The Fit Foodie
A BATTLE CRY: IT’S (STILL) TIME TO ARMOR UP BY THE FIT FOODIE MAREYA IBRAHIM Mareya Ibrahim is The Fit Foodie, a TV chef, holistic nutrition coach, author and award-winning entrepreneur and inventor. She is the author of “Eat Like You Give a Fork,” and a signature chef to the NY Times bestseller “The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life”. Mareya is the host of “Recipes For Your Best Life” Podcast and is a frequent guest on national cooking shows. Connect with Mareya at mareyaibrahim.com.
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was flipping through an old journal as I was unpacking some boxes into the new home that I share with my new husband. Yes, my new husband! We got married on February 15th,2020. just 3 weeks before the pandemic lockdown. We call it ‘Honeymoon in Quarantine’ because we didn’t actually have the chance to go on our honeymoon. On December 31, 2019, we closed down our office in Aliso Viejo, my two teenagers and I moved out of our home at the end of January 2020 and Gabe and I closed on our first home together February 13th, 2020. Two days later, we exchanged vows among our closest friends and family and partied like it was 1999. It was an amazing day and the culmination of so much hope and love shared, witnessed by so many that said it was one of the best days they’d ever had. And days after the lockdown, we were in awe of just how amazing our timing was. No one could have ever anticipated what was coming. Top the upheaval off with national cries of racial injustice and police bru-
tality, protests, Black Lives Matter and a barrage of mudslinging with the presidential election on the horizon, it has left us all shellshocked, to say the least. My mentor emailed me commenting on how she never thought she’d see the racial protests of the 60’s in her lifetime again. A lot of people are surprised by how Deja vu it is all seeming. Unless you have some intel the rest of us don’t, life can be surprising. You just don’t know what’s coming. But my very wise grandfather would say, we must live ‘fully aware’ and with our eyes wide open - about our health, our mortality, and how we handle things, small and large, because history has a tendency of repeating itself. A little over a decade ago, when I was first working on our Eat Cleaner line of products, preparing to go to market, H1N1, or Swine flu first struck in Mexico, then the United States, in the spring of 2009. By June, the novel H1N1 flu (swine flu) was reported in every state in this country, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, as well as more than 70 other countries worldwide. It hit countries in the southern hemisphere during their regular flu season — our summer months. On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic alert Phase 6, the highest level of alert. However, this was not because of how serious the novel H1N1 flu
26 Winter Warm 2021
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