Libby Pratt

View inside my client’s refrigerator.  Vegan delights, packed and ready to go as she flies from Boston to the midwest.

Unless you live in Los Angeles, where vegan cuisine is now considered “mainstream,” or in the major cities on either American coast, the HARDEST part of being vegan is that you need to prepare yourself when you go out into a non-vegan environment.

Here in France that’s the entire country! 

But there’s a great sense of well-being for anyone, whether they are vegan or not, to plan ahead and decide what they are going to eat when they leave the house rather than leaving the food decisions to chance, or trusting restaurants to provide healthy fare.

Once you take control of your food you’ll happily discover you possess a greater sense of freedom.  Freedom from feeling heavy; freedom from feeling lethargic; freedom from excess weight.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche.

View inside my client’s refrigerator.  Vegan delights, packed and ready to go as she flies from Boston to the midwest.

Unless you live in Los Angeles, where vegan cuisine is now considered “mainstream,” or in the major cities on either American coast, the HARDEST part of being vegan is that you need to prepare yourself when you go out into a predominantly non-vegan environment.

Here in France that’s the entire country! 

No matter where you live or what you eat, there’s a great sense of well-being in planning ahead and deciding what you are going to eat when you leave the house rather than leaving the food decisions to chance, or trusting restaurants to feed you healthy fare.

Taking control of your food will give you a great sense of freedom.  Freedom from feeling heavy; freedom from feeling guilty for what you eat; freedom from feeling lethargic; freedom from fat.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche.

Tamari Crusted Cashews

This is the easiest recipe ever.  If you love cashews, it’s a better way to eat them as opposed to eating the commercial oil and salt-drenched variety.  Cashews are high in calories, but a handful of these will fill you up fast, and because they aren’t heavily salted, you won’t mindlessly devour them.

1. Heat up an iron crepe pan or other small skillet over medium high heat.
2. While heating add one generous tablespoon of organic Tamari Sauce (or low-salt soy sauce).
3. When the Tamari bubbles up, add about two large handfuls of RAW, whole cashews.
4. Stir around the cashews in the bubbling Tamari, scraping up the sauce and stirring the cashews so that the Tamari attaches to the cashews.
5. When the Tamari has dried out the cashews are finished.  Serve warm.
6. The pan will wash out easily with warm water, no need to scrub, so don’t let the messy pan scare you off from making these!

Don’t try to look or act like anyone else.

Instead, do your best to be contented and confident, as that will make you gorgeous.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche

Early morning in the Camp Biche Kitchen.

If you’re excited to jump out of bed in the morning and get your day started, then you are living a fulfilling life.  

If you aren’t excited to jump out of bed in the morning, face what you dread and change the situation.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche 

Chateau Aix, Department du Lot, France

We can either become decrepit with age, or alternatively, we can become more elegant, more beautiful, more harmonious.  It’s our choice.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche

This card was sent to me by a client.  The photo was taken just after he had finished a hike here at Camp Biche.

Montcuq, pronounced MON-COO, sounds like French slang for “My Ass :)”

Happy New Year from all of us at Camp Biche. 

We wish you a happy and healthy year ahead … and a great looking butt!

Hugs, Libby

Tear Down Your Prison Wall 

1. Write down your ideal weight.

Here’s the link to discover what your ideal healthy weight is: CLICK.

2. Now, calculate how many pounds you need to lose to get down to your ideal weight — not a runway model weight, but your ideal weight as the calculator states.

3. Find or print out a full-length photo of yourself that is as large as you can get it.  Or draw a full-length image of yourself.

4. Get the smallest little square pack of Post-it Notes, and number individual little squares with a number for every pound you need to lose.  If you need to lose 25 pounds then you will have 25 Post-it Notes numbered sequentially 1-25.

5. Create a “rock wall” with these little notes, starting with the biggest number first, putting it in the upper left hand corner of your photo, and then lining up the numbers as if you were typing a book, left to right, then create a new line, spacing the Post-Its so that they cover up your body.  

6. Walk an hour each day.  

7. Peel off and throw one of the Post-Its for every pound you lose.

8. If you visualise the wall in which you’ve imprisoned yourself, you have something to attack, rather than attacking yourself, you’re attacking the excess fat, and this is a positive action.

9. When you take off all the weight, replace the old photo of you encumbered by the excess fat, with a photo of your sleek self.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche

Amazing!  Only 2.5 percent of Americans get the minimum amount of recommended exercise each week: 150 minutes of moderate activity.  That’s only thirty minutes of walking, five days a week.

If you just walked thirty minutes a day, five days a week you’d be thinner, your risk of diabetes - heart disease - cancer - depression would drop, you’d age slower, and your butt would look a lot better.

Starting an exercise program is not rocket science.  Simply head out your door and walk briskly  for 15 minutes. At the end of the 15 minutes,  head back home.  If your neighborhood is so bad that you can’t walk outside, then find a better neighborhood and walk there.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche

Photo of World War I, British messenger dog being readied to head to the front with a communique.

WINNING THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

(Yes, I know that the Battle of the Bulge was in WWII, but I love this photo  and thought is was inspiring :)

Know that once you get serious about eating right and exercising daily you need to be mentally prepared that these lifestyle improvements are not going to take you on a straight trajectory to your objective.

You might lose one pound one week, half a pound the next, and then gain 3/4 of a pound on week three.  Be prepared for this for when it happens, it’s a rough psychological blow and your sloth mind will seize on the setback to trash talk you into giving up. “I told you so! You don’t deserve to have a hot body. Come on, eat a Milk Bar.  You’ll feel much better.” 

At this point, you need to gather your forces to destroy sloth mind and allow your rational mind to take control of the situation. You do this by concentrating on the great disappointment you feel about having gained weight. FEEL, really FEEL, this crappy sensation that is drowning you in defeat.

This pain is not a signal that you should follow sloth mind’s advice and give up trying to improve your body.  Instead, the pain is an incentive to harden your resolve to lose the weight.  After all, you now know that you definitely feel better when you’re moving toward your weight loss goal. 

Listen to your rational brain. “You’re on the right track.  You’ve already lost three-quarters of a pound, and if you just get through this temporary setback, it will be relatively smooth sailing to our objective.” 

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche

Life is much more fun if you observe people as if you were a cartoonist or novelist.

Instead of allowing yourself to be annoyed, guilted, humiliated, nagged, or browbeaten by someone and expending time and energy managing your hostility, consider how light-hearted you would feel if you simply viewed the offender as a complex character in a book and embraced their, in your opinion, offensive behavior as a necessary action that makes the plot interesting and takes the hero / heroine where they need to triumph.

Libby Pratt, Camp Biche

LIVIN’ THE DREAM

Imagine you are living your life to its most fulfilling potential.

Now write down exactly what you would actually be physically doing during the day if you were living your perfect life.

Would you write novels? 

Would you prance on a beach clad only in a bikini all day?

Would you work in your beautiful rose garden?

Would you spend an hour in the morning exercising your awesome body?

Whatever it is you dream of doing, set aside the first ten minutes of your day to just do it.  Wake up to your canvas and paint. Wake up and put on a bikini and wear it as you surf the internet.

Attention and action create results.

Ten minutes doesn’t seem like much, but if you concentrate on something you really love, the ten minutes will turn into an hour, and the hour will turn into your raison d’etre, your reason for being. Or, to view it in concrete terms, if you really want to live on a tropical beach, than taking that concrete step of putting on your bikini first thing every morning will probably lead you to happily work on your abs, do some free weight work, walk more and that confidence in your bikini will lead you to seek out an apartment with a pool, and then that will lead to you seeking employment somewhere that allows you to live in your dream house on the beach, where you’ll sleep soundly and contentedly each night after the crashing waves have lulled you to sleep.

As long as you can initiate physical action, there is no reason that your present circumstances can keep you from living your dream.

I know a man, who loved drawing and painting when he was a teenager.  He knew he had talent and people told him he had talent. But he didn’t pursue his dream of making his living as an artist because life’s needs got in the way and family pressure made him feel guilty for dreaming about an artist’s life.  So he pursued a business career and was a great success rising to the  top of a well-known French corporation.

However, he never abandoned his first love.  Even though he was working at building a successful corporate career, his painting was still his first priority every day.  He would wake up every morning at six and paint for an hour.  If business travel or meetings were going to encroach on his six a.m. rule he would wake at five a.m.

Painting always came first, but his passion for painting didn’t get in the way of rising up the corporate ladder. His love of art didn’t prevent him from providing for and doting on his wife and two children. He put painting first, but it didn’t prevent him from being an active force in his community.

In that one inviolate hour each morning, he honed his technique. He built up an impressive portfolio of paintings. Perhaps more importantly, he pursued a creative calling that gave outward expression to his true self, his true feelings and from that foundation, he was able to function optimally because he was briming with ever-growing confidence and contentment.  

When he was sixty-five he retired from the business world. Free to spend as much time in the studio as he now desires, he still keeps to his daily six a.m. rendezvous with his brushes and paint.  But now, when seven a.m. arrives, he puts away his quotidien small painting and turns his attention to the huge canvases that now hang on the wall of the ancient barn that is his studio. 

Before his retirement, my friend would organise local exhibits of his work wherever he could find a willing facilitator:  a small hotel, a cafe, the local mayor’s office. I attended several of these vernisages. They were pleasant congenial affairs, but they weren’t money makers. Honestly, the vernisages seemed rather pointless since it was just his same friends showing up each year and we didn’t seem to be buying.

Then two years ago, I received a notice that he was having an exhibition in Paris at an art gallery with a good address.  And then last year I received an invitation to an even more impressive address and art dealer near the Place Vendome. 

And damn, I wish I would have bought one of his paintings when they were unappreciated and temporarily improving the walls of the local bars around here because now that they’ve moved to flashier venues, they’re out of my price range!

My friend didn’t become a professional artist when he retired from the corporate world at sixty-five.  He became a professional artist during the forty years he was in the corporate world.

Are you a creator or a consumer?

Who are you?  Are you really a person who sits in a cubicle staring at a computer screen for eight hours then spends eight more hours in front of another screen at home? Or are you a brilliant writer, a Civil War expert, an innovative interior designer, a marathon runner, an artist, an inventor, a fantastic musician.

Einstein toiled away as a government clerk during the day but worked on his crazy theories in the evenings.

Make time to pursue your passion each day.  Not because you hope for a future financial payoff, but because IT is your passion and IT absolutely needs to be expressed or you will go crazy with unfulfillment.

Put your passion first. Everyone that matters in your life will thank you for doing so.

This post was inspired by the wonderful book Make it Happen in Ten Minutes a Day by Lorne Hoden.  It only takes an hour to read this gem of wisdom but it will provide you with the simple blueprint for making your dreams come true.

Have fun and have a wonderful year ahead!