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.

Learning that Food is Medicine

Not long after I got out of the psych hospital (with a cocktail of prescribed meds, mind you) I figured out I needed to make a change to my life- or rather, lots of changes. My brain was still a complete carnival of crazy and the prescriptions I was taking didn’t help, they only muted the feelings so that I couldn’t reach them to deal with them.

You have to feel it to heal it, friends.

When you hit the point of a complete nervous breakdown, there are only two options, y’all- surface, or drown. Yes, it’s harder work to kick for the surface with lungs full of carbon dioxide. Of course it is. It’s WAY easier to just succumb to the darkness, I won’t lie to you. It comes down to what you want for yourself though. What’s your legacy? That you gave up and wasted away, like Layne Staley, or that you ditched the substances and started “lifting things instead” like Trent Reznor? The dude is nearly 60 and has arms nearly as big around as my head. He’s still making music that rocks because he cleaned up his life.

(I did mention I’m 40. The musical references should make sense given my age.)

Thanks to an extended camping trip I took with my husband a few months after the hammer episode, I forgot my psych meds at home, and I just decided not to go back on them. They weren’t doing me any favors anyway. *not medical advice. This worked for me, mostly because I hadn’t been on them that long.

Around this time my beloved husband (who I don’t give nearly enough credit to, he is my rock, my salvation, my calm in the storm, and the reason I survived) suggested I take up martial arts. He has a black belt in ITF Taekwondo and is very physically fit. Not surprisingly, my husband is also extremely mentally sound. Healthy inside, healthy outside.

I did some some research into how exercise can really help jumpstart your mental health, and that had been an area I’d been sorely lacking in. I worked desk jobs most of my life, relatable to so many people out there, I know. I also hated running. Exercise, ew, right?

Ah, this is where we learn something, young grasshopper. Exercise is about far more than making your muscles hurt. Exercise builds mental toughness as well as muscle. Can you do one more when your arms are tired? Can you run one more lap? How hard are you willing to push yourself?

Mind over matter, kids. You can choose to be sore, or you can choose to simply hurt. One of those options gives you mobility and range of motion when you’re 70. The other confines you to a chair.

I did Taekwondo for about a year. Around the same time, I started running. I went to the gym. And then, after stumbling into a Christian church locally and beginning the journey back to spiritual health (and apologizing to God for all the messes I created when I was miserable) I finally began looking at what I was eating.

Obesity in this country is at an all time high. It’s insane, and quite frankly, it’s disgusting. I could write a whole other novel on the evils of the food industry and how we’ve been pitched food “products” that don’t actually have any food in them, but this blog post will suffice for now. Let’s just put it this way- mentally healthy people don’t gorge themselves to 300+ pounds. They just don’t. Remember- the medical industry profits off of us being sick, overweight, and depressed. They can’t sell pills to happy, healthy, normal-weight people. If you weigh more than 275 lbs and you’re not a 6’8 Icelandic bodybuilder named Bjorn, you are unhealthy. Period. I don’t care what lies you want to tell yourself, they’re lies.

I began researching the best diets for mental health, and one kept popping up- the Ketogenic Diet. Reading into it, there was a study done on an elderly woman with debilitating schizophrenia, and a keto diet gave her 90% quality of life back. Stanford University did a very good study on keto diets and improving severe mental illness.

I decided that would be the direction my life took me, but failure is part of the process.

Since I’ve always enjoyed cooking, I didn’t have too much trouble with the food prep necessary for a keto diet swap, but given that I still cooked for my extremely hungry carpenter husband, it was very hard at first to stick with it before lapsing back to my old diet of heavy starches and sweets.

I finally kicked the refined carbs for good over a year ago- barring a handful of minor exceptions, which is why the cookbook I have planned for the future will be called “Mostly” keto. For me, the usage of honey, medjool dates, and dried fruit in general is kind of a gray area, and I must occasionally taste jam that I make from scratch when my husband isn’t around to taste it for me. I also enjoy the occasional brown rice and sweet potatoes as treats. If you’re getting to a place with your diet where brown rice is considered a “treat”, well done, you don’t need my advice anymore.

Whether you believe in a higher power or not is up to you, but if there are laws to nature, there has to be a lawmaker, that’s all I’m saying, and I finally hit a place where I went , “Okay, God. I don’t think I can fix me. I think only you can do it.

It is in the fixing that you realize just how real God is. I am a living testimony to it. You don’t have to believe it, but I guarantee you, if you ever get to a low enough place, and ask God you help you… God will send you what you need.

As further proof of a simply kick-ass Creator, there are so many delicious foods made by the planet. You can literally plant a seed in the right part of the world, and you’ll end up with pineapples, which is one of the most delicious things anyone can ever eat. I mean, mind blown, right? Pineapples! Oh, and let me tell you a little secret about pineapples. If you take the outside peels of pineapples and the cores you cut out and boil them in some filtered water for about 10-15 minutes and strain it into a jar for your fridge, that juice apparently has an enzyme named bromelain in it that supports joint health. Um, what? That’s not just trash? No, it’s not. Nature is so beautiful, there’s a way to use nearly everything we pitch into the garbage. It’s why I currently have like twelve baggies full of dried spaghetti squash seeds, because I eat so much of it and I can’t bear to throw the beautiful seeds away.

I will be a crazy lady in my 50’s with a spaghetti squash farm at this rate. Ask me how devastated I am that this is bound to be my fate.

Spoiler alert, absolutely tickled pink about it.

On the subject of “nature provides everything we need” why are we ruining our health ingesting engine grease (seed oils) toxic waste runoff (fluoride) addictive white poison powder (refined sugar) and why do we rub dementia under our arms every single day? (If you do nothing else, please, I implore you, buy aluminum-free deodorant if you want to be cognitively healthy past 60 and stop cooking with foil)

Realizing all of this, I took it a step further. What if I only began eating foods that exist in nature?

This was the beginning of my food journey, and I am happier, healthier, smarter, and more free than I have ever been. This is why I decided to create this blog and help others- because I know most of you have no idea where to start, and don’t have three years to read endless medical journals and balance it with what people like me know doctors lie about. For example, ever notice that doctors will tell you to eat less butter, salt and eggs before they tell you to eat less french fries?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, people.

The average person wakes up in the morning and stumbles for their coffee pot, ingesting molds that linger on coffee and impact their kidneys. Then the average person will either eat a starchy breakfast pastry or worse, a sweetened one, or they get a McDonalds breakfast meal. The average person has just demolished any chance of gut health for the day, and as I came to find out, gut health is intricately tied to our overall health.

The average person might bring lunch from home (a bright spot of salvation in an otherwise depressing food routine) or maybe eat a salad from the cafeteria and pat themselves on the back for making a “healthy” choice. Then the average person might go home to a home cooked dinner, but might as easily swing through Burger King on the way home.

The average person doesn’t know what a probiotic is, how to count carbs or read labels, or how to recognize that trisodium phosphate (found in some children’s breakfast cereals) is an industrial cleaning agent you can buy at Home Depot. The average person has heard of adaptogen mushrooms, maybe, but looks for them in the produce section.

The average person is in deep trouble.

The Traumatic Brain Injury that saved my life

I ran from my problems for a solid fifteen years after my husband died. Five years after his funeral, I gave birth to a beautiful and perfect baby girl, conceived as a miracle from a short-term relationship. Her dad and I probably should have broken up not long after we got together, but we were both too broken in different ways to love each other properly. Today’s psych lesson: Trauma Bonding. The concept that if you believe yourself to be terribly broken, you will attract to yourself only other broken people, often while not having a great opinion of humanity in general.

I developed a severe drinking problem after her dad and I split up, when she was about a year old. We shared custody while I worked several jobs to try to keep us all afloat. After my dumpster fire of a life situation moved me out of state, things got strained, and my drinking habit got worse. After several years of moving around, trying to work and keep up with child support, and subsequently falling into a fairly abusive relationship that didn’t last very long, (remember, trauma bonding) I found myself jobless and homeless in the autumn of 2017. I had pushed my entire family away in my grief, and what little time and money I had to spend on my child wasn’t enough. Her dad threatened to have my license revoked or have me jailed if I didn’t cough up child support money. Or, he casually suggested, I could just give him full custody, and he’d make the rest go away.

For the record, he’s not the villain in this story. I had been a human dumpster fire for nearly ten straight years. I hated myself. My family was sick of me (or so I felt). I had no one to lean on (barring a single friend who picked up the phone when I called and another friend who took me in. You both know who you are. Props, dudes). So I signed full custody of my daughter to her dad and he promised me a photo once per year on her birthday. Signing those adoption papers for his wife was the hardest piece of paper I ever signed, and yet, I knew it was for the best, because that way she could grow up without me messing up her life, and speaking as the child of divorced parents (there’s a lot of us out there) I felt like it was the first truly noble thing I ever did as an adult.

I managed to claw back to my feet with the help of my two friends, and got another healthcare certification (the letters I got at age 32). I worked in healthcare some more, and learned what risk adjustment was- the process of your health insurance company combing through your medical records and hoping you have more chronic diseases because they get checks from the government annually. I wish I was kidding. Your health insurance company hopes you’re sick. Really think about that one for a while.

After a year of this job, something broke in me. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had a great and well-paying job in health information technology and I threw it into the trash to go work in a bakery for minimum wage. Not long after, I found myself in hard drugs to cope with all the trauma I hadn’t dealt with for roughly eleven years. And there was… a LOT. I had just gotten remarried and I thought I was fine because of the happiness of newlywed joy, but the darkness I had avoided crept back in shortly after our marriage which led to the substance abuse.

Shortly after beginning my spree of drowning myself in hard drugs, an inflammation problem in my feet started up. Since I worked in healthcare so long, I knew that an anti-anxiety medication I had been prescribed was also prescribed for inflammation. Since I was thinking “inflammation” and not “brain” when I took this drug, I took it alongside hard drugs that messed with my dopamine receptors. I had been warned not to mix psych meds with MDMA (the street drug, ecstasy). Let me tell you why this warning exists, and further, maybe don’t do drugs, kids, because this is when my brain metaphorically ripped itself in half. When the neurons in your brain are being competed over by both uppers and downers, that’s when your brain goes to war with itself, and I spent approximately fourteen months completely insane. Most people think of traumatic brain injuries as being a physical injury, like a car wreck. In those cases, you know why you’re suddenly acting weird, but in my case, I actually had no idea. It was a chemical injury, and it didn’t even set in right away, which made figuring out the problem all the harder.

This brain injury actually saved my life.

Holly, how can a traumatic brain injury save someone’s life?

I’ll tell you.

Imagine you have a big shiny balloon full of cake. Why is there cake in a balloon? No idea, but we’re going full speed ahead with the metaphor anyway.

You put that balloon on a shelf because it’s shiny and pretty, and the cake is in good condition when you shoehorned it in there, but you leave that balloon full of cake on the shelf so long… you forget there’s cake in there. You are completely oblivious to the rot inside of that balloon because the outside is still as shiny as the day you shoved cake in it.

In my case, it was wedding cake. I never properly grieved my husband’s death, which led to substances that I only used to distract myself from the pain I never addressed.

Imagine eleven years of not addressing rotting cake in your bedroom. There’s a stench in the room, you are getting stomachaches and headaches, you aren’t sleeping well, and yet you have no idea what’s causing it because you totally forgot about the cake. So you go to the doctor who wants to prescribe you four different drugs and two of them have death listed as a possible side effect. You deteriorate worse and your doctor makes a bonus for selling those pills.

That brain injury was a needle that popped my balloon, which spewed rotten cake all over my bedroom. Rotten cake is splattered on my bed, the ceiling, all over the carpet. There’s rot and stench everywhere. It’s disgusting, and one might think well and hard about just burning the whole house down rather than endeavor to clean that awful mess, because there’s just so much of it.

For months, I was essentially schizophrenic. The two halves of my brain fought each other, night and day. I didn’t sleep well. I stopped eating because “everything is poison.” I was suicidal for those months. I talked to myself, ran around at 3am, and even cut myself at times. My brand new husband who saw me through my drug addictions toughed it out and did his best to support me, but it took months for us to figure out what had actually happened, and even once we knew what the problem was, it was an uphill battle. *This man, y’all. There are not enough steaks or beers to thank him for his perseverance and love, but dadgum, if it takes me a century, I’ll try.

I thought I was getting better, but then I fell off the wagon back into drugs six months later, and then two days after that, after not sleeping OR eating, my husband found me hitting myself on the head with a hammer. To this day, the only explanation for that I have was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was playing in my head.

He called 911 and got me an ambulance.

I spent six hours in an ER room crying my guts out. It was the first time I ever properly felt all of the loss I had suffered through the course of my life, and this short post is the truncated version- I’d been through a LOT. I spent a subsequent week in a psych hospital eating and sleeping, before coming home to fix the mess I’d made of my life.

When I came home, I donned a hazmat suit and ordered 42 boxes of Magic Erasers off of Amazon.

It was time to clean up the cake.

***

You know what the best part about traveling through hell is?

Not being there anymore.

True story.

Take it from a former dumpster fire…

Look, I get it. We all make excuses when it comes to our health. “I’ll do it tomorrow” you may lie. “It’s just not that important” you tell yourself weakly. When you hit age 40, however, it starts hurting when you get out of bed, and you’ll wish you hadn’t scrolled away the health of your youth.

I didn’t take care of my physical, emotional or spiritual health for nearly two decades. I turned into a flaming garbage heap of a person because of all the excuses I made when I was younger and trust me, those excuses were ample, so I know more about excuses than most people. I also know what it’s like to live a life extremely sick and have no idea how to heal it.

When I was 23 years old, I got married to the love of my life, and then he died in a motorcycle wreck five weeks later.

Yeah. THAT happened.

Everyone in my life thought I was so strong for simply soldiering on and trying to paint on a brave face day after day. What I didn’t know was that the same toughness that helped me survive that had also made me numb to pain because I always ignored what that pain was trying to tell me, and when your body hurts, there’s a reason for it. Instead, I just bricked my pain away and pretended like it wasn’t there, and doing that made me a very ill person. That sickness manifested outward and harmed those around me. If you suffer from chronic disease, you know it makes everything hurt, and when you hurt on the inside, you often make others hurt, too. Hard truths, but there’s going to be a lot of those coming from me.

When it comes to our spiritual and emotional health- when the egg cracks from the outside, life ends, and when the egg cracks from the inside, life begins. Nothing external can cure you. It starts within you, and you have everything you need inside of you.

Again, I know better than most.

My life went from average, to blissfully happy, to shattered, to elated while still depressed, to drunken, to homeless, to remarried and burying my pain, to utterly broken nearly beyond repair… to finally repairing.

The repairs only came when I began to address what I was putting inside of myself.

I used to be a major comfort eater. I used to be depressed I had no money, so I’d go charge fifty dollars worth of Thai food and say “Okay, I’ll treat myself tonight then cinch up the belt.” And then never cinch up the belt.

It’s a vicious cycle that poor people often find themselves in- we tend to waste more money because we tell ourselves we have no nice things, so we might as well treat ourselves once in a while. Newsflash- those “treats” eat up half your disposable income, especially if you don’t know how to cook, and if you are focused on enjoying your poverty rather than saving to improve your circumstances, you’ll remain poor. It’s a mindset- one I lived in for many years.

Even if you’re not poor, if you don’t know how to cook for yourself, you are poor in health. I guarantee. No one orders a salad EVERY night if they’re ordering, and you have no idea how much hidden sugar is in those salad dressings anyway. Also, here’s a fun fact to make you want to barf: two of the salads from the Cheesecake Factory have over 1,700 calories each. I don’t think I eat that many calories in a given DAY.

If you follow along with me on this journey, I guarantee, I will help you heal from the inside out. I’ll be your friend who holds your hand, looks in your eyes, and says “You deserve to live better than this.” And I hope you’ll nod and agree. A lot of it is food related, but what we “consume” is so much more than that. It’s the media we read, the movies we watch, the horror and atrocities we see on social media, the music we listen to, the vaccines we take. It’s all connected- what goes into you makes a huge difference to your health.

The thing to remember first and foremost- is that you are the one person you can not lie to.

People think that makes sense, but reeeeally think about it.

What lies do you tell yourself?

What lies have you told others that you later believed because you told it so many times?

When you tell your significant other nothing is bothering you, is that true?

Part of what I aim to heal is what makes us tell those lies. Usually it’s a trauma response, or a feeling that you’re just not good enough.

That’s the worst lie you’ll ever tell yourself, that you’re not good enough. That’s the worst lie. You’re magnificent. Yes, you. We’ve just got to uncover you from all of what the world said you were or weren’t, and let the real YOU shine!

After all, if a former human dumpster fire can learn to self-love, anyone can.

Next post- on why I never judge anyone for their history. Ever.

Not you, either.

Nutritional health coaching- how did I get here?

A bit about me… I absolutely insist I spent a former life as the weird lady with a house full of jars in backwater Scotland. You know, the old lady that all the villagers simultaneously feared yet came to with all their health problems. But I digress.

In this life, to be quite blunt, I understand better than  most what doctors do and do not know.  I spent nearly two decades in healthcare. I started with my first aid and lifeguarding certifications at the tender age of 15, then went on to earn my EMT certification at age 19. By age 22, I had graduated a healthcare trade school program. By 30, I got my first set of letters after my name professionally. At age 32, I got the second set of letters after my name professionally. In total, I spent roughly half my adult life auditing medical records for a living, and I can promise you, 99% of medical doctors have no idea how to cure what’s wrong with you. In fact, getting killed by a medical error is the third most likely way to die in this country.

I repeat. Doctors do not know how to cure disease. They know how to prescribe pills, and that’s about it. 

Dis-ease is exactly that- your body not being at ease.  A lot of our physical conditions are caused by spiritual and emotional health problems, and doctors know next to nothing about this. Sadly, most physicians don’t even get  more than a couple hours of training on nutrition. It seems to be all about what pill to fix what ailment, when that pill will cause three other ailments. All you’re doing in modern medicine is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and some people’s bodies, well… the check is coming due all at once.

Doctors are great when you shatter a kneecap or get into a car wreck, but regular visits to doctors will make you sicker. You can take that to the bank. Goldman Sachs once published an article that queried if curing patients was a sustainable business model, which tells you everything you need to know about the medical industry and their shareholder overlords. Go ahead. Google it. Recoil in disgust, then return to me.

I am also in the process of earning my Functional Nutrition Counselor certificate, so I’m not just some crazy lady on the internet.

Well, not just.

Through my life travels, I have delved deeply into the link between what we eat and our quality of life. If you really think about it, this makes sense, however people rarely put two and two together. The most malnourished people you will ever meet in your life are also some of the most overweight. Their body is literally starving for nutrients, yet their body carries so much excess. Part of that weight we carry is why  we are eating. What are you carrying, friends? What are you ready to put down so that you don’t have to lug it around anymore? Have you ever even heard  of generational trauma and how to put down the things we didn’t even know we carry?

Of course, some people have chronic pain due to injuries, and some have autoimmune diseases that eat up their lives. I see you, and I sympathize. Trust me, I’m hurting with you.

There is hope, though. The human body is stellar at healing itself with the proper guidance, and if my instructor Andrea Nakayama (who lives with an autoimmune disorder) has managed to live a healthy life despite Hashimotos, purely through food medicine, I’d say there’s hope for everyone!

Drop me a line and say hi! If you want to know more about me, read on, the blog publishes every Sunday evening. I will be sharing things I’ve learned in my studies about how to transform your health through food, and I will be a CFNC in roughly ten months. Then the real magic happens.

If you REALLY want to know more about me, my life story memoir will be available soon. Stay tuned.