As most of you know, I went to an Isagenix convention last week, after going on their 30 Day Cleansing and Fat Burning System. Crazy I know, to go to a conference for a product that I had just been introduced to but the more I researched the product and the better I felt, the more I felt compelled to see for myself  the legitimacy of the company and to learn about the people who stood behind it.

It was a tough evening the night before I left having just returned from the BlogHer Conference and as I lay at the bottom of the lanky boy love heap that was piled on top of me I wondered, “So why the hell am I going to an Isagenix convention?”

I woke up at 4:00a.m. to drive to Vail only to discover that my iPhone had vanished. Now what was I going to do? I was attending a conference of 5,000 plus attendees and my only contact, Ellen who was a celebrity within the Isagenix community, would be unattainable without text messaging.  “I can’t find my cell phone, I don’t think I should go,” I whispered to Wade as he lay dead to the world in bed. “Do what you need to do,” he sleepily replied. My signals were getting all mixed up and I sat in bed with my eyes closed trying to make some sense out of it all. When I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere I forged forward and jumped into my car with the stars twinkling overhead.  “This better be good,” I said out loud as I headed for the airport.

I went directly from the plane to the convention center and got in line to wait for the main doors to open. I had been forewarned about the Isagenix fever but it didn’t make it any easier when the crowd, eating IsaLean Bars and drinking the IsaLean Shakes, shoved me forward into the conference hall that was pulsating with loud music and flashing lights.

At any given moment I was either “ahhhhing” from the incredible energy and information I was receiving or “ooooing” from the overplayed hype, laden with standing ovations and stage induced actions toward self empowerment. They pulled me in and pushed me away and I was a mixed bag of emotions, torn between loving the incredible energy and the desire to withdraw from the idolizing crowd. Things began to change as I met the people whose stories I had been listening to from home and I saw for myself the wellness aspect of the products. The stories began to become real for me, where before they had seemed contrived. The emotion emanating from the stage became deeply moving and the stories magnificent.

I found Ellen and her husband Paul and they were a beautiful couple radiating warmth and compassion for everybody around them and that passion never waned throughout the entire week as they intently listened to everybody’s story, shushing everybody else into listening as well. And then I met David, who had lost 100 pounds through Isagenix. David  put authentication behind the emotion revealing to me the true heart of the company. He told me, and one of my roomies Jen, his story of how he had been in bed for two years after a head injury and how Isagenix had given him a new license on life and what I began to understand was how Direct Sales Marketing in this line of business works. Isagenix claims to have the best compensation plan in the world, has been around for eight years and is having their best year yet with an average of 600 new members a day and that is all attributed to the people who have experienced the product, found a path toward wellness and nutrition and have felt the need to share their stories and help others to achieve the same success.

But we must do our research mustn’t we, before we take the plunge, and if learning more about health and nutrition is of any interest to you I encourage you to do so. I did my best to load up on the information that was being offered  to me from the Doctors, Nutritionists and Scientists that were speaking and now that I am home I am researching further into how the nutrients; the plants, trace minerals and enzymes, have all been extracted and from where and as I research I am appalled at how little I know about my body and nutrition.

If you are like me and wanting to find more information about our food, our water and our environment, a good place to begin with your research is to visit Erasing the Bored, a blog written by my friend SuZen who is not in any way related to Isagenix but has made it her mission to inform us of what is going on with our water, our food and our environment, “We should NOT be a sick country but we are being poisoned by so much stuff everywhere you turn that it is more critical now than ever before in history to get SMART about the choices we make and STOP being so passive about what we are being exposed to.  STOP having trust in the FDA, USDA and stop believing the crap on TV ads.” The information is there, we just need to be better informed.

So, the answer is yes, I believe in the company. Aside from the weight loss that is staying off, I definitely have more energy, my nails are not breaking and are actually growing and my skin feels more lustrous. I also have noticed a significant improvement in my mental well being and most importantly, I am hoping that my body is becoming more alkaline.

For all of you who really are completely bored by all of this, please be rest assured that my site is not changing to a wellness site but I felt the need to give you a thorough follow up of what I have learned. For those of you wanting more information, please feel free to email me.

Celebrating life, after hearing David’s story, with my roommate Jen.

Ya know sometimes how you wake up from a dream in the middle of the night, only you’re somewhere floating in between the dream and reality? That’s how I have been feeling ever since I returned home from the BlogHer conference.

Trying to get my business organized so that my plane can gather speed on the runway, trying to appreciate and love every minute of these last days of summer with my boys…and all of their friends, trying to let Wade know how much I love and appreciate him all the while trying to deal with the noise, the neurotically besotted puppy, the mess, the lack of space.

It’s been tough, connecting fleetingly, and I miss that time when I was completely connected, overly connected, so much so that I felt that Wade didn’t love me anymore. I felt that I was blending into the wallpaper, if we had any. Doing Luvvie’s “Wallslide” every day. Of course, he always thought I was nuts. “I’m always right here,” he repeatedly told me.

So much going on, so exciting but can I hold on? Persevere. Stay true to my goal and my devotion to my family?

Tomorrow I’m off to another conference. My friends who are taking care of our children, so that Wade won’t be even more overwhelmed as he works his cute little bottom off, don’t even ask me what the hell I’m doing but I tell them because I want them to understand, and you as well.

I’m going to the “Believe and Achieve” Isaconvention in San Diego because Ellen invited me to go and  I’m going to trust my instincts that this is something I should do. Why, you may ask? Because I feel good, really good. In fact, I feel better than I have felt in a long, long time. And if I’m going to spread the word, I need to be completely convinced that the word that I am spreading is legit and good and as nutritionally incredible as I think it is .

I want to talk to all the other professionals who also believe in it, the nutritionists, the doctors with Harvard grad degrees, and get their take on it.

I want to see if for myself and mingle with the approximately 8,000 other people who all are feeling as good as I am. I need to see for myself that it is truly network marketing at its finest and not a ponzi scheme or a pyramid or anything sketchy. And I want to tell you all about it.

Let’s just hope I can stay off the dance floor this time.

**As an addendum, I just have to say the BIGGEST thank you to my good friend and new agent, Dede Brinkman, who is challenging me once again to reach greater heights. Dede, thank you for believing in me.

Melanie-Mouse

Michele dragging her son Devon for a picture

As I started to round the corner into the kitchen I heard my two sisters talking to each other on the phone, “You should have seen her last night. She went crazy binging on lettuce.” “ha, ha, ha, ha…,” I said jumping out from the shadows. “Very funny.”

You see, I may have painted a rosy picture in my previous post but the reality is that I am with my family and we all know that with family comes tears, judgment and irritation along with the love and the peeing in your pants with laughter.

My family finds it difficult to be patient with me when I obsess about anything, which at the moment happens to be my Nutritional Cleansing Program, and they most definitely want to stick their fingers down their throats if they happen to witness me jumping up and down in front of the mirror because my large breasts seem to be disappearing. I wouldn’t even think of saying to them, “I think I have the breasts I have always wanted, just a handful and nothing more,” especially if Wade is in earshot.

These glories are all mine to try my best to keep to myself lest I nauseate any of my other family members by appearing too vain or eager to lose weight or narcissistic.

All in all, I will say that the first ten days of the program were a cinch for me when on my home turf but in the ten days that I have been in Nantucket the challenge has become far greater and I am surprised and proud of myself for not falling too far off the wayside to indulge on what I have always loved the most about Nantucket, the family dinners with the  good conversation sparked by glasses of chilled white wine and accompanied by bread fresh off the racks at the bakery, Steamers dripping with melted butter, tomatoes from Bartlett Farm that taste like heaven when put together with cucumbers, goat cheese, basil and my mother’s famous Balsamic salad dressing and succulent corn on the cob topped off with the plumpest blueberries, raspberries and peaches, I’m drooling all over my keyboard just writing about it.

The reality is that where I miss the concept of depriving myself of eating or drinking whatever I want, whenever I want the frustration dissipates as soon as I put my loose fitting clothes on and I feel total elation rush through my body. You know that feeling? The feeling you get before holidays or before you are going on a getaway weekend with your husband or for me the feeling that something good is about to happen that I have always felt right before Halloween. Come to think of it, Halloween is the day that I met my husband so maybe I always knew somehow…anyway not to go off on a tangent or anything but I am loving that feeling of pure, essential happiness that I am doing something really good for myself, regardless of the obstacles.

It is as if I am metamorphosing into a rejuvenated and hopefully more refined version of what I was before and I like it. Now people are warning me to not get too thin, as if that would ever happen to me who can’t seem to make it through two entire days of cleansing without sabotaging myself at 9pm with chilled white wine to finish it off with a bang.

After day fourteen I was bored with it all, bored with the attention to myself, bored with explaining to other’s why I wasn’t eating and bored with not being able to eat the fruits of nature while on an island that I used to associate with hedonism in my teens. And so I did what I always do, I rebelled by going out to dinner with my family and having two glasses of white wine and half a dozen oysters on the half shell, and I felt marvelous, maybe a little too marvelous. My sisters and I perused the shops afterward and found a sweet Bulgarian girl who I unloaded my philosophy of life on, “You are young and beautiful and you seem so adventurous. The world is your oyster, go explore it,” and I saw her eyes widen with Shakespeare’s famous quote from his play “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. “I’m going to write that down in my journal and never forget it,” she said as I floated away on the cloud that I was on.

The next day I returned to the program and was none the worse for it and today I will have Michele take pictures of me and again in ten days when my thirty days will be over. Hopefully, I will have attained my goals before jetting off to New York City for the BlogHer ’10 Conference, which in itself is going to be a whole lotta fun to write about.

Eat ya later!