Karyn Calabrese declares “she is not special”. Yet it is undeniable, she has a special gift. She has learned to listen to the knowledge innate within herself and become a leading holistic healer and teacher.

Many people look at Karyn at 64 and assume she inherited a strong matriarchy. The facts are, however, that both her mother and grandmother died at ages younger than Karyn is now. With this seeming fate at hand, she sets out to prove her genetic heredity wrong. This is where her story begins.

Alone with two children to raise, she bought her first wheatgrass juicer and opened a new life of growth and prosperity with her first business, growing and distributing wheatgrass. More importantly this began her life-long exploration into the inter-connectedness between food and body and the ultimate attainment of self-insurance and inner peace.

Karyn had been a vegetarian for 12 years, but this was merely a first step leading towards a completely raw food diet. No doubt this is a tough life to come to. It is out of the “norm” and denies what we have so long held as “truths”. To make this more feasible, Karyn opened her raw-foods restaurant, Karyn’s Fresh Corner, which was a thriving success.

Although mostly self taught, Karyn had many mentors along the way. It was through these interactions that Karyn found the next important step in her path.

She believes it is not enough to simply eat live foods but to cleanse the body of the strong, negative, anti-life foods still in the body. Today, Karyn teaches detoxification classes through the year to give these lessons to others. To facilitate this process of cleansing, she opened a holistic therapy center, Karyn’s Inner Beauty Center.

This is where we find Karyn today. A 63 year old woman and “Raw Foodist of the Year” who lives the full, lively life she envisioned giving herself. She is working on a book that gives the voice to the positive experiences of the people she has helped along their own journeys. And this is what, contrary to what she declares, does indeed make her special. She has created an all-encompassing environment of food, health, guidance and care where we can all participate in our own well being. For as Karyn herself questions at the end of every day: “If you don’t take care of this [your body] where are you going to live?”

Karyn Calabrese was awarded the First Annual Raw and Living Foods Golden Branch Award in 2002 for introducing the idea of raw and living foods to the greatest number of people in the mainstream public.

Karyn has appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” as well as numerous national commercials, print ads and on an album cover.