BY WAAD ASKER

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and finding yourself situated in a puddle of sweat and clasping your chest as you struggle to breathe. It is out of this reality that Sheila Brown—the woman who once suffered this nightly experience—emerges triumphant over emotional eating that led to morbid obesity. “At nearly 300 pounds, I was clearly on the brink of having a heart attack or a stroke, and I knew it. Every night my body told me so,” Brown states.

Today, Brown lives her life in stark contrast to that woman on the brink of a heart attack. A Washington, D.C.-based Health Coach, Speaker, Author, and Chef, she now helps women conquer obesity the natural way, starting with a plant-based lifestyle.

For the last decade, Brown has been on a journey to transform the way people perceive soul food. Her strategy is to introduce them to vegan food through her Divinity Soup recipe.

“Divinity Soup segues to an important discussion about the food traditions and cultural expressions that emerged from our African ancestors who evolved a system of cooking based on their creative ingenuity even under the dire circumstances and restrictions of slavery.”

Brown wants people to explore soul food through a different mental paradigm. According to Brown, divinely-prepared meals are the essence of soul food. Divinely-prepared meals is the term she coined to describe a meal that satisfies the two sides of human hunger as Brown discusses in her e-book, Divinity Soup: an ancestor-inspired recipe starring collard greens, which is available for free on her website.

“These special meals were often at the heart of every black cook forced to make food for their families during that brutal legacy of food oppression we know today as ‘slavery.”

“We should not limit soul food to the ingredients that were available to enslaved people—which were few. Rather their divine intentions and sincere desire to prepare meals that would be able to address the spiritual and physical sides of human hunger is what matters,” she explains.

The changes Brown experienced during her weight loss created her own mindset shift. She transitioned to a vegan lifestyle over the course of a 60-day juice fast. “After going through that incredible weight loss journey and losing my first 57 pounds, I realized that my cravings for sugar, salt, fat and basically meat were gone,” she recalls.

So, Brown continued the journey by consuming plant-based food afterward. She also made juicing fruit and vegetables a routine part of her lifestyle. Her journey to becoming a chef, however, began with experimenting with vegan foods in a way that reminded her of the meals her grandmother Betty made for her when she was growing up.

“My grandmother was the best and most intentional cook I’ve ever met,” she recalls. According to Brown, she kept an immaculate kitchen and possessed a deep soulful knowledge of the perfect food combinations. Grandmother Betty’s dishes reportedly impressed even those with the most discriminating tastes.

The desire to mimic her grandmother’s methods in the kitchen led to the creation of Brown’s epic Divinity Soup recipe, or what she calls an “ancestor-inspired recipe.” The recipe, and book by the same name, is the result of her desire to cook southern-style collard greens while honoring her newfound dietary restrictions as a vegan. And this meant she had to be creative with spices and very open-minded.

Peculiarly, Divinity Soup is “very meaty” despite being vegan and gluten-free. “Everyone enjoys Divinity Soup the same whether vegan or not,” Brown exclaims.

Brown has evolved a collection of recipes that showcase the remarkable flavor profiles and textural flexibility of food that has led to a 3,000 percent increase in the number of Americans who identify as vegan over the past 15 years.

Her latest book, Sometimes Raw, Sometimes Cooked, Always Divinely Prepared: 21 Vegan dishes to inspire daughter of the Most High to eat Healthy, is just a tool she uses to help women of African descent overcome what she calls “the silent epidemic of emotional eating among black women.”

“I help women conquer emotional eating and overcome obesity naturally by teaching them to embrace a plant-based lifestyle, but also using active prayer, meditation, exercise, juicing and fasting, because I know exactly how effective these tools are to women like me. I lost 135 pounds in 15 months naturally. Others can do the same with my strategic guidance and unwavering support.”