The skinny on raw food guru Karyn Calabrese
by A. LaBan
It helps if you start with good bones. Karyn Calabrese is 52 and a grandmother, and she looks better than most 22-year-olds. A former model and actress, nature gave her a head start. But it's a nutrition and lifestyle philosophy that she's parlayed into a growing business that makes her a walking, talking, glowing advertisement for her personal mantra of living life raw. Based in a city that relishes its history as "hog butcher to the world," Calabrese is a proponent of a lifestyle that includes a diet limited to raw vegetables. Raw foodies believe that heat destroys the natural vitamins, minerals and, particularly, enzymes in food. They say enzymes are the essential active ingredients in your body that break down chemicals, digest food, and assemble amino acids. While the medical community has yet to endorse a raw food diet, rawists counter that man is the only animal that cooks food and maintain that we would be better off only eating food in its natural state.
Twenty years ago, pursuit of a healthier lifestyle took Karyn away from her former modeling and acting career. She notes, "I didn't start out in this business to make money -- in fact, I made ten times more money as a model and actress. But, as I was healing myself, things just evolved." Karyn's first health-oriented business venture was wheatgrass sprouts distribution, which she started from a greenhouse in Evanston and still maintains on the side. Soon she was supplying the turf trays that serve as the raw ingredients for wheatgrass shots all over the city. Eventually, she got into the restaurant business and opened Karyn's Fresh Corner -- The Garden Café in 1995. "The restaurant wasn't planned," she explains. "I had developed a nutrition counseling practice and had a client with multiple sclerosis and was making food for him, as well as others, at home. Soon I had six dehydrators in my house, and my husband said 'Enough.'"
With no prior restaurant experience, Calabrese admits the café's been one of her more challenging ventures. At Fresh Corner, she sprouts, purees and dehydrates, turning zucchini into spaghetti, making nuts into milk, and creating mock turkey, seasonally, from sunflower and pumpkin seeds. Patrons of all backgrounds have flocked to her indoor garden to savor her raw vegan specialties, like crowd favorites Southern greens, gazpacho, "cream" pies and cheese from seeds and nuts and, my personal favorite, almond pate.
On the heels of her restaurant's success, Calabrese opened her Inner Beauty Center to offer one-on-one counseling as well as, increasingly, group sessions. Inner Beauty services include private nutritional consultations, cleansing colon hydrotherapy, lymphatic drainage to clear the body's "waste pathway," massage, acupuncture, chiropractic treatments and oxygen baths in a "sauna-like pod."
The sky's the limit these days for Calabrese. While she's negotiating the distribution of her raw culinary creations through retail stores, she's also working on a deal for a line of vitamin supplements and is talking to publishers about a book. She'd like to expand Karyn's Inner Beauty and open centers around the country. She's built up a large following during her two decades of counseling and speaks to large groups. She's beginning to tape and resell these sessions, is contemplating the possibility of lecturing around the country, and savors her success. "Everything that I've learned to do for myself, I've turned into a business," she says. "Being able to do what I love and make money while I help people -- I'm a very fortunate person."
On a Saturday afternoon, I was introduced to the power of Karyn first hand, joining an SRO crowd at Karyn's restaurant as they eagerly await an introduction to Nature's Healing System, a four-week detoxification program that Calabrese keeps referring to as "thirty short days." We listen as Calabrese explains how to change our lives with regular cleansing and detoxings, tuning our bodies like you'd tune up a car. We're shocked as she reveals we ingest 125 pounds of sugar and over 3,000 chemicals without so much as biting into a donut. We cringe as she visually illustrates the toxic effects of dairy, meat, chicken and fish on our already overburdened colons. By the end of two hours with Karyn, the class is fired up to put their decadent daily menus behind for "thirty short days" and ingest powders and potions with names like fenugreek, psyllium and green kamut, plus as many raw fruits and vegetables as their colons can handle. I'm thinking maybe I should get on the bandwagon and expel some of the excess mucus and dead wastes out of my own lymphatic system. The stuff Karyn says makes sense -- and just look at her. Seeing is believing. Then I remember I'm suppose to have ribs for dinner. My colon is going to have to wait at least one more day for a tune-up.
Karyn's Fresh Corner, 3351 North Lincoln, (773)296-6990
Karyn's Inner Beauty Center, 2217 North Lincoln, (773)281-7708
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