Welcome to the Golden 20s 2.0! ✨🍾

I hope you had an amazing start to this new decade. I certainly did! Roman’s friend invited us to his new-bought house in Berlin. We expected only a few friends to be there. As it turned out, he had invited almost his entire staff as well as their families! 15 people and kids definitely made for a great party crowd.

He really thought about everything for the perfect NYE party. Champagne, oysters, freshly smoked and marinated salmon. Heaven! But no New Year’s Eve party is perfect without ‘Pfannkuchen’ (a jam-filled doughnut without the hole also called ‘Berliner’).

In Berlin, you traditionally eat Pfannkuchen at midnight. The French bakery Lenôtre at Kadewe sells the best in town. I got up extra early that day to stand in line. Yes, there is a line. That’s how good they are!

You could say we rang 2020 in with a bang!

Turns out, the real bang happened a few days later back in Munich. Roman texted me from work that day and told me he felt nauseous and had a loose stool. I told him to come home if he didn’t feel better in the next couple of hours. At that time, I still felt fine. I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet and didn’t feel hungry which was a little unusual but didn’t concern me much.

It didn’t talke long until I also felt nauseous

A couple of hours later (I had eaten breakfast by now), I also started to feel nauseous. Since I have a rather nervous digestive system and feel nauseous quite often (especially when I’m stressed), I didn’t give it much more thought.

Roman came home a little bit later. He was shivering all over and told me that he had the worst form of diarrhea and hadn’t been able to eat. I was in the midst of cleaning the appartment (being away 3 weeks certainly left its toll). He immediately laid down to take a nap. I continued cleaning but also started to feel worse by the minute.

The nausea would come and go in waves. When I was almost done with my cleaning but didn’t want to awaken Roman with vacuuming, I decided to also lay down a little bit and finish up later. That’s when things started to go downhill. My entire body hurt and I felt sick to my stomach. I went to the bathroom a couple of times but it didn’t really seem to help.

After fighting with myself for a few hours, things finally started to leave my body on both ends (it was not pretty, let me tell ya). Once everything had left that didn’t pay rent, I immediately started to feel better. This was the first time I experienced something like it. I spend the entire next day in bed, exhausted and with joint pain. In the evening, I finally felt hungry again and snacked on some salted pretzels.

A soothing rice dish was just what my sensitive stomach needed

We then decided to order some stomach-friendly Vietnamese food. Roman had Pho Bo which sounded amazing to me but they only offered the one with beef and this was the last thing I felt like eating now. So I decided to get the so called ‘fasting dish of the Buddish’ which was veggies and tofu in a real light sauce with rice. So delicious and just what my stomach needed.

After reading of the high carb content of rice, I had eliminated it from my food list for years and totally had forgotten how soothing rice felt on a sensitive stomach. It had also helped me with period cramps during Christmas.

In the end, I’m grateful for the incident. It kind of felt like a purge, not only physcially but also mentally. I let go of a lot of insecurities and negative mental patterns along with the food. It felt so freeing and now I’m ready to start this new decade all cleaned up and fresh!

The next couple of weeks are going to be very exciting with the new collection of FABSOUL on the horizon and the first Mindful Sunday of the year on February 2nd (tickets are already going fast!).

Let’s see what this year has in store for us! I’m beyond excited to have you on this journey with me!