bit more than one generation ago, but walking through the forests, finding their vegetables and their winter crops as well in the ground, and springtime comes and we like for the fruits to ripen. It really is so simple. In saying that, with your experience in mind, what would you consider the top three things that people should know about how to look after their body?

[00:15:00]

SHERRY: The first thing that I always get people to understand is that you're a composite being, you are mind, body and spirit and that they work together to make you healthy. If you just pay attention to the physical body and you don’t pay attention to your mind or your spirit, it becomes a one-dimensional kind of health experience. I see a lot of people who are so kind of in their head about it and they're not experienced in the richness of life. They're exercising with the point to just create a certain body fat percentage and there's no joy in it. As my dear colleague Charles Eisenstein, he wrote the yoga vidhi and transformational weight losses, they’ll work out in a gym and they’ll spend two hours lifting weight and they haven't accomplished anything. So they’ll run for two hours on a treadmill and they’ve got nowhere, you see.

They’ve forgotten about the beauty of actually moving earth in a garden and that you can work up beautiful muscle in a garden doing that. They forgot about the beauty of walking in nature and how it actually becomes a transformational process in itself of walking, connecting with nature, being completely present in the actual moment instead of listening to music and going elsewhere. So there's a disconnect between you're moving your body and what you're doing. So health really is a mind-body-spirit experience. If I was to categorise probably in the hierarchy of when you're taking care of the health is you need to, I would actually say, focus on your spirit, then your body and then your mind. Because what happens is your spirit will tell you, give you the intuition to say when something is right or not right with you. If you listen to that, the process of actually taking care of your health becomes much more joyful. I don’t know if you've ever had the experience where there's an exercise that just jars against you and you've done it because your head tells you it’s a great thing to do.

KAMAHL: Oh many times. Many times.



SHERRY: Yeah. And then you find the thing that you absolutely love doing and it no longer becomes effort. It no longer becomes work. It becomes something that you just look forward and you become so present in. Your spirit will actually tell you the difference between those things.

KAMAHL: I liken that to the executive that sits in his office all day and he's on the computer and he's doing the hard work and he's headachy and the stresses of the work life and the work environment. And then he goes home and he's working in his garden, that’s something that he loves to do, growing roses or whatever it is that he loves, and he may be putting the same amount of time and effort into that gardening activity or whatever the hobby may be. But to him, it is effortless.

SHERRY: That’s correct. It feeds his spirit.

KAMAHL: I mean it’s such common sense. Is it really that simple?

SHERRY: Well, here's the thing . . . simple, yes absolutely. All the great things that we do in life, the great findings have simplicity in them. The thing we confuse is that simple doesn't mean easy. So it's not the easiest route, particularly the way we're set up now. In nature, it was actually the easiest route. So the things that were best for you, nature put easiest to obtain. But it required more effort to actually gather it. As we decided we wanted to spend less time hunting and gathering and more time in developing and evolution so we can actually have these wonderful computers that we're recording this on, which is a wonderful development in life, we needed to have food provided much more easily. When it was taken out of our hands, it was taken out of that natural context. Now what would be so easy a hundred years ago, if someone showed up in your doorstep a hundred years ago and said I can get organic food delivered to your door and all you need to do . . . they would think that’s just the most amazing thing in the world, right?

All you have to do is go to a farmer’s market and I'll be there. Everything you need, your bread, your meat, whatever you want to eat, your veggies, fruit, it's all there and it’s organic. People would think oh my goodness, that’s the most easiest thing in the whole world. I don’t have to garden for all that kind of thing. But now we go through a drive through and we think taking that rubbish from the car to the bin is too much effort. We go home and we have a meal. I run a cooking school from home called the Food Lover’s Workshop for many years. I had many people come through my door saying if a meal takes longer than 30 minutes, I'm not interested in learning how to cook it. So they’ve kind of lost context of that whole thing that yes, it absolutely is simple. Execution is not as hard as you think, but it’s not easier than the convenience route. The big key and the big takeaway is that easier has not made us happier. That’s the . . .



KAMAHL: Absolutely. As you say, I'm just thinking about what some of our other colleagues, some of the other experts in their fields have been saying in these interviews. I think about to a wonderful friend of mine, Paul Collins, who's the body coach and has been training everywhere from primary school students to international athletes and everything in between for years. His approach is just exactly what you're saying, mind, body and spirit. I asked him about this. I said what about the time poor parents. The time poor parents is I want to spend an hour doing their food or . . . it’s a reality for a lot of people. I welcome your response on this. Because his response to that was when you're actually doing those things, when you're respecting your body . . . he talked about taking the car to the mechanic and you take it in and you get it tuned, you get your tires filled and you change the oil and you do that sort of thing. He mentioned the same thing with the body. You look after it with good food. He's getting regular massages and osteopathy and all these wonderful things. Treating his body like that, really respecting it.

[00:20:35]

What he actually finds is that his energy levels, since he began doing that, have tripled. His productivity in the time that he is working has even more . . . I've seen this guy work and the amount of stuff that he pumps out in a day with the energy and vitality that he has has to be seen to be believed in. He's talking about people at home and mums who are time poor or businesspeople or both working parents in the modern family unit. But by actually following this doctrine of mind, body and spirit and respecting your body and maintaining it, that you actually get so much more down in the time that you have and you get to have that time to prepare your meals for your family and nourish them. How would you like that comment?

SHERRY: Oh absolutely. Sorry, I have to be a bit controversial and I know there's a much more elegant way of actually convincing people about this. But time poor really is a myth in the sense of it's all about choices. We're making very different choices to how we made many, many years ago. But what I've seen people do is make different choices and in the result, choices that in the long term bring them far more joy. So people are rushing around and they're so consumed with we have so many distractions. We have television, we have iPods, we spend more time on the phone than we ever did, you know between mobiles and texting and forms of communication, iPads, . . . I sound like I'm a Mac, I'm making a commission from them, but I'm not . . . television and then the whole ferrying of children to five different activities, something they have to do something everyday. I like to actually get people to kind of stand back and question all the choices that they're making because it does fill up your time. It makes a massive kind of drain on your time.



I question people, one – is this really actually improving my quality of life or is it actually taking away, is it creating that stress? Because we all know that stress, that environment in your body when you're stressed actually helps you pack on weight. It can actually be anti counterintuitive and productive to the actual things that you're trying to do to keep a healthy body. You absolutely will get whatever you invest into your health. You'll get it back more that more. So if you put money into your grocery bill to buy organic food, you'll actually find that you will get much more health back. So I look at people that spend more on organics, but they spend less at the chemist, they spend less time at the doctors, they spend less time with the cold even. So if you just think about what it takes from your body to have one cold a year or one flu a year and you just said I'm going to spend that on my health, you will get it back hundred fold, I truly believe.

KAMAHL: I have to vouch for that on a personal note as well having been a follower of these ideals for a very long time. My shopping bill week to week is more than most people because I'm buying the organic foods. That price is coming down anyway. But one thing that I say to people who ask me about that price point of the shopping, the first thing I do is say how much were your doctors’ bills in the last few years, how much were your dentist bills. I haven't paid . . . I've paid not one cent to a doctor or to a health fund or to a . . . that’s exactly what I attribute it to. I'm financially way ahead.

SHERRY: Financially way ahead. What you also would have noticed is that you increase your quality of life. You have more joy in the actual tasting of foods. The other thing too that I often share with people and they experience when they come to my seminars or classes and I'm actually preparing the food in front of them, they don't just get joy from the food and how it tastes. Because they're always remarking how delicious it is and I used to be a chef in restaurants and I used to prepare 5-star food. What I prepare now on the kind of the chef spectrum would be 1 or 2 stars as far as the complexity and complication of the dish. I'm cooking and preparing much more simple foods. But I'm using this really high quality produce that it takes very little for you to do to make it taste good. So you can have a salad and people will come over and they taste my salads and they’ll go I make salads using those ingredients, why don’t they taste as good. Olive oil is not olive oil. Salt is not salt. How your vegetables are grown makes a big difference, not just in the flavour and the nutrients, but even the energy. There's an electromagnetic charge that’s associated with every living thing. They can actually measure it with a hertzometer. That charge is actually biogenic in that when you eat it, you get it. So something, say, an organic green that’s 70-90 MHz is going to have a very different impact on your body than something in a tin that’s 0 MHz, the same green veg.

[00:25:45]



KAMAHL: So that measurable energy, that electromagnetic energy is again . . . I'm understanding this and let me see if I can actually say back to you what I'm hearing. The cells in our body, especially the nervous system in our body sends electrical impulses and the cells have an electric potential, have a trans-membrane potential in them. So the nutrients from those foods and the measurable energy within the food actually does help the body cells work more efficiently.

SHERRY: It transfers to the body, yeah. So you're getting that energy. You'll notice it. If you have any of your clients that are regularly incorporating like at least 51% of their food is raw, they have this palpable energy and that can vary from week to week. So it can vary from the percentage of what you're having. People will look at you and they'll just be attracted to you. They go what is it that’s . . . you haven't changed physically. I may have seen five years ago. But you're actually looking more energetic, young and alive and it is that vitality that’s actually literally oozing from you that people sense.

KAMAHL: I'm wishing when you're saying that we were actually recording this on video because I can just relate . . . the first time that I met you, I'd never seen you before, I was waiting in a café, we set up a coffee meeting. Heaps of people walking through this café and then you walked in the room and I knew instantly who you were. There was an abundant energy and there was an aura that came with you and it was just like 'there's a woman who lives that life'. I got it right. I picked the right person out of that crowd.

SHERRY: You did. I can honestly say Kamahl that when I do what I know to be true as far as my health, I get that response. How I've known over the years is because I used to be twice my size. I used to wake up and have half a litre of Sara Lee Ultra Chocolate Ice Cream for breakfast. I haven't always eaten this way. I know that I meet people who've seen me 10 years ago, who don’t recognise me. I've had comments like age has been kind to you. Someone actually said to me or people saying . . . physically, I look in the mirror and I can see the wrinkles. I can see the physical differences. I think what they associate with is that there is that vitality and that energy. When I don’t do it, I don’t get the comments, I don’t get the compliments. People can see the contrast from when you're doing it and when you're not doing it.

KAMAHL: So you're not an ex athlete who was addicted to exercise and healthy eating your whole life. You've actually lived the life of the overweight, chocolate ice cream, poor self image?

SHERRY: I was a gold medallist Olympian in the couch potato Olympics, the channel changing event.

KAMAHL: Congratulations!



SHERRY: I know what it's like. I've been in that place where the largest distance is getting off the couch to get my shoes on to get out the door to go for a walk. It's not so long ago I remember that.

KAMAHL: So it's taking that first step?

SHERRY: It is. It's about moving ahead with faith. Also, I really think it comes back to that listening to your body. I would stand in front of the mirror and I would say this is not the body I'm meant to have. I'm not meant to be a . . . I look down and think this is not the body I'm meant to have. Even at that stage, I was amazed of what I could do to my body and that it still ran. I was amazed. I'd go to the doctor and I'd say I'm experiencing depression. I've got back problems. I knew the solution then. I didn't want it. I said to him I don’t want a pill. I don’t want any pills and I don’t want to change my lifestyle, but I want you to do something. He was just scratching his head like lady, what do you want me to do for you.

KAMAHL: With that in mind, I know your experience with primary school children, high school kids, you've had international athletes in your audience, you've had business executives, people from all walks of life – what's the simplest way for somebody to get started on this lifestyle?

[00:29:50]

SHERRY: I think that we all have that niggling intuition. We all have that kind of sense of knowing. It is about starting to kind of listen to that intuition. The great quote by Shakespeare – this above all to thy known self be true. It's about knowing your self and knowing what works for you. When I was so seriously addicted to food, I couldn't diet to save my life. I couldn't stand a diet. Every time I did diet, I would gain more weight. So for me, my change actually came when I knew I couldn't tackle this by trying to change who I was in that moment. I couldn’t give up my addiction to food. But what I could do is I could walk around the block. As much as I hated it and it's not something I recommend to my clients, I started running. As I found that I ran and I stuck with it, I started to crave better foods. What I notice with a lot of clients is that for them, it might be that they can't exercise and so they work on the food. But when they start to clean up the food, what they’ll notice is the body becomes more fit and alive, it craves better food. Sorry, it craves to exercise. It craves to move and it really works in that situation. So it's about listening to that intuition and then starting to think about nature’s principle in a mind, body, spirit context. So you need fresh air. You need air to breathe. Even if you're not going out to exercise, just go out to get some air, to walk around the block.

KAMAHL: With that simplicity, it really is available for everyone?



SHERRY: Everyone has access to nature’s principle. No matter where you live in the world, you have access to it. The further you get towards nature the more you can actually embrace it. It is a process. It's an absolute journey. It's not something that . . . I think the No.1 thing too to keep in mind is to let go of the quick fix solution because we're so conditioned in the society we live in to have quick fix, to have immediate gratification, to want results tomorrow, to have convenience. I would say that these are the things that have actually led to the escalating lifestyle diseases that we have. It’s not working. It's not making us happy. We need to do something different.

KAMAHL: You know there's a young girl in the house that I'm staying at at the moment. I look at the magazines that she's had and she's got all the modern teen into early 20-year-old magazines and you all know the names of them. One thing that really struck me about that was six days till this, seven days to lose this much or how to rapidly change this and how to . . . instant this, instant that. It's really at the forefront of media as well. So people are becoming conditioned to it and also kind of blind to it as well. It's that common and regular now that it flies under the radar and we're actually being conditioned. These things are popping up all over the place for us. Do this quickly, get this quick solution. We're actually not even thinking that there's another alternative out there. That has been my experience. How do we kind of shake that foundation and scratch that record, for want of another term?

SHERRY: The thing is that you can get results overnight. There are things that I've recommended to people that literally they’ve woken up the next day and say Sherry, I can't believe how much happier that I am. Just like the Transformational Weight Loss Summit that we had last weekend, I had people who emailed me the next day and said I feel much happier and hopeful.

KAMAHL: In one day?

SHERRY: In one day. That was the mindset part of it. That seminar worked on the mind, body, spirit. So it was actually conditioning on all those levels. So it wasn’t just talking about one of those things. It painted a very different picture. It's not the quick fix. There are certain things . . . if you go on a juice fast, I've had people with cancer or diabetes who've reversed diabetes in 30 days of a juice fast. That's an immediate result. That might be an immediate result. But the thing is that to change the mindset that got someone to the point of getting cancer, diabetes or becoming obese is not something you change overnight. Very rarely, it's the lightning stuck kind of people who are so traumatised by a diagnosis that might change overnight. But if you don’t have that experience and you just have the diagnosis and it takes you time to ease into the mindset that actually creates a healthy mind, body, spirit.



KAMAHL: If that starts for people now, if they start taking that little bit of time and just doing basic steps one at a time, they actually will never get to the point where they need to have that lightning bolt shift in their life?

SHERRY: That’s correct. That's absolutely it.

KAMAHL: So in your experience then, you must have come across a few success stories, people that have really changed their life, some instantly and some over a period of time? Would you care to share any of those with us?

[00:34:45]

SHERRY: Two of the success stories that I actually have them in the audience at this program on the weekend – one was Jordan who was diagnosed with chronic fatigue and glandular fever. His doctor told him it was going to take him about 18 months on a certain prescription and rest time to actually get over his diagnosis. He came to me and I said yep, you're definitely not well. We started to work with him. Even just in the first session, what I've always found is that when people are experiencing illness, there's usually some kind of mental or emotional or spiritual cause for the behaviours that they engage in that create the illness. With Jordan, he was a super success. Young guy, turned around his family, financial practice that was already successful. He had all these people who were offering him jobs. He had a certain calling that he actually wanted to do that didn't actually fit into that financial model, but was definitely part of his personality and spirit.

One of the things I identified with Jordan is I said to him, you're having a lot of problems saying no to people and everyone wants a piece of you. My question is do you think it could be much easier to get sick than to tell people no. For him, and his fiancée was there and he's now been married for a year to a beautiful girl, and they both kind of went uh, oh my god! So I worked with Jordan. Initially, we just took three things out of his diet. Within three weeks, he had lost something like 11 kilos. Jordan told the story in the weekend how he was really annoyed with me because he texted me to tell me he'd lost all this weight. He phoned me back later and he said why didn't you text me back or answer. I said because Jordan I'm interested in your health gain, not your weight loss.

KAMAHL: Good on you.

SHERRY: But the other thing that he reported was, in his own words, about 300% increase in his energy levels and no signs of the chronic fatigue. He got quite excited about that and he just kind of went with that for a little while and then he slipped back into the patterns and behaviours that were actually creating the chronic fatigue and he came back to me. We put him on a juice fast that cleared it up instantly. He lost the weight



again. But more importantly, I started to engage him in a program where he was actually changing his lifestyle. He and Maria have embraced a really organic, holistic kind of lifestyle. He's like super fit, super healthy, super happy.

KAMAHL: Fantastic. So the juice fast is something that you specifically designed for him rather than just saying everybody that has an illness to take a juice fast?

SHERRY: Absolutely.

KAMAHL: To have that blanket understanding is the modern diet industry. Everybody do this and you'll lose this weight. In essence, the weight that's lost in a diet isn't true fat loss anyway.

SHERRY: That’s correct. It's just the physical manifestation of what's going on inside. So until you fully kind of change your lifestyle, like from the inside out, you'll always have weight to lose because you're not actually living in a certain way. So one of the things at mantras I get people to actually practice when they're making a change in their life is one to actually figure out is this something that I would be happy to do long term every day forever. So training for a marathon, probably not. That's a once in a lifetime thing. People, if they're using that as a trick to lose weight, as soon as the marathon is done, you're going to spring back to the behaviour that you had before hand. So the mantra is this is how I do life. For me to go to the farmers’ market, it's not something that I do as kind of I have to do it or a special thing or I'm doing it because I want to be perceived as good. I'm doing it because it makes me feel good. So this is how I do life.

KAMAHL: If you choose to run a marathon, your life is like that and that’s how you choose to live life. If you want to run a marathon, it’s because you feel like you'd like to run a marathon.

SHERRY: That’s right.

KAMAHL: Fantastic. I don’t know if our listeners can hear, but there's some banging going on in the background. It reminds me of what we were talking about earlier in the piece where we get on a treadmill and run for an hour and go nowhere. In the paddock next to us, there's a guy building fences on his horse yard and so he's getting the exercise and having accomplishments at the same time. I actually prepared him earlier just so you know. So before you were talking about how the abundance of nature and the laws of nature and we've got air as the most abundant and so we take in lots of it and it's very easy for us and then water. Vegetables, a little less abundant than water and air, but it's our nutrients. Fruit is a little less abundant. We have to climb the tree to get to the fruit. What's at the top of that chain? What do we have to work hardest for?



[00:39:40]

SHERRY: I think the other thing that comes into perspective of that is that it's not just the physical labour that we outlay. So one of the things I often talk to people about is nature’s principles and the consumption concept. The consumption concept is if you have to source your own food, you would eat very differently to how we eat now. So for most people, when I ask an audience, who here would choose an omelette on the menu for dinner tonight or chicken. 95% of the audience, unless it’s a yoga crowd who are vegetarians, 95 will say they want the chicken. Get the same group and you say okay, you get a choice for dinner tonight, but you have to go out and get it. So you have a choice to go out and collect some eggs or catch, kill, pluck, disembowel, bleed and prepare the chicken, how many of you become vegetarian? Most of the arms go up. So the average Australian is consuming almost . . . probably now it's over 50 kilos of chicken a year and that’s just the chicken. We're not eating the chicken that’s been running out in the wild. We're eating something that’s been bred very differently to how it was a thousand years ago.

Most Australians, we're actually eating chicken that comes from a cage system or a feed lock system. Even if it says free range, they're no longer eating a natural diet and living in a natural way. That shows up both in the integrity of the flesh that you consume and energetically. It actually transfers to the body. Sounds a bit woo-woo. But we're now having evidence to kind of back that up. So when we eat in context of nature, less is more. In fact, if you look at most of the traditional hunter/gatherer societies, the healthiest ones ate four times the plant species to animal species. They're eating all that vegetation organically and biodynamically, so even more than just organic. And the animals that they're eating ate a natural diet. They ran in a wild environment. They were usually killed instantly. In the instance of like a cow, that would have been killed instantly, so it didn't have that adrenaline shooting through its body that creates that uric acid that we then eat, which is not so good for any animal that consumes that. You can go a long way down the chain. But essentially if you look at the primary kind of things of the healthiest cultures, the longest living cultures, it was mostly plant based. When they did have an animal, if you look at traditional cultures, they sacrificed that animal. So there was a recognition for a life that was lost. Not even so long ago in human histories, they did have meat, it was the Sunday roast. It wasn’t that long ago where a chicken or turkey was a once a year type thing, that it was a Christmas food and things like that. So I definitely would consider people having far less meat consumption than we do, in particularly Australia, America, Canada and UK, but also to look at the quality of the meat that you are consuming. Just that alone will lessen your consumption because it costs a lot more to produce an animal with integrity.

KAMAHL: Absolutely. So that price point is helping us once again?



SHERRY: Absolutely. It kind of levels things up because it takes food to where . . . when you make something with integrity, it requires more resources from humans and the planet. The more we process something, the whole kind of factor of that involved is that what is truly good for the body is good for the planet and what is truly good for the planet is good for the body. So very simple example is to get your orange juice from the farmers’ market where literally the farmers have driven down from Mildura is very different than pulling something that says fresh squeezed juice that you need a factory for that you're crushing that juice, you're losing a significant amount of nutrients in that process. You're putting it into a package that may have had the pulp come from Canada, the printing ink has come from China which has originally got their source of all their products from around the world, and then that creates landfill.

So the whole picture, it just keeps coming back to simplicity. The bonus in that is that when you squeeze your own orange juice, you're eating more in context of nature. So you're going to drink less of it. So you're not going to have the spikes in your blood sugar. You're going to get more nutrients because it’s just fresh out of its container. It's going to taste better. Anyone knows that when you squeeze your fresh orange juice, it tastes better than anything you get, even in a café, right? No.3, the container that it came from, the actual peel is completely biodegradable. It goes into the earth and it replenishes the earth.

KAMAHL: I noticed looking at the supermarket shelves, the freshly squeezed orange juice and there's a big splashing banner across it now with added vitamin C. Probably don’t need that splashing banner on the actual orange itself.

SHERRY: Absolutely. Particularly if it's grown organically. Yeah.

KAMAHL: It's amazing. This is totally a loaded question because I know where you're going to go with it. I think there's a farmer yelling at his dog over the way. This is a totally loaded question about things that are in our foods now that people are saying this is an ingredient in our food. It's not actually a food based ingredient, rather it’s a chemical ingredient that's being made in a lab. I know that most of our popular fast foods, the chocolate biscuits, the foods that our kids are eating as well, even when they say natural colours or preservatives or whatever it is on the packet. What is your take on these things that I can't even pronounce? Sulphide potassium and aspartame or whatever these things are.

[00:45:35]

SHERRY: My goodness, this is very long. I'll try to be succinct as possible.

KAMAHL: Keep it down to four CDs if that’s all right.



SHERRY: Okay. The No.1 thing is we don’t need anything other than the original ingredient. So when people say to me which numbers do I avoid, I say all of them. So if I buy something, it's always looking at primary ingredients that I know that I could actually source myself. So even sodium benzoate which is a common preservative that’s used in food, wouldn't touch anything that has that on it. It's a known toxin. It has all kinds of negative effects on the body and the nervous system.

KAMAHL: For example, what is it linked to?

SHERRY: Funnily enough, it's actually linked to weight gain as well. In fact I've noticed there are certain products that people claim is diet products and has sodium benzoate in it. I'm thinking probably more things like aspartame and monosodium glutamate which are excitotoxins, which actually contribute to neurological damage in the brain. We know that. There's a great book called Excitotoxins that explains how that actually works. So I've had clients who have had aspartame poisoning where they actually had loss of their motor skills, symptoms of MS. You start to do the research and it's mind blowing how these things can actually impact our body. The whole system of adding nutrients into our food is all about convenience, but more importantly extending shelf life. They're not interested in extending your life. They're extending shelf life. There's a big misconception that people think that we are actually extending our human life. The truth is if you actually take out the longevity due to less rates of death at birth, we're not actually living longer, we're actually extending our life in hospitals and through sickness and through pharmaceutical drugs. But our quality of life and length of life is not actually increasing.

KAMAHL: This is a statistic that I have heard more than once from other members of the science community. It's a great example of how people can take one scientific fact and turn it into the truth and one of those is that we are living longer whereas in fact we are not. What's happening is the infant mortality rates are reducing and so the average lifespan is increasing, but people are still dying. In fact people are dying younger than they used to. There are a number of cases of entire civilisations living well into their hundreds with vitality and health as well. The man who lived in three centuries. I think there's a wonderful book about that as well. But we've actually improved infant mortality rates. So that brings the average death rate down. So we are perceived as living longer. So we can take that and run with it if that’s a fact that you want to.

SHERRY: There was a great slide from the book The Hungry Planet - What the World Eats. The beautiful thing about that book is that it illustrates that the countries with the most processed foods are the ones with the greatest incidents of lifestyle diseases. What I found as fascinating in that book is it showed this woman from a refugee camp in Chad in Africa and you look at her children, she has 5 children that she's feeding on USD$1.28 a week. For us to buy the ingredients to feed what



she's got, to feed 5 children, would be about AUD$30. If you actually look at the jaw development and the teeth development of those children and their complexion, beautiful shiny complexion, they're much healthier than the African American children in the book, eating the traditional SAD diet, Standard American Diet. You look at the children.

One of my clients when she saw the slide, she said but Sherry, they look healthy. I asked her do they look healthy or do they look thin - keeping in mind that you can be just as unhealthy in a thin body as you can in an overweight body. But the children in the African refugee camp had great teeth development, great jaw development and great skin which were all signs of good health, particularly according to Weston A. Price who was the dentist who actually studied what he called primitive cultures. As soon as those cultures started to introduce processed food, so refined sugar, refined flours, the mandible, the jaw development changed, the teeth started to become crooked and all that kind of thing. I commented when I gave the talk in Tokyo at the TED Conference, I said I wonder if the mother in the refugee camp in Africa, when she puts the plate of food in front of her children says don’t worry about finishing what's on your plate kids, there are obese kids in America. You know we all grew up with that kind of thing. Eat what's on your plate because there are starving children in Africa.

[00:50:45]

KAMAHL: Starving children, yeah, we've all heard that.

SHERRY: We've actually reached a critical point in history where there are actually more overweight people on the planet than starving people.

KAMAHL: Is that right?

SHERRY: And here's the irony - both groups are malnourished. See what's happening is we live in a western society where we have an abundance of food, but that food is nutrient deficient. So it has what I call the lethal recipe – refined sugars, refined oils, refined salts, refined greens and refined chemicals. What happens is people eat a volume of those foods. Even fruits and vegetables that are being grown with chemical pesticides and the fertilisers, so they don’t have the same nourishment in those foods, which is now proven. It's not some kind of woo-woo hippie theory anymore. It's been proven. If you go through the process, it makes such common sense, you think duh. So anyway, they're eating a volume of this food, but it's not nutrient dense. So they finish a meal and they're saying feed me more, the tummy is saying I'm not getting what I need, feed me more. We've all done it. We've had a meal and we've known the food isn't nutrient dense. Not long afterwards, we're looking, opening up that fridge door, or that cupboard where we have those sweet things and just kind of wanting something to nibble on. The truth is that when you have nutrient dense food, it takes very little to satiate you and



satisfy you. I think that's probably the common denominator between everyone who attends my actual cooking classes. They're so blown away at how little food it takes to make them truly satisfied.

KAMAHL: Fantastic. I'm again relying on my life experience with growing up in a Lebanese household. Anything that we ate, anything that was placed on the table, my mother and my grandmother had spent the time to prepare the food from fresh, most of it that came out of the garden and the amount of work that we went into it. Mum would say it’s a labour of love and this is her way of saying I love you and providing that nurture to her family.

SHERRY: Absolutely.

KAMAHL: Yeah. The meals, there was a table just full of food, these beautifully freshly produced food. We'd have to wait remarkably less than the Friday takeaway night. When the takeaway food came in on a Friday night, and growing up as a kid, that was just the most exciting thing ever, but we'd eat three times the volume. Absolutely. And crave it some more.

SHERRY: That’s right. There's two things that come to mind when you say that. There's one quote, a French proverb that says where love sets a table, food tastes its best. I love that because . . .

KAMAHL: Lovely.

SHERRY: Another thing that’s deficient in our society, I often say to people obesity is not a disease of abundance, it's a disease of scarcity and it's scarcity of good quality nourishing food, good quality connection. We're so hungry for true connection and being really present in our conversations that we seek that kind of comfort and nourishment from food. The other quote that I think of is the Koreans always said for food to truly be good, it's not just that it needs to taste good or be hygienically prepared, nutritionally sound, but they said it must be prepared in a sincere and well intentioned way by the cook. Any person I know of who's sat at my table knows that the food that I cook is so incredibly simple, there's got to be more to it than just the food itself. I know the difference that it makes when I cook with love and I know it. Over the years, I've just come to . . . as much as I prefer to cook all my own food, there are certain times where I'm not loving food and I'm not loving the process and I know it's better to go off and get a burger, a greasy bowl of noodles than to prepare food myself. I often say to people I'd much rather have a greasy bowl of noodles with people who are positive, loving and up-building than to have the most gourmet, nutritiously prepared meal and eat with people who are angry, depressed and negative or even to eat alone when I'm angry, depressed and negative, although those times are rare.

KAMAHL: Of course. So they're all interlocking?



SHERRY: Yeah. It’s a composite of how we live. I think that's the beauty of going back to nature. In fact the title of the book that I'm pitching to publishers right now is called A Return to Food, How Going Back is the Way Forward.

[00:55:00]

KAMAHL: Fantastic. I'll look forward to that coming out. Absolutely. Very exciting. The message that keeps coming back is it's really simple and we go back to nature and we keep it basic. I've got to ask you Sherry – is there a catch?

SHERRY: Well no, no, there's no catch. The thing is you have to give up on convenience. It doesn’t have to be that hard, but it's not going to be as easy going through the drive through. We haven't reached that stage yet where McDonald's is actually serving fresh food without chemicals. So it's not the easier option. There is no catch because you know in your business, you know in your life that you get what you put into it. So that's the thing. When you start to invest in good quality food, you start to invest in the time to actually be still to listen to your body, which is so important, you invest in the time to go out for a walk in nature, move your body, dancing and the ways you love, it returns. Everything is a return on what you've invested in.

KAMAHL: That can be as simple as somebody hearing this recording switching it off and just . . . I mean even listening to this recording is an investment in yourself. Anyone that listens to this and is taking the time out to educate themselves is actually probably in the top 10% of the population I would argue, in that they're taking the time to educate themselves about their body and how to look after themselves, how to look after their family. It's even more than that. They can switch this off and spend five minutes just with your eyes closed, breathing and learning an appreciation of nature and the air and taking a different perspective to what they may have taken before. So that five minutes could be the first step to a whole lifetime of health and vitality.

SHERRY: Absolutely. Also to remember is often the most simplest messages are the hardest to get. If you can take that five minutes and understand that this is a really simple message, but to allow it to kind of actually rest in yourself, and not just in your head, but take it in and actually feel what this message is actually saying through your whole body. When you feel it, you're much more likely to take action than when you think it. So feel how this message actually resonates in your body.

KAMAHL: Fantastic. I would encourage people to listen to this over and over again until it's actually resonating with them and they get something . . . it is a physical sensation that I get when I hear you talking like that. I would encourage anybody listening to it to replay it and replay



it and replay it, read the transcripts until you actually get that resonation as well.

SHERRY: The other thing too is that depending on where you are in your life, this can also challenge you. I've had it happen where people have gone that’s rubbish, particularly people in the nutrition and dietetics world. It’s so challenging. You know that Schopenhauer quote that’s violently opposed. I've had people in the nutrition world that just go it’s all crap, she doesn't know what she's talking about. True, because they're so conditioned on that scientific point of view and because the food companies have every investment in you not thinking this way. So if it is challenging you, I also encourage you to sit with that and observe that and feel it and challenge yourself to understand why is this challenging me.

KAMAHL: Absolutely. I'm a strong believer that nutritionists and doctors certainly have their place in society. If I break my leg, I know where I'm going to go. Absolutely. But you know I read an alarming fact about three days ago. That fact was that 6% of medical professionals choose nutrition as one of their electives in their medical training.

SHERRY: It’s that high, is it?

KAMAHL: Well, that certainly surprised me. So I started delving even more into that. Doctors used to do 90% nutrition training until the ‘20s and ‘30s. I think it was Rockefeller who in the States owned the pharmaceutical companies and started sponsoring the medical schools. That's where the shift began to occur. The graphs that I was looking at were truly shocking about how the education around nutrition in the medical profession started dropping off. Pharmacology wasn’t even taught in medical schools. The incidence of disease . . . you know there's so much information in there.

SHERRY: Gee, you would think there was something going on there, wouldn't you?

KAMAHL: Absolutely.

SHERRY: Hippocrates, who was the father of medicine, one of his quotes that I always remember is that 'All disease begins in the gut'. So how could you not benefit by directly looking at that which directly goes into your gut, which is our food. If all disease begins in the gut, you have to start looking at it. We've had such an increase in incidents of lifestyle diseases, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer. All these things have actually occurred, the escalation that’s actually happened directly corresponds to the spikes in the processing. So if you look at the biggest spike that actually happened, it's when we started in the 1980s to introduce high fructose corn syrup, things like the excitotoxins, like the aspartame and all those things. When they started to go through the



most extreme processes and the biggest introduction of the chemicals into our food system, you'll see a direct correlation with the spike in obesity, heart disease, cancer and others . . . yeah.

[01:00:30]

KAMAHL: I still can't believe that these things are allowed in our food when there are such strong links . . . I know in Australia as well . . . for international listeners, if you haven't worked it out, we're talking with Australian accents.

SHERRY: Some of us are.

KAMAHL: Some of us are. I certainly am. We're in Australia at the moment. But I know in the Australian food labelling laws, the colour number 1, 2, 3 has got direct links to respiratory conditions and nervous conditions in children. Even though it’s allowed in our food, it's banned in most other countries of the world.

SHERRY: Yes, there are many chemicals that are used in Australia. I personally believe that Australia for one of the western countries, it has the very low standard as far as what they permit in their food, very low standard. Tartrazine which is a known colouring agent in the caramel colour and they use it in things like Tim Tams which I know is a sacred food in Australia. But I wouldn't call it a food. Even though I love chocolate and believe it’s god’s way of saying he loves us and wants us to be happy, it ain't chocolate. It's actually implicated in bladder cancer, liver cancer, sarcomas, all kinds of diseases. It's heavily restricted in Austria, Sweden and Germany and it's completely banned in Finland and Sweden and it’s heavily restricted in Austria and Germany. There are many chemicals that are in our foods. It's interesting because I had a colleague who's also a friend and I was preparing this organic dinner for her and her son and her son was staying with his father.

She drove 45 minutes to pick him up, and on the way back, she got him a 3-course meal from a drive through, very famously known to have literally thousands of ingredients in their food. To give you an idea, it's not a happy meal. But after he finished his 3 courses, his 3 different things, a complete change of personality. Now she had diagnosed him or had him diagnosed with ADHD. She'd said to me well you know, he has to have a treat once in a while. I said but have you noticed what you're calling ADHD absolutely came on just after he had this meal. She said what do you do about giving them treats. I said well, why not give him a gin and tonic. And she said that’s absurd, you wouldn't give a child a gin and tonic. I said but if you actually look at the ingredient label of what's in a gin and tonic vs. what's in the meal you just gave, I would much rather he have the gin and tonic. It's much healthier or less impactful than what you've just given him. So we really have to reassess this whole way that



we've been looking at food. And I'm not encouraging children to have a gin and tonic.

KAMAHL: I just got a visual there that I had to shut out in my mind.

SHERRY: Even though it’s a great source of vitamin C because it has fresh lime squeezed into it, but that’s kind of the logic that they're using. They have the breakfast cereals full of chemicals and we'll throw a little bit calcium in it, therefore it’s a great source of such and such, so your child should eat it. The truth is just because you have something healthy and you throw something unhealthy into it, it doesn't make it safe. By the same token, if you have something unhealthy and you put something healthy into it, doesn't make it . . . you know.

KAMAHL: Doesn't make it safe. Look, I guess the message is just encouraging people to just start to question everything that they're hearing and the foods they're eating, even question what we're talking about right here and go and check out the facts yourself. Don’t take what we're saying as gospel. Work it out for yourself. But as long as you start that process of questioning, you'll actually start to divulge your own truth in that. That’s fantastic. With the labelling laws the way they are in Australia, just looking at them, there's a big bold black square that has highlighted carbohydrates, sugars, fats, proteins and we're sort of conditioned to look at that as well. We just take a glance to the right hand side and look at the numbers. Take your grandmother to the shopping centre with you . . . I think this is one of yours, isn't it? Imagine your grandmother. So I've heard it many times anyway. But imagine your grandmother standing next to you in the supermarket. If she can't read what's on the label, don’t eat it.

SHERRY: That’s actually Michael Pollen. I don’t want to take credit for his work. But essentially . . .

KAMAHL: You've already told us that you download all your information anyway from nature and other sources.

SHERRY: That’s it. Well, my grandmother was a terrible cook. I remember going there and having the white processed bread with the processed cheese on it and the miracle whipped mayonnaise and thinking there are other forms of child abuse than hitting and speaking unkindly to children.

KAMAHL: Let's extend that to your great grandmother then. I've certainly had a very privileged experience in that regard. Sherry, I want to thank you so much. I love how unapologetic you are about your message and the fact that it really questions all of the things that modern diet industry is throwing at us. It’s simple. You've actually taken the woo-woo and made it easy.



SHERRY: Woo-whoo.

KAMAHL: The woo-woo fluffy stuff, made it really easy for us to understand and it's such a simple message and strong. I know how packed your schedule is. So I really want to thank you for taking the time out and sharing this message. If people want to find out more about you or get in contact with you, what would be the best way to go about that?

SHERRY: The best way is [email protected]. So you'll find my email and even my phone number there. I welcome contact in that respect.

KAMAHL: [email protected] – one word?

SHERRY: That’s right. Think of a strong Sherry and reverse it.

KAMAHL: And your website is www.sherrystrong.com.

SHERRY: That’s it.

KAMAHL: Wonderful. Sherry, thanks so much for your time.

SHERRY: Pleasure.

Total Duration [01:06:38]



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