Dr. Maria Grace is a self-fulfillment expert and is the author of "Reel Fulfillment" finding fulfillment through movies. In this abridged interview, we're going to talk about effective weight loss plans, stress management and how you can prepare healthy meals.

Abridged Interview with Self Fulfillment Expert - Dr. Maria Grace

Prepare healthy meals with love and lose weight fast!

Kevin Gianni: This is Kevin Gianni from the Fountain of Youth World Summit. On the line with me now is Dr. Maria Grace. Maria is a self-fulfillment expert and is the author of "Reel Fulfillment" finding fulfillment through movies. Tonight, we're going to talk about effective weight loss plans, stress management and how you can prepare healthy meals.

Let's start by talking about how movies have made their way into your self fulfillment practice.

Dr. Grace: Well, sure, I have always tried in my practice to find ways to help my clients know faster through their issues and especially their defenses and early on I used myths and stories. I'm originally Greek and Greek mythology has a wealth of stories about the various stages of life and in fact myths have always been used in cultures to help people understand themselves better and navigate the changes they experience as they move from one stage of personal development to another. You know, from adolescence to adulthood to married life to parenthood to mature age to old age and then to death. If you look into mythology it's all about the stages of life. So this is what I've started using in my practice, but eventually I realized that my clients felt easier and better talking about their favorite movies.

And I found that many of them had heroes and characters that they identified with or they did not identify with and they remade their problems to me through a certain character. Like Neo in The Matrix or Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams or whatever movie they would see, you know?

And so all of a sudden I realized that the modern myths in this culture are the movies and that I have a treasure in my hands that I could use to help my clients lose weight, find self fulfillment, set goals, or eat healty. So I started teaching seminars and in which I used films to make, to teach concepts about self-development and personal development and personal growth and self-awareness and that turned into a whole method which I eventually received an award for and wrote a book which is Reel Fulfillment which we should tell people that it's spelled r-e-e-l fulfillment and this is what the book is about. It's about how to use lessons from popular movies to improve many aspects of your life in 12 steps.

Kevin: How can someone use a movie or even a myth to start living their lives?

Dr. Grace: My book starts with The Matrix and my client Thomas, that's not his real name, who was someone who identified with Neo in The Matrix. He was a computer whiz, young, his early 30s, and very, very dissatisfied with his life and he was an avid movie go-er and movie lover and he made very little progress in therapy until I suggested that he watch The Matrix. Now I don't know why I had that epiphany but I did.

And so he came back and he said, "Maria, there is no spoon". He sat down in my office and his first, the first thing he said was, "Maria, there is no spoon" and I said, "What is that?" He said, "There's no spoon. There's no spoon. I got it. I got it, Maria, there's no spoon." Now he was referring to the theme, if you have seen The Matrix, where Neo is about to receive, he has received the calling that he's the one to change the world and goes through the oracle and outside the oracle's kitchen there is young boy who looks like a guru with a shaved head and bends the spoon using mind control and Neo asks him, "How do you do this?" He looks puzzled, and the boy turns and says, "It's simple. There is no spoon."

Now something about that theme really hit home for my client and what he saw was that in fact if he could find focus, if he could use his mind to focus on his goals and his desires that would eliminate the obstacles that he was projecting out there in the world. So the spoon was representing an inner obstacle that was projected out there. For example, I'm ugly, I'm fat, I will measure up to nothing, no on likes me, I'm not a good lover, I'm not a good friend, I'm not this, I'm not good at this or that. All these are statements that reflect negative thoughts that we have about ourselves that we project out there in the world and of course those negative thoughts go out there and find situations to attach themselves to.

For this complete interview on weight loss, self fulfillment and healthy eating with Dr. Maria Grace, please visit www.FountainofYouthWorldSummit.com. To keep reading click "Next>>>" below.

Dr. Grace: You see? So that theme in The Matrix somehow clicked for him and from that point on he had that breakthrough. Now, the movie became a stimulus for him, became an incident, became an experience for him that motivated him to see deeper into himself, gain this insight about how his inner thoughts were projected out there and created one obstacle upon another, and motivated him to slowly and surely take steps to change his life and today he has purchased his home, he's happier, much happier with his job because he changed employment, he is in a relationship and he mails to me from, he mailed me from time to time letting me know that he's fine and he's doing well. All that began with that theme in The Matrix.

Kevin: What are some of the best ways to make sure that information like this sticks, particularly for fitness goals, weight loss motivation, motivation to exercise, etc.?

Dr. Grace: You know, Kevin, when we talk about food and exercise and moving your body and eating well, we are treading dangerous territory.

Let me say, let me be frank with you, because we give information to people about how to turn pleasure into work and food is pleasure. Food is love. We project a lot of stuff on food. A lot of it or all our unfulfilled emotional needs are projected onto food. In addition to that, food has an amazing chemical effect on that. So when we tell people how to eat right, we treat them as though they eat wrong, okay?

So here's my approach to that. I believe that we all have our weak spots and I believe that we are all guilty of excess occasionally or not so occasionally and I believe that we could all use information to improve the way we're treating our body and our self. So when we learn all these good stuff about whole food and good food and the chemicals in food and the interaction various foods in our bodies, how to use food, how to eat food, how to walk, how to exercise, how to take care of ourselves, I think that we all need to see that these are tools, okay?

All this information represents tools that we can, that are there for us to use for our own good. So the first thing that I would advise people is to choose the tools that they can use. The key word there is use.

Okay? Now when it comes down to food, I think that eating has to do a lot with being fat, being nourished, and being fat is fine. I'm a firm believer that we should eat food that we must prepare.

For this complete interview on weight loss, self fulfillment and healthy eating with Dr. Maria Grace, please visit www.FountainofYouthWorldSummit.com. To keep reading click "Next>>>" below.

Dr. Grace: Okay? Preparations are, there are 3 key elements into the whole ritual of eating: Food preparation, presentation, and concentration. Okay? So regardless of the food that we choose to eat, whether we want to eat raw food, whether we want to eat organic food, whether we want to eat vegan or a vegetarian diet, whether we want to eat meat. I don't care. I really, personally do not care. I don't have judgment on people who like meat the same way I don't have judgment on people who eat only raw food.

However, I preach that either group of eaters should prepare their food, should present their food in a way that pleases the senses, such as the eyes, the nose, you know, the nose, the touch, and the taste, and sometimes even the, we need to hear food, you know, when it boils, when it cooks, when it bakes, and then to concentrate on eating the food. Eating food is a ritual and a ritual has steps, okay? If we all prepared our food, if we prepared our food, let's say 3 times a week, not every day. I'm not solely, you know, believing that we have time to cook 3 times a day, every day a week, but let's cook 3 times or let's even cook once, let's cook once the meals of the week. Let's budget 3 hours, alright, on a Sunday and cook the food for the whole week. Do you know how therapeutic and healing that is? That will take away all the rush and the hurriedness and the, okay, let's gobble food down, because we learn to wait, we learn to pick the food, we learn to chop it, we learn to cut it, we learn to use our kitchen.

Sometimes we create community as we cook. We may cook with a partner, we may cook with a neighbor, we may cook with our children, we may cook with our parents, and so it stops being about eating for the sake of eating and it stops being about eating well or right or wrong. It's about incorporating food as part of life and adding pleasure to the way we interact with food.

So we eat dead stuff. We eat dead stuff, we eat fat, we eat without paying attention to what we are eating, and we don't share the food that we eat. And so because we take away all these pleasures that surround the ritual of eating we eat unconsciously.

So we keep eating and eating and eating and just stuffing our body with food and then the only gratification that we're most likely to get is this fixation from having eaten. Sometimes we don't even remember what we ate. Sometimes we don't even pay attention to how many times we chewed of what we ate. Wouldn't you agree?

Kevin: Yes.

Dr. Grace: We eat very, very fast and then what does this do to us? It taxes the body and we eat fast and, again, you see, you may eat very healthy food. You may eat just the raw food or just organic or just vegan or just I don't know you name it. I mean there's just so much, the technology and the of good, healthy food is so advanced today that every day we come up with a new brand or a new department of good, healthy food. I don't care what kind of food we eat, but we may eat it very fast.

Kevin: And you say food is love. Is that what you mean by that?

Dr. Grace: Yes, I believe that we are what we eat. I do believe that. So if we prepare the foods that we eat with love we ingest love and this is what happened, I mean, isn't this the whole idea about breast feeding? About, you know, feeding the baby with love? Giving just the nutrients from the mother's body? I think that this is in a certain unconscious or conscious level, I think this is what we're looking for in our adult life.

We're looking for love in the food that we eat and, again, if we keep severing the ritual of preparing food of presenting the food on a plate in a nice way that pleases our senses and then concentrating on eating the food and relating to the food as though the food were something really, really important that gives us life. As long as we sever those elements of the ritual of eating I think that no matter what is the food that we're eating it's not going to serve its true purpose.

Kevin: Do you think that starting a practice like this can lead to opening up yourself to other possibilities like maybe exploring other options, diet plans or any other successful health program?

Dr. Grace: Absolutely, absolutely and it starts in fact if we slow down a little bit and start paying attention to how we eat, how we eat is the first one, our behavior around eating. Then we're going to start paying attention to what we eat. We need time to pay attention, we need time and space to pay attention to what it is that we're eating.

For this complete interview on weight loss, self fulfillment and healthy eating with Dr. Maria Grace, please visit www.FountainofYouthWorldSummit.com.