In Conversation With Danijela Radonic Bhandari (Dana), Integrative Health and Wellbeing Counsellor

Q: Talking about you and your work brings us straight to your platform DanaVeda which blends Eastern and Western schools of thought through Integrative Nutrition & Emotional Eating Health Coaching, Clinical Hypnotherapy, Energy Healing, Yoga & Meditation. As stated on your website, DanaVeda “integrates your intention and life mission in assisting people unravelling, embracing and nourishing their potential, and living the healthiest, most loving, joyful, fulfilling, and content expression of themselves”. Tell us more about your holistic approach to assisting your clients.

The awareness that everything in this Universe is so beautifully interconnected was present in me from an early age. The human mind and consciousness have always been the most intriguing yet inspiring aspects of our incredible existence. I always knew that my educational and professional path would never be a straight line since my curious mind always wanted to go further, deeper, more expansive. And I gave myself permission to be a student of life.

During my studies at the IIN (Institute for Integrative Nutrition), one of the most beautiful, meaningful, and impactful concepts we were taught, and which truly resonated with me, was the concept of Primary and Secondary Food. Primary food encompasses everything that feeds us off the plate, nourishes our soul and satisfies the hunger for living our fullest self-expression. Amongst other elements, it includes our relationships (how open, supportive, honest, and meaningful they are), our physical activity (how regular, appropriate, rejuvenating, energising and enjoyable it is), our career (how much it allows the realisation of our potential, how rewarding, fulfilling and how inspiring it is), as well as our spiritual practice (how connected we are to our essence and the source overall) or sound, uninterrupted sleep with healthy circadian rhythm. On the other hand, secondary food is what we consume in the form of actual food, which provides us with nutrients and energy to sustain life and has a significant impact on our minds. However, the more we feed on the primary food and satisfy our hunger for life, the less our dependence on secondary food will be.

Q: What do you see as a highlight of your Health Coaching Program?

No matter how much broccoli you eat, celery juice you drink or hours of intermittent fasting you manage to accomplish, if your nourishment is not holistic and doesn’t attend to all the aspects of life, you are not going to feel vibrant, joyful, and fulfilled for a sustained period. However, as much as I like to emphasise the importance of primary foods in my work with clients, I also want to create lifestyle changes that support their wellbeing, rather than prescribing rigid diets. The Bio-individual approach is crucial and answers your question about the highlight of my Health Coaching Program. First, we must understand that everything in nature follows a certain rhythm. Different seasons, temperatures, locations, moods, hormonal changes, activity levels, stress levels, etc., would affect our food requirements and choices available to us. Discipline is important, but so is our flexibility, adaptability, understanding of the bigger picture, and, above all, being in touch with ourselves.

To help my clients create a balance between the primary and secondary sources of nourishment is where my integrative approach unfolds itself. From guiding, or rather assisting, in their lifestyle changes and decision-making through my Health Coaching Program to get them to embark on a much deeper inner work journey through Clinical Hypnotherapy, my main aim is to connect them to their essence and develop a loving relationship with it. Honouring themselves, embracing their strengths and working on their weakness, understanding how some deeply rooted unresolved issues from the past taint or cast a shadow on their current decisions and overall state of being in the present becomes instrumental in their healing and transformation.

Q: Could you give us an example of this interconnectedness between the primary and secondary food and touch upon emotional eating that you specialise in?

If we look at the relationships, for example, try and remember how easy it is to forget about food for hours and feed on the energy of being enveloped in all that excitement, contentment, and the mere presence of your loved one (talking about partnership) or loved ones (talking about our family or friends). But the moment there is an argument, some other kind of crisis, or maybe feeling of loneliness, that ice-cream tub, which was silently sitting inside the freezer for days or weeks, suddenly becomes our much-needed companion and comes out to fill that void or cool down the inner fire of dissatisfaction, anger, anxiety, or whatever accompanying emotions might be present within us at that moment. Before we know it, the amount of ice cream in that tub has significantly decreased, if not almost gone, and all the disturbing feelings we had are suddenly replaced with regret, resentment, guilt for being so mindless. Were we really craving that ice cream, or was our craving only for a long, loving hug, perhaps? Finding the answer to Deepak Chopra’s question, “What are you hungry for?” is a process and a journey, but the one certainly worth embarking on.

Q: Does this replacement of the lack in the primary food zone with gorging on secondary foods to fill that void is what emotional eating is?

It is essential to understand that we all eat emotionally sometimes. Don’t we all use food to comfort us occasionally, as a ‘pick me up’ tool or a reward for a job well done? However, feeling out of control and guilty about it, placing food at the centre of our lives consistently and chronically, and having the overall quality of our life negatively impacted by it is when it becomes a problem and must be addressed. Emotional eating includes connecting any emotion with food and, therefore, it is all about emotional, not physical hunger.

I’ll give you an example from my Clinical Hypnotherapy practice where a client, an unmarried young guy, came to me complaining that he would eat enormous amounts of apples, sometimes even the entire watermelon if apples were not available, the moment he would feel lonely, missing his family and overall warmth and connection with his loved ones. Since he was a celebrity fitness instructor who worked with his VIP clients in different exotic locations all over the globe, most of the year he would find himself away from his family. I guided him through the Age Regression process to find the root cause of his problem so that we could work on it. He found himself in the kitchen when he was around three years of age, and his mother was there too, cooking and doing some housework. The moment he started crying and seeking her attention, his mom, a very health-conscious lady, would give him an apple to quiet him down. However, little did she know that these apples would become a replacement for her love and attention. So, we did some lovely Inner Child Work which helped him fill that insatiable void and find the most potent connection that would always be available and nourish him as no other relationship would - the connection with his inner Self, with his essence.

Q: So, different tools can be used to address food-related issues. How do you decide which one to use?

Absolutely! As I mentioned, the bio-individual approach is the key, and the goal is to always go to the root cause of the problem. Narrating one more case study would perhaps help in understanding how deep and complex our issues could be. A client who was a very famous health coach herself had a tough time understanding her relationship with food and weight. No conscious understanding and explanation made any sense to her eagerness to lose weight to be more attractive to her partner, yet feeling very, very uncomfortable, insecure, and anxious regarding her relationship the moment her weight would begin to drop. In our quest to go to the point of the origin of her problem, she went straight to the past life in which she was starved to death by a man who was in love with her and who couldn’t accept the fact that she was in love with another man. So, the impressions in her mind related to the weight loss were associated with the separation from her loved one, isolation and death. We did a complex therapy process in which she managed to heal her relationship with weight loss and become comfortable in her own skin and her relationship with her partner.

Q: That is remarkable! Thank you for sharing these examples with us and introducing different perspectives to our relationship with food, ourselves, and the world around us. In short, what would be your closing words for our readers?

Creating a life in which our inner and outer nourishments are in a beautiful, supportive romance is the real fuel for a joyful, meaningful, content, and worthy of living life. May all our lives be fueled by it!