Ep.11: Turning Trauma into Triumph

Meg Haworth, Ph.D. is the private chef to some of the top stars, producers and directors in Hollywood. She specializes in food allergies, healing diets and healthy weight loss with food that tastes so great that her clients don't feel like they're missing anything. Her great passion is teaching people with food restrictions how to eat, offering delicious and healthy menu plans, grocery lists and "how to" cooking instructions along with blogs, videos and recipes.

Dr. Meg is no stranger to the difficulties of eating for health. After spending her twenties in doctors' offices with over a dozen illnesses, she decided to take the complementary medical route to get some relief. After her nutritionist told her to remove, gluten, dairy, sugar, corn, citrus, peanuts, caffeine and alcohol from her diet, she saw massive improvements within a week.

The problem was she still did not know what to eat. In fact, her first trip to Whole Foods Market ended in tears when she saw the shelves of unrecognizable products in small packages that cost a small fortune. She left the store empty handed and pondered life's biggest questions: "How am I going to eat pizza now? What am I going to do for a birthday cake? And, how am I going to live without chocolate chip cookies?" Well, that was just crazy talk because cookies were nonnegotiable and she was going to figure out how to have those things no matter what so she headed to the kitchen to figure it out.

In the last two decades of eating for food allergies, Dr. Meg has written a cookbook, Done with Dairy. Giving up Gluten; 14 Days to a Delicious and Healthy You, owned a country inn called Harmony Oaks in South Carolina where she had a full service restaurant serving breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert all gluten and dairy free and with produce from her organic garden. She was the first food allergy chef in a mainstream venue sharing 27 of her recipes in video on Eat, Drink or Die.com, (a spinoff of Will Ferrell's Funny or Die.com) alongside celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver, Tom Colicchio and Paula Deen. Dr. Meg is also the national spokesperson for a line of kitchen products from Nexgenstore where she develops recipes, writes blogs, makes videos, commercials, and hosts live events demonstrating their products.

Dr. Meg holds a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology (Holistic Psychology) and an undergraduate degree in English with a concentration in writing and minors in both psychology and social work. She studied cooking privately with Russell Washington at her country inn and worked in the test kitchen at Authentic Foods, a gluten free flour company. She grew up in a southern family of foodies where no one measured anything and everything tasted amazing and that's just how she believes healthy cooking should be.

JJ Flizanes is an Empowerment Strategist. She is the Director of Invisible Fitness, an Amazon best-selling author of Fit 2 Love: How to Get Physically, Emotionally, and Spiritually Fit to Attract the Love of Your Life, and author of Knack Absolute Abs: Routines for a Fit and Firm Core. She was named Best Personal Trainer in Los Angeles for 2007 by Elite Traveler Magazine.

JJ vividly reminds us that the word 'fitness' is not just about the state of one's physical body, but also the factors which determine a person's overall well being.

And, for JJ, the key components in all these areas are 'invisible' — balanced support structures of nutrition, emotional centeredness and health. A favorite of journalists and the media for her depth of knowledge and vibrant personality, JJ, a contributing expert for Get Active Magazine, has also been featured in many national magazines, including Shape, Fitness, Muscle and Fitness HERS, Elegant Bride, and Women's Health as well as appeared on NBC, CBS, Fox 11 and KTLA. She is also a video expert for About.com and regular contributor for The Daily Love.