Nice to have you stop by. This is a little more about mine and my families journey to becoming nutritarian whole food plant strong household. I hope you enjoy.
The Beginning!
I grew up the youngest of four, in a military household. My dad was a Marine Corps Captain and served for 13 years. My deep drive for health and longevity came from my amazing mom.
She grew up on a farm in South Dakota. She new what garden fresh produce, homemade whole wheat bread, fresh farm dairy, eggs, home raised beef and pork were. Even when she moved away from the farm she did her best to garden and feed her children the healthiest she could. I will always be grateful for that. Even if she couldn’t get the best source of ingredients she would cook most meals from scratch. I remember having a raw and cooked vegetable with every meal and dessert was a very rare occurrence.
This is not to say that we did not eat processed food. There was plenty of Rahmen noodles, boxed MacNCheese, canned soups, and Little Debbie’s snacks. I ate my fair share of McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and DQ. But I remember more often then not eating most meals at home. It instilled an appreciation of home cooked meals and meals made from scratch.
Odd child
My mom taught me about how important balance was and eating a variety of vegetables. Through her gardening skills she helped me realize how much better vegetables and fruits tasted home grown verse store bought. I was her best eater, at least that is what she tells me, where one of my siblings loved peas and hated green beans, and the other loved green beans, but hated peas, for me I loved both.
I was willing to try something once and in our house if you didn’t like something you always had to eat a little bit. But you better not complain or you would get more. That is to say that there were things I didn’t like but having to try things and practice eating things I didn’t like helped me to develop my pallet. I am older I now and enjoy some of those foods I used to dislike.
Learning by example
As I mentioned we did eat out, but not very much. My mom cooked everyday and taught all her children how to cook. Not being able to cook was foreign to me and when I would run into people who barely knew how to make Macaroni and Cheese from a box I would be surprised. Learning how to cook was a priority from both of my parents. I am so thankful to them for insisting I learned how to cook. I now see it as such a blessing because I am so confident and comfortable in the kitchen. It is more stressful for me to eat out. Honestly, I don’t want to, because the food I make taste so much better to me. I sourced and cooked it, no mystery, no stress.
So I owe my passion for eating healthy to my mom. Who always did her best with the knowledge available to her. She was also always learning and reading new information about how to be even healthier. I would say I have followed in her foot steps and now we chat all the time about the new health information we are learning. How ever I am getting ahead of myself now that you know where my desire for health started let me tell you how I got to the eating habits and health choices I have today.
Growing up!
When I was growing up I had a really weak stomach. From the age 4-8 best I can recall I had every stomach bug under the sun. I got whatever stomach flu was going around so often that I just go used to throwing up that I felt like a pro. And as gross as this might be I kind of had it down to the point that I don’t mind throwing up now.
I also remember that from around 7-8 years old I grew intolerant to straight milk. I said lactose intolerant but it was just straight milk. I could eat ice cream and cheese without getting a stomach ache. Just one more thing that caused me illness. I was not a sickly child really, but I felt I got sick as much as other children maybe less because I was homeschooled.
I did dual enrollment at community college at sixteen, had a job, and was dancing ballet at a studio 4 nights a week. I don’t remember being sick much. Maybe once or twice a year.
The worst one
There was one time where I was sick for 2 days straight. I couldn’t open my eyes, I was exhausted. I remember calling work and school because I was sick and then falling instantly back to sleep. I remember waking up briefly to stumble to the table get a sip of water and then back to the couch to instantly fall asleep. I remember waking up and not being able to open my eyes. I was mentally trying to will them open. I couldn’t and eventually went back to sleep.
My was really worried and was about to take me to the hospital because I couldn’t even wake up to eat. But by day three I was over the worst and able to function normally even though I was weak. I did go to the doctors and best they could find out since I was no longer symptomatic was that a virus had attacked my liver.
This prompted my mom to do research into liver cleanses. So we both did it together and we did it again a few month later. I think it really helped and for the week after the cleanse we went on a vegetarian diet to help us transition our bodies back to eating.
Keeping busy
I was taking home cooked leftovers to work for lunch and eating at home for breakfast and dinner. I was busy so my mom did most of the cooking, but on the weekends I would batch cook and portion out meals that I would freeze and take to school and work.
I thought what I was eating at the time was healthy and in hindsight it was not the worse diet for me. It was better then most standard American diets. I would have at least one fresh salad with one meal if not two and my main dishes consisted of some kind of meat, a carbohydrate, a cooked vegetable, and more often then not either cheese or creamy sauce. My snacks would be granola bars, apples, applesauce, or crackers. I was a very active, athletic ballerina, and really burned calories. If someone offered me pizza, a doughnut, cookie, bag of chips, hamburger, or ice cream I would not say no.
I was a calorie consuming monster that had a physical job and was dancing over 24 hours a week. I felt I had to fuel the machine so it didn’t matter if I indulged every now and then. Some mornings I ate just cereal with almond milk (remember I thought I was slightly lactose intolerant to straight milk) due to the fact that I had to work around 5am most days and did not want to get up any earlier then necessary. I would also have eggs or oatmeal as well. Occasionally I would eat out for lunch but not often I was trying to save money. I met my husband when I was 19 and we dated for 3 years. I married at 21 and I moved out to go to college with him.
On Our Own
When my husband and I went up to college I continued to cook our own meals mostly and make freezer meals for both of us to take for lunches because we were both in school and working. I will say that the quality of our food did decline due to the fact that we did not have a lot of extra money being in school and renting our house. I gardened and cut costs. I bought a lot of produce from a non profit called bountiful baskets.
However we were both very busy and sometimes there were really good deals on pizzas or hot dogs that we could not refuse. We ate out way more then I have in my whole life.
I was making most of our meals from scratch but I couldn’t always keep up with the bread making so I would buy cheap white bread because I could afford it. Quite a few frozen meals and packaged meals also made their way into our diet as well.
I feel bad now, but around this time my husband had suggested that we try to buy organic produce. I was uneducated at the time. I knew organic is over priced and had less nutrition because it was picked earlier and therefore not worth it. I was wrong. Since we were newly married and on a budget my husband didn’t press the matter. I wish he had and I feel so bad now for shutting him down and not listening to him.
Journey begins
Well jump forward a lot of years and we left college yes neither of us graduated, we found out it wasn’t for us. I moved back home to Arizona to work at my old dance studio and my husband got work in cable networking and AV. He was gone a lot working jobs and sites that were out of state. We ended up living in my parents house because they had to move to Oklahoma for work and didn’t want to sell their home.
We had our first two children when the movie The Game Changers came out. I had really started to look into health and fitness mostly to help my husband loose the weight he wanted to. Our friends had told us about this movie and we decided to check it out end of 2018. This was my first introduction to Vegan and whole food plant based eating as a way of life. I like most thought that vegans and vegetarians were crazy. Why would you live without meat? Don’t you need protein? Well all of the evidence to the health benefits and gains even in athletics of a whole food plant based diet presented in The Game Changers changed my mind. At that moment we turned vegan.
The Next year and a half
This convinced us it was the best way to eat. And I did not feel like we were missing out on much of anything. There were a lot of recipes on the Game Changers website and our family was more vegan then whole food plant based.
As long as there was no animal products it was fine. This meant I was still using sugar and still eating oils and fast food. We ate a fair amount of vegan processed foods too. I thought they were fine and hey they didn’t have animal products. Well not much changed healthwise or weightwise and to be completely honest we really weren’t feeling that great.
I continued to look for better options. End of 2019 it got to the point where we were feeling so cruddy that I went back to eating meat and cooking some of the meals I used to occasionally make. We were mostly vegan but every now and then I would cook with meat.
Then in 2020, we all know what happened at this time, I really was back to our old way of eating because being vegan really didn’t make us feel better and it was easier to fall back into old habits. I had some family and friends that really needed some help at this time so I went and visited and helped them for weeks, because lets be honest in 2020 there wasn’t much to do for half of it. It was much simpler to just eat what everyone else was eating rather then make a fuss about food during my visits. I did try to eat more plant based foods that were provided but that was all.
The missing link!
At the end of my trips in Utah a friend told me that this book Eat to Live was about whole food plant based eating or vegan diet and how it helps to lose weight. This was it! Blown away by the information, I had to have my husband read it. He did and we discussed that it might be what we were missing and why our first attempt failed. We agreed to give it a try.
So I cleaned out my house and cupboard and cold turkey we were nutritarians. I would be lying if I say it was easy. For the first 6 months both my husband and I had bouts for days at a time of detox symptoms, headaches, nausea, and tiredness things like that. Also the food was a struggle, we did not like it especially my kids.
Success
I was trying so many recipes trying to find the ones I liked and my family would eat. I read three more books about the Nutritarian lifestyle in respect to children, diabetes and bought a Eat to Live cookbook. I even used more of the Game Changers recipes but the Whole food ones. After 6 months we had started to see progress. We felt better our energy was improving we were both losing weight, it was working. And slowly with persistence and dedication and loads of trial and error my kids and I have been very strict about it, to a fault sometimes. However my husband was still struggling to stay on it as well as we were.
I leveled out on my weight and had all the energy in the world. I look at so much health information to learn what else there is. I joined quite a few docuseries and listened to other whole food plant based doctors like John McDougall, The Starch Solution, and Collin Campbell, Forks over Knives. I also was listening to summits like the Art of Anti-Aging Health and Longevity Summits, The Food Revolution Network, Chef AJ on YouTube, and Jill from The Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show. I was learning so much and since I was not intent on loosing weight but just staying healthy and giving my body the correct nutrition. I was adding more starchy foods and whole grain pastas, and rice to our meals. All of this helped us really start loving this lifestyle.
Now
I learned a lot the first 2 years, I have only been learning and practicing and growing since. It has been 5 years since we started our Nutritarian journey and the principles remain the same, but I have found that certain parts of the lifestyle have needed adjustment for our climate and area where we live.
I have never felt better, been sick less often, and been able to have energy where in the past I could not have functioned.
I have had 2 children while living this lifestyle and they were both healthy with no complications in pregnancy or birth.
My husband has been telling me for 3 years that I need to have a Youtube channel so I can help and encourage others and share all the knowledge I have gained. “I am doing my best to raise 4 kids they are great but loud and noisy and distracting (They are kids!) I do not have time for a Youtube channel.” I would say. Then I got the idea why not a blog. I could do it on my own time and schedule with out the pressure of editing videos or worry about my kids being to loud.
The Future
I truly feel this is the best most beneficial way to live. I want to help and bless others to have the same if not even better quality of life and not have so many struggles as I did. I hope to help the journey to be less of a struggle and allow more people to gain the skills needed for this lifestyle without having as many failures as I did.
The nutritarian way looks a little different in the desert climate. I want to share what I have learned from my own personal experience so others, who are trying to live like this in the desert, do not have to suffer or wonder if it is really working. Be unsure and give up all together because they continuously do not feel well. I was there and I did the work didn’t give up and have found solutions.
My wish is to see health, vitality, vigor, and enjoyment return to adults, children, Everyone! It hurts to see so many these days struggling with health and pain, what if the science shows you don’t have too! I have learned how to live this way while homeschooling my kids, running a household, traveling and being involved in my community.
It is possible and I hope that with my experience and knowledge I can assist others to stick to it, find the skills faster, and work it into their life’s flow so they can have the benefits of living this way. If you couldn’t tell this has become a passion of mine. I would love to help you if I can? So stick around, check it out, see if it is for you, and lets do this!