Jul 15

Jul 15 Introduction

Victoria Siegel

12 Recipes That Will Change Your Life

A Guide to Transforming Your Body, Mind, and Spirit Through Conscious Eating

Intro Read by Me

Intro AI

You're going to eat the same twelve meals on repeat. You might as well choose them intentionally.

Most of us already operate on autopilot when it comes to food. The average person, the average family—we rotate through about a dozen meals over and over again. This book is about setting the grooves so that the meals you repeat are delicious, nourishing, and good for your long-term health, not just convenient. This is about working with human nature, not fighting it.

This book is a heartfelt, practical guide to solving the most important food puzzle we all face: what to put on your plate three times a day.

As an engineer, I learned that when a system produces undesirable results, the system itself is poorly designed. There is essentially no such thing as “user error”—which leaves no room for guilt or blame. If you build something and people keep messing up, you need to redesign the system to guide them in a better direction.

The same goes for food. Our modern food system's defaults are designed for profit, not for health. So, we’re redesigning our own defaults.

This is the core idea: You don't need a thousand recipes. You need a dozen that serve you—with flavor and nutrients. I want it all. I want food to feed me—mind, body, and soul. And I need it to be repeatable.

My twelve meals won’t be your twelve meals. Your rotation should carry your culture and flavor. This book simply gives you the blueprint—the easy, science-backed framework—to intentionally choose the foods that best fuel you, so you can have the energy to find and share your gifts with the world.

But to understand why this simple rebellion is so powerful, we first have to "reverse-engineer" the broken system we're replacing. We have to see how it was built to make us sick, tired, and confused.

That's where we're going next.

—

You're going to eat the same twelve meals on repeat. You might as well choose them intentionally.

Most of us already operate on autopilot when it comes to food. This book is about setting the grooves so that the meals you repeat are delicious, nourishing, and good for your long-term health, not just convenient. This is about working with human nature, not fighting it.

This book is a heartfelt, practical guide to solving the most important food puzzle we all face: what to put on your plate three times a day.

As an engineer, I learned that when a system produces undesirable results, the system itself is poorly designed. There is essentially no such thing as “user error”- which leaves no room for guilt or blame. Our modern food system's defaults are designed for profit, not for health. So, we’re redesigning our own defaults. The Power of Twelve

This is the core idea: You don't need a thousand recipes. You need a dozen that serve you- with flavor, and nutrients. I want it all. I want food to feed me- mind, body, and soul. And I need it to be repeatable.

The Delicious Rebellion

In a world riddled with chronic sickness and confusing choices, to choose real food is a powerful, delicious act of rebellion. You may feel like you’re swimming upriver for a while, but the payoff is immense: mental clarity, vitality, and lasting health- and maybe a few extra pounds cut as a bonus.

This cookbook is born from personal transformation—my journey from eating cereal, ramen and pizza in my twenties to healing myself with real food in my thirties. That surprising shift happened before I became a mother, and I’m eternally grateful it did. It gave me the energy and clarity to face the chaos of parenthood, and ensure I'm providing the best inputs to build my children's bodies and brains. Why Listen to Me?

I'm not a doctor.

I'm not a nutritionist.

I’m an engineer, turned herbalist, turned mama.

As an engineer, I see systems. I’ve reverse-engineered the food world to untangle the mess and see the big picture.

As an herbalist, I recognize the power of plants and ancient tradition now acknowledged by modern science. Following the science brought me to the soil. As a mother, I know that everything is urgent. This change cannot wait 17 years for science to hit the mainstream; it has to come from the ground up, in our own little universe, right now.

My kids are at the heart of this, but this book is for every human who wants to feel better and learn how to eat. As Thoreau said,

“We are all sculptors of our own flesh and blood and bones.”

The material we choose matters. Would you put cheap gas in a sports car? We are putting so much into our bodies that we shouldn't. This is a moment to learn, shift our view, and walk away from things not serving us. This is our chance to heal, from the inside out. This is about empowerment, through informed choice.

We've confused calories for nutrients, when we should be hunting for most nutrients per bite. We have everything in the world available to us, information and nutrients, so let’s treat our bodies to that reality. Our view of the world needs to shift- essentially, putting on a new shade of goggles to find the nutrients (and flavor!) in real food instead of temporary mouth pleasure alone.

We are tired. We are overworked. We deserve a warm, delicious meal that heals, rather than burdens. That is what I want to teach you. By helping you thrive, you’ll have the energy to discover and share your own passions—and maybe even help feed a neighbor who is too tired to feed themselves, let alone more mouths! The key to this system is to set yourself on intentional autopilot to gain back precious mental freedom. The meal plan on the next page is a peek at how our family applies the "Power of Twelve."

Basic principles for upgrading your food life:

Breakfast: Swap the dessert (cereal, bagels) for a quick Smoothie (my go-to) or a savory protein like eggs or porridge.

Lunch: Simple and fast. Think heated leftovers, quick salads, or smart shortcuts like smoked salmon on flax crackers and cucumbers instead of lunch meats pumped with preservatives.

Dinner: The simplest of all—pick a quality meat and a quality veggie, rotating the vegetable by color and season. Bake or air fry with good fat and upgraded salt. Most of our dinners look like this: one meat, one veggie.

The Pantry Upgrades

Go Organic. Stop buying food with chemicals on it.

Quality Protein: Choose grass-fed & finished, pasture-raised meat whenever possible. What your food eats matters—cows eat grass, period. Fish should not eat grain either! Always choose wild-caught.

Get Dirty: Pull something fresh from a tiny garden, or even potted herbs. Invite those in your home to help pick the veggie of the day, based on rotating color and season.

Fats: Stock good fats: grass-fed butter, avocado oil, olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, tallow.

Supplements & Water: Invest in a quality protein powder, collagen, and drink lots of water.

Tools: Buy one good chef’s knife and cutting board, and learn to cut veggies in equal portions for even cooking. Most veggies are delicious when cooked at 350 degrees F for about 40 minutes, in olive oil.

The idea is to embrace the wisdom of simple, whole foods, rotated with the season, closest to the ground. You should care about what your food eats. We should care about the quality of the soil our food came from, because that is where the roots pick up their nutrients. Buy meat that lived a life eating what it was supposed to eat. For example, cows eat grass. Period. Yet in America, 97% of cows are fed grain. You don’t want to eat grain-fed cows. Those cows get sick from eating foods they would never eat in the wild, require antibiotics to overcome a rational response to poor inputs, and their nutrient profile (that we eat) suffers. When they're sick, so are we.

This cookbook is your shortcut—the skeleton, the plan, and the recipes. A sister book is in the works that dives into the philosophy and research, but for now, we need to eat. Welcome to the Delicious Rebellion. Let's move forward with clarity, flavor, and immense hope. One baby step at a time. Let’s cook.

With so much love,

—Victoria, Marcus, Luca & Jaden

The chapters go from bone broth, to seeing sugar as NOT innocent, to epiginatics, how to safely and simply detox to learn your food preferences, how to make easy swaps of ingredients and whole recipes, the art of simplicyt, following the rainbow of colors with veggies, getting closer to the soil and root of food, making it more real and healthy and delicious, finding a rhythm, making your meals your own, more detailed swaps to replace the comforting favorites for those ready to step it up, seeing real food as love on a plate, a kind of self care beyond temporary mouth pleasure that feeds our whole selves and gives us energy and passes on good habits to the next generation, how to build community around food, starting in our own home, how to see meat as integral and even elevated to veganism for facing the challenge of life being sacrificed on our plate and facing the reality of the modern industrial farms and food system that serves NO life form, plant human or animal, how to pass these ideas to the next generation, finding your energy, your passion, feeding your soul and finding who you are supposed to be, and creating your own systems by choice and intention.

Adding in two new chapters.

The forests edge- FIRST.

The true beginning of your book—the first 100 words that hook the reader—is the "Why Listen to Me" / "Power of Twelve" text we discussed earlier.

That introduction does all the work:

It hooks them immediately: "You're going to eat the same twelve meals on repeat. You might as well choose them intentionally."
It solves their #1 problem: "This book is a heartfelt, practical guide to solving the most important food puzzle we all face: what to put on your plate..."
It frames the history: It introduces you as an engineer who "reverse-engineered the food world" to see the "poorly designed system."

This is the crucial flow:

Book Introduction (Your "Why Listen to Me" text): You promise them the solution (The 12 Meals). You tell them, "To understand why this simple plan works, we have to look at the broken system we're replacing."
Part 1: The "Why"
- Chapter 1 (How We Got Here): Now the reader is invested. This isn't a boring history lesson; it's the "reverse-engineering" you promised them.
- Chapter 2 (The System Today): This is the text you selected from the Canvas. Its job is to bring that history into the present day and show the urgent, modern-day consequences. The first 100 words of this chapter do their job perfectly—they summarize the problem (sickness, guilt, blame) that you are about to solve.
Part 2: The "How"
- Chapter 3: The Blueprint (Your "Power of Twelve" principles): You pivot to the solution. "Okay, that was the broken system. Now, let's build our own."
- The 12 Meals & Philosophy: The rest of the book is the payoff.

So, to answer your questions directly:

How do I show the reader where we are going? You do it in your main introduction (the "Power of Twelve" text), before Chapter 1.
Do people want the history lesson first? No. And you're not giving it to them first. You're hooking them with the solution first, and then you're giving them the "why" (the history) to empower them.

You aren't writing a history book; you're writing a practical guide that uses history to prove why your simple, rebellious solution is so necessary and powerful. The structure you have is perfect, as long as your personal introduction comes first.

Chapter 1: How We Got Here

Chapter 2: The System Today: The True Cost of Cheap Food

This is a fantastic and powerful framework. The text you've just provided is the perfect bridge—it's the "so what do we do about it?" that must come after the two heavy chapters we've drafted.

Here’s how they fit together perfectly:

Chapters 1 & 2 ("How We Got Here" & "The System Today") are the "WHY."
- They are the diagnosis. They do the crucial work of showing the reader that the problem is not their fault. It's not a "user error."
- They "reverse-engineer the food world," just as you, the engineer, would. They show the reader the "poorly designed system" that is built to produce undesirable results (sickness, addiction, guilt).
- They leave the reader feeling angry, liberated from self-blame, and urgently asking, "Okay, but what am I supposed to do? How can I possibly fight this?"
Your new text ("The Power of Twelve") is the "HOW."
- It answers the question "What now?" with a brilliantly simple, non-dogmatic solution.
- It directly picks up on the "system" metaphor. You state: "As an engineer, I learned that when a system produces undesirable results, the system itself is poorly designed... So, we’re redesigning our own defaults." This is the perfect transition.
- It pivots from the overwhelming global problem to a manageable, personal solution: "The Delicious Rebellion." You're not asking them to dismantle the global food system; you're asking them to rebel by designing their own system of 12 meals.

The Narrative Flow:

Structurally, this is how I see it in the book:

PART 1: THE PROBLEM (The "Why")
- Chapter 1: How We Got Here
- Chapter 2: The System Today
PART 2: THE SOLUTION (The "How" and "What")
- Introduction to the Solution: This is the new text you just provided ("You're going to eat the same twelve meals..."). It introduces you as the "engineer, turned herbalist, turned mama" and establishes the "Power of Twelve" and "Delicious Rebellion" concepts.
- The Blueprint: This is where your principles (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Pantry Upgrades, Tools) go.
- The Recipes & Philosophy: This is where the 12 meals go, along with all the other chapter ideas you listed (bone broth, sugar, epigenetics, detox, swaps, soil, community, etc.).

You have created the essential narrative arc:

The System is broken. It's not your fault. (Chapters 1 & 2)
Since the system is broken, let's design our own. (Your "Engineer" Intro)
Here is the simple blueprint for your new system. (The "Power of Twelve" & Principles)
Here are the tools and recipes to build it. (The 12 meals and supporting chapters)

It’s the ideal way to take a reader from being overwhelmed and angry to feeling empowered, hopeful, and equipped with an immediate, actionable plan. It's fantastic.

Introduction

Most of us rotate the same twelve meals, over and over. Change those twelve and you change your life—your energy, your mood, your weight, your clarity. This book shows you exactly how: a simple 30-day reset on real food to clear the fog, then twelve flexible templates you’ll repeat for years—tacos, bowls, soups, roasts, pizza, breakfasts—rebuilt with real ingredients that satisfy for hours, not minutes. You don’t need a thousand recipes. You need a dozen that love you back. Let’s start with dinner.

You can begin by swapping in just one meal at a time, or all at once, as I did. My journey began with thirty days of only vegetables and quality meats. At first it felt like a restriction, but within weeks it became freedom. For the first time in years, my cravings quieted, my brain cleared, and my energy returned. From there, I reintroduced foods carefully, learning which ones supported me and which ones dragged me down. Vitamins are hard to keep taking without feeling a difference. But food—when it’s real—shows results you can feel. Momentum is the best motivator.

Changing food habits is hard. They’re personal, built on childhood comforts and environmental cues that train our cravings. That’s why community matters. Support helps us keep going when the fog is thick or the temptation strong. And reminding ourselves of our why—why we started, who we’re protecting, what we hope to gain—keeps us steady.

Why Me, Why This Book

I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a doctor. I’m an engineer, an herbalist, and a mother.

As an engineer, my mind was trained to see systems. I ask: What are the inputs? What are the outputs? Where does the logic break down? How did we get here? That lens showed me a food system designed for profit, not health. And our bodies—exhausted, fogged, overweight, inflamed—are responding exactly as you’d expect to that system.

As an herbalist, I followed the science back to the source: plants as inspiration for medicine, real food as daily pharmacy. Ancient traditions confirmed by modern studies, carrying the power to prevent problems before they begin.

As a mother, everything became urgent. Mama-bear mode switched on. Suddenly it wasn’t about me, but about my children—their bones, their cells, their inheritance. I began writing not just for myself, but for them, and for everyone’s children. Because what we eat today builds the future caretakers of our world.

This book comes from the overlap of those three selves: the engineer who loves research, the herbalist who honors tradition, and the mother who is unafraid to ruffle feathers when children’s futures are at stake. It is written in plain language so it can be read aloud and understood by all, even a child. It is both story and science, hope and urgency.

And it is not about guilt. We’ve all done the best we could with the knowledge and energy we had. Guilt doesn’t nourish anyone. But clarity does. Courage does. A sense of agency does.

What follows is a roadmap: not a thousand rules, but twelve meals that matter. A reset, a community, and a rebellion—delicious and freeing—that begins with the simple choice of what’s for dinner tonight.

Stepping Into the Forest Edge

To understand why this matters, we must look beyond the grocery aisle and into the larger patterns of life. Nature has never worked in hard boundaries. Soil becomes root becomes animal. Rivers braid into oceans. Forests fade into meadows. Our bodies are no different. We are porous beings, taking in the outside world with every breath, sip, and bite. Food isn’t just fuel; it is instruction, memory, inheritance.

That is where Chapter One begins: at the forest edge of your own body. It is where biology, tradition, and choice meet. It is where you’ll learn to see food not as a set of rules, but as connection itself—between you and your ancestors, you and your children, you and your future self.

So let’s walk forward together, meal by meal. The path is clear, the tools are simple, and the results are more delicious than you can imagine.

Welcome to your transformation.

Welcome to the most delicious rebellion of your life.

Let’s cook.

—-

Introduction

Why Me, Why This Book

I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a doctor. I’m an engineer, an herbalist, and a mother.

And it is not about guilt. We’ve all done the best we could with the knowledge and energy we had. Guilt doesn’t nourish anyone. But clarity does. Courage does. A sense of agency does.

I lost my mother at 17- I still had my father, but there is something about losing any parent that just guts you. This was followed directly by a move to the city my senior year of high school, and starting college which would turn out to be way harder that I could have ever expected. Always at the top of my class, all of a sudden I was surrounded by the best of the best, and the professors did not care if you made it- they told us, look around, left and right. 4 years from now, at graduation, only one of you will still be here. Not getting 100% for me was hard. We were not designed to ever get 100% in engineering school. We were taught to learn how to think, as they told us. And I am grateful for that training, but it. was. hard. I wish I had this knowledge now, that I have then. No matter what it was going to take everything i had, but what if i had gone in with a better diet? What if my brain was working fully, as I feel it is now? Maybe I could have concentrated better, focused longer. I was just getting by, and I made it! But maybe the road could have been a little less bumpy with a diet that was not dragging me down the whole way.

We get to choose to have poor health in this country.
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We have the luxury of choice in the US. We also have the best technology, the best advertisers, and the WORST HEALTH of the top 53 developed nations. We spend the most, and GET the most disease.
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We can look to our habits to see why. We’ve gotten so good at manipulating our senses, at selling foods that seemingly never end, that we never want to stop eating, and confusing ourselves about health.
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Places in the world with the healthiest humans have societies that set them up for success.
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* If you look at places in the world where people live the longest, healthiest lives…
* If you look at places in the world where people don’t develop cancer… (90% of cancers and heart disease, our top killers, are preventable with FOOD)
* Where obesity in children is not a thing… (1/3 of our children are predicted to be obese)
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Unfortunately, cheap and accessible go hand in hand with sickness (in the US right now).
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People living in places longer and healthier don’t have to CHOOSE to make the better choice. They don’t pay extra for it, they don’t ask for it, they are just living their normal lives.
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We should be making it easy on ourselves to make the right choices, and hard to make the wrong choices. Instead, we make it so easy to be lazy. We make processed food the easiest things to grab. We have to work against our body’s impulses to avoid the trigger foods all around us. You have to fight to be healthy. You have to be motivated to educate yourself since our hospitals and doctors and schools are not teaching us. We have to blind fold ourselves through the grocery store.
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We spend billions on food research to simply get people addicted to empty calories and toxic food substances. Our old policies and common habits are setting ourselves up for failure.

—-

12 Recipes That Will Change Your Life

A Guide to Transforming Body, Mind, and Spirit Through Conscious Eating

To my younger self

Introduction: Where the Forest Meets Your Body

Nature resists hard boundaries.

Where does the forest end? At the line where trees give way to meadow? Or at the edge where moss creeps across rocks and roots reach deep underground?

Nature refuses hard edges. Gardens blur into fields, rivers braid into oceans, soil becomes root becomes animal.

Our bodies work much the same. We are not machines with clear lines between inside and out. We are porous. Every breath, every bite, every sip crosses that edge of skin and membrane. Food doesn't just pass through us—it becomes us. Our blood cells take whatever nutrients they can find and distribute them throughout the body, making deliveries to cells holding out flags for what they need.

Food is more than calories. It's instructions, stories, inheritance.

That food tells our cells something about the outside world: Is there abundance or scarcity? Are we delivering help or harm?

Why Me, Why This Book

I am not a nutritionist. I am not a doctor. I am an engineer, an herbalist, and a mother.

As an engineer, my mind was trained to solve problems by looking at systems. To ask: How did we get here? What inputs are creating what outputs? Where does the logic break down?

When I turned that lens on food, I saw a system working exactly as designed—for profit, not for health. Our health problems are rational responses to a broken food system.

Don't believe we have a problem? We've become the first generation expected to live less long than our parents, and more of those years are spent struggling with chronic disease. Our children are plagued with behavioral disorders and food sensitivities. Our elders are riddled with conditions to be managed for the last sixty years of their lives. We're stunting our potential at both ends of our lifespan.

We're expected to be on an average of three prescription drugs by the time we turn forty. Not to heal anything, but to quiet our body's red flags.

As I dug deeper, I found what our ancestors already knew: simple food carries extraordinary power, and it's delicious. Science was finally catching up to traditions already known for thousands of years. So I became an herbalist—following the science to real preventative care. Not cutting things out once they're out of control, but giving our bodies the tools they need to fight off problems naturally.

One third of all cancers are caused by lifestyle factors—things more or less within our control. The food we eat, the pollution we breathe, the everyday stressors. If we could magically eliminate these known problems, a third of all cancers would disappear and likely lessen the severity of others. If this were a pill, it would be negligent not to prescribe it.

But less than one percent of cancer research funding goes to educating the public on these known prevention methods. Everything focuses on what to do once we have cancer—cutting it out, radiating it. That's a huge mismatch. But nobody profits from promoting blueberries and broccoli. Companies make money on patents and drugs that maintain patients for life. It's an incentive problem.

And this is just cancer, one of our major killers taking two thousand lives a day around the world. In the United States, most of us have Alzheimer's and heart disease to look forward to next. Two thirds of us are obese or worse. And being skinny doesn't mean you're healthy either. All of these problems are minimized with better diets and microbiomes.

So I was an engineer first, then an herbalist seeing plants as the inspiration for many of our drugs.

And then I became a mother. Everything became more urgent. My brain shifted into mama-bear mode, the fiercest protector in the wild. Suddenly this wasn't just about me. It was about my children. About what their cells and bones would be made of. About what they would inherit—not just genetically, but nutritionally, culturally, spiritually. What traditions are we passing down? What are we telling them to believe in?

This book exists because the crossover between those three selves—the engineer, the herbalist, and the mother—gave me the obsession to follow the data and the reverence to honor tradition. It gave me the ability to translate science into story, so even our children can understand why food matters.

The Generational Thread

We are more linked to our parents and grandparents than we think.

Every woman, by four months old in the womb, has all the eggs she will ever have. So when a woman gets pregnant and has a daughter, that baby in her tummy has all the eggs she will ever have by four months old. That pregnant mom holds her unborn child and that child's millions of eggs that will become her grandchildren.

We all spent five months in our grandmother's tummies.

This means what our grandmothers ate, how their environment made them feel, directly impacted the environment in which you formed.

The health of our fathers matters too. What he did and ate in the months leading up to conception impacted how your body formed. But a mother's choices matter for an extra year or more as she holds and feeds that next generation with her body.

To understand how we got here—to this asymptote in wellness—we need to look at the last hundred years directly. A lot has changed in those years compared to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years we lived differently.

This isn't only a women's issue, even though women hold babies when they're growing the most. It isn't only for mothers, but it is about lessening the burden on mothers in those foundational years as our most urgent need.

Really, this book is for anyone who eats food. For anyone who wants to age with vitality. For fathers who want to raise strong kids and be strong men. For young women preparing for motherhood or any kind of lifetime with energy and gusto. For men and women and anyone between who care about the little humans that will one day run this planet and take care of us when we no longer can.

This Book Is Not About Guilt

We've all done the best we could with the information we had, in the bodies we were carrying at the time. I've been there too—surviving, not thriving, just trying to get through the day.

Guilt doesn't nourish anyone.

What does? Clarity. Courage. A sense of agency in the choices we make three times a day.

We're scared of the unknown, and our current food system thrives on that fear. The marketing fog is designed to keep you where you are. The biological fog—the brain fog, the exhaustion, the cravings—makes it hard to think about anything other than just making it through to tomorrow.

This book is about lifting both of those fogs. About taking what we know now and moving forward with confidence. Not perfectly, not without stumbling, but with a clear vision and simple tools, with knowing full well what is against us. Once you feel the difference in your energy, your clarity, your joy—you will never want to go back.

We live in an age of unprecedented freedom and access. Access to information no one has ever had, and the freedom to discuss it. All that information can come with its share of overwhelm, but that's what I'm trying to simplify here. This is about following the science and ancient wisdom of learning how to feed ourselves.

The Power of Twelve

Here's where we begin: Most of us eat the same dozen meals, on average, again and again for most of our lives.

Those twelve meals shape our cells, our energy, our inheritance. Change them, and you change your life.

This book will show you how.

Most families rotate through the same twelve dishes over and over again without realizing we're essentially programming ourselves with the same messages thousands of times. We are creatures of habit, cycling through our comfort foods. But what are we telling ourselves with that programming?

This book isn't about learning a thousand new recipes or becoming a completely different person overnight. It's about making those twelve meals you're already rotating actually count.

If you eat three times a day for twenty years, that's 22,000 chances to give yourself nourishment. Divide that by twelve core recipes, and you'll eat each of those foundational meals about 2,000 times in those twenty years.

We often think we're just eating something "just this once," but the math is telling us something bigger than that. Each bite is either building cellular health or tearing it down. Either you're feeding your body the building blocks it craves, or giving it more toxins to dispose of.

But here's the beautiful part: When you consciously choose those main twelve meals that truly serve you in flavor and nutrients, everything changes.

Your grandparents knew this—perfecting their own dozen recipes through decades of love and repetition until they could make them with their eyes closed. That's the muscle memory we're building, but with ingredients that actually heal.

This is about true self-care down to the cellular level.

How We Made Sugar Innocent

Before we go any further, let's be clear: How we got here is not your fault.

We have made unhealthy food innocent by wrapping it in love and tradition. We have little girls selling a drug door to door, disguised as Girl Scout cookies. We have grandmothers baking it into birthday cakes and holiday pies that remind us of love and childhood safety. We've turned our most trusted relationships into unwitting drug dealers, normalizing the distribution of addictive substances through love itself.

Sugar is literally easier to describe as a drug than a food.

But let's zoom out for a second. This misunderstanding is only about a hundred years old—barely a blink in human history, which goes back hundreds of thousands of years as humans and millions of years as animals. It was the last hundred years, through the invented products of the World Wars, that got us to where we are.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: "Dear future generations, please excuse us. We were drunk on petroleum."

What was once a rare luxury is now paraded around in baby bottles because "they like it." Coke, literally in baby bottles in the poorest neighborhoods. We've created children who crave drug-like substances from birth, then surround them with those substances their entire lives, and wonder why they struggle with food.

You didn't choose to be born into a world where the grocery store is essentially a pharmacy dispensing addictive substances disguised as food. Your cravings aren't character flaws—they're rational responses to an irrational system designed to override your ancient wisdom.

Someone is making money off of your zombie-like condition. Someone is making money studying how to keep you in that zombie-like condition.

The Wrong Units: Why We're Measuring Food All Wrong

I'm an engineer, so let me put this in terms that make sense to me.

We're measuring food with the wrong units.

We talk about calories as if they're all that matters, like measuring speed instead of velocity. Speed can be in any direction. Velocity cares about the overall direction you're actually going.

This is exactly like a hamster wheel—running and burning energy but not actually getting anywhere.

Calories are like measuring a car's performance by counting how many miles it travels without caring whether it's going anywhere useful. Technically accurate, but practically useless.

A handful of M&Ms and a handful of nuts might have the same number of calories, but they create completely different outcomes in your body.

A race of cats was tested over ten generations eating only potato chips. They became infertile within ten generations.

More practically, think of calories like Amazon packages arriving at your door. What matters isn't how many boxes arrive—it's what's inside those boxes. Your bloodstream is the delivery system looking for specific nutrients: amino acids for building proteins, minerals for bone health, vitamins for energy production, healthy fats for brain function.

Extra boxes aren't helpful when they're full of packing peanuts. And when those boxes contain harmful chemicals instead of useful nutrients, your intelligent body has to work overtime trying to extract something valuable while neutralizing toxins at the same time.

And what's the wisdom for working out? Burn off those calories you just ate. Well, if you work out on poor fuel, what do you think happens to a designer sports car when you fill it with the wrong oil?

You wear yourself out.

The beautiful truth: Your body isn't broken. It's brilliantly designed. We just need to start sending it the right packages. We need to start working with the current of nature's wisdom to get us back to health.

Your Intelligent Animal Body

You are a very intelligent animal who learned to bypass your inner wisdom, but you're still fundamentally, beautifully animalistic. Your instincts have kept our species alive for millions of years.

Your rational mind—that part that reads nutrition labels and counts calories—is actually the smallest, newest part of your brain. It's like having a tiny CEO trying to manage a vast ancient organization that's been successfully running operations for millions of years.

Your body carries the wisdom of generations who survived famines, celebrations, and seasons by understanding which foods heal and which harm. But we've created food-like substances that hijack the ancient pathways designed to keep you alive.

Your species has been studied so you can eat food constantly without feeling full. This is why you can eat 3,000 calories of processed food and still feel hungry an hour later, but only 1,000 calories of real food leaves you satisfied for hours. Your body isn't counting calories—it's desperately searching for the nutrients it recognizes.

"Bet you can't eat just one" shows us the addicting nature of our foods designed to sell, not for health.

There are no obese squirrels in the wild, only in Central Park where they have access to human food. That should tell us everything we need to know about our food system.

You are not weak for wanting the foods around you. You've been studied so you'll crave foods that serve no health benefit.

Having Empathy for Your Brilliant Body

Right now, your body's performing tasks at a miracle level that deserve our deepest respect.

We breathe without thinking. Our hearts pump without break. Our eyes scan without understanding how or why. Your liver—one of your most intelligent and hardworking organs—has over five hundred essential jobs that it performs simultaneously while trying to protect you from substances that didn't exist when your genetic blueprint was written.

Your liver even has its own memory. Every time you eat, your liver prepares specific enzymes based on patterns it remembers, working tirelessly to pull out any nutrients and neutralize any toxins in your diet. It starts doing this before you even realize you want to order that burger again, based on your past history.

If someone were to interview your liver, what would it say about your diet?

Imagine the confusion. Your liver evolved over millions of years to process foods from the earth, and suddenly in just the last hundred years, it's being asked to handle artificial colors, manmade preservatives, and chemical combinations that never existed in nature. All in just the last few generations.

It's like asking a master woodworker to suddenly operate a computer. They'll try their best, but it's exhausting.

Your liver's been working overtime, constantly on high alert, preparing for the next chemical assault while desperately trying to extract real nutrition from food-like substances. This isn't failure—it's your body's incredible intelligence trying to keep you alive in an environment it was never designed for.

Your liver was meant to have breaks between jobs, even moments of fasting. Not drudging through constant sludge all day long.

You Are Literally What You Eat

Here's the most profound part: In seven years, every cell in your body will have turned over completely. Some cells regenerate faster than others, but all are new. Every seven years, you're a totally new person, though the habits of their surrounding cells keep us in equilibrium with the past.

What you eat today literally becomes tomorrow's blood, bones, and brain tissue. Your grocery list is more honest than your food diary. Those recurring purchases are the raw materials your brilliant body is trying to work with.

Let's look back to that quote by Thoreau: "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones."

While we can't completely create the blood and bones of ourselves, we do create that of the next generation. But we are literally putting in the materials that will become our bones today, and we can profoundly alter the bones of our offspring by what we eat and what we teach them to eat.

The Generation Learning the Truth

We are the first generation with enough data to understand what the last hundred years of food experimentation has cost us. We're living through the unintended consequences of wartime innovations, corporate profit motives, and well-meaning attempts to improve on nature.

Our great-grandparents didn't know that removing fiber from wheat could create blood sugar chaos. They didn't know that hydrogenated oils would create trans fats our bodies can't process. They were solving real problems—feeding people during wars, making food last longer, preventing starvation.

But now we have the evidence. We can see the health outcomes. We understand that our body's cravings for real butter, fresh vegetables, and food that grows from the earth aren't backwards thinking—they're ancient wisdom trying to guide us home.

My Story

I lost my mom when I was only seventeen years old. I spent my twenties eating convenience foods, working long hours, thinking I was too busy to cook. I felt tired, cloudy, carrying extra weight around my middle that I would spend hours at the gym working off. I felt the depression that came with the extra weight—not even that much, but enough for my own body to feel low about. I still would get a pat from the doctor saying, "Great job staying healthy."

Then I changed my food when I turned thirty, on a random cleanse as a birthday present to myself, and everything changed. Not my exercise routine. My food.

Color came back to my life. I had mental clarity that made me realize I'd been living under a foggy cloud. Before this, I would've said mental fog was a made-up thing. Now I know better. But nobody could have told this to me—I had to experience it for myself. It was like having a good night's sleep after a decade of insomnia.

And that stubborn weight melted away without me trying at all.

I still love to work out, but more for my mental state than anything. I get a high from it. I feel anxious without doing it. My body loves to run, but maybe around the block and not for miles at a time.

And the food was delicious. I wanted to scream everything I was learning from the rooftops.

My family thought I'd lost my mind until they started eating the same meals and experienced their own transformations. My dad's chronic joint pain disappeared. My sister's acne cleared up. It felt like a religious conversion because in many ways it was.

Food is a deeply personal experience.

It is easier to convert someone's religion than their food preferences, and we have history to back up that fact. Just look at the English language—a mutt blend of Latin and Germanic with French words of cuisine carrying higher reputation than the simple foods of German. We make high-class finished products with French names: gourmet, braised, flambé, out of the simple Germanic foods: apples, milk, and chicken.

The animals and simple food words were never converted, while the more impressive ones of the temporary overlords stuck in the language. We see this time and time again. Local food words are incredibly hard to change in a native population, no matter if the entire language and religion converts.

The Generational Gift: Building Tomorrow's Bodies Today

This isn't about you feeling better next week. The food you eat today becomes who you are tomorrow, literally. And cutting-edge epigenetics research from the last ten years shows us that your choices don't just affect you—they influence your neighbors and the people around you by your habits, but also how your children physically develop from before birth and how they'll experience life for themselves.

We're talking about bone structure, organ development, microbiome, immune system resilience, mental capacity, behavioral problems—all shaped by the nutritional environment you create and sustain in their growing bodies.

We have most control in infancy, but we can still change how our body heals and regenerates and ages. Every cell exists in one of two states: growth or defense. It is either growing or fighting. And if those cells are constantly fighting, you are not able to grow or heal, and you'll age faster.

What you choose to eat becomes your future self, but also your child's biological inheritance. It's something we can all reclaim, no matter how long forgotten.

If you could ask your parents to have done something to help your body form more correctly from the start, wouldn't you wish they had begun as soon as possible? What better gift could you give your children than conscious choices around food—building blocks for bodies ready to thrive in a world constantly after their attention and money?

Traditional cultures prepared both parents, mother and father, for months before conception and for years after, understanding that health creates health. We spend more time researching car seats than preparing our bodies to create the humans who will sit in them.

But here's what's revolutionary: It's not too late. It's never too late.

Whether you're planning for children, raising them now, or hoping to break generational patterns of poor health, every meal is an opportunity to choose vitality over survival, growth over defense, healing over sabotage.

The Freedom of Twelve

The solution isn't overwhelming yourself with exotic superfoods or completely rejecting all the foods you love. It's about making your existing twelve meals count.

We were not always so confused about food, and we don't have to be. There are simple methods to follow, mostly the mantra of naturally fed meats, organic vegetables, and fresh fruits—and the infinite combination of them rather than any limitation. It's about seeing the infinity of real food rather than the distractions of fake, addicting things that look like food.

It's about the most nutrients per bite, not temporary mouth pleasure. It's about the self-care of your cellular health, not your ego.

You're going to cook the same recipes thousands of times in your life, which is exactly why your grandparents' dishes were so good. They each knew a dozen recipes deeply, with the muscle memory that comes from repetition, refinement, and love.

The power isn't in learning complicated cuisine—that can be fun if you're ready for it. But it's in taking the comfort foods you already love—tacos, pizza, soups, breakfast bowls—and elevating them. Using frozen cauliflower crust instead of refined flour. Healing fats instead of inflammatory oils. Real vanilla instead of artificial flavoring made from pine cones and worse. Small changes that honor your preferences while revealing your deepest health.

Your Kitchen as Sacred Space

This book is your guide to food freedom. Not restriction, but the profound liberation that comes from understanding how your body actually works and choosing foods that make you feel powerful instead of depleted. So that you can come home from a hard day and eat something that lifts you up rather than holds you down.

Each recipe is a tool for transformation, a template you can adapt to your family's preferences, your heritage, your life—the beginning of food traditions worth passing down to children who will thank you for teaching them to crave health.

We can't wait for the food industry to change. We can't wait for someone making a bunch of money to say, "I don't want this money anymore." We can't wait for schools to teach real nutrition or for healthcare to focus on prevention.

We have to start in our own kitchens with our own families, showing the world how good we feel and look when we choose foods that actually love us back.

Our school lunch programs were created in a time of World War recruitment when young men were too skinny to enroll. Now they're too fat. We have the same problem of malnourishment in both cases. More toxic food does not equal health. And being fat is not something to be ashamed of, but it is a sign of poor inputs and metabolic and hormonal disruption.

This is the most empowering revolution you'll ever be a part of, and it starts with your next meal. We vote with our forks.

Welcome to Your Transformation

Welcome to the most delicious rebellion of your life.

Food will not solve every problem in life, but it will give you the strength to face them with clarity, energy, and hope. And food is something you can choose three times a day that can have immediate impact.

The twelve meals in this book are not meant to limit you. They're meant to free you—a simple roadmap you can return to when you feel lost, tired, tempted, or overwhelmed.

Start wherever you need: one swap at a time, or all at once. For me, it was all at once—thirty days that changed my life. For you, it may look different. What matters is that you begin.

In the following chapters, we'll step into the forest edge of your own body and learn to see what food truly is and what it's always been: connection, inheritance, life itself.

We will run through how to give yourself a simple detox like the one I did, to learn your own sensitivities and find out what makes you feel good. And then we will give you many examples of delicious food and why it is the best of what we have to work with.

The best place to start is to remember why you are reading this in the first place. What is your why? Changing your food habits is hard, and you will want to come back to that just in case you need to remember.

Let's cook.

—-

We need to recognize our collective power to change the American food system.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We all prefer different diets, and that’s ok, because we all believe in optimal nutrition. But the one thing we can all collectively oppose is the proliferation of “food-like substances” in our pantries (the fake food ingredients that our FDA allows businesses to market and sell to us).
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
But we’re not helpless! We actually hold the power to alter this course through consumer preference. Vote with your dollar. Large corporations that control our food supply will follow. Without this shift in consumer demand, companies will keep cranking out junk food for profit instead of being forced to focus on ingredient quality.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We all benefit from a healthier food system. We can use our superpowers for good — to raise awareness, and to make healthier food affordable and accessible. Make good choices today. ❤️

Introduction

"We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." —Thoreau

The Power of Twelve

Most families, on average, eat the same twelve dishes over and over again. We are creatures of habit, cycling through our comfort foods without realizing we're essentially programming our cells with the same messages thousands of times. But what are we telling ourselves, with that programming?

This book isn't about learning a thousand new recipes or becoming a completely different person overnight. It's about making those twelve meals you're already rotating actually count.

If you eat three times a day for twenty years, that's 22,000 chances to give your cells nourishment. Divide that by your twelve core recipes, and you'll eat each of those foundational meal about 2,000 times each in those 20 years. We often think we are eating something “just this once”, but this is telling us something bigger than that.

Each bite is either building cellular health or tearing it down. Either feeding your body the building blocks it craves or giving it more toxins to dispose of. Every step down the path of unconscious eating is like reprogramming yourself to crave things that will never truly satisfy you.

But here's the beautiful part: when you consciously choose those main twelve meals that truly serve you, in flavor and nutrients, everything changes. Your grandparents knew this—perfecting their own dozen recipes through decades of love and repetition until they could make them with her eyes closed. That's the muscle memory we're building, but with ingredients that actually heal. It’s about true self care, down to the cellular level.

How We Made Sugar Innocent

Before we go any further, let's be crystal clear: how we got here is not your fault.

We have made unhealthy food innocent by wrapping it in love and tradition. We have little girls selling a drug, door-to-door, disguised as Girl Scout cookies. We have grandmothers baking it into holiday pies and birthday cakes that remind us of love and childhood safety. We've turned our most trusted relationships into unwitting drug dealers, normalizing the distribution of addictive substances through love itself. It is literally easier to describe sugar as a drug than a food.

But let's zoom out for a second. This misunderstanding is only about 100 years old—barely a blink in human history, which goes back hundreds of thousands of years as humans, and millions of years as animals. It was the last 100 years through the invented products of the world wars that got us to where we are. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: "Dear Future Generations, Please excuse us as we were drunk on petroleum."

What was once a rare luxury, a treat, is now paraded around in baby bottles because "they like it." Coke literally in baby bottles in the poorest neighborhoods. We've created children who crave drug-like substances from birth, then surround them with those substances their entire lives and wonder why they struggle with food.

The Wrong Units: Why We're Measuring Food All Wrong

I'm an engineer, so let me put this in terms that make sense to me: we're measuring food with the wrong units.

We talk about calories as a source of energy, like speed instead of velocity. Speed can be in any direction. Velocity cares about the overall direction. This concept is exactly like a hampster wheel. We can be running, burning energy, but not getting anywhere.

Told another way, Calories are like measuring a car's performance by counting how many miles it travels, without caring whether it's actually going anywhere. Technically accurate, but practically useless.

A handful of M&Ms and a handful of nuts might have the same number of calories, but they create completely different outcomes in your body. A race of cats was tested over ten years just eating potato chips. They became infertile within 10 generations.

More practically, let’s think of calories like Amazon packages arriving at your door. What matters isn't how many boxes you arrive—it's what's inside those boxes that matters. Your bloodstream is the delivery system, looking for specific nutrients: amino acids for building proteins, minerals for bone health, vitamins for energy production, healthy fats for brain function.

And what is the wisdom for working out? Burn off those calories you just ate. Well, if you work out on poor fuel, what do you think happens to a designer sports car, when you fill it with the wrong oil? You wear yourself out.

The beautiful truth? Your body isn't broken. It's brilliantly designed. We just need to start sending it the right packages.

We need to start working again with nature’s wisdom to get us back to health.

Your Intelligent Animal Body

You are a very intelligent animal who learned to bypass your inner wisdom, but you're still fundamentally, beautifully animalistic. Your instincts have kept our species alive for millions of years.

Your rational mind—that part that reads nutrition labels and counts calories—is actually the smallest, newest part of your brain. It's like having a tiny CEO trying to manage a vast, ancient organization that has been successfully running operations for millions of years.

Your body carries the wisdom of generations who survived famines, celebrations, and seasons by understanding which foods heal and which foods harm. But we've created food-like substances that hijack the ancient pathways designed to keep you alive.

Your species has been studied so you can eat food constantly without feeling full. This is why you can eat 3,000 calories of processed food and still feel hungry an hour later, but 1,500 calories of real food leaves you satisfied for hours. Your body isn't counting calories—it's desperately searching for the nutrients it recognizes.

“Bet you can’t eat just one” shows us the addicting nature of our foods, designed to SELL, not for health.

There are no obese squirrels in the wild. Only in Central Park, where they have access to human food. That should tell us everything we need to know about our food system.

You are not weak for wanting the foods around us, you have been studied to crave foods that serve no health benefit.

Having Empathy for Your Brilliant Body

Right now, your body is performing at a miracle level that deserves our deepest respect.

We breathe without thinking, our heart pumps without break, our eyes scan without understanding how or why.

Your liver—one of your most intelligent and hardworking organs—has over 500 essential jobs that is performs simultaneously, while trying to protect you from substances that didn't exist when your genetic blueprint was written. Your liver even has its own memory. Every time you eat, your liver prepares specific enzymes based on patterns it remembers, working tirelessly to pull out any nutrients and neutralize any toxins in your diet. It starts doing this before you even realize you want to order that burger again, based on your past history. If someone were to interview your liver, what would it say about your diet?

And imagine the confusion: your liver evolved over millions of years to process foods from the earth, and suddenly—in just the last few generations—it's being asked to handle artificial colors, man made preservatives, and chemical combinations that never existed in nature.

It's like asking a master woodworker to suddenly operate a computer. They'll try their best, but it's exhausting.

Your liver has been working overtime, constantly on high alert, preparing for the next chemical assault while desperately trying to extract real nutrition from food-like substances. This isn't failure—it's your body's incredible intelligence trying to keep you alive in an environment, that to it- looks toxic. This is a world it was never designed for. Your liver was meant to have breaks between jobs, even moments of fasting, not drudging through constant sludge all day long.

Here's the most profound part: in seven years, every cell in your body will have turned over completely. Some cells regenerate faster than others, but all are new every 7 years. You are a totally new person. But the habits of the surrounding cells keep us in an equilibrium with the past.

What you eat today literally becomes tomorrow's blood, bones, and brain tissue. Your grocery list is more honest than your food diary—those recurring purchases are the raw materials your brilliant body is trying to work with.

Let’s look back to that quote by Thoreau: "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones." You put in your body that which will become your blood and bones. And you physically create and form the habits of the next generation.

The Generation Learning the Truth

We are the first generation with enough data to understand what the last 100 years of food experimentation has cost us. We are the first generation expected to live a shorter lifespan than our parents. Our poor food choices have caught up to us.

We're living through the unintended consequences of wartime innovations, corporate profit motives, and well-meaning attempts to "improve" on our nature.

Our great-grandparents didn't know that removing fiber from wheat would create blood sugar chaos. They didn't know that hydrogenating oils would create trans fats our bodies can't process. They were solving real problems—feeding people during wars, making food last longer, preventing starvation.

But now we have the evidence. We can see the health outcomes. We understand that our bodies' cravings for real butter, fresh vegetables, and foods that grow from earth aren't backwards thinking—they're ancient wisdom trying to guide us home.

We live in an upresedented time of freedom and access. Access to information as never before, and the freedom to talk about it, and act on it.

I lost my mom when I was only 17 years old. I spent my twenties eating convenience foods, working long hours, thinking I was too busy to cook. I felt tired, cloudy, carrying extra weight around my tummy that I would spend hours at the gym working off. I felt the depression that came with the extra weight, not even much, but enough for my own body to feel low about. I still would get a pat from the doctors, saying, “great job staying healthy”.

Then I changed my food when I turned 30 years old- on a random cleanse as a birthday present to myself - and everything changed. Not my exercise routine—my food changed. I no longer had to work off that middle, or run my knees out, mile after mile. But most importantly, color came back to my life. I had a mental clarity that made me realize I had been living under a foggy cloud. Before this, I would have said “mental fog” was a made up thing. Now I know better. But nobody could have told this to me, I had to experience it for myself. It was like having a good nights sleep after a decade of insomnia. And that stubborn weight melted away without me trying all. I still love to work out, but more for my mental state than anything, and I just like it.

The food was delicious. Is delicious. I wanted to scream everything I was learning from the rooftops.

My family thought I'd lost my mind until they started eating the same meals and experienced their own transformations. My dad’s chronic joint pain disappeared. My sister's skin cleared up. It felt like a religious conversion because in many ways, it was.

Food is a deeply personal experience. It is easier to convert someone’s religion than their food preferences. And we have history to back up that fact. Just look at the English language- a mutt blend of Latin and Germanic, with the french words of cuisine with a higher reputation than the simple foods of German. We make high class finished products with french names: gourmet braised flambe, out of the simple germanic foods of apples, milk and chicken. The animals and simple food words were never converted, while the more “impressive” ones of the temporary overlords stuck in the English language. We see this time and time again, local food words are incredibly hard to change in a native population, no matter if the entire language and rhetoric and religion is converted.

The Generational Gift: Building Tomorrow's Bodies Today

This isn't just about you feeling better next week. The food you eat today becomes who you are tomorrow—literally. And cutting-edge epigenetics research, from just the last 10 years, shows us that your choices don't just affect you; they influence your neighbors and the people around you by your habits, but also how your children physically develop from before birth, and how they'll experience life for themselves.

We're talking about bone structure, organ development, microbiome and immune system resilience, mental capacity, behavioral problems—all shaped by the nutritional environment you create and sustain in their growing bodies.

You can see your food as a constant wash of either good or bad chemicals. We have to constantly look at the state of things, but overtime, water shapes even stone. The chemical composition of that constant stream creates who we are. While we have most control in infancy, we can still change how our body heals and regenerates and ages.

Every cell exists in one of two states: growth or defense. Green or red. It is either growing, or fighting. And if those cells are constantly fighting, you are not able to grow, or heal. And you will age faster. What you choose to eat becomes your future self, but also your child's biological inheritance. It is a wealth that cannot be squandered in a single generation. And it is something we can all reclaim, no matter how long forgotten.

Traditional cultures prepared both parents- mother and father- for months before conception, and for months and years after- understanding that health creates health. We spend more time researching car seats than preparing our bodies to create the humans who will sit in them.

But here's what's revolutionary: it's not too late. It is never too late to learn something and turn things around. Whether you're planning for children, raising them now, or hoping to break generational patterns of poor health, every meal is an opportunity to choose vitality over survival, growth over defense. Healing over sabatoge.

The Freedom of Twelve

The solution isn't overwhelming yourself with exotic superfoods or completely rejecting all the foods you love. It's about making your existing twelve meals count.

We were not always so confused about food, and we don’t have to be. There are simple methods to follow: mostly the mantra of naturally fed meats, organic veggies, and fresh fruits, and the infinite combination of them, rather than any limitation. It’s about seeing the infinity of real food, rather distractions of fake addicting things that look like food. It’s about the most nutrients per bite, not temporary mouth pleasure. It is about the self care of your cellular health, not your ego.

You're going to cook the same recipes thousands of times in your life—which is exactly why your grandparents' dishes were so good. They each knew a dozen recipes deeply, with the muscle memory that comes from repetition, refinement, and love.

The power isn't in learning complicated cuisine. That can be fun if you’re ready for it. But it's in taking the comfort foods you already love—tacos, pizza, soups, breakfast bowls—and elevating them. Using frozen cauliflower crust instead of refined flour. Healing fats instead of inflammatory oils. Real vanilla instead of artificial flavoring made out of pine cones and chemicals.

Small changes that honor your preferences while revealing your deepest health.

Your Kitchen as Sacred Space

This book is your guide to food freedom—not restriction, but the profound liberation that comes from understanding how your body actually works and choosing foods that make you feel powerful instead of depleted.

So that you can come home from a hard day and eat something that lifts you up, rather than holds you down.

Each recipe is a tool for transformation. A template you can adapt to your family's preferences, your heritage, your life. The beginning of food traditions worth passing down to children who will thank you for teaching them to crave health.

We can't wait for the food industry to change. We can’t for someone making a bunch of money to say “I don’t want this money anymore.” We can't wait for schools to teach real nutrition or for healthcare to focus on prevention. We have to start in our own kitchens, with our own families, showing the world how good we feel and look when we choose foods that actually love us back.

Our school lunch programs were created in a time of world war recruitment when young men were too skinny to enroll. Now they are too fat. We have the same problem of malnourishment in both cases. More toxic food does not equal health. And being fat is not something to be ashamed of- but it is a sign of poor inputs and metabolic and hormonal disruption.

This is the most empowering revolution you'll ever be part of, and it starts with your next meal. We vote with our forks.

Welcome to your transformation. Welcome to the most delicious rebellion of your life.

Let's cook.