I write books, I write a blog on the Huffington Post, I answer emails and try to get the word out. So let’s see, what’s come up first is my Twitter account. So I’m going to tell everybody what’s happening right here: “I’m with folks from Supreme Master TV, filming, and having fun.” There we go. We have just tweeted. So that’s my life. The writing life.

Halo, peaceful viewers, and welcome to Vegetarian Elite here on Supreme Master Television. Today we travel to New York City, USA to visit a well-known American bestselling author, motivational speaker, radio host, life coach, and holistic health counselor – Victoria Moran. Passionate about life and helping others, including animals, Victoria has been writing for publications on topics such as health and spirituality since she was a teenager. Her lifestyle as a high-raw vegan reflects her compassion for animals, as well as her commitment to help people adopt a healthy and deliciously fun life habit. As Victoria so eloquently puts it:

“I live my life and do my best to be an example of what seems right to me. If people want what I have, they’ll ask what I do.”

Conveniently, Victoria also offers coaching to people worldwide by phone and on Skype. Victoria’s public appearances include being a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show – twice!, as well as on Good Morning America Now, The Today Show, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Aside from authoring 10 books (one of which has been translated to 29 languages!), she has also written for Yoga Journal, Body & Soul, Woman’s Day, Mothering, Natural Health, and Ladies’ Home Journal. She has been noted in acclaimed publications, from the Washington Post to Glamour magazine, and has had her own show on Martha Steward Living satellite radio. Let us now meet the wonderfully inspiring Victoria.

I’m Victoria Moran, I’m the author of “Creating a Charmed Life” – that’s my best known book - and some other books like “Fit from Within” and “Younger by the Day” and “The Love-Powered Diet.” And my purpose in life is I think very much in common with yours, to help make this world healthier and more humane.

Absolutely wonderful. Will you tell our viewers how you got started writing books and how you became a motivational speaker?

Sure. I’ve written my whole life. I think sometimes we really know what’s in us at a very early age, and words have always been my medium. So I started writing for publication when I was 14. I wrote for teen magazines because I wanted to meet the rock groups that were popular at that time, and I did. I succeeded pretty well – my biggest coup was meeting the Beatles!

Yes, so that was quite a deal. But as I changed my diet in my late teens, early 20s, the writing shifted as well, and I started writing for “Vegetarian Times” and an animal’s rights magazine called, “The Animals Agenda.”

Victoria’s interest in a healthy lifestyle began when she was a teenager.

I had a struggle with weight earlier in my life, in fact a 30-year struggle, but that’s overcome for over 20 years now.

Congratulations!

Thank you.

First, for me, I had to heal from the inside out. I know that you do meditation; this is so positive and helpful. When I was struggling with weight, I was maybe 18 years old. I wandered into a Christian Science reading room and the man there suggested that maybe I should learn how to meditate, and I walked out in a huff thinking, “He doesn’t know anything that doesn’t burn any calories!” And that just shows how far off base I was because I didn’t get it that I had been using food to fill an empty hole on the inside, and I needed to fill that hole with spiritual food. Once that was taken care of, I was given the gift of choice about what I would eat.

For 30 years, Victoria searched for a perfect lifestyle that she could be conscientiously happy with.

As I told you, I struggled with food for a really long time with overeating. And the way that that changed for me was taking care of the inside first. I’d been on all kinds of diets; you can spend your life going on diets. There are plenty of them out there, there’s all kinds of things you can spend your money on, all kinds of tips, if you stay up late enough at night, watch infomercials. It could just take up your life to try these various diet aids and the machines and the equipment.

But the reality is, when you heal from the inside out, when you take care of the inner longing, the inner yearning… See, this empty hole is not abnormal, and it’s not something that only people who have overeating problems have, we all come with an empty hole inside. That’s part of standard operating equipment for human beings. And that empty hole is there so that we’ll search for meaning, but we don’t know that’s what we’re supposed to do with it, so we try to fill it with all kinds of other things. Some people use alcohol, some people use drugs, some people use work.

Makes a lot sense to use food, because if the empty hole feels like it’s right about at stomach level. And that’s what I did for a lot of years, and a lot of people do that. But once you start to see that that’s what Pascal called the God-shaped hole in every man that only God can fill. The hole is there and it’s supposed to be fed with spiritual food. Once you get that piece, then you appreciate yourself more.

Life seems sweeter. When life gets richer, your food doesn’t have to be so rich, and then you can start really treating yourself to the best that life has to offer in terms of your food choices, your people choices, your relationship choices, your television and movie choices – everything that you do, you get the best because you deserve the best.

We’ll be back in just a moment to continue our chat with the lovely Ms. Victoria Moran. Learn how God, a martyr fish, and the ladies room became one of the first steps in Victoria’s charmed veg life.

Welcome back to Vegetarian Elite on Supreme Master Television and our feature on Ms. Victoria Moran, bestselling author of the “Creating a Charmed Life.” Interestingly, Victoria did not choose to become a vegetarian for health reasons as we would have imagined. Instead, her decision was one that blossomed forth from within:

“I stopped eating meat when I was 18 years old because I didn’t want to kill animals. It didn’t seem like a big a deal at the time: when you’re 18, when you’re making life choices every day and this was just one more. But as I evolved from vegetarian to vegan, and I became somebody who chose not to eat or wear or use products derived from animals, it was obvious that this was a big deal, after all.”

The compassionate seeds of a meat-free lifestyle were sown for Victoria much earlier in life, when she was still in elementary school.

“When I was seven, I came home from school and proudly recited to my grandmother the four food groups, that was the gold standard of nutrition education at that time: the meat group, dairy group, vegetable and fruit group and bread and cereal group. Ever the contrarian, she retorted: ‘There are some people who never eat any meat. They’re called vegetarians. I could take you out to Unity Inn (that was a church-run semi-vegetarian restaurant in a suburb of Kansas City) and get you a hamburger made out of peanuts. You’d think you were eating meat.’”

Two more incidences had occurred at different intervals in her young life before Victoria made the conscious decision to dispense with meat entirely. The first incident was when she was nine years old. Her family had taken her to a Boat, Sports & Travel Show in Kansas City. There, she “caught” her first fish and subsequently witnessed the brutal killing:

“…the booth worker grabbed the line and smashed the fish’s head on a metal table. I was totally unprepared for the torrent of blood that gushed from this now deceased being. The woman put it in a baggie and handed to me. I had killed. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d done it. I put the plastic-shrouded corpse in a ladies’ room trash bin and asked God to forgive me. I had to go direct; this wasn’t a sin I could take to confession.”

The second incidence occurred when she was in high school. Unable to bear the dissection of worms in her biology class, Victoria asked to be transferred to a lab-free human science class. When she explained to her teacher that she didn’t “want an animal to die for me to go to college,” his profound reply was, “But you eat meat, don’t you?” A question so simple that made her question her values:

“I’d been a fraud all these (15) years, claiming to care about animals while scarfing down fried chicken and pork chops and, of course, Kansas City steak every chance I got. But what could I do? I was a kid. My parents wouldn’t stand for it. What would I eat? I couldn’t even drive yet to get to the place with the peanut-burgers. ‘I eat it now,’ I told him, ‘but I won’t forever.’”

Through the discovery of yoga when she turned 18, Victoria was introduced to the concept of a compassionate lifestyle of non-killing.

It helped me connect my awkward physical self with the spiritual part of me where I’d always felt at home. And central to its moral code was ahimsa, non-killing, non-harming. I stopped eating land animals right away, and then sea animals, too. Now, I’m not proud that it took me more than a decade to go vegan (with no eggs and dairy), but that was the common route 30 years ago. People who were sensitive to these issues became vegetarians and we worked up to vegan over time.

Victoria struggled with the addiction to eggs and dairy products before she was able to transition to a pure plant-based diet.

I was already a vegetarian; I didn’t eat meat and I wanted to be vegan. I’d heard about vegans, it made sense to me, but I just couldn’t cut out that cheese. I couldn’t do without the eggs that were in all the baked goods because I needed those binge foods. I was really addicted to food and to being able to have any kind of food I wanted at any time. And once this inner healing had taken place I had the gift of choice and was able to become a vegan, which of course has made it much easier to keep the weight where I like it and have a really healthy life.

From being an ovo-lacto-vegetarian to a vegan, Victoria took a step further: she became a high-raw vegan.

I think a high-raw diet is very doable for a lot of people. Now there are raw fooders who eat 100% raw food. And what they say is that eating only raw fruits, vegetables, sprouts, juices, nuts and seeds, you feel remarkable in a way that those of us who don’t do that could never imagine. That may be true. I know that having a high-raw vegan diet – meaning that in the summer, I probably eat 85 to 90% of my food raw, uncooked, maybe heated up to 115 degrees or so; some of those vegan raw snacks that are made in a dehydrator.

I don’t own a dehydrator, I keep life simpler than that. But that’s pretty much what I eat. In the winter time up here in New York City, winters are long and cold, and then I’ll eat maybe 70, 75% of my food raw and have steamed vegetables, some cooked beans, some warm soups. And this is a lovely, lovely way to live because it gives you all the benefits of raw – meaning that you’re getting your food live with all the enzymes intact with that wonderful life energy that the yogis called “prana” that the martial arts people call “chi.”

Victoria Moran’s bestselling books, including Creating a Charmed Life, Fit from Within, Shelter for the Spirit, and The Love-Powered Diet can be found on BN.com and Amazon.com Say “Hi” and learn more about Victoria Moran at www.VictoriaMoran.com

Compassionate viewers, it is a pleasure to have you with us on Vegetarian Elite today. Join us again next week for part 2 of “Victoria Moran: A Charmed Life of Kindness.” Coming up next is Between Master and Disciples, here on Supreme Master Television. May all beings on Earth live together as one family, in laughter and joy.