Truth

I thought about what to write all week, and then the answer came to me. It’s not about food. It’s about WHY WE ARE SO SICK.

Truth- Because we gave our God-given power away to people who hate us, poison us, and then lie to us about it, all the while telling us to obey and eat our poison like good little peasant slaves. And you bet I’m mad about it.

There are people in this world that I know who use the terms, “Your truth” and “My Truth.” Those are not truths, I am sorry to say, those are opinions. Truth is objective, and remains the truth whether you want to believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient to what you believe or not. I do not claim to know everything, for the record, but I have spent several years doing nearly nothing BUT researching in rabbit holes to find out why nothing in this mortal life made sense. And I found out why- because of the simple truth that it is far easier to fool a person than it is to convince them they have been fooled.

No one wants to completely dismantle their belief system and rebuild it from scratch, and it is a harrowing experience to do so, I will be the first to admit. It was awful learning that nearly everything I believed to be true was a complete lie. Learning that I grew up in a horribly twisted hellscape in which evil pretends it is good and good doesn’t fight the evil because it doesn’t know it exists. Learning how much power I have- and learning who tried to get me to surrender that power in the first place. But don’t be afraid, because Jesus REALLY IS the truth. You just have to unpack Him from whatever other religions told you about Him. Study HIS word. What HE said. The Bible is the only book you need. Jesus will lead you through your dark days, I promise.

But you have to be willing to be wrong. Anyone who isn’t willing to be wrong, well, God can’t work in you.

I would like to detail my journey through truth so that anyone reading this understands what I’m talking about. All I can do is tell you what I’ve learned, and you can look any of this up.

When I was growing up, I was raised in a religion that, I was told, had the “whole” truth about Christianity. I actually didn’t know until I was in my twenties that there were non-Mormon Christians. It literally just didn’t occur to me, because of the teaching when I was a child about how a man named Joseph Smith prayed and asked “Which of the churches are true?” and was apparently told by God that NONE of them were, and to go start his own. This is where the lies and brainwashing started- and how I was raised to believe that there were no good religious people outside of Mormons. Or if there were, that they were poor lost souls who needed to read the Book of Mormon, because if you don’t hail that book as important as the Bible, there’s something wrong with YOU. I genuinely believed that the LDS church had the complete monopoly on salvation- because that is what they teach.

The LDS church teaches that there are not one level of Heaven, but three, and the second level of Heaven is for “Those who are not valiant in the testimony of Jesus Christ.” Which is what they believe of non-Mormon Christians- that if you believe in Jesus with your whole heart but don’t obey the LDS church, obviously you’re not as good as the people who do. The third level of Heaven also apparently includes a thousand year detour through hell, which is reserved for the liars, but even they apparently get to a lower level of Heaven someday. Huh. (This is an infographic anyone can look up btw)

A contradiction began to form within me- because of one honest and true teaching that I DID get in my youth church classes- that God gave us free will, but the devil wanted us to obey. So, logically speaking, anyone who blindly obeys the LDS church and does what they say, is not following God’s plan for their life, and I began to rebel in my teenage years, because I wanted to flex my God-given free will, and my family and church drilled into me that I needed to obey them. I left the church after graduating high school because so much of it just didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t make any sense to me that good families could be separated in the afterlife just because one family member didn’t want to do strange temple rituals or pay 10% of their income to a 5013-c corporation with an army of lawyers and a hundred billion dollars. Like, really? This business holds the gatekeeping to my entire eternity, and if I don’t do what they say, as they say it, then I’ll be ripped away from my family forever? What kind of racket is this?

Then I met my husband, a Godly man if one ever walked the face of the Earth. He was raised Mormon like me, but stepped away in teenage years like I did. He got himself into trouble, sure, but he cleaned himself up, worked hard, saved money, married my dumb ass, and bought us a house. He was selfless, kind, and pure. He thrashed at metal shows, he loved to drink heavily at parties, he paid for his niece’s gymnastics lessons when his brother was too broke to afford them. He sat at the kids table at Thanksgiving because the children had more interesting conversations. He was as close to God as I ever could have conceived of in a mortal man. He showed me that you can be the most beautiful, pure soul in the world without being beholden to any sort of oppressive religion, and it changed my life.

After my husband died, I think I stopped believing in God for a while. It was a rough few years stumbling around in the dark, and then my beautiful daughter came to me. 6 lb, 10 oz miracle baby. Her job was to teach me how God loved- unconditionally, no matter what messes we get ourselves into. If my child screamed for an entire day, I would still watch her sleep peacefully and go, that’s my sweet girl, I’ll love you no matter what you do. And that’s when I started to understand God’s love- truly unconditional, and limitless. Without limit or condition. I would crawl over broken glass ten miles for my baby girl starting right now if I had to. I love her that much.

Then I began to have a realization about God, and why the LDS church felt so wrong to me. They teach that God and Jesus are two separate people. When you understand this, so much more makes sense, because if you truly believed that a loving God would send HIS OWN FLESH AND BLOOD CHILD to Earth to be tortured to death, then, my goodness, what wrath would He visit upon me if I don’t do what He wants? After all, I can’t be NEARLY as important to Him as Jesus is, right?

I also, ashamedly, had a hard Liberal lean for a lot of my adult life. I was so damaged by the oppressive religion that taught me that I should be fearful of God and that I had no power, that I rebelled against that notion, and I decided the “other side” had to be correct. It took a lot of humble pie to admit I was wrong, trust me, especially when loved ones tried to convince me that I had been brainwashed by propaganda and it led to some extremely ugly moments in my family. I was so sure I was right, I cut my family off. And I had to go to them later and tell them I was wrong. Was it easy?

No. It sucked.

A few years ago, when I had my traumatic brain injury, I ran desperately back into a Christian church and begged God to heal me. It was literally a hail-Mary pass. I had no other option. I had to go to God because I knew I had messed myself up so badly that only a miracle could save me. And He did. Jesus set me back on my feet and led me out of the darkness, and once I was out of the darkness, I began to see evil for what it truly is- darkness pretending to be light because good people don’t know when they’re being lied to, and evil lies through our feelings.. Evil doesn’t march around announcing it’s evil. Evil sidles up alongside the good and tags along, then suggests 1% deviations to accepted practice over a long enough timeline, until you’ve made a complete left-hand turn without knowing it. It just wants to exist alongside good, and the easiest way to do that is to pretend to be good. Then I figured out that if we comply voluntarily because we promised we would, the evil ones can’t say they violated our free will. Which is why it’s so hard to rip people away from their brainwashing, because they truly do believe they choose it.

This is when I realized just how badly Jesus’ words have been twisted and used against us. We spend our lives groveling for mercy rather than standing tall and recognizing the evil where it lives- within the bloated, rich corporations who sell salvation for the low, low price of 10% of all your income, for life (oh and your complete obedience to our rules). The REAL truth is that God Himself loved ALL OF US so much, that He, the Creator of Absolutely Everything, came PERSONALLY to show us how to love, how to live, and how to conduct yourself. He healed, he fed, and he cracked a whip at corrupt religious leaders who sold salvation, turning worship into a business. And the angry religious leaders who were ABSOLUTELY SURE of God’s limits had Him killed rather than admit that maybe their interpretation of God’s law was perhaps incorrect.

Things started to make far more sense when I began to realize another inconvenient truth that most Christians just don’t know- the fact that to this day, most Christians, especially older ones, believe that a tiny country that didn’t exist until 1947 is full of the people God loves the most- except, there’s one problem- the people who live in that country and wear tiny, round hats are the descendants of the people who killed Jesus Christ and aren’t sorry about it. This tiny country has their claws in literally everything, and I mean everything. They siphon off American tax dollars to the tune of 300 billion dollars cumulatively since 1948, while our own veterans go homeless and without medical treatment. Did you vote for this? I didn’t. I also don’t stand for genocide of a population of women and children in Palestine just because Israel wants them off their “holy land.” Um, there are a lot of Christians in Palestine. If you think you own that land because your great grandpa lived there, maybe you should rethink your life.

Why do we give Israel so much money? It starts with realizing how many members of Congress are dual Israeli citizens. It’s quite a number of them, which is an abomination given that we are a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles. But Holly, I hear you ask, they are good, moral people too! Why can’t a religious group that’s only 2% of the total world population have their representation in our Congress, too?

For starters, maybe because a rabbi owns Pornhub.

Yeah. That’s real. Look it up.

They also say homosexuality is a Jewish value.

And now you know why there are well-funded pride parades in every major city. Your tax dollars pay for it.

Can you imagine an American going to Norway and getting elected into their government with dual American citizenship?

Can you imagine an American going to Mexico, getting elected into their government, and then voting to send America hundreds of billions of dollars?

Can you imagine an American moving to Israel and voting for open borders, allowing cannibal tribes to move there, to assault the women and children?

This is what has happened to our country. The only way to destroy us is within, and the only way to understand what has happened to this country is to realize what has happened to our religion- we were taught to bow our heads and pray and do meaningless rituals rather than fight back. My mother, as much as I love her, said she wouldn’t have allowed me to learn Taekwondo as a child, because it’s unladylike and the purpose is to take your opponent out.

The purpose is also to prevent yourself from being assaulted, Mama. No offense, but I’d rather be unladylike than sexually assaulted.

The recent girl with a knife and axe in Scotland springs to mind. You go, girl.

Women in America, and most other predominantly white European countries, are being assaulted and murdered by the immigrants we were taught to “love as Jesus loved.” His teachings did NOT allow for religious nonprofit groups to siphon off American tax dollars and use that money to flood our cities with Somalis who behead random girls with machetes.

Our religions have been twisted to only teach Jesus’ love, and not the part where he screamed at the corrupt religious leaders, who, to this day, have a holy book called the talmud, which is different from the Torah (which is the first 5 books of the Bible, plus I believe Isaiah and Psalms). I learned recently that the orthodox rabbinic population residing in Israel holds the talmud as law, which specifies their manner in which they plan to destroy gentiles- non-Jews. Us. White Christian Europeans. Whom they view as their mortal enemy, and you’d never know it because their law allows for lying to us.

Don’t believe me? Read some of the talmud with me, and try not to be sick.

And then I began to research the Red Terror, also known as the Bolshevik Holodomor, in which at least TEN MILLION CHRISTIANS were starved to death between 1920 and 1935. Why didn’t we learn about this in school? Because Christians were the victims. We all learned about the Holocaust, when supposedly six million Jewish lives were extinguished (which isn’t true, because the census records of the Jews in Europe show an INCREASE in population between 1933-1945), so why wouldn’t we also learn about the Holodomor?

Because Jewish interests own all the textbook publishers, and it was Jewish Bolsheviks who starved the Christians to death.

You ever hear of Ghislaine Maxwell? Yeah, her dad owned a publisher. A sex trafficker’s spy dad owned a textbook publisher. We can TOTALLY trust them to teach the truth, right?

Did you know that Jewish people don’t pay interest on loans, because according to their laws, it’s illegal to charge a Jewish person interest? But they have no problem charging that interest to YOU? Tried to buy a house lately? How does it feel that Christians have to pay interest on loans to Jewish bankers that they don’t have to pay? Google “Heter iska loan” and learn more about it. Remember this the next time you make your mortgage payment.

How any of this this tie into Mormonism and the big Religion lie, you ask?

Because of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a guidebook to Jewish interests conquering the world without anyone noticing. They specified that they would: Infiltrate world governments, siphon off money to themselves, flood white Christian nations with low-iq savages from third world countries, they would take over media and tell half-truths to the populace, they would infiltrate religions and twist them to suit themselves and get Christians to give up their power and not fight back, they would infiltrate and take over medicine and give us poison instead of treatments, they would poison the water, poison the air, and no one would ever suspect a thing, because the lies would be so big, no one would ever put the pieces together. If the Zionist Jewish population infiltrated and twisted Christianity and invented the Mormon religion in order to raise up generations of meek, quiet, fearful church mice who refuse to question the corruption of their leaders… would we even notice, if they slap Christ in the name of the church?

But a lot of us did notice, and are ostracized from our families for the crime of noticing.

And also notice that White Christianity in America for the most part isn’t fighting back. Mormons are too focused on baptizing dead people to notice human trafficking going on and stop it. They are too focused on temple work to notice they’re being robbed. They are too focused on making sure they say exact prayers correctly in church services to research freemasonry and what the masons do behind closed doors, or who the masons even worship (which is kind of… key to the whole thing, considering Mormons do freemasonry oaths). Mormons say anything that exposes the LDS church’s corruption is “Anti Mormon Propaganda.” They compare Joseph Smith to Jesus- ignoring real, confirmed news articles that he and Brigham Young routinely murdered people who didn’t go along with his cult.

Again, don’t believe me? William R. Parrish, noted in the Wikipedia page about LDS Blood Atonement- leaving the church back in the day was worthy of having your throat slit. A newspaper from the time detailed the facts, while the church publicly denies it.

Joseph Smith committed the following atrocities:

1. Incorporated Freemasonry DEATH OATHS into religious marriage ceremonies (as in “I would sooner be disemboweled than reveal the secrets”)

2. Married a 14 year old girl when he was nearly 40 years old

3. Murdered people who left his church

4. Apparently had an abortionist doctor friend named John. C. Bennett who, according to Sarah Pratt, aborted the babies of Joseph Smith’s polygamist wives

5. Destroyed a printing press that was writing bad things about him

6. ACTUALLY ADVOCATED FOR SLAVERY AT ONE POINT

7. Drank wine before he died despite telling his church it’s a sin to drink alcohol

8. Had a gun and shot people in the jail he died in

   I mean, anyone who researches cults know that the FIRST three things a cult leader does is:

   1. Says let me have sex with all your wives, because God said to

   2. Says give me your money, because God said to

   3. Says I’m going to swear you to keep my secrets or you die, because God said to

   4. And as a bonus, tells all members of the cult they’ll never be happy outside the cult. Man, 4 out of 4.

      
      
      I’m actually convinced this is the little season mentioned in the Book of Revelation in which satan is loosed, because I am pretty sure ol’ joey smith is the actual literal devil, and yet so many people think he’s just like Jesus, which is MINDBLOWINGLY CONFUSING when you know all the horrible things joe did.

      I am convinced this is true because the only thing needed for evil to flourish is for all of God’s moral battle angels to believe the war against good and evil was fought a long time ago, good won, evil can’t get a foothold anymore, and there’s no fighting to do. If all of the most moral, pure Angels on Earth believe there is no war, then they won’t fight it. Mormons are taught as a child that the evil 1/3 who fought on satan’s side weren’t allowed to have bodies anymore, so there is no evil anymore on Earth. That sounds true, right? (not even remotely)

      And that’s the most evil thing I can imagine- because it’s true that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he doesn’t exist.

      This is why they spend their time doing baptisms for dead people and do weird rituals in funny hats rather than work out 6 days per week so they can drag corrupt politicians who are blackmailed with crimes against children to the nearest guillotine. No, it’s okay, Mormons. Just go baptize some more dead people. Ignore the human trafficking. Ignore the crimes against children. Ignore your new communications director advocating for transgender rights. Care more about what your gay friends think than what’s moral and right. It’s okay, go back to sleep.

The brainwashing is so real.

Sometimes, the truth is inconvenient. Sometimes, we have to examine what we believe and why. Sometimes, we have to realize that just because something threatens what we believe to be true, that doesn’t automatically make it false. Sometimes we have to look at WHO is giving us the truth and telling us it’s truth, and who tells us not to look elsewhere. Sometimes we have to question what three generations of our family believed to be true. Just because my grandparents believed something was true, doesn’t make it true.

Much like the covid vaccines which were touted as “safe and effective”, a lie told many times does not automatically make that lie true, and now millions of people lie dead because they injected a bioweapon into themselves.

Which, of course, the LDS prophet also told them to do, too. You’d think a cardiologist who speaks to God regularly might have been warned that the shots caused heart damage and would murder millions of people.

Unless, of course, he doesn’t speak to God, and is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

If you want the truth about the Covid vaccines and the millions of deaths and disabilities it’s caused, please read the Hope Accord paperwork signed by thousands of doctors worldwide.

https://thehopeaccord.org/

Truth doesn’t stop being the truth because it says something you don’t like, and wolves hide among sheep everywhere. If you don’t learn to spot them, you’ll get eaten.

Yet people attack the sheepdogs- me- who try to warn them.

How do I wrap this all up?

Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. All who get to Heaven do so through Him. Not through a church that uses His name, not through meaningless rituals that eat up your time and have you focused on the wrong thing. Your faith in Jesus and following His footsteps is what gets you to Heaven- that is, Heaven, singular. Because God Himself said there are sheep and there are goats, and if you truly believe that scaring your family into compliance just so you’re not separated is the way to Heaven, I have a bridge to sell you. If every single moment of your life doesn’t feel like you’re fighting against “obedience” to worldly commands in order to do what God says in your heart is right, you’re following the world, not Him. If every single moment of your life doesn’t feel like you’re swimming upstream in a world trying to kill you, you’re not following Him. Every day is a fight against evil. Every single day.

You can’t fight evil if you don’t know how it operates. From Second Corinthians ch 11:

Jesus told Pharisees to their faces that they were of their father the devil. I say the same to modern LDS church “leaders”- I see you for what you truly are, and I despise you for what you have done to my family. I pray you seek Him while He can be found. Repent.

I’m taking a break from posting for a while. Godspeed in your search for truth, and may you find peace when you do.

Kindness, not cancer

I was all prepared today to write a blog post about the evils of the cancer industry- starting with the work of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, who discovered something called “antineoplastin therapy”- and used it to cure cancer. The FDA forced him into a hearing, where many of Dr. Burzynski’s patients testified that he did, indeed, cure them. And what was the FDA’s response? To hound him with lawsuits until he stopped practicing. This is true- despite what Google says about his “dangerous and unproven treatments that fly in the face of proven science.”

But do you know what is more important than talking about the evils of this world? Talking about the kindness of this world instead.

We’re all hurting right now. Some of us are going through unspeakable trials- from troubles with family, to self-worth problems, to body image issues, to financial woes, every one of us is dealing with a lot, and if any of you are like me, it’s more important than ever to be kind. But not just kind to each other; to ourselves.

This is an area I admittedly struggle with. I have a perfectionism problem, and I have had this issue my entire adult life. There is a fantastic book about soul wounds by Lisa Bourbeau called “Heal Your Wounds & Find Your True Self: Finally, a Book That Explains Why It’s So Hard Being Yourself!” and it discusses five different soul wounds we receive as children and must heal as an adult. I would like to display, with honesty, the soul wound that I had my whole life, and that I healed only recently.

I borrowed this from a website called LightCentre.com;

“The wound? Injustice. The mask? Rigidity. My greatest fear? Coldness. My greatest need? Freedom.

Awakening of the wound

The Wound of Injustice awakens in the child roughly between the ages of 4 and 6, when he becomes aware of his individuality and his differences.

Several origins are possible:

Parental Coldness: The child can feel coldness from the same-sex parent. This parent seems too critical, severe, demanding for him to allow himself to be himself.

The obligation to follow a model: young, the child had to follow the example of the big brother, the big sister, a cousin. His parents often cited the person as an example for his qualities, expecting him to be the same. This parent was putting enormous pressure on the child. While this one, internally, wanted to exist and be appreciated for what he was deep down.

Emotional repression: an impossibility to express one’s sensitivity without being judged, pointed out and punished.

You would have understood it…

This feeling of injustice is built up if the child has not felt free to be himself and to express himself as a unique individual! His parents did not encourage, facilitate, or even accept his personality.

It is for this child deeply unfair that he cannot be himself

The child retains the impression of having been wronged, a victim of difference with this parent in particular.

And also the impression of not being recognized and appreciated at its fair value. He realizes that people appreciate him more for what he does than for who he is.

He hides his wound behind a rigidity and a demand for perfection by protecting himself from what makes him suffer. He creates protection for himself each time he is confronted with this wound. Lise Bourbeau talks about this protection as the RIGID mask.

A wound of injustice always follows a wound of rejection

Recognizing the Rigid 

People whose wound of injustice is often activated have common characteristics. All of these attitudes are not true all the time, only when the wound of injustice is triggered.

Perhaps you will find yourself in many of them…

Your biggest fears

– Being COLD: your greatest fear is coldness. You find it difficult to accept it in yourself and in others. Besides, you are convinced that you are a warm person.

– Fear of MISLEADING: you resent being wrong and making mistakes. You are doing yourself an injustice.

Your RIGID Personality

– SENSITIVITY:
You are very sensitive. Yet others feel that you are cold and insensitive

– Will of JUSTICE:

You seek justice and what seems right to you. You only take into account your values and your criteria. Only, you have to understand that they are not universal.

And justice, for you, is perfection. Your ideal is to aim for the best, the right, the correct. You can also appear controlling. Yet deep down, far from wanting to control others, you want to make sure it’s fair for everyone. Attracted to all things noble, you can easily be impressed by social status or a place of honor.

– PERFECTIONISM

You want to be appreciated for what you do. This explains your perfectionist and competitive spirit, but also your doubts when faced with choices. Your perfectionism means that you often lack time for your projects. You can also start a lot of projects but you get too scattered trying to be too perfect. You are a good burnout candidate.

– STORAGE

You like everything to be tidy, serialized, categorized. This desire for tidiness and order can sometimes even lead to obsession.

– RIGIDITY: you confuse discipline with rigidity. Know that discipline achieves a specific goal

But you, you focus above all on the means used to achieve this goal. For example, you can decide to exercise at the gym once a week.

What’s the problem?

Well, if you’re feeling out of sorts that day, you’re able to force yourself to go just to stick to the plan you’ve put in place…even if it’s not the wisest thing for you.

– MERIT: you need to feel worthy of what you receive. If there is no reason to get something, you can even unconsciously make sure you lose it. You find it difficult to relax without feeling guilty.

– LIMITS

It is difficult for you to know and respect your limits. Your perfectionist side is such that you rarely ask for help. You sometimes go so far as to exhaust yourself so much that you don’t listen to yourself. Watch out for burnout!!!

Your Relationships

– SHARING

Your desire for justice is such that you want everything to be equitably distributed. Otherwise it’s not fair.

– SENSITIVITY

Above all, you avoid being affected by others. You often hide your emotion behind irrelevant laughter or derision rather than acknowledging your sensitivity. It is difficult for you to indulge in feelings and receiving. In this regard, you generally pass for a cold and unloving person.

– AUTHORITY

You fear authority because as a child you learned that authority was always right. Despite this, when a situation seems right to you, you “step up to the front” and dare to defend what seems right to you.

– ENVY And ANGER

You may feel a lot of cravings. The most common emotion is anger. Anger most often towards yourself when you make mistakes or when attacking others.

– HYPER CONTROL

In love, it is difficult for you to let go, to feel pleasure and to express your feelings.

Your STIFF Physique

– STIFFNESS

In general, your body is straight, stiff and well-proportioned. If you are overweight, your pounds are evenly distributed. Your desire for perfection drives you to want the most perfect body possible.

You tend to have a closed attitude by crossing your arms.

Your gestures are rigid and without much flexibility.

– HEALTH

Although stressful, you are rarely sick.

Not that you have no symptoms, but you are very demanding with your body, and rarely respect your limits. You only go to the doctor as a last resort, when you are at your worst. And it’s a pride for you!”

All of this applies to me. All of it has hamstrung my adult life. It was a long road to letting it all go.

How have I cured my rigidity soul wound? By being kind to myself. By allowing my house to be a mess. By shrugging when I don’t make perfect food choices every day, because at least when I slack off, it’s with seven dollar coconut sugar organic chocolate, or something similar. By not expecting perfection of myself. By reminding myself that due to what I’ve been through, I can be cold, so I go out of my way to remember I’m not the only one going through traumatic experiences. By slowing down on the forcing myself to do the workouts EVERY day. By allowing myself to be human.

Remind yourself to be kind to yourselves, people. Speak nicely to yourselves. Words have power. Be your own best friend. Learn to enjoy your own company. You are the one person you will never escape, so you might as well learn to heal what’s hurt you. I highly recommend that book, by the way. We all have soul wounds- and they all have to be healed.

I have no idea what I’ll write about next. We’ll see what inspiration strikes.

Exercise and How It Cures Us

The time frame between when I injured my brain and when I began to heal it was roughly 16 months. That was the longest, most brutal 16 months of my life. Of anyone’s life, that I can possibly imagine. And if you think I’m being uncaring or hyperbolic, imagine spending sixteen straight months in a panic attack that didn’t end, constantly in fight or flight, constantly terrified. Every waking hour of the day, actively terrified. This wasn’t like pregnancy contractions that ebbed and flowed. I didn’t get a chance to rest.

I was just terrified. For almost a year and a half. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I almost died of a heart attack. I’m amazed I didn’t.

Once I stumbled back into a Christian church and God was able to find me and pull me out, a few things slowly began to happen simultaneously.

1. Another voice began to speak inside of my head that quieted all the other voices and pushed them back.

2. A wellspring of hope began to flow inside of me, that maybe this wasn’t just my new, permanent state of being, that maybe it would end.

3. I began to look at my diet and what I was eating, and I started to make positive changes. IE, eating low sugar yogurt instead of regular, using honey as sweetener instead of sugar, etc.

4. I began researching mental health cures other than pills. Exercise was one that kept popping up at the top of the list.

Me being me, well, I’ve spent most of my life behind a desk for work, so it’s not like I made a living lifting things very often. There were a few exceptions, my first real job was lifeguarding and I swam on my breaks, there was my brief military service before I got injured in Basic Training and chaptered out, and there was when I worked at the specialty French bakery for most of a year when I got married to my sweetheart in 2019, etc. But needless to say, I didn’t spend most of my adult life moving, to my own detriment.

Some of you know what my husband looks like, but for those of you who don’t, he’s basically a walking Adonis. I do not exaggerate. His physical form is what a man (and their wives, let’s be real here) get to enjoy when that man spends fifteen straight years throwing kicks from age 3 to 18, and THEN joins the Army and learns new ways to fight like groundfighting/Greco wrestling. He said he was strong but lean when he went into the Army and then he put on 15-20 lbs of muscle in the first year. His abs are visible and countable at nearly 40, he can leg press over 800 lbs, and he likes to put me on his shoulders and do squats with me. And now he spends his days carrying heavy things and working with his arms above his head. My husband is one of the most mentally sound human beings alive. He’s calm in crisis, he thinks clearly, he is neither depressed nor anxious, and he fears nothing.

His shoulders should be studied by future generations.

But I digress. The point of this post is not to drool over my husband to the point of replacing my keyboard due to water damage.

Get it together, Holly. Okay. Do tell, what is the point?

Exercise, m’lads and ladies. Exercise. Exercise makes you healthy.

I mean, it’s not like this is something people don’t know. We know that diet and exercise are the two primary ways to keep yourself healthy. We know this. Everyone knows this. In modern society, a lot of us just don’t do it, and it’s little wonder that the rise of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs has perfectly correlated with the rise of obesity. One causes the other, or the other causes the one, it doesn’t matter. They go hand in hand. But 100 years ago, we were lifting hay bales daily, hammering on an anvil, gardening our own food, pulling weeds, and lifting 5-9 children for playtime daily, and that has been replaced with screens, to our detriment.

Pills have been the front-line treatment for mental health concerns for decades, but new research is showing that there’s a much better option for us- movement!. A smart doctor whose work I follow named Dr. Nicholas Fabiano recently released a study proving that schizophrenia could be managed/mitigated with exercise overseen by a qualified physician. Of course, my brain has been fixed for at least a year now, but his study proves what I learned a couple of years ago from other doctors- that sweatin’ to the oldies helps you GET to your oldies if you have any type of mental health concern.

Dr. Fabiano is not the only healthcare provider who has realized this connection. A few more examples below:

For me, it all started with Taekwondo, my husband’s preferred art form. (Yes, much like Bruce Lee, my husband studied many forms of art and expression, and decided that kicking people in the head was the best one). My beloved husband who saw me through the worst sixteen months of my existence suggested that maybe if I was feeling scared, that learning to feel powerful would only help me.

And he was right.

I took Taekwondo for over a year. I breezed from white belt, to yellow, purple, orange, green, and then split green/blue. I learned to kick people in the head. I learned self-defense techniques to throw anyone who ever grabbed my wrist. I put on sparring gear and started sparring with other students. I was really good at it.

And then, I started other forms of exercise. My husband and I went to the gym together and I began lifting weights. I started doing calisthenics at home on my floor, situps and pushups. I was feeling pretty strong, and bonus, my rear end began to get muscle in interesting places for the first time in my life. I’m telling you, kicking did this for me. (Moms, I’m looking at you. If you feel like you can’t fix the downstairs after childbirth, you need Taekwondo. I used to pee when I sneezed too hard. I don’t anymore. Real talk from one who knows. No, I have neither shame nor filters.)

So then comes a funny story- my younger sister, whom I am incredibly proud of, got her personal training certificate and now teaches aerobics classes at a combo pilates/ballet studio called Barre 3. She’s the peppy lady with the headset and spandex who can do cardio for 45 minutes and talk/encourage through it. How, I do not know. It’s insanely impressive. Anyway, she invited me to come up and go to one of her classes. Which I did.

And I couldn’t walk for two days afterwards. I tell you what, ow.

I was so impressed by her class- and to find out that she leads like six of these classes a week? The woman is positively magical.

Scrolling through YouTube, I found a series of Barre 3 classes recorded and put up by a woman in Massachusetts. She has four different 30 minute classes available, and that became my new routine, because I am telling you, you can think you’re in shape all you want, but until your own younger sister has kicked your rear with aerobics, you have no idea how out of shape you actually are. And people who are thin aren’t automatically in shape, for the record. You need muscle mass, people!

For the past year, I have done Barre 3 classes and pilates in my living room 2-3x per week. I have extremely strong legs now and my knees no longer hurt (they did for 20 years!!!!). I am appx 5’9 and 140ish pounds on any given day. But most important of all, exercise has helped me rewire my brain to the point of curing my mental health problems alongside my dietary changes- no more processed food, no more cheap food, only organic vegetables, and only things like honey, coconut sugar or monkfruit for sweeteners.

In a generation of sweeping Ozempic users who would much rather inject themselves with a questionable substance daily rather than just cut the McDonald’s and go for a walk, dare to defy the social norms. Once again, you deserve it, people.

You deserve to be as healthy, happy, and carefree as I am.

Next week- modern revelations about cancer and cancer treatments. Prep your foil hat again, we’re going deep.

The real truth about American “health” care

I know it seems like this is a dead horse I keep kicking, but I saw two statistics recently that made my mouth drop open.

Did you know that America makes up only appx 5% of the total world population? Five percent. Put that in your mind. Five. As in, we are 1/20th of the whole world. Think about yourself, your neighbors, your family members. Think about your overall health. Are all of you marathon runners with perfect mental health, with blood work that makes every doctor smile with delight? Or are all of us somehow sluggish, slow, tired, depressed, and hopeless about it getting better?

There’s a reason I ask this question. We, in the United States specifically, have been systematically poisoned since birth, and conditioned to believe that sluggish, slow, overweight, depressed, anxious, and with autoimmune conditions is just how we are supposed to be over age 40.

Now realize that the United States is only one of two countries that allows drug companies to advertise directly on TV. Look it up. Or, don’t, I’ll do this for you. I got this statistic from the Journal of Health Economics., who has an eye-opening journal on the topic. From the article:

“Drug ads have been ubiquitous on TV since the late 1990s and have spilled onto the internet and social media. The United States and New Zealand are the only countries that legally allow direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. (The European Union was furious when Lady Gaga’s Instagram post promoting the migraine drug was visible on the continent, noting it flagrantly violated its ban on direct-to-consumer advertising.)”

Now I’d like you to ask yourselves two questions- first, do you think they advertise for our benefit or theirs, and two, why has nearly every other civilized country banned this practice?

Think about it for a second while I give you Statistic Number One- Americans apparently account for 80% of all opioid usage.

In the whole world. Eighty percent.

Do any of you know who the Sackler family is? They’re an exceptionally greedy family who owns Purdue Pharmaceuticals. They are not Christians. I actually implore you to look up what religion they practice- it might surprise some of you. Why do I mention this? Because of the fact that if they were Christian, they would be running a food bank instead of trying to addict and poison Christian Americans to death while raking in billions of dollars for themselves. As I said, I punch evil in the face, and a certain group of people had Jesus Christ killed. They, to this day, have never apologized for it, and in fact, spend a considerable amount of their time attempting to poison or murder Christians. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, I’m sure, but as I said, look up what religion they practice and decide for yourself if they’re good people or not. Understand that I am a devout Christian and I wouldn’t say what I just said unless I was certain I had researched it to death and it is absolutely accurate. You don’t do things like target the elderly for addiction unless you’re fairly soulless.

Per the State of New Jersey in their lawsuit against the Sackler family:

From the body of the lawsuit:

“Specifically, the complaint alleges that each Sackler defendant named in the lawsuit helped direct and took part in a widespread campaign to deceive doctors and other caregivers with prescribing authority about the risks and benefits of Purdue’s marquee opioid pain relief drug, OxyContin, as well as other dangerously addictive opioid pain medications made and sold by Purdue and prescription opioids generally.

“The Sackler family built a multi-billion-dollar drug empire based on addiction,” said Attorney General Grewal. “Despite knowing the harms that would result, the Sacklers drove Purdue to pursue deceitful sales campaigns for OxyContin and other highly addictive opioid painkillers, campaigns that were dutifully carried out by a small army of the company’s employees. Our communities are still reeling from the epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths caused by their misconduct.”

and

“The State’s complaint lays out a callous plan by the Sacklers to use deception and misinformation to turn the medical community – and the public --away from the prevailing view that opioids were so potent and potentially addictive that they should be prescribed sparingly.

The misinformation campaign worked, the complaint asserts, and the Sacklers managed through intensive marketing and high-pressure sales tactics to replace the old wisdom with a new mindset: that pain was an under-recognized and undertreated health care problem, and that opioids should be the first line of treatment for patients suffering from such chronic conditions as moderate back pain, migraine headaches and arthritis.

“During their reign as controlling members of the Purdue Board of Directors, the Sacklers were not satisfied with merely raking in millions and millions of dollars. They wanted billions,” said Attorney General Grewal. “They cared more about money than they cared about patients, the public or the truth. So they pushed, on a near daily basis, to have more patients consuming more opioids at higher doses and for longer periods of time. To the detriment of all of us, they succeeded on a grand scale. Now it’s time to hold them accountable.”

I wish to make something quite clear at this point- we are all good people, here in America. We want to work hard, raise loving families, and go to bed at the end of the day feeling a job well done. We want to have strong bodies, strong minds, strong faith, and a strong spirit. But when pharmaceutical companies go out of their way to poison us for profit, preying upon our natural-born trusting instincts, this is when we get into trouble.

I once got into a spirited discussion with two separate family members regarding the virtue of “obedience” and their disbelief that I don’t see obedience as a virtue. Obedience to God, sure, but obedience in general to whatever authority is saying, “Trust Me”? Absofreakinglutely not. I don’t trust anyone unless I know their motivation. I don’t trust anyone unless I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that their intentions towards me are pure. And how would you know if a person’s motives are pure? When you are asked to believe something, ask yourself who benefits from me believing something is true. And then research that person and their entire family and their background, and chances are, if they are exceedingly rich, they are not doing it for your benefit.

Now you know why Jesus said this- because in this reality, the most wealthy of people and organizations are usually the most nefarious, because they only got rich by taking from us, the innocent people who trusted our doctors when they first prescribed that legal heroin to us. This is why if an organization says that you paying this money to them is mandatory- for health, for salvation, etc- (especially if they already have billions of dollars) you should probably question why you are giving that money to them. This is why I have a problem with prosperity preachers- people who would take 10% of the money of poor people, say Jesus requires that you give me your money, and then buys themselves a new private jet, like Kenneth Copeland did, saying, “You can’t talk to God while flying commercial.” And yes, he really did say this. If you want to get a good look at evil firsthand, look up his interview in which he says he doesn’t want to fly with a bunch of demons. Look at his eyes. Ask yourself if Jesus is in this man. Jesus, the man who washed feet and uplifted the poor. The man who says, “What you do for the least of these My Brethren, you have done it unto Me.”

Kenneth Copeland, the Sacklers, and many other wealthy people are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

We were warned about those.

And I am the sheepdog, ever here to sound the alarm and let you know how to spot those wolves as they prowl.

Our goodness and trust as American Christians is why millions of seniors always ask their doctor if Trimflamajam XP “Is Right For Them.” Our trust is why we believe our doctors when they say “This will help you.” Our trust is why we are bled dry to the tune of billions of dollars per year for drugs that will only make us sicker in the long run. Our trust is why our society suspends the medical license of one Dr. Paul Thomas of Oregon. His crime? Proving that children who take multiple vaccinations have worse health outcomes than unvaccinated children. And he was punished- not for harming anyone, but for threatening the narrative and daring to go against the grain.

See the research for yourself- the lines are total number of cases he saw, spanning over 3,200 children he treated personally.

Now ask yourself if they stripped his medical license to help us, or to quiet a good doctor sounding the alarm.

And also ask yourself why the news isn’t reporting on his findings- rather, they smear him and say he’s a danger to the public. At least, that’s what a quick Google search says.

Statistic Number Two- The United States accounts for over FORTY PERCENT of all drug spending. In the entire world. When we make up only 5% of the population. And in case any of you think I am exaggerating, here it is from the National Institute of Health.

Where am I going with all of this?

America is overwhelmingly a Christian nation. We tell the truth, and believe others tell us the truth in return. We believe that if we give our best to others, they will give their best to us. But somehow, lost in translation, is the idea that real evil actually does exist, and it often wears pressed suits and ties and tells us to trust them. And we do, right off a cliff, while they laugh all the way to the bank- because we believe people when they lie to us and tell us to obey them.

It is though all of this research that I truly came to understand just how real the devil is- and how his wish for us is to be sick, weak, sluggish, depressed, and overweight. If we are, then we can not fight back. It stands to reason, then, that our obligation as Christians is to recognize when we are being taken advantage of, cut off the people siphoning away our money and energy and lying to us, and doing the opposite of whatever the “experts” recommend. The devil says sit all day? I do exercises. The devil says eat fast food and sugar? No thank you, I will eat grass-fed steak and eggs with spinach. The devil says take the pills that make your pain go away? No thanks, I’ll make myself stronger so that my pain disappears. The devil says take antidepressants. I say, no thank you, I would prefer to dive into the well of my pain and heal it, rather than cover it up.

I saw a quote once-

The best thing any of you can do, if you want to live to your older years in good health and not feeding the gaping maw of greed, is to take charge of your own health. Invest more into high quality food at high quality stores. Know where your meat comes from and refuse to eat fast food or french fries. Read your labels and put back anything with “bioengineered ingredient” or soybean oil. Make yourselves exercise. Do prolonged fasts. Eat fruit for dessert instead of ice cream. Because the people we believed we could trust are slowly poisoning us to death and lining their pockets with our pain. Realize that if you have heard a horror story about some food product like Crisco or mystery meat at Taco Bell, that it’s probably true. Realize that the rich people also own Google, and the more articles you find saying something is false, the more likely it is 100% factual. Begin to build your life based on uncomfortable truths rather than comforting lies. Realize that you’ve been lied to by MOST of the people you trusted your whole life, and NEVER trust someone who pretends like they have no dirt. Everyone has dirt. I’m clearly open about mine.

And the most important thing to do? Practice acceptance and forgiveness. Accept yourself as you are, shortcomings and all. Forgive yourself for mistakes you’ve made. Forgive others for mistakes THEY have made. Accept the life path of others, even if you don’t understand it (unless they are committing a crime like harming children or selling heroin to confused elderly people. Then you intervene and stop them) And THEN once you have done the inner work of facing the pain you don’t want to feel, you realize you are miserable, and you get mad enough to change it.

You want to know the real truth? You deserve better. You deserve better than to hurt all the time, you deserve better than to be sick, you deserve better than to eat cheap food. You deserve better. Treat yourself like it.

Learn to trust yourself, and start doing some deep research. Honestly, Twitter is a great place for such things- the information is widely available there because so many people have begun doing the digging and lay out sources. This is where I found out that dandelions can help cure cancer- if we’d just stop spraying them with chemicals that CAUSE cancer, of course. Chemicals that Big Ag would swear up and down are perfectly safe.

However, our cancer statistics do not lie, and scream otherwise, even though there are at least 100 different documented cancer cures in the world, our cancer rates are rising- because too many people eat poisoned food, drink poisoned water, and then don’t clear out the garbage.

It’s time to take out the garbage, friends. Whatever you are holding onto, let it go, accept, forgive, and show love- most of all, show love to yourself.

You deserve it.

Next week- the exercise regimen that saw me begin to age backwards- with a shoutout to my beloved younger sister, Valorie.

Carnivore Diet- and why it’s taking the health world by storm

I’m going to start this blog post by apologizing for it being a day delayed. I spent a few days last week caring for my husband laid up with an injury, and then on Sunday morning, a pyrex dish full of a baked egg breakfast exploded on my stove. I decided to just… take a day.

What is the Carnivore diet?

The carnivore diet is a much more restrictive version of a ketogenic diet. You ARE in ketosis, of course, because you eat no carbs, but your food is limited to whole meats, eggs, cheese, milk, butter, tallow, and… I think that’s about it. Basically, only animal sources. No plants. No fruit. No margarine, no sugar, no seed oils, no chocolate. None of it. Experts of the carnivore diet say heavily processed meats are not the best idea, because you want the nutrition of the whole meat itself rather than a version that’s been through a grinder and mixed with random things like sausages, but in general, if you are on the Carnivore diet, your breakfast is bacon and eggs, your lunch is half a rotisserie chicken, and your dinner is half a pound of beef brisket washed down with a quart of raw milk. Something like that. I like to make omelettes with smoked salmon and feta cheese. That would be 100% carnivore approved.

To me, when I first heard about it, my first thought was, “Gosh, that sounds incredibly restrictive.” And in a way, it is. Eating nothing but meat would bore me after a while. I love a fatty ribeye steak with the best of them, but I love a lot of other whole, organic foods too, and variety is the spice of life with me. Even so, I already eat a lot of the same things all the time, so to cut out 2/3 of what I eat routinely would be considerably more difficult than what I already eat, and I already tapdance cartwheels around my food. If you are what you eat, I’m half nuts, and most of my family members would roll their eyes at the idea that I’m ONLY half-nuts. Hahaha. No offense taken, it’s probably far more than 50%.

I actually was going to plan to try a variation of the carnivore diet- I had mentioned it in a previous blog post, but ended up not doing it. Why? Well, for starters, I really don’t have a good enough reason to go fully carnivore. I’m perfectly healthy. I don’t want to mess with a good thing. I don’t need it. What I am doing currently WORKS for me. You can’t improve upon perfection, and given that only 3% of the animal kingdom is true omnivores, I’m going to stay comfortably in my om-ness. I like being part of that rare 3%. It suits me.

There are, of course, healthy people who swear by carnivore- Joe Rogan is one. He’s almost sixty, and he looks 35. Look him up. Does he look 58 years old? I’m sure his physical activity level is also to thank, as he has an ITF black belt in Taekwondo same as my husband (ITF requires 10 years of training to get their black belt, as opposed to 3 years with WTF Takewondo) and his morning exercise routine is apparently so crazy, even the healthiest of athletes can’t keep up with him. It’s seriously goals for my husband and I- if we’re still outperforming athletes half our age when we’re nearing 60, I’d say we won at life. But Joe Rogan also has millions of dollars and a personal chef to make him Waygu tenderloin five times per day if he wants, so it’s probably a lot easier for him to eat carnivore, because it can get relatively expensive unless you’re good with ground beef and chicken… a lot. Which is fine for most people, if you really wanted to cure something, you’d get by with that just fine as long as you’re eating enough fats with it- remember, eating fat makes your brain burn fat. It’s a healthy thing to eat fat!

So- why are people turning to a carnivore diet? Good question.

I think it stems back from the corrupt Food Pyramid the USDA tried to sell us in the 90’s. Remember that? The one that tried to convince us that 6-11 servings of bread was the foundation of a healthy life?

Guess who paid for that propaganda? Corrupt agricultural interests who want to give an entire generation of young people Crohns disease. Because here’s the thing, it’s not necessarily the wheat that’s bad, it’s the glyphosphate- the chemicals they spray onto the wheat. And commercial flour is now so poisoned, it’s hardly even legally food anymore. The trouble is, most people these days are just brainwashed to believe that having debilitating gut issues are normal. THEY ARE NOT NORMAL. Your food is just poisoned, people, and when the FDA, Big Pharma, and corporate agriculture are in bed with each other, it serves their interests for you to just eat poisoned bread, be weak, and have to pay $800 per month for prescriptions for the rest of your life.

Crohns disease, for those of you who don’t know, is an inflammatory bowel disease that basically makes it impossible to live. You can’t eat anything, you’re sick all the time, and you often have to get surgeries to remove parts of your intestine because they are so inflamed and diseased. It is serious business, and Crohns is on the rise.

This is nothing short of catastrophic.

Some people think I’m a little out there with my “we’re being poisoned on purpose to drive profits for pharma companies and their crooked executives” but ask yourselves this- if a group of people WERE going to poison the general population to make them sick and dependent upon medications for life, and make the strong youth too weak to do something like, say, overthrow a tyrannical government… how exactly would society look different from what we have today? Look around you and really think about the general health of people you interact with.

Approximately 60% of American adults (that is Sixty, with a 6 and a 0) SIXTY PERCENT of American adults have at least ONE chronic health condition. Google it.

Sixty percent?

Stop and think about that for a minute. Do any of you think that’s normal? That we should just accept this?

I say no. No, we should not.

And thankfully, a lot of people are revolting against the pill-pushing drug dealers in white coats and taking their health back into their own hands. I highlight Crohns for two reasons, one, a funny story I’ll share at the end of this blog post, and two, how carnivore diets are curing- not just managing, but CURING- their inflammatory digestive system diseases.

Here is the testimonial that got me down this rabbit hole to start with. This young man is age 19, with horrible Crohns disease and arthritis. His doctors told him to AVOID red meat and eggs. He kept getting sicker and sicker, docs said his condition was “incurable.”

Six months on a carnivore only diet, and he cured himself, against all the advice of the doctors, whose advice would have killed him.

This is not the only testimonial I have read. Just look at these comments. All these lives returned to them… by eating an animal based diet.

There is a woman who works at my local co-op who said carnivore cured all her chronic conditions too, and there was a study done- a study that was suppressed, of course. But you’d think that if the cure for Crohns was discovered, they’d be shouting it from the nightly news, right? Why aren’t they doing that? Oh. Right. Because MSNBC is sponsored by Pfizer.

Harvard did a study, too. This one was more aimed at diabetics, but… Hey, diabetics, did you know that a lot of you… don’t have to be diabetic anymore? Especially you type 2 people who don’t use insulin. Your condition can be reversed. Your doctors aren’t taught that.

So if you are a person who suffers from Crohns, IBS, or any other type of inflammatory digestive condition that affects your life, you may want to consider 30 days on a carnivore diet. Phase out your fiber slowly, and just start eating lots of red meat, chicken, fish, yogurt, eggs, cottage cheese, and find a local co-op to buy raw milk. I have seen people say that raw milk works wonders on people- even lactose intolerant people- and doesn’t cause them issues like pasteurized milk does. We buy at least a gallon of raw milk every week. Yes, I DO drive thirty minutes to buy a $16 gallon of milk every Wednesday morning (my coop gives 10% off to members on Wednesday… it helps). Health is wealth, and it’s completely worth it to me.

I want you all to remember something. Your doctors are not your enemy. Your doctors are not trying to make you sick on purpose. They don’t do that. I know doctors to be overwhelmingly loving and caring for their patients. But they sit in a classroom for eight years and get taught that there’s just hundreds of chronic conditions that “there is no cure for.” And the doctors literally are taught the opposite of what you need, which they pass on to you, thinking they are helping you.

It’s little wonder that the only reason I am so healthy today is because my diet is 70% red meat, fish, Greek yogurt with honey and nuts, cheese, butter, and lots of salt. Doctors would scratch their heads and marvel that eating fat cured me of all my medical conditions- I no longer have hypertension, anxiety, depression, any type of inflammation, anything.

Remember- if doctors cured you, they’d be out of a day job. And really think about this point I’m about to make- human beings lived for thousands of years on red meat, eggs, raw milk, local cheese, salt, and butter. But now, apparently, those things will… kill us? And we can’t possibly survive without the pills and vaccines that didn’t exist until a hundred years ago? How can that be right?

I dream of a world in which there are only doctors for injuries, and they are merely on call for accidents. That’s it.


Funny story-

My husband had a roommate in college with severe Crohns disease. He was told to eat gluten free due to his condition, which is one doctor-ish thing I actually agree with for any type of gut issue. This genius-level braincase used to mainline Papa Johns pizza regardless of what his doctors said, and apparently spent finals week one year getting a segment of his intestines removed surgically. And then he…ate more pizza.

This young man works at Raytheon as a physicist. He works on rockets.

And thinks he’s smarter than someone like me who never graduated college.

God help us all.

Aversions and Gerber- and how they’re related

I really got thinking over the last few days what I was going to talk about in this week’s post and decided on a subject near and dear to my heart, the nourishment and health of our young ones- which ties into how I eat. And then as I was drinking sauerkraut juice straight from the jar, it occurred to me- children don’t eat for health. They will eat it if they LIKE it.

Let me back up, and I’ll explain the sauerkraut jar, I promise. I had a massive A-Ha moment this week which led me to don the ‘ol conspiracy foil hat once more, but don it I will, and proudly at that.

I spent time in my 20’s working at a pediatric behavioral therapy clinic, and part of what we saw children for was food aversions. This is not an uncommon thing in this day and age. Children will always go through phases where they don’t like something, sure, but it’s far more common these days to see children as a whole just flat-out refuse to eat food that isn’t what is within the wheelhouse of what they like. In fact, I don’t think I’ve encountered a single child in the last decade who will just eat whatever you put in front of them- other than my own. So while I was putting a round of pot roast and veggie jars into the pressure canner this morning, I started wondering to myself why my child is different (beyond the obvious, she’s the best child because she’s mine, I am clearly not biased and I will take no questions at this time.) After turning it around in my noggin, I finally came up with a few potential, plausible reasons as to why my kiddo never seemed to be a picky eater.

1. We were very poor when she was a young toddler. If she wanted something else, there wasn’t anything else. She had to eat what we gave her.

2. Along the lines of #1, there was no “kid” food at our house. She ate what the grown-ups ate. It wasn’t like I was making myself Julia Child’s Beef Bourgnignon and nuking my kiddo some chicken nuggets in the microwave in the same evening. Occasionally she’d get mac and cheese with peas in it. That was about as much “kid” food as she got, and those nights were rare.

3. I made all of her baby food from scratch. Why? See #1 again, we were extremely poor. Two carrots and a sweet potato cost about three dollars back then. Two carrots and a sweet potato makes about 10 meals I could stash in the freezer, rather than spending $2 per Gerber jar. It was simply more cost efficient for me to use the steamer/puree machine I had been given as a gift, rather than cough up $200 per month on Gerber jars.

As I was thinking about this, the A-Ha moment popped into my brain. If you were the FDA and in bed with Big Pharma (which I believe I have already proven is true), and you wanted to make people as unhealthy as possible, how would you do it? Simple- you’d go after the children. You’d process a vegetable until there was almost no nutrients left in it, boil it to death, strain it, make it bland, tasteless, or even worse- disgusting, and then sell it for $2 per jar to parents who don’t know any better (and I am certainly not blaming you, folks, I didn’t know better either back then). Those parents turn around and forcefeed their baby this nutrient-less concoction, and as they grow into toddlerhood, they are told they must eat this food because it is healthy for them. Now take the average four year old who has just learned the word “No” and loves to use it at every opportunity. As soon as they figure out they have free will, there is NO WAY they are voluntarily shoveling that processed, puree’d nasty business into their faces. They have now made the connection that healthy = gross and they refuse it. Now you have a five year old who refuses to eat any vegetable at all, ever.

I babysat the children of a former boss of mine while he and his wife took a trip to Italy- which was really fun, honestly. They’re great kids. It was a week-long trip, and it was sometimes a little hard to feed them because they didn’t like hardly anything healthy. They got breakfast egg sandwiches (minus the one who wouldn’t eat eggs), they got fresh fruit, they happily slurped up yogurt. For dinner, chili was a hit, and so was spaghetti, but if I put a salad in front of them they would have looked at me like I had a whale tapdancing on my nose. I’ll just let you sit with that visual for a moment, and on we go.

The point is, feeding our children is so much harder these days because we have placed our trust in the hands of corporations who are paid bribes to make sure your children end up with six different prescribed medications by age 18. This is the real problem- that we have trusted these corporations, who have sneakily over the past 50 years slowly changed the ingredients in the food we eat. Which is why I contort myself into knots to home cook or home bake literally everything. This is how I taught myself how to make my husband imitation Cheez-Its from scratch. And before anyone gets indignant, I am very well aware that having the time to make everything from scratch is a luxury I have that many do not have. My husband and I live very simply so that I am afforded the ability to pressure can/make fruit leather/meal prep all day. If you do work, there’s still a lot you can do on weekends to make your weekday life easier- it’s all about choices. There is no judgment being passed- I’m simply making people aware that if they outsource their cooking, chances are they’re consuming things that are designed to make them sicker in the long run- important information that many people simply don’t know unless they’ve dived into as many rabbit holes as I have.

Wonder Bread is a great example of this horror. I’m sure most of us ate Wonder Bread as a child, back when it wasn’t, y’know, pure poison.

It’s the slowly boiling frog phenomenon. If you just toss a bunch of frogs into a boiling water pot, they jump out. But put them in nice, cool water, then turn it up a single degree every hour, and they’re boiling before they know to jump out, because they acclimate. This is what’s been done to us. We have been engineered to believe that obesity is now normal. That gut issues are just a thing that happen to most people. That allergies are just genetic, and that food aversions are just kids acting up, or a symptom of the spectrum. We have been led to believe in the modern age that sickness is health and health is sickness, and there is no greater example of this than how I was told to my face that I looked anorexic a couple of weeks ago, which was completely wild to me, because 5’9 and 145 lbs is nowhere near anorexic. Anorexic was when I was about 120 lbs in late January of 2021, around the time of The Souffle Incident (which I’ll circle back around to) but needless to say, I didn’t eat for almost two solid months and size 4 clothes were hanging off of me back then. I was positively skeletal. THAT was anorexic. Not the way I am now- a muscular woman at age 40 who has hacked her brain to burn fat for fuel. And for the record, anyone can do this. It doesn’t make sense to most people that I mainline full-fat cheeses, fatty steaks, heavy cream, and tons of butter, and look the way I do, but I think this is the way our bodies were intended to work, and I stand by that statement, because I’m in better health at age 40 than I was at age 25. (and for the record, I am not bulemic, either, just in case someone thinks they are calling a bluff)

Now- we get back to the trusty sauerkraut jar I was drinking out of a couple of days ago. As I was sipping the fermented, salty, briny liquid, I realized that I eat for nourishment and not for dopamine hits anymore. When you eat for dopamine hits, you are eating what makes your mouth happy, but not what makes your body happy. A chocolate malt milkshake probably tastes amazing, but enough of those and now you’re injecting insulin 3x per day. We can’t eat for what makes our mouths happy, our mouths are, quite frankly, idiots. *To be fair, the fatty steaks and butter -do- taste good, I’d be a liar if I said otherwise, but I’m also the person doing ginger, tumeric, lemon and cayenne pepper shots at 4:30am some mornings (which is exceptionally good for you, by the way. Capsaicin is incredibly good for circulation, ginger is great for the tummy, tumeric boosts your immune system, and the lemon helps you detox). At some point along my journey to health, I discovered that sometimes you have to eat stuff that definitely doesn’t taste good in order to nourish your body, because our food is currently stripped of those nutrients you need. I eat all sorts of strange food combinations that most people would think is bizarrely weird- zucchini and kale in my scrambled eggs, wheatgrass shots, dandelion greens in my tea, etc. There’s in fact a lot of very healthy things for me that I straight choke down because I know it’s good for me- like those lemon, ginger, cayenne shots.

Aversions aren’t just food related, by the way. Did you know that temperature therapy is a thing? As in, both heat and cold are things you can use to build mental resilience and boost your health. I give you two amazing examples- extreme cold and extreme heat.

First- cold plunges. Sitting yourself into an ice bath builds neuroplasticity (IE mental flexibility), trains your cells to adapt better to stress, improves autophagic function (the way your cells release waste) as well as extends cellular longevity and even prevents disease! A study from the University of Ottowa states the following:

Second- heat therapy. This one blew my mind, because I am well-acquainted with several people who can’t stand the heat- at all. It’s very uncomfortable for them. But a study out of Finland just proved that frequent usage of a very hot sauna reduced all-cause mortality by 40%. FORTY. PERCENT. You are literally 40% less likely to get a medical condition that can kill you just by forcing yourself to sweat in a sauna regularly! My husband is half Norwegian, and his genetic lineage says the following: Frolic in the snow all day, then sweat nearly to death right after. My husband is a huge sauna enjoyer.

Ice baths and sauna sessions are now something I have incorporated into my semi-regular routines. Okay, I have done them… a few times. Full disclosure, ice baths are not fun. Trust me, the first time you slide your body into your bathtub full of cold water with a bag of ice emptied into it, all you can think of is Jack hanging off the door and freezing to death at the end of Titanic, and every molecule in your body rebels, particularly when you plunge your head under. I swear, my life flashed before my eyes the first time I did that. It is freaking awful to do ice baths.

But you know what happens afterwards? You get out after 3-5 minutes, you warm up, and something in your brain changes. You literally feel invincible, like you could lift a car over your head.

Little wonder that ice baths have been connected with improvement of severe mental illness. There are tons of studies on this.

We have been unfortunately exposed to the idea that if something is uncomfortable for us, it equals bad, when just the opposite is true. If you do the things you do not like to do but choose to do because you know they are healthy for you, then you will live a longer, happier, mentally-stable life. For me personally, it’s running- I don’t like it but I do it regularly because I know it’s good for me, which is part of the reason I am so slim- because I exercise at least an hour per week, usually two or three 20-25 min sessions. It’s the very act of mentally pushing ourselves through those uncomfortable feelings that makes us grow and builds mental resilience- which is part of the reason why people in my life say I’m so strong. This didn’t happen by accident, this happened over a lifetime of pushing myself mentally through difficult or uncomfortable circumstances and not sitting down and giving up, or refusing to see it through. Those who never encounter any hardships will stagnate- which is why I have learned to be grateful for the things in my life that I dislike, because they make me better in the end. The people who grow are those who look at their discomforts and dislikes and dive into them anyway, cheerfully. In other words: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Which is an impossible concept to explain to an 8 year old who is crying into his broccoli.

I, however, have found some clever ways around this for children. I say it’s not lying if you simply don’t give them the whole truth, which might be sometimes needed if you’re dealing with a particularly food-adverse child. God would forgive you.

For example- Does your kiddo like chocolate milkshakes? Great!

…You don’t have to tell them that a scoop of this is in said milkshake, and they’ll never taste it over the ice cream. (This is found on vitacost.com and is well worth the money)

I mean, check out the health benefits of this stuff. I can’t count how many containers of this choco greens mix I’ve gone through. You put a scoop or two of that goodness in a blender with some full-fat yogurt and coconut milk, and it’s Heaven on Earth.

Does your kiddo enjoy hash browns? WHO DOESN’T, am I right? Allow me to give you the recipe I snuck into the kids I babysat, and they never knew they were eating veggies.

ZUCCHINI HASH BROWN CAKES

1 package of Simply Potatoes (or appx 4 peeled and grated russet potatoes, soaking in water)

2 small or 1 large zucchini, peeled

2 eggs

2 tbsp flour

Seasonings to taste- I like salt, pepper, garlic salt, and a little parsley

Drain your potatoes or empty your package of Simply Potato shreds into a bowl- wring potatoes out in a cheesecloth or paper towels if they were freshly grated and soaking. Take your zucchini that’s been peeled, and grate it on your cheese grater into the potatoes. (without the peel, they’re almost the same color as the potatoes, hahaha) Add your eggs and mix, then add the flour and stir in until the mix looks a little gummy and sticky. Too much flour and it gets stiff, not enough and it’s too slimy to hold shape into a round ball. Add your seasonings- not too much salt, but keep in mind they can hold a lot of salt. I can’t say how much salt to add because that’s taste preference.

Heat a pan with your preferred grease on the stove (I prefer beef tallow these days because it has a high smoke point and isn’t a seed oil, coconut oil will also work great) with the grease about 1/4 in deep across the flat pan. Take a big spoonful scoop of your mix in a large spoon, place it down into the hot oil, and then press on the back of the ball with the rounded edge of your spoon until it’s flattened out. You’ll have about a 3 inch diameter pancake. Let it fry for a few minutes until you just see the edges start to turn brown, then flip, carefully (I’ve burned myself with hot grease on these puppies a number of times). When the second side is golden brown, remove onto a plate with paper towels to drain, and sprinkle a little salt on top to finish if you wish. Add a little more oil if you need between batches, they soak up a lot.

This recipe makes a LOT of hash brown cakes- you can halve the recipe easily. Fair warning, the mix doesn’t keep well. I’ve tried.

A couple of these bad boys with a squirt of ketchup will get some veggies into your unsuspecting child and they’ll never know. They were a hit with children who “didn’t like veggies.”

To end this post- The Souffle Incident.

Between Nov 2020 and Mar 2021 was the worst of my traumatic brain injury. I spent about two months not really eating much at all, and in late Jan of 2021, I was actually anorexic-looking, my family can attest. I was a skeleton. Well, considering that food is probably my most accomplished gift (after music, I mean, do something since you’re 2 years old and you’ll always be a pro) I decided one evening after being suicidal for a week that if I couldn’t make a dessert souffle that held on the first try (something notoriously hard for an accomplished, well-fed and well-rested chef to do on a GOOD DAY) that I’d just fling myself off a roof and end it all. Yeah, irrational. True, regardless.

So I watched Gordon Ramsay’s Raspberry Souffle tutorial, and I whipped my egg whites by hand (yes, while skeletal). I put those souffle’s into ramekins, they baked, and when I pulled them out of the oven, they held without collapsing.

And I ate one. And it was delicious.

And then I started eating again.

I probably will never meet you, Mr. Ramsay, but you should know, your raspberry souffle tutorial saved a life. And God sometimes works in tiny miracles like that- reinforcing the structural integrity of a souffle made by a crazed, exhausted, terrified, unwell woman with shaky hands. Praise Him for that.

And now, at 8am, after having choked down my cayenne, lemon, ginger and tumeric shot three hours ago, I will voluntarily go for a run- something I very much dislike but choose to do anyway, because our bodies are the temple where God dwells, per 1 Corinthians 3:16. If we assume that is true, why would we allow it to fall into disrepair? I believe we have an obligation to be in as good of health as possible- to glorify the One who created the temple I get to drive around in this life. And I have to say, I got a pretty good one. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Next week’s post- The Carnivore Diet and why it’s curing incurable illnesses, with Harvard research to back it up.

Edit- Next blog will be published next Monday, 8/11. This week ended up crunching a lot of my time!

Neurodivergence and Humble Pie

A few hectic weeks later, here we are, back and better than ever- and with a new topic to delve into.

Recently, I was approached by someone in my life who reads my blog regularly- I was both touched and appreciative. This person made mention of something I hadn’t considered, and this is where the humble pie comes in. I am not so arrogant as to believe I know EVERYTHING on the subject of health/medicine/food/etc, but just knowledgeable enough to feel I have a pretty good grip on it. Stick a pin in the slice of pie I happily ate this last week, I’ll get back to it shortly.

I have probably made mention of my interesting and somewhat frustrating childhood- it was frustrating for my parents, I am sure, because I was diagnosed with ADHD at a fairly young age. My mother spent a solid heroic decade keeping me from processed sugars as much as humanly possible rather than medicate me with Ritalin. When I did partake in sweet treats, I got wild and out of control- the blood sugar spikes made my behavior unpredictable and often destructive. It is only in my adult years that I look back at my childhood with a sense of A-Ha- that the spectrum of disorders we know as “neurodivergence” isn’t just for an autism diagnosis (which is commonly known) but rather, any inner working of the brain that causes disruption to everyday life.

As an adult, I’ve made my ADHD tendencies work for me. I have a series of systems that work for me that I have developed so that I am able to live a normal life, although, normal, my life certainly has NOT been. My sense of going from thing to thing to thing to thing has actually proved to be a boon for me in a career such as the construction estimating job I held for nearly 3.5 years- because in construction, you can be tunneling intensely into some project and be hyperfocused, and then your phone rings with some fire that must be put out immediately. While you’re putting out that fire, three other little fires pop up, and now your attention must be equally split between four things that must all be done RIGHT THIS SECOND. And when you’re finished with all those minor crises, you must go back to your first project and jump back in without re-acclimating, because it’s two hours worth of work and you have exactly two hours and 15 minutes to get it out the door, thanks to your workday interruptions.

These tendencies pop up in my home life as well. Say it’s 4pm and I’m considering starting dinner. I tell my husband, “I’m going to start prepping for dinner.” And then five minutes later, he sees me putting a load of laundry into the wash. Why? Well you see, I pulled everything out to make dinner, but noticed I only had one clean dish towel left, so I figured that while I was prepping dinner, I might as well be doing laundry at the same time so that I’m doing two things at once. And then I start actually prepping said dinner, but then halt that to finish loading the dishwasher as well, so that I have room in the sink for the dinner dishes, and now it’s thirty minutes after I said I was going to “begin” prepping dinner, and I’ve only sliced the onions yet. This is typical for me. Ask my husband. To him, it’s beyond strange, but to me, it’s efficient- if I can do three chores at once, I’m really saving time, right? I will often spend a Saturday doing 5% of twelve different chores at a time. Halfway through my day, the entire home is a wreck- far worse than when I started- but by the end of the day, I will have successfully completed 10 out of 12 chores, with the final two about half done. But I will almost never, ever start a project and then sit down and finish it all at once. That is pretty much inconceivable to me.

In doing some research this week, I learned that the pioneers of autism research are Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. In the 40’s, Kanner specialized more in early-infantile autism, and Kanner researched more into what is considered “high functioning” autism, though both on the same spectrum. The name “autism” was coined by a psychiatrist named Eugen Bleuler in 1908- and it was a way to identify a schizophrenic who was withdrawn in their own inner world. This, unfortunately, is something that I personally have some experience with- not an autism diagnosis specifically, but after my traumatic brain injury, I spent nearly a year inside of my own head and didn’t have the capacity to interact with the outside world. This was in 2021, so Covid lockdowns were still active and most people were antisocial at this time anyway. I had my work (the construction project estimating) and I had my home- which, at the time, was a 500 square foot, 1 bedroom coffin of an apartment that my husband and I shared. It was not an easy year. All our belongings were stuffed into this tiny home and I spent most of that year barely speaking. It was misery for my husband who tells me that he loves the sound of my voice. The worst part, being a musical child, I didn’t sing much. I think I understand as much as a person can about being a non-verbal prisoner inside of your own head. When I was in that state, I would have done anything to wave a magic wand and get myself out of it. I know myself to be a vibrant, lovely, extroverted human being who loves people and loves to be funny and whimsical and silly, so that year was abject terrified misery for me as well, because I knew I was not myself. I know that parents of vaccine-injured children who withdraw into themselves and later get an autism diagnosis feel the same- that their child was stolen from them and that they’d do anything to get them back.

I will also add this- what I know about formally diagnosed autistic children is summed up into three categories- first, the nonverbal, non-responsive children with frustrated parents whose lives are a struggle (and I see testimonials of said parents online all the time), second, a reference to the first type of child in a series of fictional books by an author who is also a physician (The Touch- by F Paul Wilson. A doctor ends up with a mysterious supernatural power to heal, but every healing takes from him physically, and his final act of healing before his powers cripple him and put him into a wheelchair is to heal the nonverbal, non-responsive autistic son of the woman he loves) and third, a personal story of a friend of mine who struggles with social cues and told me more than once that she -hates- being autistic. I know her to be a wonderful person who pushes herself to work hard and exhausts herself with trying to push through a normal life, but it is also clear that she struggles, and again, has voiced so to me on numerous occasions.

These few exposures to what I know about autism is what led me to say what I said a few blog posts ago regarding mothers who cured their children’s autism with raw milk kefir- and where the humble pie slice comes in. The loved one of mine who I spoke to within the last week said a statement that I have rolled around in my head for days now. “Holly, autistic people don’t want to be “cured.”

Huh.

It is only through this revealing conversation that I truly see what the DSM-5 categorizes as “neurodivergence” disorders- simply a way of one’s brain operating. And it truly is a spectrum, ranging from the “Well, I guess I’ll just rock being weird” (my perspective) to a wheelchair bound autistic child with a feeding tube. In my case, imagine if you woke up one day and you pushed a block on your table forward, only to have it slide right. You push it right, and it slides backwards. With enough patience and determination, you could learn a system so that you knew exactly how to push the block to make it go the way you wanted it to go 100% of the time. That’s kind of what it felt like to rebuild my life after my traumatic brain injury- that every day I have to wake up and remind myself I have to pull backwards if I want something to go left, but at this point for me, it’s old hat- it’s very rare that I’m surprised by the block going in the wrong direction than I intended. To this day, I still randomly pull either the word “oven” or “freezer” when my brain searches for the word for an extreme temperature appliance, no matter which one I actually mean. That is the best example I can give of retraining my brain so that it works correctly-enough for dealing with every day life. And I am completely humbled by the people in my life who, despite potential learning difficulties, or social anxieties, or food aversions, or struggles in general- say, “You know, I like me the way I am.”

It’s also led me down a path of thinking that most modern psychology is trying to classify normal personality behaviors as a diagnosis that needs medication. Of course, I don’t see this as such a stretch, considering what I know about the medical industry and their desire to sell pills to as many people as possible. I don’t think people’s personalities can be classified into categories or that they ALL need pills in order to function. Some people’s lives are genuinely biochemically challenged, and modern medicine has allowed them to live a normal, happy, and successful life, and good on them! But I also generally believe that we are drastically overprescribing and that a lot of people’s mental discomforts could be solved through dietary changes.

I refer again to the study that started my brain on the path to healing- the Stanford study that proved that a ketogenic diet improves severe mental illness.

I fully admit that I tried several times to try and figure out how to include the link directly to the study in my blog, and it fought me the whole way, and now I have decided that my mental health is more important than spending the next hour trying to get the link to work. Y’all are smart cookies, however, so simply searching Stanford Ketogenic Diet will bring you where you want to go.

The long and short of it- my mother was doing more for my mental health by limiting my sugars than I could ever understand at the time. For those of us whose brains push forward and the block goes right, processed sugars and carbs will only muddy the waters of these big, beautiful brains. I can say for certain that once I started to get the hang of the keto journey, I have uncovered my brain from the garbage it used to swim in, and now it’s paddling like a champ. It took a lot of trial and error, a lot of supplements, a lot of patience with myself, and a lot of self-kindness, but I, too, got off the road of “wishing I was different” to the road of, “You know, I’m quirky, and that’s how God made me.”

And so I close with thanks- thanks for my loved one who showed enough courage and self-love to tell me I was wrong, and thanks to all people in my life with all kinds of brains- mostly for putting up with my “push forward, go right” noggin. My mom especially, who did more for my mental health during my entire life than I ever truly appreciated.

Next week- More regarding what I generally eat, and a few recipes!

The Covid Lie

Yes, I’m posting this now. I didn’t feel like waiting until next Sunday. I can do what I want, it’s my blog. :)

There’s really no better title for this blog post than the one I have chosen. This post will be absolutely brutal but truthful, backed up by facts and logic. If anyone prefers comfortable lies instead of honest truths, this post is not for you. This post will be upsetting to some. Turn away now if you do not want to know the truth, because I will expose evil where it stands, no matter how inconvenient those places are. Read on if truth is important to you. Here we go.

Allow me to start with my credentials and expertise on the subject of healthcare statistics, because once it’s established that “whoah, this woman actually does know what she’s talking about more than most people in healthcare” my meager audience might be more likely to listen to me, something I genuinely hope for.

In late 2017, I managed to get back on my feet after a suicide attempt and got a pretty sweet gig as the Risk Adjustment Coding Auditor of the Community Healthplan of Washington- it’s the local health administrator for Medicaid/Medicare claims (read: government funded). I had my Certified Professional Coder certification, and went on to pass the test to become a Certified Risk Adjustment Coder. Before I go further and tell you what my day to day job duties were, let me explain what risk adjustment is. Risk Adjustment is the process of your health insurance companies combing through your medical records annually, picking out all of your chronic health conditions from your records, and reporting them to the government. They do this because the government will then “reimburse” the health plan for the cost associated with those chronic health conditions: the worse they are, the more money your insurance company gets to pocket. Translation? Your health insurance company hopes you’re more sick this year than you were last year because for every new illness, they get paid. I wish I was kidding. That was a whole job- looking for sicknesses in your medical records. A broken bone won’t cause health problems year after year, but chronic health conditions will. Disgusting when I look back at it with these eyes now. It’s literally money laundering and profit off of your pain. Diabetes might net a company 4k per year, but cancer might net a company 12k per year, depending on severity (and stick a pin in that.) My day to day job was auditing the coding of medical records to see if there were any chronic health conditions that the medical coders missed. As in, “This patient may be more sick than we previously knew about. Let’s turn them over and shake loose change out of their pockets.”

Yes, looking back, it really felt like this.

Now- most people are aware that the 2017-2018 flu season seemed to be especially bad. You may remember hearing about it marginally, or noticed you were sick more often. Maybe you don’t remember. Allow me to refresh your memory- the 2017-2018 flu season was one of the most deadly on record, with an estimated 79,000 Americans who perished of the regular flu strain in just a few months. Keep in mind that I knew about this. I knew that Americans were passing away in alarmingly large numbers from the regular, annual flu strain that year because I was assigned to a special project mid- spring 2018. My job was to comb through a seemingly endless spreadsheet of hospitalizations for our Medicaid/Medicare members and pick out the encounters that were seasonal flu related. I am aware of the high number of deaths and I am sympathetic to those who lost loved ones that year, although to me, in my job, it was just numbers in a spreadsheet. My point is that I was aware of it. I want you to understand my full meaning- imagine that 15,000 Americans died of the regular seasonal flu each month for five months, and I knew that it was unusually high, but I knew it was completely normal for people (particularly older folks with pre-existing conditions) to die of the flu. I knew this. 12k-50k Americans die of the regular flu every single year in this country- that’s 2,500-10,000 Americans dying of the flu per month, every flu season. Sick people die. This is not a major revelation to those in healthcare, but to those not in healthcare, you just… don’t know, or don’t think about it unless it’s someone you know.

Keep this information in your head, and fast-forward to February of 2020. I had just gotten married in December of 2019, and I was working in a bakery near SeaTac airport when the reports of a deadly flu strain began circulating around all of the media airwaves. They said hundreds of people have died from this flu strain, and the media is working overtime to convince people that this new flu is something absolutely horrific and that “it’s a pandemic.” I watched all of this extremely confused. Hundreds of people died from a flu strain? Really? That’s what the news is reporting on? The news is telling people to stay in their homes over a flu? Then they locked us all down, because “thousands” of people have died from this flu strain every month for a few months. I am, again, completely confused and dumbfounded. Like seriously, you people don’t seem to know that ten thousand people per month will die of the regular ol’ seasonal flu every month, every year?

The media whipped people into a frenzy. Counted cases. Counted dead bodies. Showed gruesome propaganda of people in body bags being wheeled around. Locked people into their homes. Closed churches but kept liquor stores open. Closed mom and pop stores but left Walmarts open. I knew something was seriously wrong, but I didn’t quite know what yet. I couldn’t believe our lawmakers and media would be so dishonest in frightening people without context- if they’d reported that this was normal for a flu season, then people wouldn’t have panicked. Again, remember that I knew all of this, and most people don’t, so they were easily manipulated into believing Covid was something it wasn’t. 2021 rolled around and Covid was somehow worse the second year. Let me ask you something, though- if Covid was truly a separate and distinct disease, can any of you tell me why the seasonal flu, something that infects tens of millions of people annually, decided to take 2020-2021 off?

It didn’t. Covid was the flu, people. Covid was simply the seasonal flu. And don’t even get me started on the “cases.” MILLIONS OF CASES the news media bleat night after night after night to frighten you, when they PCR tested anyone who came into the hospital, no matter what it was for. If you broke your leg but had the sniffles, well now, that’s another Covid case. If you die in a motorcycle crash but had Covid the week before, boy howdy, it was the Covid that killed ya, don’t ya know. Added to the totals.

This is real, FYI. Think about how many car crash victims they PCR tested and then said “It was Covid that killed them.” Probably… a lot. Part of the brainwashing.

And then the masks happened. The masks. Nazi gestapos were bodyslamming people to the ground in Australia over not masking for a seasonal flu. Daycare workers were putting masks on crying children. You couldn’t go into a grocery story without masking up. Meanwhile the media continues to bleat out body counts like it’s completely unusual for thousands of people to die during flu season. Keep in mind I am watching all of this in abject horror, knowing what I know- that it’s just the seasonal flu, and that this is all out of proportion. I am watching as people are forced to wear a mask until they sit down at a restaurant, then it’s okay to take it off. I am watching marching bands wear masks and play their instruments with their mouth, THROUGH THEIR MASKS IN A HOLE THEY CUT INTO IT. In what world is that based in any kind of scientific evidence? The masks were NOT preventing anyone from getting Covid. Masks were both a mind-control device and an IQ test, one that most people in this country failed. I mean, even I wore them for a while when absolutely forced to early on, but my husband and I were some of the first people to march bravely into the grocery store with uncovered faces, something that the masses routinely attacked us for. And why did I stop wearing these face diapers? Because I knew they were nothing more than a mind control device. Just read the side of the box, people. READ THE BOX. It was nothing more than to force people to obey meaningless rules to their own detriment.

Late 2020, as we approached Election Day, President Trump came out with Operation Warp Speed- which released vaccines for this pandemic to the general public. Do you know what else I know? I know that all vaccines released in America require at least ten years of safety studies so that we know they are safe to inject into ourselves. I was the person reading medical journals throughout lockdown because I actually understand what I am reading in a way most people don’t. I was reading that the problem with MRNA technology is that it can cause neurological damage, that it’s prone to DNA contamination, and that it can cause a disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is an autoimmune disorder which can cause paralysis. It was around this time that I was reading about these shots that were being developed, and frantically emailed my immediate family members and told them all not to take these shots, and I warned my sister not to give them to her children, because there was absolutely no way that a vaccine could be developed in under a year for a “brand new disease.” Absolutely zero way. You need five, ten years at minimum. The media weaponized the seasonal flu to make people believe it was deadly, but you get the flu, you’re sick for a few days, you recover, you’re now immune. Meanwhile, if you inject these shots into yourself, you’re lining up to give yourself something far worse- neurological damage or an autoimmune condition for life.

Early 2021, the shots rolled out under Biden. I watched with horror as the vaccine gestapo censored doctors who spoke out, how they fired medical personnel for not getting in line, how they said this shot was “safe and effective.” I watched as real Covid cures were demonized as “horse dewormer” and I watched as Covid patients were given medication that took their life (remdesivir.) I watched the news media say that hydroxychloroquine (a drug that prior to 2020, the CDC said was safe enough for pregnant women to take) was demonized as something that if you take a single pill, “it will kill you.” I watched horror story after horror story of a Covid patient placed on a ventilator and murdered, with the hospitals getting reimbursed nearly forty thousand dollars per patient they murdered via ventilator (and I can prove this. For every condition that’s wrong with you, there’s a 3-5 digit code in the International Classification of Diseases. For everything they can do to fix you, there’s a 5 digit code called Current Procedural Terminology- a CPT code. Placing a patient on a ventilator has its own 5 digit code that can then be billed for. As soon as a patient had bad enough respiratory failure to require a ventilator, they bill that code to the insurance company and get their $39k check as reimbursement for that billed code. I am 100% telling you the truth.) Then, doctors were literally banned from prescribing Ivermectin, citing that it wasn’t approved to treat Covid. Again, with my medical knowledge, I am quite well aware that doctors are allowed to prescribe anything they want at any time, even for off-label usage. Doctors getting their medical licenses stripped for prescribing a fairly inert medication was absolute insanity to me.

Everyone on social media who spoke about any of this against the media narrative was banned, censored, or called an “anti-vaxxer.” And then the profits began rolling in, and I suddenly understood, with abject horror and clarity, the endgame of the rich government officials and billionaire world leaders- get everyone afraid of a perfectly normal flu season, and then get people to voluntarily inject themselves and their children with the actual bioweapon that would cause lifelong chronic health problems like myocarditis (a swelling of heart tissue that can, and has, killed many people after vaccination.)

Don’t believe me?

Remember when I said that risk-adjustment was money laundering via the government tax dollars, funneled to insurance companies for all of the chronic health conditions they would have to treat? I will translate what the above segment actually says. “We got 100 million people to inject themselves with a poison that we knew would cause them long-term chronic heart problems, so now that those chronic health conditions exist, we will add a code for it so that we can bill them to the government on an annual basis for a huuuuuge portion of tax dollars, paid directly to us.”

That is literally what that segment says. Myocarditis was given it’s own HCC, or Heirarchal Condition Code for risk adjustment- something I am quite literally a subject matter expert on.

Fast forward to this last month, in May of 2025, four years after people started injecting these “safe and effective” vaccines into themselves. The FDA is only now, after four years, requiring Pfizer and Moderna to add a “hey, this vaccine can cause permanent heart damage, our bad” label to the vaccines- something that people like me knew about before the shots even rolled out. We were quietly vindicated with no fanfare, to our own horror at being correct. Our worst fears were confirmed, and we lost even more sleep over it.

I want to make something extremely clear at this point. I am not happy to be right. In fact, the fact that I was right the whole time haunts me daily, like what could I have done better to prevent people from injecting this poison into themselves? Meanwhile, (unsticking the cancer pin) cases of cancer are skyrocketing, and doctors are pretending that they have no idea what’s causing it. Only, I know. I know. I knew the whole time, and the people who knew were laughed at like lunatics, censored, banned, and demoralized by our own government officials and family members.

Consider that the MRNA shots are causing cancer rates to explode. Then ask yourself how much Big Pharma makes on treating cancer every year. Go ahead. Look it up. Feel nauseated. Look at that, they project a 50% rise in cancer profits by 2026. Who could have ever expected this completely random happenstance occurrence?

Then ask yourself why Pharma would ever release cancer cures, with that much of a cash cow in their pocket that they can just keep making money off of. Ask yourself why these people would not purposely cause cancer in young people if they stand to make billions off of it. Realize you don’t have a good answer. Realize that true evil exists, and it bribed society with donuts to inject cancer into themselves.

Where am I going with all of this? Truth be told, I’m not actually sure. I don’t know how to wrap this all up. Fauci said one Covid shot would make you immune to the common cold, and then it became two shots, and then seasonal boosters… and now most people who have at least one, well, they probably have at least four of these shots in themselves. I never got a single one, thankfully. I only had one PCR test, too, and it was against my will while I was hospitalized in March of 2020. It was so painful that I never ever had another one. My doctor pushed the covid vaccine and I said no. I am thankful I had enough sense even while I was losing my mind to refuse vaccination for what amounted to a flu with a 99.95% survival rate if you’re under 60. Which is to say, a completely average and normal flu statistic for mortality rates.

There are a couple of things I wish to say before I wrap this up- one, that the literal definition of “coronavirus” from the American Medical Association textbook in the late 80’s defines “coronavirus” as “the common cold.” This is not photoshopped. This is pulled from a video of the person actually opening the textbook because they had one on hand. Now imagine me trying to scream this all over social media to people who are medically illiterate. Obviously the book has to be wrong, or I have to be wrong, because the super duper official experts can’t possibly be lying in order to make piles of cash… can they?

Yeah. They can, and they are. They brainwashed people to be afraid of the common cold, and those same people screamed at me to quit being a conspiracy theorist.

Also, God’s honest truth is that after this ordeal, it made me hyper-aware that real evil exists. Most people can not comprehend the level of coordination required to pull off such a horrible hoodwinking on humanity, but now I think all of you see what I see, and what I have seen the entire time- that there is a small subset of greedy, evil people in the world who would purposely orchestrate a gigantic lie just to inject people with a bioweapon that would cause chronic health conditions that they will now make tens of billions of dollars treating per year. Create the problem, sell the solution.

Also, please ask yourself why Bill Gates (who is not schooled in healthcare) is touting vaccines as a “zero carbon solution for overpopulation”?

Sounds a whole lot like he wants to murder a good portion of the population with vaccines, huh?

And yes, before anyone asks, that is a real newspaper. I saw a video of a woman holding a physical copy. She saved it because she knew it might get scrubbed from the internet.

I would also ask yourself why a cardiologist (a heart doctor) who claims to speak for God either didn’t get warned by that loving God that these shots cause heart damage… or he simply failed to inform his congregation about it. Either this man does not speak to God, or he simply decided not to warn his church population who look to him for guidance on the right thing to do.

I would ask all Catholics the same question of Pope Francis. Either God just decided not to warn the pope of the dangers, or the pope had an agenda, and was bribed to push the shots.

All these religious leaders in complete lockstep, recommending vaccines to their congregations- using guilt and manipulation in order to do it. Saying God wants you to do it.

what… is this? Brainwashing 101.

And no one seemed to question why the literal embodiment of evil to Republicans, and all the Republican religious leaders, were pushing the exact same messaging. “Give this to your children.”

At no point in history have the good guys and bad guys come together for the betterment of society and agreed on something.

Parents lined up to inject their perfectly healthy children after caving to trillions of dollars of propaganda and brainwashing, which led to… these precious lives lost. This is just a handful that I could find in a matter of minutes. If I searched for hours, I’d have hundreds of names of beautiful children murdered by these bioweapons.

Look at their faces. All lost because their parents believed that rich people who make money off treating sickness had their best interests at heart. All lost because they refused to listen to their loved ones who said the shots weren’t safe.

Now imagine me watching these stories roll through my social media feed over and over and over and over and over and over and over in the last 3.5 years. Imagine how heavy my heart is. Imagine how angry I am, as a mother, that these parents lost their children due to ignorance and brainwashing and pure evil.

There is not enough fire in Hell for how angry I am.

*deep breath*

I continually pray for all of these families harmed by these horrible bioweapons, and I hope this has shed some light on why I feel the way I do, and also why I say

I punch evil in the face.

I am aware that occasionally, evil dresses up like a sweet old man who is holding a Bible.

Sometimes, evil hides behind a veneer of godliness that you’d clearly be a bad person for questioning the motives of.


My God requires that I speak the truth, even if my voice shakes, and that’s what I was raised by good parents to do.

I’m sorry that the truth is horrifying. I really am.

Following Jesus Christ is not for the faint of heart, when you follow Him properly. Remember, He toppled corrupt institutions and called wealthy religious leaders “vipers.” He feared nothing.

I can not say I follow Christ if I am unwilling to embody the same.

I am taking a break from blog posts for a while. I will come back to it once a few life events shake loose over the next few weeks. I mostly want to keep this post stickied at the top, because it’s the most important thread of information I’ve ever put together.

Remember, kids:

Oh, by the way- a little bit of levity to lighten up some heavy information. How I broke my nose.

So… I got drunk at a wedding one time. Some random guy I met at the bar a few minutes earlier was on the dance floor, and the Dirty Dancing “Time Of Your Life” song came on. After 7 or so glasses of wine, everything sounds like a good idea, so the guy catches my eye, kneels, beckons me to run and jump for The Lift, and I took a running start… and went sailing over his arms, hitting the dance floor on the other side face-first, with my dress flipping up and exposing my backside to literally everyone in attendance. I sat up and just said “I’m fine” over and over. It was the only thing that could come out of my face, as blood gushed from my nose and I was drunkenly half-carried to a car to drive back to my boyfriend’s parent’s house. And said boyfriend wasn’t even at the wedding, he was away, working. Not my finest moment.

Not only was my nose entirely busted, but my two front teeth also got slightly slammed inward in due to the impact and I had to see a dentist to file down the back of my top front teeth so I could close my mouth and actually chew food. And then I told everyone I was in a car accident for years, because the truth was simply far too embarrassing back then. It’s fricken’ hilarious now.

I have been sober for nearly 2.5 years now, and it’s still one of my favorite stories to tell. I don’t even think I could smell a glass of white wine without my nose throbbing.

-fin-

Autoimmune Conditions, Seed Oils, and Statins

Before I get into what I’m learning in school this month, I just have a quick announcement to make- At some point soon, I am buying a butter churn. I’m serious. I told my husband I would ABSOLUTELY churn some butter, and I will wear a bonnet if I must. I can’t wait for unlimited raw milk butter, because butter is one of the healthiest substances you can eat. I am not kidding you. Read on, but let me explain something first.

I know my last post got kind of heavy, but please understand- these are all things I had to learn about myself and the world before I finally shook off my chains and stepped into the power God put inside of me to use. It is so freeing to look at propaganda whether it comes from a church, a government official, a foreign country, etc and be able to see it for what it is- control mechanisms. People are so afraid of “disobeying” that they obey themselves into a form of slavery that takes their money and gives only fear back. I no longer live in that place of blind obedience out of fear, and it took realizing that I am the cause AND solution of most of my problems in life. Yes, people will mistreat you sometimes when you are in the process of learning, but only because we mistreat ourselves, so we give our outer world permission to mistreat us in turn. Once I started being nice to myself, I began to only encounter nice people. The inside projects to the outside.

How wild is it that when we show ourselves perfect love, we only encounter loving people? When Jesus told us to love each other as He has loved us, we forget to love ourselves as He loved us. We are so mean to ourselves, and when we do that, we are not doing His work. White Christians especially are beholden to a guilt complex- we’ll tear ourselves up at night over something stupid we did over a decade ago! Don’t you think the enemy has weaponized our guilt against us so that we feel bad and imperfect and only do comparisons for how far we fall short, rather than see how far we’ve come or recognize the good we do? Why do we do the enemy’s work for him, for free? Why do we have it drilled into our heads that putting our needs first is selfish, rather than important for health? Why do we please everyone else around us rather than just tell people the truth? Why are we so afraid of offending another person that we are willing to stamp our own voice out in order to not make waves?

Believe it or not, this ties into autoimmune conditions- the term for when our body turns on itself and views itself as an enemy. When we are mean to ourselves, our body thinks we are the problem, and it makes us sick. When we try to escape our life rather than accept it and forgive it, our body views us as trying to not be ourselves, and again, this makes us sick. When we feed ourselves garbage, we are telling our body it’s not worth feeding properly, and we get sick. When we need constant distractions because we can’t stand our own company, our body interprets it as “I am the problem”, and it shuts down. When we beat ourselves up at night over mistakes, our body reacts and tries to fight itself. All of these things invite autoimmune attacks- and I am a firm believer that most autoimmune conditions start in the mind- it starts in how we treat ourselves and how we view ourselves.

In my classes this week, I am learning a lot about immune function and how nutrient deficiencies contribute to our ability to heal itself. Eating properly is absolutely key to health, and I’m not just saying this to slap cheeseburgers out of your hands (unless it’s made with local butcher meat and a home-baked bun, then that’s not so bad.) I’m also learning a lot recently about why we have the nutritional deficiencies that we do, and it’s honestly… horrifying. It’s incredibly hard to wake up and realize that we’re lied to by everyone we generally are told to trust- but once you realize that true evil exists and it wears a suit and tie while smiling through CNN interviews, a lot more about this reality begins to make sense.

For example- prior to 1948, cottonseed oil was actually considered toxic waste by large factory companies like Proctor & Gamble. In 1948, P&G did something that changed the course of human history forever- they began to take this toxic waste runoff from their factories that they didn’t know what to do with, they hydrogenated it, and then paid the American Heart Association a $1.7 million dollar bribe to promote their newly hydrogenated seed oil product called Crisco to the public, claiming that it was more “heart-healthy” than traditional butter. The American public, always wanting to be healthy, immediately jumped on board… because if an organization called the American Heart Association says it, it MUST be true. Huge swaths of Americans began to swap our their butter from God-given nature for this processed toxic sludge called Crisco and margarine products, just because there were commercials everywhere advertising it as “heart-healthy.” Welcome to yet another example of why I have shaken off the chains of obedience drilled into me as a child- unless we know the true motivations of who is telling us we can trust them, we absolutely can not trust them.

Over the course of the next 70 years, what happened to us as a society? This dramatically impacted the beef and dairy industry because they lost business, and obesity and cancers began to rise. The human body was not designed to ingest toxic factory sludge, and now, it’s literally everywhere. If you look at a box of Cheerios (yes, the cereal we all fed our children!) you will see two things- one, a stamp of approval from the American Heart Association, and two, that cottonseed oil is one of the ingredients. It’s in our margarine because they said it was better for you than butter. It’s in all of our fried foods. They put it in nearly everything processed these days because the FDA and Big Pharma pay bribes to each other. The more people whose health fails due to eating seed oils instead of butter, the more they will go to their doctor for help with their chronic illnesses, and the more pills the doctors get to prescribe.

On that note, let me get into statins, one of the biggest lies of the medical industry. Did you know that prior to 1970, a total cholesterol level of 300 was completely normal? “New research” to the brainwashed doctors in medical school began slowly lowering the acceptable level of cholesterol to 250, then 190, now 150. Why do they do this? So that they can sell statins, which destroy your brain. Your brain is 25% cholesterol, people, and dementia isn’t on the rise for absolutely no reason! Statins will cause brain damage, neuroinflammation, and mitochondrial dysfunction. Statins will actually cause more strokes than a high animal fat diet. Statins will induce type 2 diabetes, can cause liver damage, and increase the risk of brain bleeds. In short- if your doctors is prescribing statins to you and telling you to eat less eggs, what he is doing is making the pharmaceutical industry more money by creating more health problems in you that they make money treating.

There are good fats and there are bad fats. Good fats are the kind God created- fatty steaks, chicken, cheese, eggs, coconut oil, beef tallow, avocados, butter, olive oil. Then there are bad fats- and bad fats are made by man- “vegetable” oil, Crisco, canola oil, cottonseed and rapeseed oils, etc. This is how you know the difference between a good fat and a bad one.

If you or someone you love is on a statin, for the love of God, please get them off of it as soon as possible, and encourage fatty meats, butter, and lots of eggs into their diet. MCT oil, usually made from coconut oil, is one of the healthiest things you can ingest. When my brain broke, I spent about a year avoiding meat because I felt some moral way about it, and it actually did more damage to me in the short term. Once I began eating a diet sparse in sugar and high in animal fats, my brain actually healed itself. My blood pressure dropped. My stress level dropped. Every single health marker you can imagine improved in me once I shed processed food and ate primarily animal fats and vegetables and avoided sugar like the plague it is.

There’s a reason I say I’ll never go to a doctor again unless I have an injury, and I’d have to be practically dying to allow it.

Here’s the thing guys- Either your doctors genuinely don’t know why you’re sick, or they know the seed oils and sugar are the problem but don’t want to have their medical license stripped from them for speaking out- which genuinely does happen in this country. The amount of propaganda and brainwashing to get us to consume things that literally destroy us from the inside out is staggering to learn and comprehend, and all of those industries hold hands behind the scenes. Big Food will make sure your food is stripped of nutrients and poisoned, Big Pharma will make sure they can sell a pill to manage your health problems that are caused by your nutrient deficient diet, Big Insurance will launder money from the government for all of your chronic health conditions they have to manage, and Big Lobby will make sure your lawmakers pass laws so that all of this is done legally. And again, please remember how much I know about this. I literally wrote healthcare policy for an insurance company in the state of Washington while auditing a team of Risk Adjustment coders. More on that in my next post, and it’ll be a doozy.

Back to autoimmine disorders- our bodies attack themselves because we are filled with foreign invaders in the form of pesticides, parasites, and factory toxic sludge runoff. Remove the toxins from your diet, eat what God provided in nature for us to consume, and watch your health- and mental health- improve. I saw a video the other day of a man with Crohns disease- he switched to a carnivore diet- that is to say, meat, eggs, fermented foods, and a handful of fruits (seriously, that’s all he eats) and he not only cured his Crohns, he’s in amazing shape and now runs marathons, when his doctors said he’d be sick for life and require multiple surgeries, which he no longer needs. There are more stories than I can count of people going onto a carnivore diet and curing all their autoimmune conditions within a year. The foundational research that started my entire health journey was a Stanford article about the link between sugar and mental health.

As a side note, since switching to a high-fat, high-meat, and little to no sugar/ low carb diet over a year ago, I have gone from being late 30’s, mostly sedentary and out of shape with anxiety, depression, high blood pressure and an inflammation issue, to age 40 with zero health problems and able to pass the Army PT physical with a score of 260 (out of 300, mind you, and this score is higher than when I took that test in Army basic training half my life ago.) Just this morning, I did the pushup and situps portion of the test, and passed with a perfect score in each of the two categories. Most 40 year olds I know are on a cocktail of medications and have a whole host of ailments wrong with them or are at least overweight. They can’t run a mile in under 10 minutes unbroken- something I did on Tuesday of this week. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back. I say this to ask you- do you want to trust what your doctors are telling you, or will you finally trust the word of a woman who by all rights healed herself to perfect health at age 40 by literally disobeying what the “authority” (doctors, politicians, and “experts”) told me to do?

If you eat what you eat because you trust people with lots of money, chances are you buy food based on if there’s a stamp on the packaging from the American Heart Association calling something “heart-healthy.” Every time you see that logo, just remember, they were bribed today’s equivalent of twenty two million dollars to lie to you. Today’s obesity, autoimmune, and cancer epidemic is on them. All I see when I see the American Heart Association logo with the heart and the torch is, “Trust us if you want to turn your heart health into a dumpster fire.”

I understand the hesitance to trust what I am saying. I do. I say a lot of radical things that most mainstream sources will disagree with. I am aware that if any of you reading this are on the verge of believing that I might actually know what I am talking about… it kind of makes you wonder what else I might be correct about, and I am aware that the implications are frightening to some of you. Consider, though, that my life has never been more peaceful or healthy, so while completely reorganizing your belief system is scary in the short term, please use me as proof that on the other side, the skies are clear, and it’s smooth sailing. I have no motivation to lie to you because as a born again Christian, I believe I am accountable for my words and actions, and I believe Jesus would want me to share what I know. I truly believe that, and I will stand before God someday knowing I did all I could to spread the truth of what I know and try to save people from a fire they don’t even realize they are standing in.

Next week I truly open the can of worms I’ve been itching to crack the top off of.

Covid.

It will not be pretty. It will, however, be truthful and backed up by fact. That is a promise.

Mindset and Fixing It

Why do I write these blog posts? I’d like to answer that question for you, first and foremost, because this post may be jarring to some who read it. Also, apologies for length.

I write these things because I love all of you (even those of you I’ve never met or talked to) and I believe you deserve a better, happier, healthier life than you’ve currently been living. I will always be the person who tells you a truth you don’t want to hear rather than a lie that makes you comfortable and feel validated. I’m not making a penny off of this endeavor and I volunteer my time for you. I write out my wisdom to share what I have learned, because there are so many people that I love who have given their power away to some outside agency and they are now a victim of their own lives and their own choices. I know of people who, despite having all of their healthcare and bills and groceries covered by the taxpayer, will moan about being a victim and how nothing ever works out for them and how due to what they’ve been through, they just can’t be expected to make good choices or take responsibility for themselves or be held accountable.

absolutely. not.

Victimhood is a mindset. When everything happens “to” you, you are powerless against it, and it just keeps happening, and you don’t know why. The reason why it happens is because you view it as “things happening to you” rather than “things designed to make you stronger.” Women especially are prone to this, because in this reality, we are generally taught that we have no power. But that’s an absolute lie, because while it’s true that, no, we generally don’t have the raw physical power to do what men do, we mistakenly believe that this means we don’t have the power to halt things from happening to us, or to have power over ourselves. Most of us women are simply unaware that our outside surroundings are a direct projection of whatever our inside beliefs are- as in, if you believe you’re weak or powerless, then you will constantly find people trampling all over you as your inner self’s means of validating what you already believe.

I had an epiphany the other night. The biggest lie that we’re taught in this life, as women, is that we have no power, and must defer to the man to meet all the needs and make all the decisions. We have it drilled into our head through media, churches, and just societal brainwashing in general, that we are secondary to the alpha carnivores, which obviously makes us prey in a world of scary man people who like to beat each other up for fun. But what have we done with that information? Rather than endeavor to make ourselves stronger, we seek to defang the very people who protect us and build our world. We try to make our men kinder and softer and gentler and rounder, when they need to be the very opposite. We have sought to destroy the Alpha-ness of our men rather than perhaps rise to the occasion and be the complementary partner for our Alpha. And this is the problem with our society- that weak women who have no control over themselves either seek to control other people as a means of making themselves “feel” empowered (despite only digging themselves a deeper hole) OR they simply find themselves as a damsel in distress constantly, with no ability to solve their own problems because they think they can’t. The feminist movement has absolutely destroyed our society, and I don’t care who gets offended that I say this. All we’ve done is turned women into inferior men while devaluing the men themselves, which in turn makes them check out of society, making life harder for all of us because women now actually have to work harder.

Instead of making ourselves betas who don’t have any power to defend ourselves OR puffing ourselves up to try to equal an Alpha (and failing miserably), why don’t we women choose to be Omegas instead? Think omnivore. Foxes are an excellent example. So are rats. True omnivores are only 3% of the planet, with carnivores making up 64% of the planet and herbivores making up roughly 32%. Omnivores absolutely have the potential to be prey, but they generally have defense mechanisms in place to bite the crap out of you if you try to mess with them. In human terms, an Omega woman is neither preyed on by the Alphas nor does she act predatory to prey. She is the true blend of strength and softness. She is brave enough to march into a coal mine if her husband forgot his lunch. She will bite the head off of anyone who disrespects her man. She pulls her Alpha out of his comfy chair on Saturday afternoons to go to the gym with her. She doesn’t buy him garbage food that is actually poison just because he “enjoys” it and instead stands up to him and makes him eat salads occasionally instead of Pop Tarts- and he listens to her, because he knows her strength. She empowers herself to research recipes so that she can make him Cheez Its from scratch. In short, Omega women make Alpha men stronger and better. More, Omega women can see when human prey is being preyed upon even when they can’t see it themselves. There are wolves dressed as sheep all over this world, and I can see them with startling 4k clarity. Omega women make the wolves dressed as sheep afraid, because I see them for what they are.

Now, a lot of the above is directed at women, but men, it’s your turn, now.

I generally have mixed feelings about Jordan Peterson, but he said something recently that I 100% agree with. Young men, it is your responsibility to turn yourself into an absolute monster… and then tame that monster. If you don’t have the ability to defend your wife with your bare hands, then you are not living up to what God put you on this planet to do. I don’t care how soft you are, how many video games you have wasted your life and your body playing, or how many excuses you have- eating Burger King and playing WOW all evening is an absolute disgrace of your life. Like, I get it, often it’s how you’re raised, and if you were raised soft, then I blame your dad, but after age 16 or so, you have a duty to get yourself into shape and run yourself through an Agoge (the Spartans sent their sons through this training… from age 7 on, they learned to fight, to steal, to kill, to hunt, etc. They came back at age 16 or so, fully men.) Men need fights to fight. Men need to kick other men and bash their arms against things. And amazingly, the strongest men generally turn out the kindest, because they do not suffer from a lack of confidence.

My husband, for those of you who do not know, is one of the most deadly human beings on the planet. He is 6’4 and nearly solid muscle. Beginning at age 3, he took Taekwondo lessons from a Grand Master who essentially taught the Korean Special Forces soldiers how to kill in the 60’s. My husband came home bloody from sparring beginning at age 7. He played soccer, ran marathons, and then enlisted into US Army Modern Combatives training. I am thankful my husband was raised the way he was, because for all the talk about “toxic masculinity,” it’s actually a lack of masculinity that’s the other problem in this world- too sharp of women, too soft of men. A brutal combination. The cruelest, meanest man I ever knew in my life was an obese man-child who beat up on his own wife and son, and he legitimately thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room because he looked into a microscope at a commercial lab once. That guy needs a run through Army Basic Training if anyone ever does, because for men, the condition of your physical vessel is a direct correlation to your inner health. And his wife allowed his abuse for years because he made her feel powerless. She believed him rather than straight punching him in the face over his treatment of her, because she mistakenly believes that anger is bad- because that’s what society says. Don’t get angry, it’s bad. Just tolerate everything, liberals say.

again. no.

I speak on these subjects to demystify them because I am intimately familiar with them. For the first few years of my marriage with my husband, I spent a great deal of time scrunching up my nose and being offended at a lot of my husband’s perfectly normal behavior. I took everything personally instead of letting things just roll off me. If he cracked a harmless joke, I felt like he was putting me down, which was absolutely not the case, considering that men tease to show love, and I didn’t realize that- instead, I tried to control his behavior so that I wouldn’t have hurt feelings all the time. I tried to defang my own husband due to my own feelings of weakness. Then some weird years happened where I had a drug problem and broke my brain open. My early blog posts cover this. But then, something else weird began to happen. I ceased to become “beta” and started to become “Omega.” I became strong enough to stand with him. I regularly force myself into fasting prolonged periods of time. I have self control. I don’t blame anyone else for problems and no one ever tries to hurt me anymore because my higher soul self knows I don’t need those lessons anymore. And yeah, I literally care not at all what other people think of me- it’s their problem, not mine, because I am absolutely delightful. Someone could tell me the most horrible insults directly to my face, and all I’d say is, “Ye who smelt it, dealt it.”

How does this help you?

People, you have to confidently drive your own life. God gave you a car so that you can go anywhere, but it’s up to you where you go and how you drive there. You can’t just sit back and let God drive for you… you won’t go anywhere, because God didn’t create you to wallow in shame and drown your feelings in McDonalds or become agoraphobic or say “poor me.” God created you to be absolutely magnificent. If you refuse to drive your life, now you’re letting the enemy drive it for you, which is where most of us begin to feel put-upon. It’s as if our life is holding our own hands and smacking our faces with it, saying, “Stop hitting yourself Stop hitting yourself.” It only stops once you wrench your hands out of the grip of the one who is making you hit yourself with your own hands and say

no more.

Stop saying things like “Nothing ever works out for me.” Because you’re making that true. Stop saying things like “I’m so bad.” Because you make it true. Stop saying things like “I have no power.” Because you make it true.

And now, to really ram home how much power we actually have, some Hindu wisdom.

There is a Hindu legend about a time when all humans were gods, but they abused that divinity. They so abused it that Brahma, the chief god,  decided to take it away from them and hide it where they would never find it again. Where to hide it became the big question.

The lesser gods were called into council to consider this question: “Where shall we hide humanity’s divinity?” The council said, “We will bury humanity’s divinity deep in the earth, but Brahma  said, “No that will not do; one day they will dig down deep into the earth and will find it.”

Then they said, “We will sink their divinity into the deepest ocean.” Again Brahma replied, “No, not there, for they will learn to dive into the deepest waters, and search the ocean bed and find it.”

Then the lesser gods said, “We will take it to the top of the highest mountain and hide it there.” But again Brahma replied, “No, for eventually humans will climb every high mountain on earth; they will be sure some day to find it and take it up again.”

Then the lesser gods gave up and concluded, “We do not know where to hide it, for it seems there is no place on the earth or in the sea that humans will not eventually reach.” Then Brahma said, “Here is what we will do with humanity’s divinity. We will hide it deep down inside the humans themselves; they will never think to look for it there.”

Ever since then, the legend concludes, humans have been going to and fro throughout the earth, climbing, digging, diving, exploring, and searching for something already within themselves. The divinity within humanity is still the best-kept secret of the ages.

I know better than most- our power is within us. Amazingly enough, Jesus also taught this concept, but modern churches say “The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You” is just a mistranslation which is such a breathtaking display of brainwashing, because when you have enough life perspective, you begin to see how everything in your life happens for you and not to you. After being widowed, living through prostitution and homelessness, healing from a drug problem, and giving up my child for her happiness, I have all the excuses in the world as to why I just should have rolled over and given up- until one day, I realized that living a life of victimized weakness is exactly what the enemy wants for us. Jesus wants you to hit the gym at 6am before work so that you can punch evil in the face. Jesus wants you to eat a salad instead of McDonalds. Jesus wants you to give up sugar and alcohol and other worldly vices because those vices aren’t of Him. And now? I am actually thankful for my life. All of the awful parts of it made me stronger and led me out of a pit I didn’t even know I was in- a pit I could only see once I had gained altitude.

Part of fixing your mindset is coming to terms with the fact that nearly everything on this planet that is made by man is designed to weaken you and sicken you. Yes, nearly EVERYTHING. The TV. All fast food. Seed oils. Sugar. Modern wheat. Non-organic vegetables and fruits. Pasteurized milk. Air fresheners. Polyester sheets. The very people you trust are quite often bribed to lead you astray. They will tell you half-truths without giving you the full story. I grew up in a religion that taught about fasting, but only for half a day. This robs people of the health benefits of prolonged fasting and doesn’t actually teach you why it’s important. They also teach that cannabis is the same as alcohol- a “drug” - when one is a plant that God put here for our medicinal usage and the other is created by man and promoted everywhere from billboards to commercials on TV. One shrinks tumor cells, the other gives you fatty liver disease. By lumping weed in with alcohol, an avenue of healing has been removed from good people over a belief that a plant God put here on this world purposely is somehow forbidden. No one has been able to give me a convincing reason why a loving God would give us a plant that cures cancer but would punish us for using it… perhaps we have such high cancer rates because certain religions say God prefers you not use the cancer-curing plant or you will be punished.? We as humans disavow things that could actually be good for us based upon what someone else has said about it instead of using your God-given critical thinking skills to find out for yourself. Yeah, it’s scary finding out what’s true and what’s not, but I’d rather wake up in a vat of goo and realize I used to be a slave, than to refuse to see the truth and continue to be a slave. You can’t fight evil if you aren’t aware of how it operates.

Trust me, I am as gentle as a dove to a newborn, any child, a person in distress, etc. I hug grandmothers and I pray for the homeless. My hands wash dishes, pray, feed others, change diapers, and make shadow puppets. I am as kind as can be to every human on the planet, whether you are a predator or prey.

But I am absolutely capable of punching evil in the face.

Because that is what my God requires of His battle angels, and I truly believe that if you are incapable of fighting evil, then you are unwittingly doing its bidding.

War is not won in a single moment, but rather, in 100,000 individual bullets. I make a good choice instead of an unhealthy one that the enemy wants me to make, 100+ times per day. Sleep in? No, get up early. Skip workout? No, go running. Coffee with lots of sugar? No, adaptogen tea with honey. Donut? No, scrambled eggs with spinach. Take a nap? No, work on building your business. Lose your temper at a customer service person who messed my account up? No, make her laugh, and thank her for her time. Be lazy? No, take a shower. Talk over a person who has a differing opinion from mine and insist I’m right? No, hear them out in case I can learn something. Eat two portions of dinner? No, just one. Ice cream for dessert? No, just a handful of trail mix. Leave dishes in the sink overnight? Nah, knock them out before bed.

Consider that everything the enemy wants you to do is easier than what Jesus wants for you, and now you understand the trap. (I want to make it clear, however, I’m still human. My clean laundry occasionally sits on my couch for days at a time, and for every 100 decisions I make that are good, I might make three lazy ones.)

No one tells you how lonely it can be learning to punch evil in the face, but no butterfly can explain flight to a caterpillar, either. It’s sort of a, “Just trust me bro” kind of thing.

Find the strength to grow wings, my friends, and stop fearing consequences for challenging your beliefs. When your validation comes from the light inside instead of fitting in with the crowd, you fly.

Long story short, you are either the victim of your life, or the victor of your life.

No one can decide but you, kiddos.

Fasting- Update

I broke my fast this evening out of necessity after the 72 hour mark. My husband and I decided I’d simply lost too much weight, and I wasn’t large to start with, being a fairly muscular 5’9 and 140ish pounds. I absolutely could have gone two more days on just water and coconut water, but it was his decision that I stop this evening and have a meal, so I did.

I began my fast technically Sunday evening, although all I had to eat on Sunday was about half a scrambled egg, a spoonful each of quinoa salad and hummus, and a small cup of mixed greens and protein powder. I got through Monday and Tuesday with just pinches of salt in water, feeling absolutely fine. This morning I branched out with some of my greens in water, I had a small cup of basically plain coffee with some MCT oil and a tiny pinch of keto creamer, and then coconut water all morning and afternoon. This evening I was still feeling fine, but my husband, upon hugging me, told me that five-day fasts were for severely overweight or severely unhealthy people, and that in his research, autophagy maxes out at 72 hours, and just because I CAN do something, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy for me to do so. And he’s correct.

This little experiment was interesting. Mentally I was absolutely prepared for two more days. It really is mind over matter when you decide to do something. I can easily push through the first two days like a breeze when I do fasts- it doesn’t even faze me anymore. I suppose this proves that I could starve myself to death if I really willed it, which just goes to show how much mental willpower I’ve developed in a house full of food, while cooking dinners for my husband.

I guess the wrap-up is this- a three day fast is great for anyone, I think, once per year, with a few 24-48 hour fasts thrown in annually for good measure, especially after a big holiday like Christmas. But if you’re working out 3 days per week and not a pound overweight, more than 3 days and you start to wither a bit. I found this out so that now you know.

Blog post on mindset and willpower coming Sunday!

Bonus- Keto Fudge Recipe

My older sister makes some amazing fudge. So did my Grandma Nellie- in the form of “Stained Glass Window” cookies. They weren’t cookies at all, but rather, a log of chocolate and colored marshmallows that she cut into slices. It was a Christmas staple annually, and I can literally still taste it if I think about it hard enough. However, I view those treats in a very different light these days- because I’m aware that a single small slice of that chocolatey goodness is packed with more sugar than I now eat in six months. And yet it was normal to mainline several pieces of it in a row back in the day.

When I started my keto journey- I truly believed that meant I’d never eat anything that tasted good ever again. Boy, am I glad I was wrong, and one of the things I invented was a recipe for keto-ish fudge. I say “keto-ish” because the jury’s still out on the usage of coconut sugar and dried dates. I’m not as strict as most keto eaters, but the little I do let myself have is still better than what I used to inhale while depressed- which means it’s perfect for people just starting out on this journey to health.

If you have a food processor, you can whip up a batch of these bad boys in a matter of 20 minutes, and they keep in the fridge for a month (if they last that long). I recently went two weeks without any chocolate at all as a challenge, knowing I had a bag of these fudge squares in the fridge. They kept good for weeks, and promptly disappeared after my challenge was over. I am human, after all.

Ingredients:

22 Medjool dates with pits, preferably organic (pre-pitted ones tend to be drier- whole ones work far better for this recipe)

3/4 cup of any nut butter you prefer (I like almond or cashew butter)

3/4 cup dried raw coconut shreds or chips, unsweetened (Bob’s Red Mill makes the best bag of coconut)

1 cup of Guittard’s Coconut Sugar Chocolate chips, divided in half (Yes they are expensive. Yes they are worth it.)

3 heavy tablespoons of coconut oil (eyeball it is fine)

1 cup of any nuts you like (I prefer walnuts and pecans)

1 tbsp each of flax seeds and chia seeds (this is optional, but the seeds add a great, healthy crunch)

Prepare a bread loaf pan by cutting a piece of parchment paper so that it goes cleanly down the two long sides of your pan and up over the outsides, hanging over the outside. Handy trick I learned for freeing the chilled fudge.

Put your dates into a large glass bowl and cover them in hot water- not quite boiling, but almost. Set aside for 10 minutes.

Come back to the dates once the water is cooled enough to plunge your fingers into, and then kind of smush the date with one hand and remove the pits with the other hand, then place the meat in your food processor. *Mind that some of them have end caps as well- you don’t want that in your fudge.

When you’ve got all your date meat in the processor bowl, add your nut butter and coconut, then process until just combined, then stop.

Next- either use a small double boiler, or a glass Pyrex cup in a small pot of boiling water, and add 1/2 your chocolate chips and the coconut oil. Melt them together in the cup or double boiler pot over low simmered water until mixed together and liquid, stirring frequently. Turn heat off burner and carefully prepare to pour chocolate contents into the food processor.

Return to your food processor and add the rest of the chocolate chips, the nuts, and the seeds if using. Process, then as it’s running, pour in the chocolate and coconut oil mixture until it’s all combined and looks like it’s very wet and a little greasy. Carefully remove the processor blade and then scoop the contents into the prepared loaf pan. Press the mixture hard into the pan, pushing it firmly into each corner and making sure it’s level- you can use a spatula for this, but what I do is take the two ends of the parchment that hang over the sides and fold them back over the top, and press on it over the parchment. It helps really get it pressed firmly and evenly. If the parchment is stuck into the mix, remove it carefully and leave the paper loosely folded over the top of the pan, then stick the pan in your fridge for appx 2 hours. *It WILL look greasy. I promise, that’s just the melted coconut oil, and it will set perfectly. Trust me.

When you return to it, take a butter knife and slide it along the sides that aren’t covered in parchment to loosen it, then take the two ends of the parchment paper and lift the whole brick out of the pan, then set it on a cutting board. From there, you can cut it into squares (I do half longwise, and then 2x1 inch rectangles, but you make it last longer if you cut it into 1x1 squares), stack your chunks onto a fresh piece of parchment, wrap, shove the package in a gallon Ziploc bag, and hide it in the fruit drawer where your significant other won’t raid it (I’m just kidding, I make my husband his own batches- he likes oats and peanuts in his).

Then grab a chunk and enjoy. I am telling you, this stuff is better than any of the chemical garbage you can buy at the store, and it’s full of powerhouse nutrients while scratching that chocolate itch.

You are quite welcome, y’all.

And yes, I DID write out a post detailing my fudge recipe while on an extended fast and having only eaten 500 calories on Sunday. I told you that you can do hard things. I’m feeling fantastic and I’m sure I still will come Friday.

Fasting

Okay kids, we’ve arrived at the topic no one likes- that’s right, the dreaded fasting.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I love food. I am always eating. Seriously. When I worked in a construction office, I had an entire cabinet drawer devoted to snacks. I take after my mother’s metabolism and prefer 4-5 small meals in a day to the standard three squares. I’m pretty sure the powers that be marketed “breakfast, lunch and dinner” to people so that we’d eat heavy three times per day rather than do what’s healthier for our blood sugar and do what I do- stuff like randomly just have a single handful of trail mix and then be on my way. So yeah. I am always munching on something, and I’m pretty sure it’s a crime what I spend on groceries each week (organic or bust, yo)

All that being said- for a person who loves food as much as I do, I also routinely do without it for prolonged periods of time. (Water is always allowed. You die pretty quick without water.) Already this year I’ve done a couple of 1-2 day fasts, but as this blog posts, I’ll be rounding the corner into beginning my first 3-day fast of the year- Sunday night through Thursday morning. I have done a 72 hour fast three times in my life, and the first time was definitely the hardest, because it was no-man’s land for me- a complete unknown, and unknowns are actually pretty hard for a lot of us. We fear the unknown because we fear there’s bad stuff in the unknown. But what if you ventured into the unknown and all you found by the end was strength, confidence, and a renewed sense of health? What if you left the light to walk into the dark, but found there was more light on the other side of the darkness?

A great quote I saw once (probably at my chiropractor’s office) said “Make time for your health or you’ll be forced to take time for your sickness.” This quote absolutely applies here, because most people never take the time to stop pushing or being productive, and we don’t realize that we are NOT supposed to live this way. The way the human condition is supposed to work, we’re supposed to rest, we’re supposed to take time off, we’re supposed to have health breaks, we’re supposed to balance our chi and get massages and sleep in without alarms. But in this current climate, that’s not the messaging, and that’s why most of us are sick- because a lot of us would rather swing through McDonalds on the way home from work late than just miss dinner and start afresh at breakfast. Why do we do this? Because we’re essentially programmed to- the FDA, the government, pharma, yes… they all have a hand in trying to make you as sick as possible. I know we’ve been over this, but it’s really important that we all realize that the “food pyramid” they peddled to us in the 90’s was brainwashing to give us all Celiac and IBS and depression. Miserable people go to the doctor and buy pills. Happy, healthy people don’t.

I will probably never go to a doctor again as long as I live. Because they don’t know how to fix you. They know how to prescribe things so that your next test “looks” better.

The human body is an amazing thing. It was created by an amazing, intelligent designer who gave us all the tools for immortality, if we’d just look inside ourselves, do the hard thing, and use those tools. The word of the day is “autophagy.” Definition? The process of your digestive system having no active food in it to digest, and instead, it directs its attention to eating the dead parts of your own body instead. Yes, I am quite well aware that this sounds like the beginning of a horror movie (The body started eating itself, the horror!) but it’s really not like you think. Our body is made up of countless trillions of cells. These cells are individual but part of a larger whole called… us. We who are immortal souls driving mortal bodies have some challenges in these lifetimes of ours, namely, can we force ourselves into being uncomfortable for short periods of time so that our overall lives can be better? Really, this is the entire secret of health- purposely do the little uncomfortable things, and never have to deal with major health problems. I’d rather run than be bedridden by 70. I’d rather fast than get cancer or lupus. I’d rather skip sugar than get diabetes. And so on. I’m currently in the immune intensive of my classes, and I am here to tell you- when the food we ingest is more plastic than food, our body -will- attack it as a foreign invader, so when our cells absorb that chemical mess… it’s our very own cells being attacked. I no longer wonder where autoimmune conditions come from- sometimes, unfortunately, foreign invaders enter our bodies in the form of S’mores Pop Tarts or Blue Razz Icee’s. And something else no doctor will tell you- depression and anxiety are autoimmune disorders. We turn on ourselves and either kick ourselves or make ourselves afraid. And we do this because we ingest more sugar in the average week than humans used to in an entire year, 100 years ago. Birthday cake was special because it was so sweet and you didn’t get it that often. Now there are people who drink four Pepsis every single day. (another of my tinfoil hat theories is that Pepsi destroys pepsin- an enzyme in our stomach that breaks down protein. Destroy the gut, destroy the mind.)

But we as humans have come to love our creature comforts. We’ve become little hobbits, who just want our morning cup and pastry, and the idea of not eating the morning pastry is just a foreign concept to us! We have also come to identify any “bad” feeling as, well, bad. We have come to pursue only what feels good, rather than what IS good, and this is why so many of us have unhealthy bodies right now- because we have not been taught how to properly care for them, how to rinse them out, how to flush liver gallstones, etc. We’ve been taught to just buy pills. And this is the biggest problem of all- we’ve given our agency away to a monster that doesn’t care for your happiness, but rather, how much money it can take from your wallet because of decades of poor food choices, for a lot of us. And we haven’t realized we do not live in a black and white world. Uncomfortable doesn’t automatically equate bad. It can equate unusual, or strange, or unknown, but discomfort leads to growth. Not a single person ever grew while comfortable. Take that to the bank.

A three-day fast is one of the purest forms of self-love that can exist.

It is saying “no” to your body’s impulses because you, the soul, the driver, is telling it that it deserves better than to be unhealthy, and so you’ll go through an uncomfortable process in order to bring health to said body. Self-discipline, as in, doing the right thing for yourself not because someone is telling you to, not because you feel you have to, but because you choose to, is the road to self-mastery. Matthew 16:24 says, quoting Jesus, “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” Have any of us stopped to consider what this means? It means Jesus was smarter and giving us deeper truths than any of us want to admit. The 7 deadly sins are what they are for a reason. America has a severe sloth and gluttony problem right now. What we have wanted to do for the last 50 years is clearly killing us- and what we have wanted to do is eat fast food and ice cream and then sit on the couch and binge Netflix… for thirty years. I am no exception to this. I spent a third of 2016 and half of 2017 eating thousand calorie pints of 7-11 Salted Caramel ice cream in between bottles of white wine while watching TV and trying to drown the feelings of how much I hated myself. We as a society have gotten to a point where just hating ourselves but pretending not to has become the norm.

“You will stay the same until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.”

I know this better than most, which is why I challenge you- what if instead of hating yourself and what you’ve let your life become, and instead of distracting yourself from the reality of your choices, you put that energy into actually fixing yourself and becoming the best version of you that you can be? The best way to jumpstart feeling better about yourself is a prolonged fast in which you reboot your entire immune system in just 72 little hours. That and you can recalibrate your taste buds. People don’t realize they’ve acclimated to garbage food. They’ll put three spoonfuls of white sugar in their coffee, four times per day, but have no idea why they are depressed, anxious, and get stomach aches all the time. You do a three day fast, though, and now all you need is a single spoonful of coconut sugar or a little squeeze of agave syrup in the morning joe, and you’d be amazed at how sweet it tastes. A ripe apple after a fast tastes like Mana of the Gods. I can’t imagine swigging a soda these days, any flavor. All I would taste is chemical poison. Which is exactly what soda is. And when you go back to food after the long fast, you suddenly think about those aforementioned Pop Tarts. You ask yourself, “Does my body want this or just my mouth?” Chances are, it’s just the mouth, people, Just the mouth.

I have spoken to a number of people who have blood sugar regulation problems, and as such, they eat as often as I do, which is to say, constantly. Or they say they can’t go longer than half a day without eating because of shakes, brain fog, weakness, etc. I am certain most of you can relate. I don’t knock those who eat constantly- I do it because I enjoy it and feel healthier that way. But I don’t eat that often because I think I have to. That’s the difference- that I am mentally in control of my blood sugar and have no problem regularly skipping a meal or two without losing my mind. I am not a slave to food. It is a friend and a useful tool, not a necessity.

Here’s something that will blow your mind to learn, though. Those of us who do regular prolonged fasts… you’re aware that we also feel those shakes, the weakness, and the brain fog, right? You’re aware it sucks just as much for us as it does for you, the first time? That we simply choose to power through being uncomfortable because we know what we are doing is healthy for us?

“But Holly, how do you deal with being productive if that’s the case?” I plan to do nothing the first day. No errands, little to no cooking, etc, no strenuous housework, etc. Which is why I said what I said about taking time for your own health. I recommend you take a Friday off from work and fast Friday through Sunday. Boom. Now you’re only really out a single day and you’ve just made fantastic strides for your health. And I say a single day for a reason- because most people have the impression that they’ll be shaky brain goop crankypants for all three days, but here’s the magic- God designed our bodies to do this, right? Do any of you think it’s an accident that by prolonged fasting, your body will just eat and discard cancer cells? Or do you think that maybe God never intended for our bodies to turn on themselves in such sickness, instead using the beautiful gift of fasting to bring us back to health? It’s the second one, I promise you, because around 24-30 hours into your fast, something happens. Your ketosis switches on. And whroooomph, just like hitting runner’s high, you find you have tons of energy and you’re not even hungry anymore.

I am very serious. This happens.

Let me give you just a handful of the benefits of a prolonged fast- from the Googles:

Ketosis

After glycogen stores are depleted (typically within the first few hours of fasting), the body begins to burn fat for energy, entering a state of ketosis. 

Weight Loss

The calorie deficit created by fasting can lead to fat loss. 

Improved Insulin Sensitivity

Fasting can improve how your body responds to insulin, which is beneficial for individuals with insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes. 

Autophagy

Fasting may trigger autophagy, a process where the body removes damaged or old cellular components, which can be beneficial for cellular health.

Increased growth hormone

Fasting can elevate human growth hormone (HGH) levels, which helps preserve muscle mass and burn fat. 

Other Benefits

Some studies suggest that fasting may reduce inflammation, improve cognitive function, and potentially even extend lifespan. 

So… it’s really, really good for you. I am aware it is also hard. Ask my hungry husband how hard it was when he did it with me once. As soon as it was over, he wanted a pile of biscuits and gravy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was supposed to ease back in slowly. Nope. He wanted a plate of grease, so that’s what he got. And to this day he’ll tell you it was the best biscuits and gravy of his life, which I don’t doubt. My biscuits and gravy are probably almost as good as they make them in the South… but not quite, Southerners. Not quite. *bows to your biscuit glory*

Look… I know it’s daunting. Most people don’t have the courage to walk into the dark, fearing that the light will never come back. People often don’t have the courage to force themselves to willingly suffer. But…since you all know how much I love Jesus, ask yourself this- how can we be like Him if we are not willing to suffer on purpose for the greater good of our own lives? Are we that devoted to our own chains that we would believe the adversary when he says we can’t do something? Or are you willing to take a leap of faith, trust God, and know that He will lead you through what amounts to one hungry day and two energetic but somewhat weak ones, in order to jumpstart your own healing? You can reset your entire immune system on a simple three-day water fast and potentially get off some of your medications. Your thinking will be clearer, you’ll have renewed confidence, you’ll feel proud of yourself for doing something hard, AND you’ll potentially drop a pants size. Just in three days.

If Jesus can get up from His tomb after three whole days of being dead, you have the power to get through a 3-day fast. I believe in you, because I was you, and this will be my fourth 3-day’er in two years. No sweat.

The only way to overcome hard things is to face them… and overcome them. Mind over matter, kiddos. (Edit: Due to my own yammering about overcoming hard things, I have challenged myself- just to put my muffins where my mouth is. As of today, Sunday evening, I have decided to turn this into a five-day fast, ending Friday afternoon. I know who drives my life and I trust He will help me through it. Remember, you can do hard things.)

“No one tells you that courage feels like fear.”

That, and occasionally belly gurgles.

Supplements!

Well boys and girls, as promised, a blog post on supplements. This post may get heavy into what people might call “tinfoil hat” territory, but if you think I’m crazy, ask yourself whether you’d rather be crazy and sprinting up several flights of stairs in your 40’s, or “sane” and wheelchair bound by 50. My proof is in my pudding, and I did 50 pushups in a row last week, so since I doubt most doctors can do that, maybe the crazy lady knows a thing or two when it comes to your health.

In my Functional Nutrition schooling curriculum, my classes are divided into 8 roughly equal segments about 5-6 weeks long each. I just finished the entirety of my digestive module, and I have already learned so much! That being said, in each of the modules (I just finished digestion, we’re going to do cardio health, immune, nervous system, etc) there’s an “herbology bonus.”

Remember when I stated that I am pretty sure I spent a life as the weird herb lady in backwater Scotland? We’re getting to why these people actually knew what they were talking about.

Herbology is the practice of knowing exactly which plants that God gave us will cure whatever condition we’re suffering from. If we look hard enough at nature, there’s an answer for everything. Take quinine, for example. The Googles states: “Quinine is a naturally occurring substance (alkaloid) extracted from the bark of the Cinchona tree, native to the Andes region of South America. It has been used for centuries to treat malaria, and was the first effective treatment for this deadly disease.”

However, notice we aren’t prescribed “quinine” pills today. We are prescribed things like “hydroxychloroquine.” What is hydroxychloroquine? Again, to the Googles: “…It is a synthetic derivative of quinine.

• Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are synthetic drugs developed in the 20th century based on the chemical structure of quinine.

• They are not extracted directly from quinine or cinchona bark. In essence, hydroxychloroquine is inspired by quinine but is a distinct, manufactured drug.”

Oh. Okay. So what you’re telling me is that I could have the real, undiluted cure, but instead, you make a chemical copy of the cure with no cure in it and market it as the cure, because just the chemical structure of it is good enough, according to you? It’s shaped like the cure, therefore as good as the real thing?

Let me make it clear- hydroxychloroquine is a fantastic medication that cures and also prevents malaria. The CDC listed it as safe enough for pregnant women prior to Covid (and I won’t open that particular can of worms today). But it’s a synthetic derivative of the natural plant, and companies like Pfizer would have you believing that the natural tree bark will make you sick but their synthetic drug that they can charge you for is perfectly safe.

Do you know why companies like Pfizer market drugs like hydroxychloroquine? Because they can’t patent what exists in nature. This is true. Look it up. IE, “drug” companies can’t make a profit off of selling their own, watered-down version of something if people know that the original something actually works better, and thanks to Rockefeller medicine, they really have brainwashed society to believe that the plants are poisonous but their petroleum (read- you refine petroleum down into gasoline) based pills are healthy. That’s right, before about 1900, people were actually just healthy and living healthy lives well into 100 years, rather than dying with a whole host of ailments by 78. Rockefeller’s medicinal hijacking put a stop to “traditional” cures (ie plant based) and said, “Nah, we’ll just prescribe pills that we can sell for trillions of dollars per year.” Sacklers, I’m looking at you. This family wanted to make OxyContin (basically heroin) available OVER THE COUNTER.

*breathes heavily into a paper bag*

Okay, now that my point is made, let’s continue with plants.

I read somewhere that the average American only eats something like 15 species of plant per week at most. I can’t remember exactly where I read that, but it honestly seems… well, scary if true, and horrifying. Think about it- we may eat some lettuce and tomato on a burger. We may eat some pickles. Maybe an ear of corn, or perhaps we go wild and actually eat a spinach salad with some radishes in it. But considering that there are literally thousands of beneficial plants that exist in the world, the fact that we only eat the familiar, comforting ones is jarring.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I start my day with a warm glass of “morning greens.” What’s in that, you ask? I have a habit of buying multiple “supergreens” powders and mixing them together. At this point I’m not actually sure how much of each I have in my “morning blend” but I can tell you what they are primarily composed of:

-Bloom’s Supergreens and Probiotics Coconut flavor

-Amazing Grass Greens Antioxidant blend

-Kuli Kuli Gut Bliss Greens

-Green Foods Magma Plus

If you are interested, look up those four greens blends. Look at the ingredients list. Now ask yourself how many species of plant I ingest first thing in the morning every single day. It’s at least 150.

As a helpful tip for accumulating such things, two of the four above I got at Grocery Outlet for less than $15 each, and I can often find the other two on sale for less than $30. Mixing all four together gives me six months of morning greens. That’s $100 total for half a year of jumpstarting my day properly. If you think you can’t afford to eat healthy, cancel your Disney Plus for three months and you’d pay for it easily. Again, ask yourself what matters to you.

Other than my “morning greens” I also take a few supplements regularly. I am a huge Huge HUGE believer in adaptogenic mushrooms for brain health. I have seen a difference in my own life as well as in the lives of those around me who have started taking them. They are available in mushroom coffee, mushroom green tea, mushroom protein powder, just powdered mushrooms in a bag by themselves- you name it, there’s a way to take them. I like a blend of them- Om brand makes a Master Blend of adaptogen mushrooms that I mix into things like protein powder. Hugely and highly recommended.

In addition- I accidentally discovered a supplement called MSM or "methylsulfonylmethane”. It’s a naturally occurring compound found in a lot of plants and has fantastic anti-inflammatory properties. Putting the foil hat on again… if you Google MSM, websites like WebMD will tell you “there’s no good evidence to support its usage.” Of course they’d say that. If you refuse to ever publish a study proving it works, then it’s not exactly a lie to say “We have no evidence.” They do this to cover their own butts. If no significant modern study has ever been done to show that it works conclusively, then they can, in their minds, say that there’s no evidence that it works and not be lying. This dissuades the average American from using it, forcing us to purchase and rely on on traditional pharmaceuticals like Advil that cause liver damage. These people are quite crafty in what they do to keep Americans sick, weak, and unhealthy in every single way- they cause the problem, and then sell the solution.

Let me tell you what MSM did for me. I had an inflammation problem that started up a few years ago- my toes would get swollen and inflamed, and it was painful. MSM pretty much eradicated this problem of mine. It oxygenates tissues and reduced my inflammation. I now have mostly normal toes again. So ask yourself again who companies like WebMD work for- you, or their shareholders who accept bribes from Pfizer?

Another supplement I take regularly is DHEA. It’s an adrenal hormone that declines in the human body with age and regulates my energy and mood. Of course, yet again, the Googles would have you believing that “more research is needed” and “safety is still being debated”- over using a hormone that my body naturally makes.

Now google SSRI’s- a class of antidepressant psych drugs which include Prozac- Google says, “SSRIs are generally considered safe and well-tolerated.”

Do you see how the general public is being misled? They would have you believing that a hormone that your body already makes but makes less of as you get older may be harmful to take as a supplement, but a psych drug that literally causes suicidal thoughts is “generally considered safe.”

people. realize what I am saying.

I am going to close this blog post out with a story about God’s sense of humor.

A wonderful woman at my church contacted me because she knows I’m in nutritional counseling classes. She is very concerned about her children who have digestive issues. Well, we said some prayers together for healing over her children’s guts, and then I told her what I’d just learned last week- that marshmallow root and slippery elm are two herbs that can help heal what is referred to as “leaky gut” syndrome- that is to say, if your gut’s structural integrity is compromised, then it almost won’t matter what you’re eating, you’re going to have issues. She in turn asked me if I could recommend some brands for supplements. After doing a quick search on a favorite website of mine (vitacost.com) I stumbled upon the perfect supplement for her children- a probiotic and marshmallow root blend. The best part? The brand name is “Amen.”

Sometimes God needs a minute to answer a prayer. Sometimes, God has an answer right away.

I am a huge believer in doing your own research and finding what works for you. I can give you information but without you doing your own reading into WHY things work and knowing all the ways how you are being poisoned, you won’t have the inner gumption to heal yourself from the inside out. For that reason- I advise you to type these words into Google: “herbal natural remedies for” and then whatever you’re suffering from. Inflammation, brain fog, digestive issues, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, anxiety, etc. You name it, you can find it. Find what herbs are recommended and try a couple. Herbs can be used in conjunction with most other herbs and shouldn’t cause problems with medications- but again, do your own research and check with a doctor if you take a lot of medications. If that’s the case, I advise that you find a naturopath- someone who is licensed for medicine but also knows about herbs. I do not dispense medical advice- I am sharing what I have learned that works for me and for others, but I am not telling you what to do besides research and deciding for yourself.

After all, your power comes from within you. Remember that. Nothing external can heal you until you want to be healed. Of course we all SAY we want to be healed… but healing means taking responsibility for your life and refusing to play along with the poisoner’s game. It requires discipline, research, and in my case, learning that true evil exists. You can’t fight a war you don’t know you’re in, and you can’t fight evil unless you realize it exists and wears a suit and tie and threatens to fire you from your job if you don’t take an experimental vaccine with no long term safety studies.

The real war on drugs should be fought against the pharmaceutical industry, not those who inhale a plant that helps them sleep. Anyone still in jail for marijuana possession should be freed immediately. I stand by that statement and I will die on that hill.

I’ll just add this- cholesterol levels above 500 were perfectly normal and acceptable 50 years ago. Medical schools have “new research” that teaches their physicians that high cholesterol causes heart problems which I have found isn’t true, and prescribe you statins to lower your cholesterol “for your health”. Your brain NEEDS cholesterol. It’s fat! It is my fervent belief that statins are the cause of Alzheimers today. Case in point- when I switched to a high-fat diet, my brain function improved.

I can’t legally advise you get off your statins, but I can highly suggest you use Duck Duck Go or Twitter or YouTube to research statins and their link to brain impairment. I highly, hugely, strongly suggest you read into that. There are several doctors with videos out there talking about this.

Why?

In the Bible, Revelation 18:23 states- “By their sorceries were all nations deceived.”

The Greek word for sorceries is “Pharmakeia.”

Now ask yourself why we inject mercury and aluminum into two month old babies.

And then ask yourself where SIDS comes from.

Don’t let yourself be deceived by sorceries you willingly put into yourself and your children. Become your own health champion and begin listening to the “crazy conspiracy theorists.” We’re generally silenced for a reason, and it’s not because we’re wrong.

Next blog post will be much lighter, promise. This was all just too important to not share. The weight of what I know about all of this keeps me up at night occasionally.

*she says, while editing her blog post at 11:29pm*

Interlude: For the Love of Rats

This blog post isn’t about food. It’s about rats. I’ll do supplements next week, this seemed more important. Pardon the interruption, I’m just feeling wistful tonight.

Yes. I am talking about rats. The most adorable, snuggly, inquisitive, sneaky, loveable creatures you can have as pets.

In the summer of 2022, my husband suggested to me that we needed to add to our family. He had pet rats in college and told me how smart they were. I admit to being slightly dubious, but I said, what the hey. Let’s give it a go. We came home with two brother Dumbo rats who were rescues- they are called dumbos because they have giant ears. I kid you not. My husband introduced to me the concept that a paper bag was about the greatest thing in the world to a rat, and we filled their new cage home with lots of bags and cardboard. I fed them little rat kibble bites and was delighted to discover that they eat everything on their hind legs, using their front hands to hold whatever they’re eating like you or I would eat a sandwich. And upon doing internet research, I discovered that they have a whole host of taste buds and really like a varied diet. And thus, our two brothers were dubbed Merry and Pippin… so named by my husband because our spoiled boys got two breakfasts every day- once when my husband got up at about 4am for work, and another when I got up at about 6.

Huh. I guess this post is about food after all. I guess at least I’m consistent.

Pet rats are gold, people. Merry nipped my nose one night while learning about me, and I thought it was hilarious. The boys also loved to lick our fingers to give us kisses, regardless of whether there was snack residue on them or not. We used to put them behind us on our computer chairs because rats love tight hidey holes. To this day I can still feel Merry nuzzling behind me as I sit in my chair writing these words.

Sadly, our Pippin passed away in his cage only a couple of weeks after we got him. I don’t know why he got sick, but blamed myself, as I’d fed them tomatoes not long before, and I read online that an underripe tomato can be poisonous to a rat. To this day I don’t know if that was what did it, but regardless, we buried our sweet boy and set out on a hunt to find our now solo boy rat a playmate, as rats are very social creatures- you never want to have just one of them.

My husband found a Craigslist ad for a single male rat for a good home, and we went to go pick him up. Unfortunately we sort of ignored red flags about the house, noticing that this poor brown rat had been solo in a small cage without any entertainment. Regardless, we couldn’t let Merry live by himself, so we took him home. The meeting was… rough. Merry didn’t know who this big, bulky weirdo was, and the newcomer didn’t seem to be terribly intelligent. It was at that point that my husband figured that this newcomer rat (who we also dubbed Pippin) was probably used to breed feeder rats and otherwise left alone, traumatized. We rolled up our sleeves and decided we’d just give him the best home possible, with lots of places to play and things to find. Our new rat was Rat Gump. He was a bit special and kind of… slow. Merry tried to teach him how to play, but the new guy just wasn’t really having it.

So, my husband decided after a month or so that we’d adopt a third little lad, if we could find another baby boy to join our mix. Enter another little baby dumbo rat my husband promptly named Bandit, for he had a black Zorro mask over his eyes. Also, my husband said he stole his heart, the little thief. I fell in love upon meeting him, and our strange little rat family coexisted peacefully for a good long while. Bandit had the intelligence Merry needed and we were relieved that he finally had another real playmate, something the poor little guy hadn’t had since his brother died. Our special lad New Pippin was content to chew holes in his little slings we made from old bandannas and just watch the hustle and bustle of the other two.

A few months into our trio of playful boys, disaster struck. Our little ratty Gump started to get cranky in what we believe was old age, and it began to take a lot of work to coax him out of hiding so we could do things like clean the cage out. One night as my husband retrieved the old grumpy boy, he sank his little rodent teeth deep into my husband’s index finger, and we had to quickly remove the rat from my husband’s knuckle before there was permanent damage. We got him off, and put him in a separate, smaller travel cage away from the other two while I bandaged up my husband’s finger. We ended up deciding that this poor probably abused rat was more of a liability than our other two boys deserved, and so we took him to a local shelter to be put down. It really made us sad to do it, but we figured at least this old cranky guy got to eat delicious food and enjoy an entertaining home for a while before his final days. We did the best we could.

And then there were two- Merry and Bandit. We moved homes and the rats came with us. I embarked on a new tradition of creating a cardboard box mansion for them every single week, as rats enjoy new environments all the time- they get bored easily. I spent far too much on little hammocks and swings and steps and chewy wood toys. And I proceeded to feed these two pet rats better than many adult humans eat. I’m not kidding. These boys usually got a breakfast of fresh fruit, cheese shreds, cheerios, and something like spinach or cucumber with their rat kibble. Their evening meals ranged from custom veggie and chicken pasta salads to ratty fried rice. I legit made them their own cooked dinners. I am insane and will not apologize for it. The most fun part was setting their food dish into the cage and seeing the little chunksters paw through the healthy stuff at the top to find the nuggets of avocado or a piece of cashew I hid under the healthy stuff I wanted them to eat first. I also discovered that if you cut cucumber slices into little wedges like watermelon, they chew away at the inside just like we eat watermelon and then they leave the rinds behind, with tiny little tooth marks in them. I also adored how our two boys had their own individual tastes when it came to treats. I’m a huge nut eater (they say you are what you eat, make of that what you will) and I would grab a handful of a variety of nuts to offer my boys when I was feeling particularly spoil-ish. Merry would always, hands down, go for the macadamia, while Bandit enjoyed an almond or walnut.

Ask any rat owner what the hardest part of having rats is, and invariably the answer will be, “Saying goodbye.” Rats only live for about two years on average.

Late 2023, we gave our two boys a bath (we did that regularly, they just kind of swim around until we pull them out) but this time, Bandit kicked Merry under the water by accident, and we assume Merry got a lungful of water. He proceeded to get a lung infection that made it hard for him to breathe, and he ended up with prescribed medication I had to shove in his mouth twice per day with a little dropper, which, you guessed it, he hated. In January of 2024, our Bandit had developed a calcified fat deposit on his chunky little leg, and had started chewing on it, which led to an infection. I mean, I was all prepared to pay thousands of dollars for surgery for Bandit, but they couldn’t even guarantee he’d live through it, and my husband gently reaffirmed to me that we can’t just rack up the credit card for a maybe, especially since Merry was also sick. Both of our boys were in bad shape, and although it broke my husband’s and my heart, we knew it was time to say goodbye to our boys.

Late January of 2024, we set an appointment to say goodbye. All week, Merry and Bandit ate like kings. Lots of avocado, grapes, pasta, and lots of nuts. I even baked them tiny little rat cookies with peanut butter and granola. And because I am a crazy chef woman who was so in love with my rats, I decided the first batch of rat cookies I baked wasn’t tasty enough and baked a second batch fit for rat kings. (I mean, it was full of human ingredients. I’m not over here eating rat kibble) We loaded our sweet boys into their little carrier, gave them each a cookie, and with heavy hearts, we took them to the edge of the rainbow bridge and said goodbye.

They are buried in an undisclosed location in Washington state, in a park, near a creek.

I have pictures of our rats hung up in collages on my wall, and I’m looking at them as I type these words. Those boys were so friendly, so sweet, and they loved us -so- much. My husband used to get these little teeth chitters out of them- they’d sort of vibrate their teeth together and make the tiniest fast clicking noise, and it’s apparently the rat equivalent of purring. I used to let them loose in our bathroom with the door closed to get some exercise out of their cage, and I’d sit on the floor reading a book while they played. A couple of the books on my bookshelf have tiny little rat tooth bite marks in a few pages because Bandit wanted to inspect what I was reading.

People, if you ever get the chance to have pet rats, do not pass it up. Being a rat mama reminded me of when my baby girl was a toddler- honestly, they probably would have enjoyed most of the same breakfast foods, and you cut the food into similarly small pieces. It caused an ache inside my grieving momma bones while simultaneously healing that same ache. I can’t describe it any better than that.

Anyway, that’s the story about our pet rats.

I will return to my regularly scheduled nuggets of wisdom next week.

Thanks for listening. See below for pictures of my bestest good boys, the two we had for a year and a half.

Bonus Post- Eat This Instead Of That

One of the things that overwhelmed me when I started trying to eat keto was the weird feeling that I’d never eat anything enjoyable again. Being a foodie by nature, I love delicious food. I like things that taste good going down and give me those sweet, sweet (literally) dopamine hits. Some people get that feeling from eating anything, which is bad news for you if you like your drive-throughs, because I can wholeheartedly tell you that fast food is the absolute FIRST thing you should completely trash from your diet and never eat again. I had an In-N-Out lettuce burger a couple of months ago and I’m pretty certain I’ll never eat a fast food burger again in my life. Don’t get me wrong, it was delicious- but I have to practice what I preach. The lettuce doesn’t negate the fact that it’s oozing in questionable grease.

Another thing that weirded me out when I began my keto adventure is reading labels of everything I used to enjoy and seeing like 8-10 grams of sugar per serving in something like crackers. Um, what? Then we have the “bioengineered ingredients” problem (and you should be reading your boxes, people. We’ve discussed this.) Also, please be aware of sugar alcohols- they’re a very unhealthy crutch. The Atkins brand stuff is chock full of them and I say avoid it like the plague. Read on, because I have found ways around sugar limitations. I eat a LOT of delicious stuff. I want for nothing.

First it was about elimination. Any massive diet overhaul usually has an elimination phase and then a phase where you add things back in. The things I eliminated first were:

All white sugar

All potatoes

All pasta

All rice

All cereals

All crackers

All granola

All bread

… and no, it wasn’t easy.

Something really weird happens to you when you’re trying to give up carbs for the first time. There’s a phase about 2-4 weeks in where you’d just about stab somebody for a baked potato. Being a fairly non-violent person by nature, this was intriguing to me. It was almost as if my body was going through the 5 stages of depression, and anger is definitely one of them. You feel hungry all the time, and you don’t want a salad, no sir. You consider rooting through your garbage for that stale, half-eaten box of Wheat Thins you tossed out a week ago. It’s that weird. I also recommend a prolonged fast to kick start the process. A lot of people think they can’t go more than a few hours without getting shaky or falling apart, but the people who think they can’t, you’re most in need of it, brothers and sisters. Start with a juice fast if nothing else- organic, cold-pressed juices for a couple of days will still recalibrate your taste buds. (My recommendation is to go to the refrigerated fancy juice section of your local grocery store and select an orange/carrot juice, a mixed reds juice with beets, and a mixed greens juice. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.)

I firmly believe that we’ve acclimated our taste buds to being used to all this sugar, which is the problem- we’ve grown used to our poisons!!! We have dietary Stockholm Syndrome where we are now desperately clinging to what is slowly killing us. To further make my point about acclimatization of the ol’ tasters, I actually tried eating a regularly-sugared pistachio truffle about a month ago. That bite spent appx .03 seconds in my mouth before finding its final resting place in the garbage. My taste buds have thankfully recalibrated to the point where a small swirl of honey in a morning tea is sweet enough, and when you get to that place, trust me, the hard moments on your journey are worth it. That truffle tasted like chemical trash, and I used to mainline twelve of those in a row on a holiday like Christmas. Blech.

To get you from point A to point B, I have compiled a comprehensive list of things you can swap in your diet today to start making a shift to more healthy meals, and it won’t be as painful as you think, because everything I am listing here, I have taste-tested and it’s not only incredibly healthy, but it passes “food snob” muster.

Swap 1. Swap your regular wheat/white bread for Ezekiel Bread. You can get it at Trader Joe’s for about four bucks a loaf, and sometimes Walmart carries it too. I don’t go up into town that often so I buy them two at a time and pop them into my freezer. I grab a slice whenever I want one- a loaf will last me a month or more. I still eat this bread occasionally because it’s primarily made of ancient grains and seeds, so the amount of wheat in it is negligible and doesn’t spike my blood sugar too badly. It’s a cheat for me to be sure, but it’s a great place to start your keto swaps. There’s also a brand of bread called Hero Bread that’s low carb, but it’s also like… nine dollars.

Swap 2. Make a switch from white/brown sugar to coconut sugar. You can get it in any decent sized grocery store, possibly labeled “Palm Sugar.” An organic bag of this will run you about seven bucks. No, it’s not as sweet as white sugar- but remember what I said about recalibration. Ingest absolutely nothing beyond water for three days and then try out some coconut sugar in your coffee. You’ll be amazed at how good it tastes. (I’ll do a post on fasting soon- tips, tricks, how to not go insane, etc. I’ve done several and it’s seriously mind over matter. You can do it.)

Swap 3. Swap out your breakfast cereal for keto, grainless granola. Trader Joes has a fabulous one sweetened with honey and coconut sugar, and I’m also a huge fan of the brand Three Wishes. They make three varieties of grainless keto granola, and they’re all delicious. I am also a fan of the brand Elizabethan, but that one is slightly more spendy. Spendy, but tasty. I like to buy them on Vitacost.com. Three Wishes also has a number of low sugar, high-protein breakfast cereals in various flavors, also available on that website, just in case you need another step between giving up your Cocoa Puffs and making it to keto. I’m here for your success and will give you every trick I’ve got.

Swap 4. Instead of rice, buy yourself some riced Hearts of Palm. What is that, you ask? Go ahead and google it. Someone online said the flavor is reminiscent of an artichoke or asparagus, and I’ll agree. The brand Palmini has not only several flavored varieties, but also several textures. They make hearts of palm rice, linguini, mashed, lasagna noodle style, etc. You can get a few packs on Amazon for about fifteen bucks, and I get two meals out of each pouch- one pouch would work for two people for one meal. They store nicely in the fridge in a baggie for a few days after opening.

Swap 5. If you’re a noodle person, and I am, then eating becomes a challenge when it comes to keto. In addition to the Palmini noodles I mentioned above, I have located a brand of shiritaki noodle called Miracle Noodles or Skinny Noodles. Some people aren’t a fan of the texture, but I hardly notice it. They’re best mixed into a stir-fry with some homemade teriyaki sauce, I’ve found. Again, Amazon is where I source them.

Swap 6. King Arthur has you covered for keto flour and flour-based baking supplies. They carry keto wheat flour, keto pancake mix, even keto pizza crust mix. I’ve had them all and they’re all good. I believe they process the wheat with extra fiber so that the fiber cancels out the carbs. I’m not actually sure, I’m not a flour-ologist, but I know that if you want to start lowering your carb intake, these can help you along the way.

Swap 7. Agave syrup is beyond divine. It’s quite versatile and is fantastic for making your own sauces (like that homemade teriyaki I mentioned.) It mixes well into coffee, into baking, and anywhere else you need liquid sugar. Organic stuff can be between 6-10 bucks a bottle at any major grocery store, but it’s so sweet you go through it sparingly. It’s a staple in my home.

Swap 8. When I first discovered medjool dates, I thought they were too good to be real. I am not kidding you. You buy a container of medjool dates and bite into one (careful of the pit, mind you) and your brain melts into mush as you savor a divine treat that you could swear was an old fashioned butter caramel. They are literally that good. And, coincidentally, “date caramel” was how I first heard of them. I make a keto fudge using these bad boys that can rival any sugared fudge you can make, and I’d put money on that. If you soak about 20 in some hot water for a few minutes before popping the pit out, you can put the meats into your food processor to make caramel if you add a little coconut milk, or you can add some oats, coconut, peanut butter and chocolate chips for a pressed granola bar. These things are wildly versatile and absolutely insanely good. I’m about to go eat one right now, brb. Totally did. Totally amazing.

Swap 9. One of the harder ones for me was figuring out which protein powders weren’t full of sugary junk. After much trial and error, I stumbled upon Four Sigmatic. I have gone through several cans of their vanilla variety. They include adaptogen mushrooms for brain health and are sweetened with maple syrup, something which is definitely sweet but comes from nature, so it treats me pretty well. It can be found online or at nicer health food stores. Far cheaper online, however. Save yourself the cash. Expect to pay between $28-34 online for a can, but it lasts a good long while, and it’s very high quality.

Swap 10. When those chocolate cravings hit and they get nasty on you, I have two solutions for you- Goalz and ChocZero. Depending on what kind of chocolate person you are, you may prefer one or the other. If you like milk chocolate or prefer things like snickers bars, I’d peruse the ChocZero website. They actually have quite a number of keto staples for your pantry including cofffee syrups, cookies, jams, baking ingredients, and many varieties of chocolate treats made with monkfruit. Taste-wise, I can tell you to avoid the white chocolate varieties. They just… don’t taste quite right. However, their milk chocolate truffles and other treats are quite delicious. If you are more of a gourmet dark chocolate aficionado like me, however, Goalz is the way to go. Their chocolate is made with allulose, a fruit sugar found in figs and raisins. Both the milk and dark varieties are delicious, but the dark chocolate sea salt *chef’s kiss*

Bonus- PaleoValley has the best protein superfood bars I’ve ever had. They come in four flavors, chocolate, lemon meringue, apple pie, and red velvet- the last, I am not a fan of, but I’ll take a 3/4 success rate. Your mileage may vary . They are a little pricey, but occasionally on YouTube you’ll see an ad for BOGO and I highly recommend them. They are clean, full of good protein and fruit, and they’re way delicious. PaleoValley has their own website with lots of other delicious things I recommend, including their clean protein meat sticks and bone broth protein powder. I also have found that the brand IQ bars are wonderful as well, and those come in many varieties. They include adaptogens for brain health and are also keto certified with low sugar. Every flavor I’ve had of those, from banana nut to blueberry muffin to chocolate almond, has been delicious. Sourced on Amazon.

*Edit on 6/2- I just discovered Stars and Honey protein and collagen bars. ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. I just bought a thirty pack of Dark Chocolate Coconut, Cookies and Cream, and Maple Blueberry flavors, and I am splitting them halvsies with my neighbor who loves protein bars as much as I do. Can’t get them on Amazon, they have their own website. Peruse it.

Even if you just swapped out a few of these things, your body will come to thank you.

So what does Holly primarily eat? Here’s a sample day for me:

I wake up in the AM and first thing, I have a small scoop of supergreens powder mixed into warm water on my empty stomach. It sets my gut up for success for the day. About an hour after that, I’ll have a Mud Water tea or something similar (I have an embarrassing number of different morning drink powders in my cabinet) with a half cup of steamed raw milk. This honestly satiates me for several hours, so then around 9-10am, I’ll usually have a few bites of kimchi and then one of two breakfasts- either plain Greek yogurt with honey, fruit, and keto granola with nuts, or an omelette with veggies and raw milk cheese. If I’m on the go, a couple of hard boiled eggs and an apple will do me fine. Often I’ll need a snack a few hours later, and end up nomming on a piece of fruit and a protein bar. A handful of mixed nuts completes my snacking for the afternoon, and then dinner- the most complicated of meals when you’re married to the digestive equivalent of an industrial meat grinder. (He earns it. The man often spends his whole day carrying 80 lbs up flights of stairs… all day. My sweetie could eat an entire large pizza to himself and lose five pounds. We should all be so lucky, but I don’t want his job. Shudder)

Dinner usually consists of one pot being full of some variety of meat and veggies, and two separate smaller pans have our individual sides in it. The Mr. will get rice/mashed potatoes/couscous/ pasta with his meal, meanwhile I have a pan with some palm rice/miracle noodles, or just a pile of extra sauteed zucchini or spaghetti squash, which I have come to find complements nearly anything. I dish up our dinners and we chow down together. Often I just have a scoop of whatever the meat and veggies are and forego the extra side if I’m in a hurry or not that hungry. I try not to overcomplicate things. When sweets cravings hit at night, a piece of my keto fudge (or the coconut butter variety I invented- I’ll put both recipes up in the future) will do the trick, as will a handful of trail mix with dried fruit. A lot of websites would tell you no fruit at all on keto/paleo, but I poohpooh that notion for the most part (but be careful with dried fruit, make sure it’s only sweetened with apple juice. Read your labels!) I love fresh apples, pears, and strawberries best these days- I do generally avoid pineapple and red grapes even though I love them- because of the high sugar content. Yes, being this healthy means you give up things you love in the short term for long term happiness. It’s also worth noting that I eat a lot of the same foods nearly every day. There’s hardly a day goes by I don’t eat at least one egg, sometimes it’s a pile of them with onions, spinach and half an avocado. Thankfully I’ve always enjoyed healthy food so as long as I mix it up somewhat, I’m never usually bored. My body is quite happy with my food routines.

When I go out to eat, that can get complicated. I do enjoy salads but you don’t want those all the time. Usually I’ll just ask the server if they can dish me double veggies instead of the starch with their main meal, or if you’re lucky, you land at a place like Over The Moon cafe in Tacoma, where they serve a lasagna with butternut squash instead of noodles. I’ve recreated it at home several times. Lasagna is bangerang with butternut squash.

Edit: I promised a blog post about supplements next, but ended up writing a love note to my beloved deceased pet rats instead. Regular health posting will resume on May 25th. Promise! ^_^

Raw Milk

That’s it. That’s the whole heading. Raw Milk.

For the last several years, Amos Miller, an Amish man in Pennsylvania, has been absolutely embroiled in a legal battle over being able to sell raw milk to the public. It took literally years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to get our “here to help” government to leave this guy alone and let him sell his milk to whoever wanted it. Last update earlier this year, he prevailed. Our government tied this innocent man up in courts for years over selling the kind of milk we’ve been drinking for… I mean, for as long as there have been cows. Pasteurization is a relatively new thing in human civilization, and it has actually harmed us through the killing of good enzymes and bacteria in the milk straight from the udder. If any readers are in Pennsylvania, go get some milk and food goodies from this guy. I just scoped his online store and I have never wished to be among the Pennsylvania Amish more. Give me the modest dresses and the bonnets. I’m down.

I’ve been learning a ton in school about our gut and its connection to our brain health. In just a few weeks, I’ve completely overhauled how I’ve begun to think about health, and I couldn’t be happier. Lately I’ve been reading testimonials from parents of autistic children who fed their children raw milk and they actually healed their child. And of course, our government shuts down research into cures, because, remember, they want us sick, depressed, fat, and unhealthy, so that they can sell us pills. They want our children autistic. They want to cause harm to families in any way possible.

Last week, my husband and I tracked down raw milk at a local co-op. It was thirteen dollars per gallon, but I ponied up the dough and home I went with our milk.

People.

We have absolutely been robbed.

It’s nectar of the GODS.

It’s as creamy as half and half, it’s a lovely creamy ivory color, it just feels good on the belly. And it apparently cures autism in kefir form.

Lately I’ve started a trend of buying fewer groceries but more expensive, higher quality ones. I’ll pay $9 for a dozen pasture raised eggs. I’ll pay $20 for raw honey. I’ll pay $13 for milk. Yep, sign me up. Know why? Because I’ve noticed that the higher quality of food I have begun eating, the less of it I actually need. This has blown my mind. The amounts I have eaten each day have dropped easily in half.

Of course, trying to get my very hungry carpenter husband to stop after the third bowl of cereal in a row is like trying to put an octopus into pants, but I’ll take the little wins where I can find them, considering he now refuses to eat any bioengineered ingredients anymore, either. Read your labels, people. If it comes in a box, look for the Non-GMO Project logo. Yeah, that means your crackers are six dollars per box, but it’s worth it. Trash food is cheap and plentiful, and if you go for cheap and widely available, you’ll be miserable past age 50. My beloved sweetie lamented his Cheez-It loss until I learned how to make those from scratch, too. Kitchen-Aid Mixer for the win. Yes, I am a busy wife.

Another thing I learned in classes the last couple of weeks is just how important “ferments” and “krauts” are to the belly. I’ve begun enjoying kimchi, saurkraut, and kombucha lately. My belly is so happy, it sings my praises. A few mouthfuls of ferments on an empty stomach will probably extend your life.

For women, our gut health is especially important. It’s our second brain! Men tend to base things on left-brained ideas like logic, facts, and evidence. Women kind of just go… “Uh, ick feeling. Maybe avoid that.” So when our gut health is thrown off, our whole system of intuition goes by the wayside, too.

An excerpt from my nutritionist teacher’s lesson this last week:

“I was actually at a thyroid conference, several years ago, sitting next to a Russian doctor. She now practices naturopathy here in the states, but she was trained as a medical doctor in Russia. As we chatted along and she got a sense of the work I do, she started to pepper me with questions about how I work with the gut and gut healing. Somewhere along our conversation she said to me: “every time I see someone with IBS, they also seem to have mental health challenges (depression, anxiety, ADD/ADHD), do you see that too?”

She was clearly starting to connect the dots — move into the physiological associations that help us to be better problem-solvers. And I had to admit to her that, yes, we’ve seen particular temperaments — mental temperaments — in relation to particular states of dysbiosis in the gut. It's very fascinating. You can start to be a detective about someone’s gut by the way they behave!Ponder that for a moment. And if you have digestive issues yourself, don’t fret, but maybe think about if your mental state or your emotional temperament is different now than it was before you began to experience those issues. How do the two (gut and brain function) track on a functional timeline? Toward that end, have you ever wondered why an impending job interview can cause an attack of intestinal cramps or butterflies in your stomach? And why do antidepressants cause nausea or abdominal upset in millions of people who take them?The reason for these common experiences is because each of us literally has two brains — the familiar one encased in our skulls and our second brain, the gut. They’re kind of like Siamese twins, completely interconnected; when one gets upset, the other does, too. When people say to me that they don’t know if what they’re experiencing, like sugar cravings for instance, is psychological or physiological, I always say you cannot separate the two.”

Listen, I know we’re all starved for time and resources, but making conscious choices as to what you put into your body is paramount to a happy life. If you set aside a few hours on a Sunday afternoon to do food prep for your week instead of scrolling TikTok dance videos, you’d avoid eating out, you’d save money, and your health will be better. If you were to make just a handful of healthy swaps in your diet, over time, you’d notice your entire world changes! You’re happier about yourself, you’re losing weight, you’re more optimistic, less prone to depression, and have more energy! I’m the living case study for this!

What are some of the swaps I make? My next blog post will be all about swaps. Stick a pin in it.

Now, I hear you saying, “Holly, I just can’t afford that expensive food.” As yourself how much random Chinese crap you bought off of Amazon or Temu this month. Look at your video subscriptions. How much did you blow at Starbucks? Yes, you can afford more expensive food. You just have to decide what your health is worth to you, because for the cost of a McMeal, you could invest in a package of six low-carb side dishes. Knowing how to cook is absolutely paramount in this day and age- because, as previously stated, no one who orders in eats salads every night.

For me, cutting back on trash and buying carefully chosen indulgences has been priceless, and I recommend it.

Maybe just start with the raw milk and go from there. (There’s a warning for elderly people and pregnant women, but all of you outside those two categories, you need raw milk in your life. Trust me. Google is your friend. “Raw Milk Near Me” is how I found the two local co-ops.)

If an Amish person eats it, chances are it’s great for your diet. Now please excuse me while I invest in a bonnet and a butter churn.

Special Announcement!

I started school a few weeks ago (by the time this posts) but my blog posts up to this point have been mostly about how I got here. Breaking the fourth wall, here, this blog and website is awesome because I can write posts several weeks ahead and schedule when they are to publish. Boom. I could go for a tropical vacation in Tahiti for a month and still get my blog out every week.

I have a special announcement for the handful of you who read my blog, though, and it’s… amazing. Tell your friends. This is a testimony, to be sure.

Anyone who knows me knows I am God’s biggest cheerleader. No one is more faithful than the converted and saved. I also am a staunch believer that God uses the bad things that happen to you for ultimately better good than the bad was. Translation? Something we perceive as negative will end up as a net positive given enough time.

I went out of town with my husband on a work project the same week I started school. I had a low back injury in 2019 that was mostly healed but then of course, in classic Holly form, I went and lifted a box I shouldn’t have lifted over the weekend before. I felt fine for a few days, but then while out of town, my back just goes… “aaaaand NO.”

I limped into a local chiropractor for a small fix while I was in town (shoutout to Dr. Ross in Wenatchee, you’re a prodigy, dude) and then when I came back, I had to go back to my regular chiropractor who happened to be 45 minutes north (we moved, not her). I was still willing to make the trek because I love my chiropractor (shoutout Dr. Ashley) but her office was closed the entirety of last week. She couldn’t fix me.

This forced me to establish care down south here in Olympia where my husband and I moved last autumn. More dramatic crying and wailing noises. What a pain.

Wouldn’t you know it, though, I found an AMAZING chiropractor by the name of Dr. Derrick, and I had mentioned I also own a little lip balm business when I went in. He said I should come back in and sell some of my balms in his office, so I came back in the next day and prepared to make the sale.

I started talking with a lady in the waiting room who I assumed was another patient, until she mentioned she was actually Dr. Derrick’s wife, Lisa. I took to her instantly because she had a sweater with “I Love Jesus” right on the front of it. I mentioned I was in school to become a nutritional counselor, and she goes, “You should talk to Dr. Derrick about that, because he’s trying to build a network of providers for holistic health in his office.”

um, whaaaat?

The Good Doctor comes out of his office and we chat for a minute. I tell him what I told Lisa, and he essentially told me I should set up a practice in his office when I graduate.

UM WHAAAAAT

Let this be a lesson, kids. To you, in the moment, all you’re feeling is “my back dun broke.”

To God, it’s, “Let’s bring her to a doctor who will help her establish a nutritional counseling practice once she graduates.”

Our ways are not His ways. Our understanding is not His understanding. If you focus on the negative in your trials, you may miss out on the opportunity to make something awesome out of it. If I had been grumpy and in pain and sour grapes about having had to move chiropractors, I wouldn’t have been smiley and cheerful and made the connections that I just did. Smile through your pain, people. You never know what’ll happen.

The next time you think something in your life is negative, give it time. God can turn it into a net positive for you somehow. He uses our tragedies to make our life overall better, and ain’t that just the real secret of life? This is why we have to be thankful for our tragedies and trials- because there’s something good God’s working with them, even if we can’t see it yet.

This concludes our special announcement. Regular blog posting resumes Sunday.

Things I’m learning in school…

I started school to become a Certified Functional Nutritional Counselor this last week. On first blush, this program is simply amazing.

This is an excerpt from the very first class of week 1:

“For most of the history of what we call “conventional medicine,” the 6 non-naturals were
the primary tools for addressing the body’s health. These non-naturals were first articulated over
six thousand years ago in Ancient Greece, and they included: diet, sleep, exercise, breath,
excretion, and emotions. Check it out… over half of these--diet, excretion, and emotions—link
directly to the digestive system. The idea that food, mood, and poop are critical to our health and
well-being has been a consistent part of both folk-knowledge and elite medicine for thousands of years.”

Too many people in modern medicine are trying to reinvent the wheel! How many times has your doctor asked you about your emotional state or what trauma you carry? How many times have they asked if you’re breathing well, even if your lungs are healthy?

Not enough.

We used to get by just fine without Pharmizer making trillions of dollars per year selling pills. We were more hale as a species, probably lived longer, and were much happier, too.

What happened?

We got lazy as a species.

We preferred greasy takeout to cooking a dinner from scratch. We began buying food at stores rather than growing it ourselves. We gave trust regarding our health to agencies like the FDA who approves things to be sold for consumption that should be NOWHERE NEAR a human body. Most of your cracker, cookie, candy and frozen food aisles are full of literal chemical garbage. And once you realize that agencies like the FDA and CDC get paid bribes by pharmaceutical companies to approve things for human consumption, you realize Pharma only makes money when people are sick. Therefore, go ahead and ponder the intentions of such agencies. Really consider if they are incentivized to feed you slow-acting poisons that only deteriorate your body when built up over twenty plus years.

Let me tell you a true story.

I traveled with my beloved husband out of town to stay with him a few days in a hotel while he worked on a construction project nearby. I generally make him sandwiches for lunch, and you can’t have a sandwich without pickles. According to my husband, there’s a law written somewhere that requires a savory sandwich have pickles, and this law comes complete with heavy penalties for failure to comply, according to the very real and serious research my husband has done on the subject. I mentioned in the last post how my pressure canning hobby all started with pickles, and dadgummit, I’m sure I started because of that very law. I’m not a troublemaker.

Since I forgot a jar of homemade pickles on our road trip, which was nearly unforgivable, I had to buy some at the local Safeway along with some other basic groceries for the trip.

I stood in that pickle aisle, I kid you not, for ten straight minutes reading labels.

Open Nature, I’m disappointed in you. Your products are supposed to be organic and not-toxic. You advertise “No artificial flavors” while including chemicals like Polysorbate 80 and Calcium Chloride in your pickles. For shame, Open Nature. For shame.

Horribly, most of the rest of the pickles were the same. Um, there should only be cucumbers, salt, vinegar, maybe a little sugar, and some dill/mustard seed/garlic. That’s it. THAT’S WHAT PICKLES ARE.

Finally I found one single jar from Seattle Pickle Company that was ten freaking dollars, but they included no chemical garbage additives. One jar, out of twenty five or so brands and varieties of pickles.

That’s what we’re dealing with, folks.

You need to assume that 9/10ths or more of the food available for purchase has some sort of chemical additive that will slowly poison you in some way so that in 30 years, you need a cocktail of regular prescriptions at fifty bucks per pop just to stay alive. Please buy your groceries accordingly.

Back to my original subject, we really don’t realize how much our mood affects our overall health. This is why it’s important to not bathe yourself in things that make you stressed out. Politics can really stress some people out. Listening to violent music can do the same, whether we know it or not. Reliving old memories and kicking ourself for not doing better? It’s doing the same thing. My nutritional teacher with something like 12 letters after her name professionally is absolutely right.

Everything we need to heal ourselves is found in nature. During the Covid lockdowns, people actually got sicker because they stayed cooped up inside and didn’t get sunshine or fresh air. Sunshine, fresh air and exercise will cure a lot of mental health problems, and you get positively abused on Twitter if you say so.

This goes back to- people have gotten lazy. They would rather get their stomachs stapled shut than go running. They would rather swallow pills than just eat less and do some pushups. I realize I might be speaking more to the under-50 crowd here (since we have more time to right the ship, as it were) but movement will extend your life. If you spent your life sedate, you need that movement twice as badly as someone who regularly goes for evening walks. And Ozempic? Gosh, people. There’s studies that it will make you go blind. If you’re young, please just eat salads with oil and vinegar and go running. I promise, slow and steady works better than blindness shots.

I am not about band-aids or get-fixed-quick schemes. I am about personal responsibility and personal accountability. Fixing yourself from the inside out isn’t easy, but with hard work and awareness, you got this.

One other thing I learned this week was about something called the GAPS diet. Gut And Psychology.

What is it?

The GAPS diet is a strict elimination diet that requires its followers to cut out:

• grains

• pasteurized dairy

• starchy vegetables

• refined carbs

In her book, Dr. Campbell-McBride states that the GAPS dietary protocol cured her first child of autism. She now widely promotes the diet as a natural cure for many psychiatric and neurological conditions, including:

• autism

• ADD and ADHD

• dyspraxia

• dyslexia

• depression

• schizophrenia

• Tourette’s syndrome

• bipolar disorder

• obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

• eating disorders

• gout

• childhood bed wetting

When I was a child, I was squirrelly with lots of behavioral problems. Interestingly enough, the doctors were recommending this diet to my mother without it being defined as the GAPS diet when I was a child.

My mom is my hero, btw. She refused to let them put me on adderall.

So I went for most of my childhood with boxes of Rice Milk handy and not getting birthday cake at parties, which, trust me, I raged about as a child, but as an adult, I’m incredibly grateful my parents acted upon the hard rights instead of the easy wrongs.

I notice that it’s extremely similar to keto (which I already do) except it also excludes pasteurized milk and milk products. I’m going to be trying this modification to my already-existing keto diet and see how I feel. I’ll report back after I see how I feel!

Much to my chagrin, it appears triple-cream brie cheese is out for a while.

Excuse me while I fling myself onto a fainting couch and weep dramatically.

Healing Myself through Feeding Others

Something really interesting began to happen to me around the time I started going back to church, in January of 2022. I began finding little old ladies to feed in my community.

No, I’m serious. I began to collect them. Everywhere I moved, I collected another little old lady to feed, without fail.

You see, it all started with pickles. I learned how to make pickles from scratch for my very tall and hungry husband because he could eat half of a jar of pickles in a single sitting. In my journey to health, I decided if he was going to eat pickles, he’d eat homemade ones with homemade ingredients so that I knew he wasn’t mainlining Yellow 40.

I then made a jar of pickles for my elderly neighbor in our triplex, and baked her cinnamon rolls for her birthday.

Then there was another lady at church who ALSO got cinnamon rolls for her birthday.

Then my husband and I moved to a condo community where I collected a lovely Catholic woman who lived across the complex. She was disabled and just had knee replacement surgery when I met her, so naturally I offered to bring her a couple of hot meals while she recovered. In talking to her, she’d been living alone a very long time and got so excited about simple things like getting red meat to enjoy, which she generally couldn’t afford on her fixed income. I began bringing her over a hot dinner a couple of days per week.

Around this time, I began to learn how to pressure can.

I wished I’d known about pressure canning YEARS ago. You can’t can cheezits or fruit snacks or french fries or marshmallows. That may seem obvious, but there’s a point to me saying this. You can pretty much only pressure can what exists in nature (minus grains and dairy for the most part. I’m sure there’s cheats, but that’s the general rule).

Pressure canning is the art form of spending four hours in your kitchen over approximately fourteen bowls of ingredients and three pots of different flavored stocks and making endless combinations with them while micromanaging an extremely hot and pressurized container. My sweet husband quipped one time that I looked like I was directing a “food orchestra” with my wild spoon-waving and all of my ingredients chopped up, filling every bowl in the house. And I won’t lie, on pressure canning day, I occasionally get a little stressed. It’s kind of stimulation overload. My husband came in to make himself a cup of coffee and I yelled at him because one more device making noise would make me lose it.

That was a funny day.

Pressure canning is fantastic for buying lots of meat and veggies at once, and then preserving them to be shelf-stable for a couple of years. I have popped open a jar of chicken soup from over a year ago and it still tastes like the afternoon I made it. I am serious. Lots of people have concerns over botulism, but may I remind you, women were pressure canning in the 1800’s. If it seals, it’s generally safe. You can tell by how the lid sounds, If you flick the lid with your fingernail and it’s a light “plink” rather than a heavy “donk”, your jar is safe.

Yes, plinks and donks. I will die on this hill. Canners, back me up. Plinks and donks.

When my husband and I moved down to where we live now, in Olympia, Washington, I was able to return to the church I had originally found God in, given that we’d moved out of the area for a couple of years. This was such a blessing, because, again, I found yet another little old lady to feed, a precious woman to me who invited me into her home for scripture study in a women’s group a couple of years before. This year, however, she and her husband had been going to lots of medical appointments, and I began bringing them various jars of soups and stews to tide them over on busy nights.

My pressure canning has gotten extremely refined. I highly recommend the book The Canning Diva by Dianne Devereaux.

Recently, as I came to a Wednesday night prayer group with my church, I found myself talking about my health journey through food and my keto diet. I found myself counseling a young woman on fasting, and another woman asked me for advice on my keto diet, which I promptly spent hours typing up to send to her. I talk about my brain health-food health connection to anyone who wants to know my story.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I made contact with my neighbor, an absolutely lovely woman about my own age who works at home (and works too much) in a high-stress job. Me being me, I asked her about her diet, given how much I know about the link between mental health and what we eat. I offered to become her personal chef, and she happily and gratefully agreed!

I made my first food delivery to her midweek last week- flank steak and vegetable stir fry with brown rice, salmon, veggies and brown rice/quinoa, some keto chocolate fudge bars with dates, and a batch of egg and bacon muffins. Tomorrow I make her next batch of food- turkey pesto meatballs with spaghetti squash and a chicken verde salsa mexi bowl, with local butcher pork sausage and egg muffins for breakfast and a round of homemade lemon hummus.

This is all stuff that’s easy to make. Cooking is not hard. You just have to get to know your food.

Then today, as I went to the grocery store and was accosted by the Girl Scouts with their poison boxes (which, word on the street is that the Girl Scouts are being sued for heavy metal toxicity in their cookies, which is why I call them poison boxes), I decided to tell them about a ketogenic diet instead. The woman was floored when I told her that in me, it cured nearly everything. I then told her where to buy allulose chocolate (goalz.com, shoutout to the best chocolatiers on the planet) and she said I should become a nutritional life coach.

And now we have arrived here, to the exact moment that I am typing up this blog post.

People, I am telling you, what you eat, and what you don’t eat, will make the difference between you living a happy life and living a miserable one. There is no further black and white way to say this. WE ARE WHAT WE EAT.

Some of us are puddles of Coors Light and a pile of seed-oil fries.

Some of us are endless oceans of pepperoni and cheese.

Some of us are piles of sugar rotting us.

What are you made of?

I decided to become made of nature, and I am not lacking in goodies. My date bars with coconut sugar-sweetened chocolate chips and walnuts can rival any fudge in existence.

The closer we eat to nature, the closer we are to health. And when we cook in nature, and we give that nature away to others, what you are saying to them is, “You deserve to be nourished.”

It feels good to nourish others, as I have learned that all other people are really just a mirror of ourselves. By feeding others, we also make sure we, in turn, are fed, and being fed isn’t always food. Sometimes doing good works is spiritual food.

More on that another day.