founder of the cognate diet this is a weight loss program that combines cognitive behavioral strategy stress reduction and of course healthy diet and lifestyle change very meek was diagnosed at age forty two with ovarian cancer and this of course created a huge shift in her relationship with food so welcome thank you for being here and thank you for inviting me yes dorothy i came in the u s in ninety five  a very healthy french woman and you know i was raised on all the right stuff and then i started to discover how they moved to atlanta i discover their claws and hamburgers and fries and  never ate before and this is not how you grew up in what part of france in normandy your monday and also in belgium ok so the food ethic let's just start with the food that we have in front of us because the food is going to drive the telling of your story and this looks more like what you would've grown up with and in france right yeah i started to cook at age six was my grandmother we spend our vacation in our farm in normandy so i've done it all you  cancer in your family there's no history of cancer in my family at all ok so coming here and getting cancer at such a young age was a bit of a smoking gun something was different here from how it was when you grow up so let's just take a look at the ingredients in front of us and we're going to talk about them in terms of why you emphasize eating the who now particularly because you're post cancer treatment and you just want to generally be healthy  the grass would just go out into the else ok so when you look at the vegetables those green vegetables are really one of the some of the highest in terms of alkalinity so they are really going to be very good for body ok french people don't mind taking time to cook do they know because it's an experience that you enjoy it's a zen attitude in fact it's a form of meditation zen french is zen ok yes french sent because you are connected to girl ok i could use a lemon juice and salt and pepper ok all right good and of course we left the fish in the refrigerator for the obvious reason but why do we want to be eating what did you bring salmon yes we also that the second course is going to be salomon and whil with a lot of vegetables and fruits ok so i'm going to start you can give me a job i'm going to start chopping something but i want you to talk more about this because this issue of alkalinity came up when talked about strong bones too so what's going ok and some will some some food will have a tendency to release hydrogen ions and some other ones will have a tendency to attract i dredge and high ends so for instance very acidic foods are not a or saliva or whatever so we can we can play that game later ok varity and i are both facilitators for the suppers programs and she plays the best games at her meetings ok so let time of your diagnosis and the experience of coming to this country becoming a pharmaceutical executive that wasn't a stressful life was it where it started in atlanta in the south so you could see life was a little bit more relaxed than in your jersey or new york but the food was really a cultural shock to me everything pride everything in big portion foods i had never eaten before so i really started to gain a lot of weight and you know at one point i realized something was wrong with me and the story is that you know i always said that i you know i saved my husband's life but by saving his life you see of mine because my husband's family has cardiovascular problems history and one day i saw him at home and we still it was really starting to feel very bad i felt like something's going to happen it looks like it's a heart attack so i drove him to the princeton hospital and he had the heart attack at the hospital see people want to know what did that i say well he started to have pain in his left arm and typical my husband never complains that he's not attention you know i was like ok something is wrong maybe i should see my gynecologist but not thinking for one minute there is something going on here but what happens is that i got so scared and so stressed because he had the heart  grew exponentially so one week after my husband had his heart attack all of a sudden i look i'm i'm pregnancy three months ok so i always say i saved his life but he saved mine because then i went to see the doctor and my doctor dr way so in a way is it safe to say that you understand why you got cancer well i i guess that the cancer came from you know imbalance in my body because all of a sudden grapefruit and the pieces of the figs in the and the figs and this is part of your lifestyle since you were in treatment that you eat this way yeah we all the time we used to eat a lot of vegetables and in fact we eat even more vegeta vol i mean this is a study that was published not so long ago in d and u k in fact followed i think twelve thousand people and they really sure there is a strong correlation between the number of vegetables even more than than fruits that you eat and longevity as well as quality of life in terms of house and they even say that you know the five to six that we are supposed to eat is not enough we should go up to eight now eight so eight or a cup of and cook yes the mortgagee we eat the better and you can eat mountains of vegetal ball and you're not going to gain weight ok i'm going to go get the fish you want to start the salad dressing ok thank you so i make sure there is some room here for the fish so we're going to keep it very simple for the rat was just using olive oil and today apple cider vinegar that we could also use lemon juice so what's important is what all the ratios so for let's say four of this i would use three of vinegar so one to add depends on the quantity so i'm going to go here like we stew ok and then i'm going to have one of this one so you know some people like it a little bit more acidic than others so that's why i'm going as you know then adding acid to your food reduces the glycaemic value of your food i just read that that's a good thing to do you know it's it's a good you know what we need balance in life right so we need balance between alkaline and some good acidic food because everything has a role in or body right so i want to add a little bit of salt just sold i don't so we can decide to toss it but i like to toss it when it gets to the table ok over it was i like any family going to make it pretty by adding the little pieces of you and that's a very nice way to start your dinner the china is also a bit of a juice and here is your salad is ready to be that's beautiful let me take that away and we'll get started on our sound i think i better clean us up a little bit of space here first because you need this one right yes ok this thank you thank you ok what's first ok so in order to create this wonderful solomon with spend very cautious about not cutting myself when we use those instruments because you know you're going to have to get rid of part of your bowl but please don't cut yourself ok so you know that that should be enough for pepper and i thought a little bit a little bit of oil ok do french people worry about pets no good you think you can everything is edible here is a piece and usually a good size is four ounces this is invented that rest ok but i know maybe some other people have done it this way but one day i said i would like to created this way and you guys usually always do things this way with anya and so whatever said let's try something different then we are going to squeeze one orange bowl and what's important is we are going to need to start to create like a little vessel here because we are going to put some of the juice i use like one already or proportion ok and we have to be careful then when we put this in the oven or when you know that it's not going to be like cut anywhere so use good quality paper because otherwise you're that's a portion for one person and usually it's no going it's going to go in the oven depending on how you won your what i'm not sure like i usually put at four fifteen ok it's pretty heated and then i leave it for twelve to fifteen minutes and then bending on you know here it's a it's a rather thick piece of salmon so i'm going to put it like twelve minutes ok i'm going to set up the rest of the game and you brought your ph strips w that is oscillating between seven sortie five and seven forty five in the ph as i told you earlier measures the number of free hydrogen ions that are circulating in any liquid ok if the ph of a broad was really out of controversy about this because you know when you look at science your blood is kept in balance at every moment even when we eat very acidic food by in fact bye bye bye buffer saliva yes stress so every part of our body has a different ph because every part of our body has a different role right like the ph in our stomach would be various scenarios accident one to sweep point five because it's like taking care of all that food ok and pending on what you've been eating the night before if you checked with the little peach strips i will surely or your urine in the morning you will see variation between you know as five to eight are you more alkaline are you more there is too many of those free hydrogen ions with the same one we eat or what we eat has an impact of home any of those hydrogen are circulating at any time ok so the best so the best thing is to eat as close as we can to or natural ph which is seven point sorry five and you will see that depending on the war we drink they will have different ph is like the tap water where i live it has a potassium all sorts of mineral ok make them more alkaline then bring it back to people who are in treatment or after cancer treatment we want them to be more we alkaline and testing yeah the ph strips will help them change behavior well if you if you stick to an alkaline diet where you're going to eat a lot of vegetables and fruits protein as well i mean some people need to eat fish and  right but you really get rid of processed food eaten actually a lot so lots of vegetables and fruit you will still be able to see an impact on on your ph not so much on your blood because you brought is regulated but you will see the impact when you glasses on now because i need them and we're going to play the ph strip game so for that game you need ph strips here they are you can buy them and your local pharmacy or you can buy them online just type ph strips it's very inexpensive ok and so you see this is going to change color with the liquid and here this is the most alkaline you can be so we are going to start we between between a six and a seven you have to wait a few a few seconds ok so a little bit more outlined then if yes yes ok now the bottle so we're going to wait for a few seconds and i would say yeah it's clear seven mikei so we've gone as we went here one more alkaline then we are going to try this bottle here and you can see the difference here right so i have to flip i have to flip it because for this one here i would say that i am more like a five that we going to know try a carbonated drink milk and remember we said it was a dairy writes a dairy products so it's more on the acidic side ok ok and then we are going to know nature is the same rules whether it has to do is a soil the rain or a body and so i think it's it's very enlightening to greenock how did i yeah yeah it's time for me to get the salmon out of the oven very neat why don't you tell people a little bit about how he died and how to get in touch with you ok so by the colony that in fact you heard my story so i decided to i learned more about nutrition and i got a master's degree in nutrition in two thousand and six it took me a couple of years to get it while i was working and you know as a nutritionist i realized that just teaching people about food and power use and i was not enough so i started to read a lot about cognitive  therapy and stress relief you know there isn't a strong correlation between stress and weight gain so i developed a common diet program that really looks at a person really holistically because if you don't take very much focused on you know house we played a ph d game at some of the supper aside and i was asked by dorothy you know what is your message today and i would say you know what as a kid and coming from europe time to stop to eat and enjoy what we eat ng so if you take the time and you get really respectful with food and understand the power that food has to help us be healthy and have a long life then i think everything is going