Feeling Rebooted

On Saturday I attended an amazing event called Reboot

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Nope, not that kind of ReBoot (although my brother was a huge fan of that show until stopped watching because he was really afraid of it thanks to a character named Megabyte, but don’t tell him I told you that…)

I started off the day by having lunch with Danielle from Body by Nature. Danielle and I have read one another’s blogs and followed each other on Twitter for a long time now, so it was amazing for us to finally meet! We have a lot in common (including a love of all things food and the fact that we’re both working on our holistic nutrition designations) and it was really lovely for us to finally be able to connect.

Since the event was being held at the 918 Bathurst Centre, I suggested we head to Butler’s Pantry for lunch. Anyone else entertained by the fact that the soup of the day was “Ash”? I love the window booths at Butler’s and their mixed vegetable bhaji is one of my favourite things. I opted for half the rice that they normally provide and lots of salad. Holy yum. I love spending time with awesome bloggers from the veg community as it often takes very little time for us to get comfortable after daily interactions via Twitter and the fact that we often know a lot of the same people. We had an amazing lunch and laughed a lot, especially when we realized how much we really had in common.

Yafa from House of Verona had put together an amazing line up of international speakers for ReBoot including Benjamin Stone, Meghan Telpner, Elwin Robinson and Philip McCluskey. We were also treated to yoga from IamYoga and there were fun vendors set up all around the room.

Yafa started off the day with a talk about lifting depression with raw food. It was really amazing for me to finally meet Yafa and realize how much we have in common. Her story of healing her depression through a raw food diet is definitely inspirational and given my family’s history of mental illness, I was truly intrigued by all that she had to say. I love all that she is doing for the community and we agreed that we need to have tea sometime soon to talk more!

Meghan’s lecture on “10 Things [she] Learned Healing an Incurable Disease” really hit home for me. Meghan has been an amazing source of inspiration and support for me in my journey and hearing her recount her story in this manner really hit home for me. It reminded me why I do what I do, and gave me that extra little push to continue with the work that my naturopath and I talked about a couple weeks ago. Some of my favourite quotes included “We are better to spend our time happily creating, than creating to be happy” and “I have become the person I needed to meet'’. Meghan is a dynamic speaker and her presentation had a lot of humour, tough love, inspiration and motivation. Love. Love. LOVE.

My other favourite speaker of the day was definitely Philip McCluskey. Philip’s story of losing 215 lbs is absolutely phenomenal. While the underlying theme of his talk on Saturday was about the amazing benefits of raw food, it was really about saying yes to life and transforming your life. Philip has a pretty great perspective on life and was very inspirational to hear him speak and have the opportunity to chat with him throughout the day. I was also really excited to score a copy of his brand new book on Raw Carob Desserts.

Awesome people.
Yummy food.
Raw chocolate.

Inspiration.
New ideas.
Sunshine.

I couldn’t have asked for a better way to spend my Saturday!! Thank you to everyone who made the event possible. I definitely feel rebooted.