Caulikween Instagram Stories

Inspirational

I believe we need to study and understand ourselves, from the fuel we put into our bodies, to the environment we place ourselves in, and our response to it all.

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Expand that view to include our interactions and impact, not only on our own bodies, but our minds, our ecosystem, immediate world, the greater population, plants and animals, environment, and our successors. Where do we draw the line of where we start and end?

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Can you really draw a line around the forest edge, a line that’s constantly interacting with more beyond? Do you include that weed, that bird flying in and out, that raindrop about to fall? Do you count the air breathed, the view from a window miles away, the memory once gone, or the story of its existence?

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We can draw a line in the sand to say this is my world, my home, the space where my impact ends, but how deep into the ground do you go, how high? Are we more than that which exists within our skin barrier? How does our energy change the room? How do we influence the air and interact with those around us? How far into yourself do you look, how far into your mind where your entire universe dwells? What impact have we imprinted onto others in the few years we’ve lived?

We do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.

Kauai, the garden island, the oldest Hawaiian mound of volcanic earth with the most rainfall and cleanest air in the world.

Where natives assumed the gods surfed, and curious sailors watched as locals rode the waves as the most ecstatic/happy and FIT people they’d ever seen.

The land was divided in slices from the center, communities each having access to the fresh streams from the mountain tops, through the lush forests, and open fishing at the ocean’s edge. Each community was self sufficient.

Travel back even further to the canoes carrying carefully picked and packaged plants to these mounds of volcanic rock. Ancient Polynesians riding in ancient canoes carrying about 20 people and all the plants they needed to survive crossing the mighty ocean, into the unknown.

Fast forward to the modern influences of “civilization”:

single crop farming that destroyed native farm land- and their way of life

️ the missionaries that stole their best land, claiming to be there to “save their souls”, signing treaties the locals couldn’t read

and an eventual dependence on a modern food system that instills diabetes and all the other fun things modern doctors have no answers for except the lifelong pills they are trained to pass out.

But hey- we got sugar plantations and pineapples out of it right?

We found our favorite places in the farmers markets, on organic farms, and the natural playgrounds of beaches and sacred gardens and secret forests. We tried to stay away from the touristy spots, where the contrast in health of kinds of people it attracted and quality of food was in stark difference to those who know how to play in the modern hunt for real food.

Learn about ways of living older than the last 5k years, focus on those that LASTED for even longer and passed on ways of living that helped bring bounty to the earth- rather than destroying it.

Learn about people that thrived before we started thinking we were smart for dominating others and stripping the land of its nutrients. They were the wise ones we need now.

Why did I choose a natural childbirth?

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You know you did something amazing when you shock all the nurses and doctors. We were very lucky to have no tearing, no swelling, and I was able to walk immediately. My baby’s APGAR scores were 8 & 9.

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We think: is she crazy? does she love pain to go unmedicated? But my pain was over as soon as I saw my baby. Most modern births have much MORE pain in the form of recovery.

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Birth stories need to be talked about, especially prep for the calmest entrance for your baby. The truth is: DECLINING very popular hospital procedures can SAVE mom from a lot of pain. But a different kind of mental/physical prep is involved. We need to re-learn techniques for better outcomes for mom and baby.

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How does it work?

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Pain is a trigger to react, and mom feeling sensations helps move her baby out more efficiently! A typical modern birth means restricting movement, being hooked up to 8+ iv’s/sensors, strapped in one position, all chances of tearing.

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Mom has endorphins (natural pain killers) that get BLOCKED with pitocin (most common fake hormone used in hospitals). Pitocin is meant to speed up contractions, but makes them more intense AND more painful. This makes her reach for meds and epidurals that have their own side effects, SLOW down labor, all chance of c-section (bad for baby’s gut).

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Biologically, the uterus is the only muscle that can open AND close at the same time, to push baby out or hold baby in. When stressed during labor, your muscle tries to do both, and THAT hurts. Our main job is to stay calm to ACTIVELY prevent pain.

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Sometimes interventions are needed, but that should only be 10% of the time. And they are always available.

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Navigating a natural birth in a hospital was difficult, mainly bc of outdated protocol. The science is there, but policies have not been triggered to react. SO LET’S TALK. We should know going natural is an amazing, scientific AND biologically smart, EMPOWERING option.

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Every human has to be birthed. The process matters, and we should talk about the data to allow for easiest births for moms and babies.

Meals at home have become pretty easy.

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Most of ours can be summed up as:

• homemade oatmeal w hemp milk

• organic farm veggie deliveries

• pasture raised meats/bones from butcher

• snacks of nuts and seeds and berries and hummus

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I’ve never eaten simpler or healthier in my life! (No vending machine temptations )

You can’t change the world but you can make a corner of it pretty nice. -Dave Chapelle

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We can restore a little bit of paradise every day.

“How can you make sure this beautiful planet is pristine enough for our great grandchildren 7 generations down to go hug a really old redwood tree, swim in clean water and be able to open their mouths and drink while they’re swimming?” -Kiss the Ground. And can we forget the day we could pick food straight from the ground?

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What can we do today so our children can flourish in the abundance we create (rather than deplete)? If we stop getting distracted by shiny objects or clickbait maybe we can start to see what is really important.

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Right now, more than half the rivers and lakes in the US are too contaminated to swim or go fishing. On a calm day, poop dumped from cruise ships washes right up to our ocean’s shores (as a kid, we swam right next to it, before beaches closed down later in the day). We do things we think are okay, until we realize they are not (like dump sewage into water and chemicals onto food). But there are many people trying to do something about it. What can you do? For now, start learning, and vote w your fork.

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• Watch KISS THE GROUND, or BIGGEST LITTLE FARM, FED UP, FANTASTIC FUNGI

• Read DRAWDOWN, or DEEP NUTRITION or THE DORITO EFFECT, & the OMNIVORES DILEMMA

• Listen to podcasts by DR MARK HYMAN and ESSENTIALS OF HEALTHY LIVING

• Learn who is getting voted into your local elections, find out if they care about food/pollutions, etc, and if they don’t, WRITE TO THEM

• Or just google contaminated water/glyphosate/EMF exposure/pesticides in your area/sustainable farming/soil health... and go down your own rabbithole to learn your own connection to health, nutrition, soil & sustainability.

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Start anywhere so our kids and grandkids can enjoy a clean world like we once could.

Childhood obesity is a prickly situation. What are other countries actually doing about it?

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In Chile, over HALF of all 6 year olds are obese, and we are not far behind. This is not just cute baby fat, it cuts their life expectancy down 10-20 years. This is something our doctors did not see when they were in training 30 years ago (meaning they are not trained for it). Diet is the precursor to all our crippling chronic diseases we seem so stumped by. Obesity makes our overall immunities weaker (and a sign of malnutrition), and we all foot the bill for higher health costs.

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It took us Americans 4 years of intense pressure to put “additional sugar” onto our confusing food labels. In the same amount of time, Chile passed food labeling laws that:

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Banned junk food ads btwn 6am and 10pm

Removed cartoon advertisers from junk food packages and kid’s web sites (ie.Tony the Tiger)

Put warning labels on toxic foods

Removed the selling of junk food in schools

Increased soda tax to 18%

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And they are already seeing a huge change in behavior. Kids are telling parents, “Don’t buy these foods because the teachers say they are not healthy if they have the black logo.”

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All over the world, coca cola is cheaper than water. Sugary drinks are one of the PROVEN causes of obesity (but only one small part of the problem). Cereals and white bread raise your blood sugar more than sugar. But adding 18% tax to sugary drinks brings sales down by 25%. US food lobbyists spend MILLIONS to prevent ANY kind of food labeling or marketing restrictions. Coca Cola makes 20% of its revenue directly from food stamp programs (TRILLIONS of tax dollars from SNAP), increasing social disparity further by making poor people sicker and more addicted through targeted advertising. Our policies make it more convenient to give toxic “foods” to our babies, making them calorie zombies a little earlier every generation.

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Does our country have the guts to stand up the toxic food industry in the same way?

Learning what foods trigger you is such a science! I finally ordered a home test: A single finger prick, mail back, and results in a week. Some things I knew, others I was denying. Without a test, you can go SUPER clean for a month, then try out different foods, 3 days at a time. But I’ve never been able to do it fully.

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Food sensitivities are much harder to pinpoint than allergies, which are basically all out attacks to certain foods. The wrong foods trigger our bodies to react, or even block other nutrients (if you DO eat the ones you need). The constant triggers show up as skin issues, weight gain/loss, migraines, tummy issues, energy problems, sleep issues, all the subtle things that can really mess you up. They also tend to be the kind of problems most conventional doctors don’t know what to do with (aside from maybe write a RX bandaid of a drug, forever).

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I showed mild reactions to 6 of the 96 foods tested, while M showed high reactions to half of the list, basically everything he eats!

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When EVERYTHING you eat gives you an abnormal reaction, it means your gut lining may have tiny ruptures, allowing large pieces of food into your blood stream. Your body sees the large particles as foreign invaders, and creates an immune response.

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Many sensitivities can be healed in a few weeks or months, just by avoiding the specific foods (for you) long enough for your gut to heal. Everything calms down, and things can finally be broken down and absorbed as tiny, important nutrients.

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On the surface, it can be hard to notice your triggers. If you are always inflamed, your body may react to more things, and your typical “allergies” are way worse. You can have 6 pack abs and never get sick, while your body is fighting something for decades internally (until it eventually runs out of steam and shows up as a “surprise” disease w no typical cure). It’s amazing what normal feels like when you remove the right foods. This cost $150 from @everlywell, but I feel like it should be standard in healthcare!

We know veggies are good for us. We roll our eyes at the idea of them, like DUH. But once you know why our bodies love them so much, you understand why it’s so important to eat more, as fresh as possible, and why go organic. I pay extra to keep stuff OFF my plate, to keep poisons OFF my food, and to get more nutrients per bite.

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Veggies are jam packed with all KINDS of nutrients and phytochemicals beyond our beloved fat, carb, calorie or protein counts. We eat the compounds the plants makes to survive. Especially persistent weedy plants plunge their deep roots way down into the earth to pull up nutrients. That tenacity makes incredible medicine.

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The wild plants produce more good stuff because they have to fight off bugs, resist weather and competition. They produce extra nutrients so they are strong enough to survive. They transform that soil into something that is much more beneficial to us than straight up dirt. We rely on them for essential nutrients we couldn’t get alone. The diversity of wild life gives us all the nutrients we ever need, without having to understand complex biochemistry to know how to feed ourselves. To us, fresh food just tastes really good. Pretty brilliant.

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Then you can think about where those organic/wild plants are pulling their nutrients from. The little microbes in natural wild soil have billions of living organisms in every teaspoon of earth, all interacting with each other and crucial fungi, deeply connected with all the other wild things in the ground. Imagine how different that is than a tsp of isolated potting mix?

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Putting pesticides and herbicides on foods stops them from getting strong. It makes life easier for them, allowing them be lazier, making far less nutrients. Without the struggle, they don’t produce as much of the good stuff. Not to mention that means they also are getting sprayed crazy stuff requiring farmers to wear haz mat suits, not really something I want to put in my mouth.

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I love that we can learn all about this with access to all the modern science that backs things that we already just know to be true, like more nutrients when cared for properly.

Once upon a time, we had the best three nights of sleep in our lives, under the brightest stars, exhausted and nestled between waterfalls in the deepest canyon paradise. Just a year ago today I said yes to all the adventures with you for our forever.

It’s easy to miss the medicine around us.

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Plantain leaves relieve bug bites or cuts, lining trails where needed the most. Many of our most nutritious “weeds” have aggressive roots that pull up incredible medicine from the earth. Many were brought in by immigrants, treasured for their nutrition or other perk for generations.

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Our worlds are full of modern conveniences that allow you to focus on what you want, not needing to pay attention to how your food is grown, how your medicine was picked. Once you give away all your powers to someone else, you no longer need to know how to feed yourself without their help. You don’t know how to take care of yourself if you get sick. You instead let someone else pull something from the ground, add their chemicals so they can patent it and call it their own, and sell it as a drug. Call it a cure. Flip a switch and it’s there, that’s all you need to know.

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We are all one major pause away from noticing how deeply we are connected to our food, our medicine, our energy sources, our intertwined world. We go off to study some specialized field, but lack the final touch that brings it all together.

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We are all on the same team, all a single complex living breathing organism, just as the petri dish of YOU is made up of a bunch of disconnected living cells working in harmony (or disharmony sometimes) together. One animal’s breath is another plant’s fuel. One kingdom’s waste is another’s food. There is a balance and harmony that is so beautiful when we can connect it all together.

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The first step in collaboration is recognizing the other players.

You don’t have to eat as if you live in captivity.

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You don’t. Even within quarantine, while so many are eating “comfort” meals covered in “flavorings”, chemicals, and preservatives, others are doing good things for their bodies.

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If people started eating real food, started EXPECTING it in their pantries, the food system would be forced to shift. Effort would be made to create more space on shelves (and on our soils) to make more of the stuff we as a species could eat that promote the strongest expression of our cells, our SELVES. The only thing that can ever make that shift is more people like you and me CHOOSING to eat real foods. Then, lots of other people will shift to meet an increasing demand. Imagine all the space taken up to create corn syrup and the top 3 crops that promote dis-ease that could now be used for real food that makes people HEALTHIER w every bite.

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So many people NORMALLY eat stuff made to sit on shelves for years. News flash... our food is SUPPOSED to go bad. That’s the way life works. Emergency food is great... for just that: emergencies. There is no reason to be eating preservative laden “foods” everyday when fresh stuff is available to us. We live with more accessibility to any kind of food in history, but our agricultural system is set up for replication of old world theme of greatest caloric gain. We perpetuate a certain kind of food leading to most money spent on the worst health outcomes. Sure, it’s darn convenient to eat the popular foods; to follow the patterns laid out for us. How do you NOT get tempted by billboards boasting the tastiest creations covered with more and more “flavorings”, tricking our taste buds to thinking it is made of real food, (as replicas of flavors found in nature). But we can do better. Eating like the Normal person around you gives you obesity and every kind of chronic “dis-ease”, effecting 2 in 3 people! That is NOT my normal.

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Imagine if you allowed your body to eat REAL food for a month, as opposed to the franken-food SNACKS that fill the grocery stores?

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Put down the emergency food. Pick up something real.

I love to think of food as the base ingredients and finding out what it took to get them to my plate. How we can deconstruct our familiar meals, and combine them in new ways, without any chemicals or preservatives?

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But don’t forget that first part! Build your energy to the point you can’t help but share it.

You have the power to wake up feeling alive, engaged, energetic. You can set yourself up for the best sleep, best fuel, best thoughts to build the strongest existence in your power. Give your body the best inputs so it KNOWS you are safe, strong, and thriving, so it can do ITS best work at creating YOU.

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Your body is a whole other being with a mind of it’s own (Infinite processes you don’t control). It relies on signals from you to tell it what the environment outside is like.

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What does this internal being without eyes use to know how to respond? It uses how you are FEELING to decide how to react. It uses the quality of the air, the food, the water coming in to decide what hormones to supply or neurotransmitters to engage. It uses the amount of nutrients coming in to decide if you need to pack on pounds due to missing building blocks, even if you are mindlessly shoveling in the calories. It speaks in quality of thought, in light, in energy (and these are just the ones we know about).

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You help your body choose to be in defense or growth mode. It is in growth mode where you thrive.

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Every email is not life threatening, but your body doesn’t know that, it just sees your cortisol increasing, heart beat rising. Every trigger does not require your immediate reaction in the modern world. So you have to keep reminding it, hey slow down there, we are fine.

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You can learn to train your body and mind in a way to feel your best in any given moment. And if you grasp it for a moment, you still have to work to keep it. Sometimes you have remind yourself to ignore the triggers around you and come back to that [loving, safe, grounding] place intentionally, almost constantly until you return to this calm place without thinking. That is the goal.

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You know what it feels like to have strong, good energy. Learn to optimize yourself so you can find those things that sets your soul on fire. Treat yourself right so you can do what you want in the world. Treat your body like the living, breathing, loving creature that it is so you can feel and look your best, and do your best work.

Can you eat too many vegetables?

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Mother Nature does not want you to eat everything in sight. A mega predator eats everything to exhaustion, to extinction. But nature tries to keep everything in balance. You were designed to get full. We are the brilliant creatures who found ways to KEEP eating, to bypass our brains saying stop so we can keep eating for pleasure, only to find ourselves fat and sick and wondering why.

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You don’t need to count out your broccoli stems, unless you like doing that kind of thing. WHY WOULD YOU CAP YOURSELF ON NUTRIENTS? Just eat what’s good for you, and you will GET FULL. Eat real food, aka things grown from the earth, (before we add all the chemicals), and your body will naturally tell you to stop. You get full on real food.

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We love to say “Eat in Moderation”. But most of the visible “food” in America was DESIGNED TO BE DEVOURED. You can’t have just one bite, just like a drug addict can’t have just one hit of cocaine.

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Our food is packaged, covered in a coating of “flavors” and chemicals, all designed to keep you coming back for more. It’s a great business model. KEEP EATING ME. Billions of dollars spent in flavor science and brain sensory testing just to fill you with toxins in every bite. No nutrition. No benefit to your body, only negative physiological inflammation and dependence. That temporary superficial pleasure of taste quickly converts to swarms of silent inflammation, while you still WANT MORE infinately. Your body is being shoveled with burden of MORE toxins to remove, creating disease pathways in many subtle ways (including making you fat and brain foggy in the short term).

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We can spend hours of our lives pouring over remedial unnecessary details (like counting calories), creating (and advertising for) billion dollar companies that make people sick with fake “foods” and billions more on the medications that they require in their wake. Or we can enjoy real food and move on with our lives.

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Bitter melon pictured here. The bitterer the better. That stuff makes you pucker, and kickstarts digestion to better absorb everything. I dare you to try to eat too much.

Even at the farmers markets, all the food trucks still sell tempting fried #yellowfoods. It’s still rare to find fresh, well-cooked veggies.

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I wish someone would create a grill stand where you can just bring your freshly cut veggies and grill them on the spot. Business venture anyone?

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Most of my meals become several orders of the fancy appetizers. But at least they are on the menu ! And inspiration for meals at home.

Hold the toast, extra veggies please!

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I don’t want complicated. I just want basic foods. I want my food as close to being picked from the [untainted] ground/vine as possible.

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Someone asked me what kind of food I eat. I want simple foods. I don’t want pesticides, i don’t want antibiotics in my food. I want the least processed, most naked foods. And just because it’s simple, doesn’t mean has to be raw. I still prefer lightly cooked (which helps break it down for you to digest better). Simple also doesn’t mean bland. Real ingredients have so much natural flavor they don’t need to be masked with a “Dorito-like” coating.

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Those easily available foods everyone is eating are not “easy” by any means. They are not easy on your body, your health, or the environment. It took so much effort, energy, ingenuity to get them to look and taste the way they do. And it took tons of food subsidies and government policy to make them cheap as they are.

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No sprinkles of chemicals please. No genetically engineered out flavors so the food can hold the most pests and herbicides. Even non-gmo wheat is sprayed roundup (that kills your healthy gut bugs) to help it dry faster for harvest. Hold the foods with years of flavor testing to be fakes of the real thing (anything called “flavoring” is not a real food). I don’t want foods that took 3 factories to make. I don’t want refined sugar, refined flours. I don’t want manipulated, man-handled Frankenstein foods. If that makes me high maintenance to be so basic, fine with me.

What are your favorite go-to recipes on crazy busy days? Broth saves me on those days I get home so late to go straight to bed.

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A few simple, well-established habits (like weekend bone broth making) got me through this week much easier.

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Working out: luckily I was able to sneak in 2 lunch workouts, only by making it a priority, practiced in prior weeks/months/years. Membership right next to office, towel, hairdryer, shoes and shower stuff all ready to go, left in my work locker room.

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Breakfast: When I could, made a habitual smoothie.

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Lunch: little note... I HATE microwaves. I’d rather eat food cold. So I bought myself a little electric single serve sauté pot to leave at work. I bought it as a gift for myself over Christmas, $20 online, and LOVING it! I’ve had 3+ people I don’t know ask if they can just watch me make something. I pick up some pre-chopped veggies at Trader Joe’s, coconut oil, and kale, and cook it down. IT SMELLS SO GOOD. And takes me minutes. Warm, super healthy. Super happy here. Great for days you pretty much stuck inside.

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Dinner: honestly just keeping these super light. I make that broth on the weekends, and freeze in little cubes for easy defrosting! A couple days I grabbed an organic, (super low sugar) nut bar from vending machine, and heated up some bone broth and/or tea for my trek home. I want my digestion to be super efficient on days like this, and want to finish eating around 6, before I head for commute home. If I waited till I got home, I’d literally be eating in bed. That’s basically one of the worst things you could do for sleep.

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Set yourself up for success. If you’ve got some time, learn to make your life easy so you have brain space for those crazy moments that are bound to happen sometimes!

An invitation to stumble.

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Most of us don’t notice the sleep walk, the dance of our subconscious through the patterns of our lives.

We have a conscious mind that we barely use. Most of our thoughts and actions are those we’ve experienced before, usually many times before, and we become so comfortable that we never question if there’s any other way. We add in new habits every once in a while, so we know we have the capacity to grow/to change, but we hardly flex that muscle.

Each of the days of our lives is like a wave of the ocean. Day to day we don’t notice much difference, but slight changes in tide can dramatically change the shoreline. Knowing this power of pattern, notice the habits you’ve fallen into. Make a pattern of the behaviors you want to keep. Notice the patterns of the people who inspire you.

The alternative, to never question your comforts, to never stumble, means to constantly replay and embody the visions of someone else.

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We can go deeper, and realize, yes, there is this world of form but we don’t have to be limited by the way this world has been laid out for us.

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We can do things differently. We can begin to deconstruct everything we think we should be, all these myths we’ve followed and the institutions we’ve been busied by, and create our own reality in that universe.

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We keep embodying labels and hold onto them bc we believe that’s who we are, who we need to be, moving away from fluidity by holding ourselves to these roles. We open our boxes of food and could care less where it came from. We allow anything into our bodies or minds because it’s too hard to rethink anything different. We listen to a story and forget to ask WHY that’s the story they chose to tell, and we forget why we ever chose to listen.

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We want so hard to be something, but there’s a trap. I WANT to be a good (blank), someone else’s version of something, instead of just being present, instead of growing into your own free thought and aligning yourself with what feels right to you. Carve out the life, the body, YOU want.

What are the easiest ways to feel your best? Eat more veggies and play out in nature more! The latest research comes back to getting yourself to a calm state as much as possible for your body to function properly!

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Get out in nature at least once a month. Breathing natural plant terpenes and essential oils (just floating around wild trees) amplifies healthy red blood cell count AND activity for up to a month. (Boosting immunity and NK cells that naturally kill cancer cells!)

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Eat the rainbow (of vegetables). Walk the produce aisle and pick one of every color for dinner. (Get both green veggies AND green leafies for totally different bioactive compounds)

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Fill each plate with 75% veggies. Strive for 5 cups of mixed veggies a day, 27 different kinds a week.

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Eat organic if you can! A California farmer last year was able to sue Monsanto for pesticides causing cancer (by killing the good gut bugs in your stomach, not necessarily an immediate toxin). Gut imbalance is the start to most of our common chronic dis-ease.

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Eat until 80% full (allow your body to break down old stuff in there). Make sure to once a day! If not, that should be Mission Critical.

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Start noticing what foods bother you. Food sensitivities can have all kinds of strange effects, including mood swings, headaches, seasonal allergies, etc.

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Do something you love to do, for no other reason than you just like it (create calm and flow)

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Walk 10k steps a day, sweat 2-3x a week to release cortisol AND help body detox naturally, and circulate blood more regularly.

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Get your sleep right, and most other things fall in place! Tips? Sexy time helps you sleep! No electronics or food an hour before bed. Digestion takes a LOT of energy, taken away from recovery. Electronics can mean harmful light to your eyes, over-stimulation, and microwave radiation.

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Put your phone on airplane mode when not in use (and get laptop off your lap when on wifi or 4G). Use external headphones when on a call. Radiation close to your body disrupts your little cells that mess with your body in really weird ways.

Is it possible to stay in love with someone forever? Leave it up to a stem cell biologist to come up with scientifically studied theory on love. We can learn to understand our brain chemistry to control our own destinies. You CAN stay madly in love forever. And you can have way more benefit by being with that person longer than the initial chemical induced blissful moments. Love doesn’t dwindle with age, it gets stronger (if you allow it to). We can learn to trust (selectively) those in our lives so we are not only madly in love, we feel safe and deeply cared for at a cellular level.

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Why does our body make these love chemicals anyway? What does it mean to be [physically, energetically] in love? How can we stay content with our loved ones? With ourselves?

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We all fall into infinite biological processes that run as programs in the subconscious background. We are one of the few living things on the planet (but not alone) with the ability to see our behaviors and go in manual mode to change them. We still get stuck in auto pilot MOST of the time. But we can deliberately choose to be the humans we want to be. We can grow, learn, CHANGE, adapt... and we can be CONTENT with the body, soul, mind that we were given, knowing that change will always come. We can learn to make CONSCIOUS choices, so when our autopilot is running, we trust it’s running the programs we want it to run, not replaying bad versions of the past we’ve seen in others growing up.

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It takes work, but you can wake up every morning with the life you want to be living. We can model ourselves after anyone we know or don’t know. We are the masters of our own destiny. We create the lives we want to be in. We create the BODIES we want to be in. We attract the good in others we choose to have around us. We are the thoughts in our minds. We manifest that which we think about. Phew. Heavy, huh? Re: #thehoneymooneffect by @brucelipton

Looking for some healthy, beautiful, easy Thanksgiving dishes (desserts too!)?

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Don’t forget how striking and deliciously simple roasted veggies can be! Check out my Thanksgiving page for some inspiration. I just came up with my shopping list for the week, and realized I don’t need a crazy fancy recipe. If all I can do is run through the produce aisle and stack all the random veggies I can, just roasting them will be delicious. One big pile of roasted garlicky broccoli, or carrots, or onions, or [fill in the blank] would be incredible. Let your inner 5 year old run through the produce aisle picking one veggie of every color and learn what to do w it. :)

Working out isn’t just about losing or gaining a couple pounds, it’s about taking back control of your mind. You can move your body to change a stuck mental mode and literally shake off anxious energy. You can use those adrenalin and cortisol hormones your body thought you needed and actually go for a run.

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Our body runs in two modes: rest&digest or fight/flight. We can’t be in both sympathetic and parasympathetic at the same time. I like to call it red or green states. When triggered, our body puts us in the red so we can respond quickly to a threat. All this happens before we have a chance to know what scared us. But we have the ability to calm it down.

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I’ve noticed when some trigger sets me off, my body wants to stay in that angry space. 10 minutes later I can ask myself, am I still really upset about that? An hour? Your rational mind and monkey mind look to find excuses to stay in that red zone when our bodies haven’t flushed out all the hormones we just made. But you don’t need to run away. Pause, pay attention, breath. I’m not in danger, I just got pissed off, or surprised. I don’t need that extra cortisol and adrenaline, my legs don’t need extra blood to run away, I need a moment to let all that calm down so I can be rational. And if I have the chance, yes go run! Use those hormones in the way they were meant to be used. But we don’t always have that luxury in the moment.

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You actually can’t digest your food when you’re in the red. It’s in the green zone that we do the hard work to take in nutrients, digest, heal, make babies, dream. Learn to bring yourself back to green a moment faster every time. And if we can, find a way to use that energy so it doesn’t build up in a stationary body.

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We like to think of working out as a way to get rid of calories, as an excuse to eat that extra slice, a way of losing weight or building muscle. But I use it as a way to burn up that extra anxious energy. If I’m really upset, nothing works better for me than going for a run, to let my body move the way it was expecting to.

Every once in a while, I still hear it. Outdated advice of recent past: Moderation is key. Calorie in, calorie out. And more recently: There is no good or bad food.

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In other words: Go easy on yourself, but stay on that hamster wheel.

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Eff that.

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Saying, “have one Pringle” that was designed as “bet you can’t eat just one” won’t work. And we can’t just work it off. Every bite sets off thousands of reactions that don’t reverse with excercise.

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We all need proteins, fats and carbs, and there ARE good and bad versions of them all:

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Proteins: easily available meat, full of injections and antibiotics, is not good for one or any THING. But there are clean (and better treated) versions from animals AND plants that our body craves and needs.

Fats: Overly-processed, cheap and most easily available fats (canola and vegetable oils) basically create havoc inside our cells, while Omega 3’s are amazing for us.

Carbs: All veggies are carbs, and we want as many as we can get. On the other hand, those simple carbs: cereal and sugar and alcohol are broken down into sugar inside your body, basically toxic in the amounts we eat.

Calories are just a blanket unit of energy, basically a worthless number when talking about food. We need to care about the KIND of calorie.

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And quantity? If you eat the foods for your BODY (not your manipulated taste buds), you become satisfied. When your tummy is happy, you don’t need to overeat. If our healthy gut bugs are in balance at a cellular level, we can focus our energy on anything else. Bad gut bugs crave sugar, and man, do they let you know it.

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Our bodies are pretty amazing and can survive on very little for very long. We can even survive on just one thing (ppl survived on sweet potatoes for decades after WWII). Our current problem is an overload of junk. But over a lifetime, it just won’t do any of us very well to have every option (healthy or unhealthy) at our fingertips 24/7 if we don’t know what to reach for.

I love looking at my life as a movie playing out on screen.

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What does the main character do over and over again?

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What does she love to dwell on, no matter how many times she’s thought it?

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Is there anything obvious she should stop doing or thinking?

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Leave room for imagining the things in your life you could work on, more than just the physical inputs. It means stepping out of a normal day of life to explore the mundane decisions you make; the habits you do not once, but thousands of time in your life.

Each behavior we have started with a first try, a first inspiration, and our body found something to latch on to. There are certain things we ruminate on, think about every waking moment (good or bad). The more you engage, the more that behavior is engrained in. Most things don’t happen just once.

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Take notice of the thoughts and things you do every single day, no matter how seemingly simple. How we wake up, when we grab our phones, when we decide to let the first ads hit our conscious or subconscious minds is within our control. Wanting that frozen yogurt on the way home is a trigger bc I am reminded of it as soon as I get off the train. But I control my route home. The thoughts I dwell on everyday are a choice, even if I can’t control all the images that come across my path. How can I disrupt that signal so I don’t even think about it? First take a look without judgement, an innocent bystander looking in on the thoughts going on in your brain. Take notice at first, then slowly act on things over time if you choose to.

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Maybe you like most of your habits. Maybe you’ve put the time in to make your day what you want it to be. But there is no holy grail. Our habits change with the seasons, with the way the sun comes up later or earlier, with the temperature, with how we age, with the needs that change every single day. We can never be bored if we don’t let ourselves be. We will never run out of work we can do. We will never run out of books to read, things to learn. So learn to save your energy for those things that matter most to you.

Embrace the little joys

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* carve a moment for yourself every day

* have an uncluttered home that you love to come home to

* make a conscious effort to embrace slow and intimate moments with people you treasure

* close your eyes and think about what makes you feel relaxed

* think about something that sparked curiosity or excitement from you in the day

* intentionally set the table for dinner at night

* choose several pools of softer light for an intimate atmosphere instead of one massive light above your head

* put your phone away, and notice the subtleties of the world around you

* carve out a space for yourself that releases stress, frees the mind, and helps unwind from any pressures

* be kind to yourself. Tell yourself nice things

* learn to stop negative chatter that just puts you in an angry spiral. If you can do something about it, do it. If not, get over it

How many of nature’s secrets have we forgotten?

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Generations removed, how could we ever know something as delicate as the story of mosses?

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Some scour through handwritten notes of our oldest records of anthropology. But the “history” we have, compiled by rich white men on what they observed to be important, is insufficient. Notes from anthropologists as far back as the 1800’s hardly mention these green beauties, aside from some notes on fire pits, weapons, construction insulation for little cracks between the logs. It was found inside gloves and boots for warmth, even layered within a sleeping pad for added comfort. But could that be it? Other, much older languages have all kinds of words for these green backdrops. They have specific words for tree mosses, berry mosses, rock, water, and very specific mosses. In the English dictionary, we only have 1, reducing 22,000 species to a single type. What are we missing?

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Mosses usually cover things, they stand strong in moist, wet banks, creating a soft layer under our feet. We find them near the spray of waterfalls, where salmon jump the river. They reveal their gifts every time it rains. Just watch as the moss swell after a thunderstorm, some absorbing up to 40x their weight in extra water.

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What the upper-crust gentlemen failed to notice was the unique gift that moss provides that no other pine or grass could rival.

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Then she found it, a single entry; you can almost see the blush in the brevity of the statement.

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Mosses had a widespread use for diapers and sanitary napkins.

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Imagine the complex relationships that lie behind that one entry. The most important uses of mosses were everyday tools in the hands of women.

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What other genius solutions had our great grandmother’s figured out?

Just because it’s on the store shelf doesn’t mean it’s safe to use (or eat)!

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Cutting out the extras saves you money, and also means not being exposed to thousands of chemicals, from the products you put on your skin to the food you put in your mouth. These are just some of the toxic things hidden in plain sight:

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️When eating out, we have no idea what’s in our food. Even when cooking at home, so many things come ready in a box, and you can bet there are some strange things in there. Eat things without a label! You dont need an ingredient list for organic brocolli.

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️If you do eat meat or dairy, realize you are eating the added hormones that are fed to make animals fat. These make you fat too! I don’t want your chicken fattening hormones in my tummy! Go organic fed, pasture raised, or leave it alone. (Guarantee that fast food burger has all kinds of chemicals and antibiotics in the meat, and glyphosate in the bun!)

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️Skincare. Does that lotion have a paragraph of chemicals? Instead, alternatives are baking soda as deodorant, and coconut oil as moisturizer

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️Candles, make sure it has a cotton whisk, and better as beeswax or soy base. If anything says fragrance, it can have over 100 chemicals without naming. All of those are toxic to your system.

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️Cleaning products: right on the bottle of windex is a little warning that says it is toxic to humans and domestic animals. Instead, you can just use baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, and white vinegar to clean your home. (Shown to work better than bleach)

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️Need to paint a room? Go for non VOC paint, or at least add some organic vanilla extract mixed in to balance the chemicals (and your reaction!)

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️Get a vacuum cleaner with a hepa filter

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️Find some household plants now known to detoxify pollutants in your home! Studied for spaceships in orbit.

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️Many chemicals are not filtered by municipal water filters. Get yourself a good one.

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It’s important to detox everyday, not once a year. Every day make sure you are not adding to toxic burden. Eat real food, not piles of added flavorings and chemicals.

How do you activate garlic’s superpowers?

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Chop it 10 min before you add it to heat. Garlic has natural enzymes, one including allicin that gets activated when crushed. But it needs a couple minutes to do its job. Just make garlic the first thing you chop, set aside for 10 min while prepping other things, then throw it into some good, hot fats (grass fed butter or avo oil are my favorites). Add in some chopped veggies for pretty much every meal we make.

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Once you crush and let it sit, that nutrition stays activated even through the heat.

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Why leave the pre-minced stuff at the store? The benefits of the minced garlic only stay active up to 4 days. If you could count how many days that stuff was on the shelf, it’d be dead for weeks before you get to eat it. Plus you don’t always know the preservatives or kind of oils they use.

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As with most processed foods, there’s a convenience that can be hard to give up. But leaving live food on its stem for as long as possible means the most benefit to you!

For many things in life, you have to pay in order to enjoy the rewards. Hard now, Easy Later.  Consider cooking: while putting the effort and time to cook, you are paying the price to sit down and eat and enjoy the rewards. In parallel, it’s like working out, afterwards feeling healthier and fitter, sharper of mind.

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The hack, or trick, is to learn to love the payment. Whether it’s “I enjoyed cooking this meal” or “I loved this run,” you are benefitting on both sides. There’s no work anymore.

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The happiest people don’t know the difference between work and play.

Vacations give you the best moments to make lasting changes in your life. When you’re in an unfamiliar environment, your brain is primed for forming neural pathways for imprinting new behaviors.

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When you live your everyday life on routine, your brain stays on autopilot, and it might be hard to set in new habits.

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But when you’re out of your familiar environment (or change your perception), your brain is constantly being flooded with new experiences, and it adapts by forming new neuropathways. You can add to this by throwing in even more new behaviors, so you will be more able to do them automatically with minimal effort.

You could pick 2 or 3 new things you might struggle with at home; like moving your body every day, trying a dance lesson or cooking class, finding a new place to read for an hour or more. Focus on making those activities new lifelong habits wherever you are.

You can revisit your home town as an newbie. Visit a new restaurant. Stop at that cafe down the street you’ve never been to in all the years of being there. Walk a different route home, check out a park you never stepped onto. Try a different grocery store or farmers market. Take a camera and search for the most beautiful buildings. Ride a bike, a scooter, try a different gym for a month as a new member bonus. Maybe just map out a walking path for a couple miles, with a new audiobook or podcast downloaded. Learn some history of your town. See your own city with different eyes. Visit the same restaurants you love, but try something new on the menu, maybe a healthier side dish or gluten free option.

Learn how to apply your eating habits when out of your element too. When a dish comes out with bread, I tell the server they can save it for the next person so it doesn’t go to waste, and I won’t be tempted as a bonus. Allow your new habits to stick (the ones you want) no matter where you are, no excuses. Try new things, explore new options, and study how your body reacts after. Even a slip up is a great learning experience. Learn to bounce back with no guilt. Surround it with other good choices, always ordering some greens to go with a lesser choice.

We are toeing the line between two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment.

Now we have all this gear, we have to put it to use! Where are your favorite camping places in the world? What rocks have you hidden behind to pretend to live in the wild, if only for a couple nights?

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It is pretty incredible to think we have access to All of these places, and access to the internet, a collection of stories, pictures, and GPS points of the most incredible places on the planet. These are places someone perchance stumbling on it after years of trecking through the wilderness, or some nice person building roads to make easier for other wilderness seekers to follow.

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We can choose, on a long weekend, to jump in a car, leap back in time, and sleep far away from the noise and into a sea of stars.

Along with our own history, another history glides on; one of the external world.

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“We measure time in seconds, years, maybe a century if we are lucky. But the world, the universe, the stars count in millennia.

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And still, our lives are intertwined. A person is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.” -Emerson

“We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.” –Thoreau

It’s cheaper in the long run to eat healthy.

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It costs more financially to combat disease. It costs more mentally to deal with obesity. And it costs more physically to start deteriorating at a younger age.

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While it may cost more now to prioritize organic, grass fed, optimal nutrition with sustainable farming, we cannot afford the costs of chronic diseases stemming from scarfing down cheap commodity crops and expensive pharmaceuticals.

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Most of my money goes to eating. And I make most of my food at home. If we shift demand, prices across the board start to shift in favor of real food instead of filler food.

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It’s silly to ignore the way food is produced if we care about the food on our plates. Only 2% of our farm bill (that we pay for with taxes) goes to fruits and vegetables. If 75% of our plate should be veggies, shouldn’t 75% of our monies go to producing veggies? We need educated farmers to enrich our soils, educated chefs to use rotational crops in our menus, educated public that can distinguish real food from a marketed trap. Many great farmers are creating businesses to pave the way, we just have to start learning about them. There is money in sustainable soil farming, aka working towards real food that generations will benefit from. But there is no good in the destructive rat race of corn, soy and wheat production we are now stuck in.

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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.

“I suddenly found myself neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those which commonly frequent the garden or the orchard, but to the wilder and more thrilling songsters of the forest which rarely, or never, serenade a villager.”

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Reading Thoreau is like sifting through poetry. A single sentence can spark several days worth of imagination.

My health focus is having my clearest body and mind. I want to be free. Free from toxins, added hormones and flavorings, unnecessary cravings for foods my body doesn’t need.

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This focus comes down to hunting for most nutrients in fewest bites, maintaining a healthy gut balance and reducing blood sugar spikes. I want my body to absorb as many nutrients as possible. I want to function as cleanly/efficiently as possible.

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I think people focus so much on counting things to lose weight, on following some strict regime rather than finding sustainable habits for a lifetime. I eat good food, I eat food that I love! And I love it even more for doing good things to my body. By eating healthy foods, I don’t have to work out until my knees are raw and in pain, I can play when I want, and the fat in weird places just disappeared. I always thought I had to work that belly fat off, but it never worked until I started eating right and started trying to get my sleep in balance (all having to do with healthy body, mind, hormones and gut). Then my skin glows, my nails stay strong, my hair shines too.

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My goal is to have a working mind, to feel free, to break away from foods and thoughts that put me in a downward spiral. I love minimalism for the idea to remove unnecessary things from my life. That includes foods with weird pesticides, meats treated terribly w hormones (and other things), sugars that mess up my brain, cheap oils (like canola) that block vitamin absorption, and also down to removing extra clothes in my closet. It’s all the same to me. I only keep things in my life that I want to be there.

You are my paradise.

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Not even sure how to put these last few days into words.

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There is a hidden paradise in all of us. There are other hidden paradises to find in the world and in others. Some you have to work much harder for, and only for those that you want to give everything for do you feel like it was deserved. You can never regret the effort, the failures, the work to maybe just catch a glimpse. And once you do get THERE, or some other new place you never expected, any place you end up if you’re lucky enough to even start the trek, you don’t even know what to do with yourself. You just feel like the luckiest human in the world to be standing where you are.

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Sometimes knowing you have a wonderful home to come back to, wherever, whoever it is, is all the paradise you ever need.

It’s much easier to do this together. The way we eat can be very personal, sensitive, and sometimes, hard. Especially when those in our home choose to eat differently than us, and possibly bring in things that are like putting cocaine around a drug addict. Treat yourself with kindness. And your partners in life. 

Our zipcode has more determination of our pant size than our genetics. Who you surround yourself by (just like our cells, stem cells morphing to those around us, or an accent in language, per energy conservation laws we have to fight to become different than our surroundings), makes a huge difference in who you will become. We get to choose everything. And for the things we cannot change, we can choose to see the world differently. 

Sometimes people in prison, Nelson Mandella comes to mind, can even find revelation and peace and freedom. Most of us hopefully do not live under such restriction, but sometimes it can feel that way. Neighborhoods, jobs, homes, even people we choose to call family are all up to us. Sometimes blood relatives can be toxic. Sometimes we need to take root in new soil to really blossom, and sometimes we need to take flight. Often, it feels great to come home. Everything is so personal, and pay attention to how your body feels. Listening to yourself is incredibly valuable, and it takes practice. Notice the triggers and red flags, the moments of peace. 

Consider this with the people you invite into your life. Who do you genuinely like to be surrounded by? Who likes YOU being around them? Who makes you feel welcome? Who feels good to be around? They may not be who we expect. Friends, family, and lovers should all make us feel warm. People who live the longest are shown to be surrounded by people who they genuinley make them feel l liked. Sometimes our closest relations are the ones that hurt us the most.

We only have finite energy, so use it strategically. Fill up your cup, too- just like the airplane model. Put your seatbelt on first, because if you are the only one to survive, you can help anyone else. It may not feel right sometimes to think that way, but sometimes we are desperately needed to help, and we are needed at some capacity.

I have had to make painful decisions about where to place my energy, and I choose to focus on the next generation (my kids) as top priority. I have to let some things lie in the past. I have to choose to take care of the people that I feel like need it the most. I choose to take care of me sometimes rather than give in to “energy vampires” that require black holes of my energy. 

What are the easiest ways to feel your best? Eat more veggies and play out in nature more! The latest research comes back to getting yourself to a calm state as much as possible for your body to function properly!

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Get out in nature at least once a month. Breathing natural plant terpenes and essential oils (just floating around wild trees) amplifies healthy red blood cell count AND activity for up to a month. (Boosting immunity and NK cells that naturally kill cancer cells!)

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Eat the rainbow (of vegetables). Walk the produce aisle and pick one of every color for dinner. (Get both green veggies AND green leafies for totally different bioactive compounds)

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Fill each plate with 75% veggies. Strive for 5 cups of mixed veggies a day, 27 different kinds a week.

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Eat organic if you can! A California farmer last year was able to sue Monsanto for pesticides causing cancer (by killing the good gut bugs in your stomach, not necessarily an immediate toxin). Gut imbalance is the start to most of our common chronic dis-ease.

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Eat until 80% full (allow your body to break down old stuff in there). Make sure to once a day! If not, that should be Mission Critical.

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Start noticing what foods bother you. Food sensitivities can have all kinds of strange effects, including mood swings, headaches, seasonal allergies, etc.

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Do something you love to do, for no other reason than you just like it (create calm and flow)

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Walk 10k steps a day, sweat 2-3x a week to release cortisol AND help body detox naturally, and circulate blood more regularly.

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Get your sleep right, and most other things fall in place! Tips? Sexy time helps you sleep! No electronics or food an hour before bed. Digestion takes a LOT of energy, taken away from recovery. Electronics can mean harmful light to your eyes, over-stimulation, and microwave radiation.

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Put your phone on airplane mode when not in use (and get laptop off your lap when on wifi or 4G). Use external headphones when on a call. Radiation close to your body disrupts your little cells that mess with your body in really weird ways.

I remember the moment the curtain was first lifted.

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I was sitting in a classroom full of people all looking to use food to better their health. I remember coming in skeptical, maybe I shouldn’t even be here, probably just wasting my time and money. But I listened. I felt myself cracking. Were some of those things I was feeling really due to my food?

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I was an engineer with an MBA, a “healthy”, motivated, overly-educated 30-year old American who had everything at my fingertips, always working to keep myself in shape. But I did’t know how to eat. I didn’t know what was in my food. And I didn’t know how it was affecting my body. Could so many of my physical and emotional pains be preventable things based around food?

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I think it was a slide on spinach. A bowl of spinach we eat today contains about 1/20th (or less) of the nutrients that a bowl used to in the 1950’s. On one side of the slide was a single bowl that our grandparents used to eat. And on the other side was 20 bowls, the amount we would need to eat to get the same amount of nutrients. With all our modern advancements, we stopped breeding foods for flavor (aka nutrients), instead growing for size, shippability, pest resistance (which just grows weaker with more chemicals), and color. We have bred out nutrients for pretty, empty, chemical-laden vessels, that taste more and more bland every year. And that’s just the plants (animal treatment even scarier for health and the planet).

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We have to work twice as hard, 20x harder than our grandparents used to in order to get the same nutrients to build our best selves. Daily food recommendations are wrought with political drama, funding aliances, and strange oversimplified outdated science. The daily recommended intakes are to maintain an average body of the population, even when the average is trending towards obese. It’s never to reach an optimal state or based around healthy people. We not only need to eat more vegetables than our grandparents, we need to find ones with less chemicals, find ones most naturally grown (with nutrients not bred out), and to pay more for them.

Some things I learned about women’s health on my own nutritional health journey (my own studying):

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Respect the female body, her mind. Love her, be nice to her, support her so she can love and support you back. She creates every human coming into this planet. Female education is something not nearly valued enough. As women, we get that time of the month that can be kind of tough sometimes. It’s ok to be different, our bodies do incredible things!

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Remember, even when your tummy may be aching, cramps set in, moods change and your energy may shift, that just getting a period means your body is working properly. But there are some things you can do to manage the symptoms once a month.

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Mental support:

Celebrate! Many women struggle with getting their period at all, are too stressed or have something else wrong. So first, be grateful for functioning hormones, since they do a lot more for you in your daily lives, including make you feel joy, energy, digest food, build your physique, and help you sleep. They also help your brain to function properly.

Don’t stress if you don’t have a normal period. It just takes a bit of healthy diet and less stress to get your body back. If really abnormal, you can use that as a sign to get to a naturopathic doctor and check it out. It is your first red flag that something could be wrong (a sign men do not get).

Find out what a normal period is. Learn about your cycle and hormones, and what affects them.

Minimize exposure to toxins (and products with lots of man-made fragrances and chemicals)

Go to bed an hour earlier if you can.

Stress prevents your body from functioning normally. It actually suppresses a woman's ability to have babies, which messes with so many other things by changing your hormones. Your body is constantly listening to you, taking signals from your reactions, queues from the foods you are eating. So let it know it is safe, that it is in an environment of abundant good food (not in a food desert that many of us choose to live in with our forks). It is safe, it is comfy, it is loved.

Nutritional support for that time of the month (and all month long)! Continued from previous post.

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Cleaning up your diet is step 1. Sugar, refined carbs, and cheap oils (like canola) make pains worse. Eat lots of leafy greens, colorful veggies, healthy fats (like avocado oil, coconut milk), and good sources of protein (not too much, go for quality over quantity).

Try eating Brazil nuts the week before your period for pain.

Try seed cycling to support healthy hormone development (eat pumpkin and flax seeds in the first two weeks starting with first day of your period, and sesame and sunflower seeds in the last 2 weeks). 1 tablespoon of each per day.

Try omega 3 fish oils in the first 2 weeks of your cycle, and prim rose oil in the second half.

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Fun stuff:

Tips from female CEO’s: Be strategic. If you have to schedule a big meeting or presentation, see if you can book it during the time of the month you know you feel your best. Try to book vacations when convenient for your body.

Use this time as a reminder to relax. Get a massage (hey guys!), go to a sauna, take an Epsom salt bath, drink some herbal teas.

Try out some essential oils with frankincense and lavender, anything that smells good to you in those few days. Your senses are smarter than you think.

Give yourself space when needed. Follow your body’s rhythm. If you have lots of energy, use it. If you feel depleted, lean into something easier on you. Try some of the more creative work that you put off the rest of the month. Maybe some writing, photography, reading, learning, gardening.

Try some light yoga, go for a walk, or just stay comfy under a blanket.

If you can take a sick day, take it. I hardly ever get sick, and am allowed a sick day a month, so sometimes use it if i feel depleted.

Get some sunlight, breath in some fresh air. Allow yourself to be human.

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Taking care of yourself is critical for a happy brain and body. Be nice to yourself and those around you. Be grateful for the things you have (you supposedly can’t be grateful and angry at the same time). It just feels better too!

Eating well is easy! Food can taste good and make you feel good. This is my advice (based on lots of lifestyle cookbooks), years of steady results (weight loss, health, and mental clarity), and after a lifetime of confusion!

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Eat lots of leafy greens (1-2c per day)

Colorful veggies (2 diff colors per day)

Healthy fats (like nuts, avocado oil, coconut milk, olive oil, ghee or butter)

Good sources of protein (not too much, go for quality over quantity)

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Avoid: Sugar, refined carbs, and cheap oils (like canola, especially fried foods). If you do partake, just have a bite, and surround it w greens all day. Support your body so it can deal w removing it easier.

Also important:

10 min of sunlight first thing in the morning (to have best sleep at night)

10k steps per day, walk to bus or lunch walk

Some form of play 2+ times per week (yoga, running, tennis, etc)

No phone or screens 1 hour before bed

One visit to a park per month (minimum)

We should actually be able to eat as much of whatever tastes good to us... our problem is that we’ve become too good at making fake flavors.

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Cravings are our body’s way of asking for a specific nutrient. Cravings were meant as a signal from our body to say, hey I need more of this, get that again!

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We’ve found cheap ways to produce the TASTES of real natural things rather than the real thing itself. Flavor chemists and scientists are too good at making us want more of these flavors bc our body still thinks are connected to real food. Then we keep eating them bc our body is deprived of what it asked for. Certain combos of salt sugar and fat were studied to get rats so fat they burst. Brilliant business model.

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I picture it as a little molecule of disease dressed as an M&M, or a chicken nugget. A costume of a nutrient to trick our brain, but really inflammation in a Halloween costume, only it’s every day, 3x a day. Instead of that expensive vanilla? Try vanillan! Half the price, but without the super nutrients and made of processed pine cones and other stuff. Have you ever actually tried real vanilla? What about cinnamon? You can get real Ceylon cinnamon, or the cheap kind available everywhere that has a 1 tsp max before it becomes harmful to your health. Is that on the label? Of course not.

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We’ve learned to cover up the blandness of our diluted engineered foods, watered down from depleted soils, and breeding larger, less nutrient dense, less flavorful foods.

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We like the flavor of these dorito covered foods until we can learn to listen to our bodies again. We can get that natural signal back. We can taste the amazing sweetness of a fresh strawberry. You can eat all the variety of things you were meant to be craving, and your body tells you when you are full. I can keep eating those eggplants, those sweet potatoes that I can’t get enough of. I crave my sautéed broccoli mushrooms and garlic every day. The most nutrient dense foods from nature are the smallest ones you can find. The small wild organic blueberries, the small zucchini’s. They are packed with the good stuff and full of real flavor.

You are what your food eats.

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Could the excess corn we feed ourselves (and our food) really be so bad? Let’s look at the omegas. The ratio of omega 3 and omega 6 fats (getting the right combo of both) creates problems when out of balance. Changes to the way we eat fats has been so slight we barely noticed it, in part bc we didn’t understand omega 3’s until the 1970’s. We had no idea these being out of balance could be contributing to obesity, learning disorders, depression, modern diseases...

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O3 is produced in the leaves in plants, O6 in the seeds. Our ancestors ate these in equal amounts. We now eat 10x (some say 20x) more of the O6 seeds from all of our seed crops. There are so many kinds of corn derived products that our grocery is made up of about 40% to 60% corn. That means WE are 40% corn.

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The process of making hydrogenated oils eliminates good O3’s, and we have been nudged to eat more of the cheap refined veggie seed oils (O6’s) to help eat up more of the excess corn.

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Understanding how important the leaves (and good O3 fats) are turns a lot of our conventional thinking on its head. We have grown up on the thought beef is less healthy than salmon. But that may be just because of the feed we are forcing on the animals. But that judgement assumes the beef has been grain-fed and salmon fish-fed. The diet of that animal on grain or grass changes it’s omega ratio (the meat you eat) from 2:1 to 10:1.

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We forced the land animals to change their diets from grass to corn, but we now also learned to force feed farmed salmon on corn. If we raised the steer on grass and salmon on grain, we’d prolly be better off eating the beef. You also need tons (literally) less antibiotics for animals that you allow to eat their natural diet (which was not corn). Side note... they also fart less when their tummies aren’t upset with this new strange diet (Less methane emission).

we have failed every predictor of high iq testing. why not try sponsoring families to have better families? raise better nourished children? giving various minorities a late leg up does not work. we need to start earlier. with education of girls. family education. changing the food system. actually putting children first- across the world, above military, above religious colonialization. We need better food. We need to reconnect with the planet. our bloodline can be seen as our torch to bear- our inheritance to pass down worth more than any treasure or money that can be lost in a generation. give generational genes, and habits to train those genes not just to depletion. 

I get it.

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I don’t want to go the rest of my life without garlic bread, without cheesecake, without empanadas. I don’t want to live my life WITHOUT.

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I want to eat good food, yummy food, AND I want an amazing body and mind.

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Can we have all 3? Absolutely.

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But can we have all of it with “food like substances” being our main source of fuel? I am afraid not.

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I saw, I FELT first hand what its like to learn I had a health problem, fearing its outcomes, worried that my choices had made irreparable damage to my body. And worry if I didn’t catch it in time.

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I told myself I would give up all the burgers and fries, all the Cheetos if it meant having my health back. I ended up going way down this food learning path, a path I am super grateful for.

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Do I have empanadas or tiramisu every ONCE in a while? Yes. But the difference is that it’s very rare and I surround it with other foods I love that will protect me. I have also learned to make healthier versions of the foods I do not want to live without, like this Cauli crust cheesy bread. I have found many MORE foods that I love. Its not like I loved everything I was eating, I was just eating lots of crap on top of it that I honestly didn’t care that much about, it was just cheap and convenient. I just swapped out the non-essentials for other foods that are medicine to my body. And the best part? Those foods I was so addicted to just don’t taste good to me anymore. It’s like my brain and tummy are like what is this crap?!

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I think it’s important to see what an elimination diet feels like to know what your body is MEANT to feel like. To see and feel a new normal. Your body can handle quite a bit of toxins, quite a bit of adversity and struggle. I want to minimize the struggle, maximize satisfaction, and optimize my health.

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I don’t feel like I am missing out. I feel like I opened up my food world to an amazing new normal. I don’t believe my body could have healed if I kept doing the things that got me there in the first place. I did restrict my diet abruptly, I HAD to. I changed my food environment from a toxic one to a place of healing.

The problem with starvation is essentially the same problem for those who over-eat. The underlying problem is malnourishment.

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We can still be malnourished even if we eat 5000+ calories in a day. When we overeat, it means something went wrong with our body to say, no, I’m good. If we don’t give our bodies the basic foods needed, our bodies say, “Keep it coming”.

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Calories are irrelevant to nutrition. We, as humans, do better on a low calorie, nutrient dense diet, than an overload of empty (and harmful) calories. When you eat better quality food, you actually need less calories, less food. When you are eating less calories, buying less (more expensive) foods, you also have less waste (internal and external), and your brain works more efficiently.

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“Eat until 80% full” is an old Japanese saying. It takes a while for your brain to say it is full (20 min), but if you don’t have the right nutrients, your stomach will be saying a lot more to you an hour later. Sure your stomach is “full” right now, but if there is nothing good being spread out to your cells, they continue asking for more, over and over again all day. And instead of having anything to power your body, you are just giving it more work to do to get rid of those toxins and extra food items now in your body.

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Undernourishment is a real problem, and more local than we know. The pain and cost in medical bills from chronic disease shows a real picture of the burden of overeating. There are real benefits of fasting, our body knows how to deal with periods of time with low food (and can use a process called autophagy to be more efficient with what it does get). The problem of over-burden is new to our bodies. You may think you are giving yourself a burst of energy with a bag of Cheetos or a Coke, but you are setting off a set of chain reactions that shortens your life span and provides lots of chronic pains you may have no idea were due to bad food choices.

When you look at it this way, bulimia and anorexia are completely rational responses in a toxic food system. If the food is toxic and addictive, we either avoid it, and if we cannot, we try to remove it as soon as it reaches our stomachs, to prevent it from entering our systems. Body dysmorphia (seeing your body different than it is, or in negative light) is incredibly sensitive and personal and real, and a true problem to look into- as it can have very complicated rational and important ways out, but we are talking about weight as it connects to how we feel about ourselves. Removing the emotions, the truth is that being fat, or overweight, or malnourished is just bad for us, period, and, in any sense: makes us FEEL terrible, too. For many reasons: confidence, sexuality, energy, hormones, imbalances, etc. I eat well so that I feel well. I work out for mental health and strength: not to lose weight. To lose weight, we need to eat better. No more calorie in / calorie out lies. The QUALITY matters, not quantity. It is like an amazon package arriving to your door- you can have a thousand boxes or one, what really matters is what is in those packages. Your blood stream carries nutrients to your whole body, and it wants to grab the nutrients. The rest is toxic, or getting in the way- often blocking the good stuff. Getting full on bad fuel/food prevents us from being hungry for real nutrients. And processed foods prevent absorption of many vitamins. Microwaved and overcooked foods zap key nutrients. Often, even if we are eating the best foods, if we are stressed, we are not digesting those nutrients. Traditional foods often pair together - like turmeric and olive oil and pepper in ways that enhance them- chemical reactions that make one plus one equal three (or more!). Cooking food is chemistry. Eating is chemistry. It is incredibly complicated. 

Food words are powerful, but not all telling.

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“Organic” is not the ultimate answer. Lots of stuff can be hidden behind this term. People can use plastic mulch sitting in the hot sun over the organic crops as a protectant and still be called “organic”. Plastic in sun creates a major toxin getting soaked into the soil and food. Organic foods still can use unsustainable processes, use lots of diesel and still have harmful practices that undermine soil quality. I still choose to grab organic foods bc they tend have more phytonutrients and use less chemicals, but we now have to look further than that. And most are right next to non organic, stuff blowing right in.

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“Access to pasture” for animals is not enough, though we do feel a bit better, and many of us will pay more for it. But we have to understand what that really means. The animals could be born inside cages, and once they are fully grown (a whole 20 days, yes sarcasm in that) and set in their ways, a small door that is now there that is inconvenient to get to will not mean anything to them. But that door allows companies to add cool words to the label and make us feel good. Does the requirement for “pasture raised” mean enough? Is it actually being enforced? That little door that the animals don’t use also does not mean the animals were fed high quality food or treated well.

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“Zero” carbs and zero sugar on a label does not always mean healthy. Coke Zero is not keto, and it is definitely not healthy. It may be health-IER than some options, but lets use common sense. What are they putting in instead?

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“Gluten free” is not enough. It could be health-IER than other options, maybe, but I don’t think adding arsenic-lined brown rice is healthy, no matter if swapped for the glyphosate soaked corn.

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“Non-GMO” is great, means no added herbicides. But again, we have no idea about the rest of the processes involved.

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Loose definitions allow ppl to be confused, and make it easy for companies to manipulate their labels to keep us confused. I say this so we can feel empowered, aware, and ask for real change to our food expectations.

Your first attempt at cauli crust may be a disaster, but your 1000th will be amazing.

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Your 1st blog post will be bad, but your 1000th will be great.

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Your 1st workout will be weak, but your 1000th will be strong.

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Your 1st meditation will be scattered, but your 1000th will be focused.

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Put in your reps.

Get paid to learn your hobby

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Something I love to do is find a way for someone to pay me to get training for something. It could be for a new thing that I am interested in, something I want to learn more about or just to afford something that I maybe couldn’t have otherwise.

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Some examples that ive done (or seen) in the past:

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Worked at a yoga studio at the front desk for unlimited free yoga sessions

Worked at a winery, basically paid in wine and wine knowledge, enjoy the California countryside, and get free tastings all over the place, made some great friends

Worked at a clothing store just for the discount (and never spent more than that paycheck on that store).

Worked at Sur La Table as a chef’s cooking assistant. Basically a glorified dish cleaner and table setter, coffee pourer, but I got to sit through every cooking demonstration that otherwise costs about $80+ per class with a private chef. This was fun and easy after work, learning all kinds of cooking techniques and various cuisines. Knife skills are invaluable!

Worked while getting my MBA, fully covered. many companies will pay you to go back to school, and maybe you can throw in some cool community college classes or fun studies along the way.

Started volunteering at a gardening club to learn how to tend my garden with the experts. Many times I even get some free lunches, hey free food is not wasted!

Volunteered at Habitat for Humanity to learn construction techniques

Volunteered at beach clean ups and animal shelters

Want to travel? Find a company to sponsor you, or even join the peace Corp, army/navy, etc

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Volunteering your time is not time lost. Meeting new people, developing new skills, helping others, getting outdoors and making other people smile is something we all of us have access to. We all need to be humbled sometimes to realize how much we have to give rather than what we can take.

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And when it comes to paying to learn something, you can always pay your way through school or lessons, but there is something so satisfying about getting to do something you love for free.

We have a nature deficiency.

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Patients that have a view of nature have faster rates of recovery. Doctors have started to prescribe nature bc they know it will be helpful.

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A lot of problems we have are due to a separation from our naural cycle. What does that mean? That means we are all made up of the air we breath, the water we drink, food we eat and the microbes we are exposed to on a daily basis.

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Every time you walk through the woods, you are kicking up all these organisms that you are inhaling, and they are actually helping to modify your immune system and help to manufacture certain nutrients that are essential to your health and happiness, they are there to help you digest your foods.

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Those microscopic organisms do so much for you, and at the same time, you are outside, moving your physical body making large muscle groups move blood, pump nutrients and carry oxygen to the brain.

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At the same time, you are getting some rays from the sun and those rays are touching your skin, breaking bonds in your skin making something called vitamin D. Which is one of the most important immuno supplements on the planet, something that can protect an inflammed brain.

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The entire connection between humans and environment is designed to bring health. When we stick ourselves in cubicles away from sunlight, when we surround ourselves with (and eat) man-made synthetic compounds, when we lack the excercise, you can feel the difference.

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Health vs disease can just be your connection w your environment.

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What’s the one thing we can do? Get back to nature. Do what comes naturally. Be part of a system instead of dominant over it.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own county as a foreign land. -G.K. Chesterton ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Realize the culture around you does not define you, it is not normal or right, just common. You get to choose where you are (for the most part). 

To see our partner as novel is the key. Bringing newness into a relationship. 

Sure, we can spend our whole lives on the ferris wheel of relationships. We are primed to want someone new after about 2-4 years, enough time to have a baby and raise them to relative stability. But the fact that these emotions naturally calm down is not a bad thing. Is it a bad thing to want to come back to a safety blanket, our beds, our homes, our favorite recipes? No. Neither is coming back to stability. 

We want both, in everything: newness, as well as comfort. We need to breathe in and breathe out. We crave the changing of the seasons to keep things interesting, while also familiar. 

We can have both with our partners. Whether we are creatures meant to mate for life is debatable. Some animals do this (penguins and dolphins included), but even within these creatures, we see variations. We are all unique, and have unique tendencies. But also we see patterns over the large scale. There is wisdom in the modern age to staying as a unit. For the way children are raised, it is best for them to have a family that stays together, rather than having parents who spend all their energy on new partners and new families. Even into retirement, often, our systems are set up to take care of a small nuclear family: economic, taxes, laws, etc. In today’s world, it should not matter if parents are male, female, or unknown genders. What matters is having loving, committed people that make their children feel important and safe: while also allowing the child to have challenges and initiations. We should raise our children so they can be on their own as the ultimate goal, but also WANT to spend time with us. We want to raise children the world wants to be around. It is hard- to be in relationships knowing anyone can walk away at any moment. It keeps us on our toes, having us learn about our new selves as much as learning about your partner or child’s unique self. 

We can choose to have heaven on earth every day. Neurochemically, we can make ourselves FEEL like our partners are new, with patience and practice and novelty. We get more than that bachelor life of a new partner with no stability- not to mention risk of STD’s and who knowns what else- as well as the crash of hard feelings when it ends. It is good for us to stay in committed relationships that are good for us. But we should always be able to leave. We should not totally depend on someone for everything, in case something happens to them. We are all here for a finite amount of time, no matter what. But we should learn to be individuals, together. 

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -Carl Sagan

To a worm, the apple is the universe. 

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Weekend berry soufflé from “scratch”. Been making this dish almost every weekend now, and every time gets a little bit easier.

Oxidation is a fact of life. All cells produce energy by oxidizing (burning) a variety of fuels. Your brain runs on electricity, requiring a constant supply of fuel to function, using 20% of all your calories. But the source of those calories makes a world of difference. The type of calories can either spark extra oxidation, or protect it from happening.

During these reactions to make energy, some explosive material leaks by. These escaping oxygen molecules are like little sparks flying out of a hot fireplace, causing tons of damage in your brain (and everywhere else in your body). Normal oxidation is the reason for aging, wrinkles, food going bad or a flower wilting.

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This is a problem when too much happens in the brain. 30% of our brain is made up of something we will call PUFAs, some of the most highly combustible material in the world.

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Now think of “ANTI-oxidants” as a force field against those sparks. Without a constant supply of fresh antioxidants, sparks flying may ignite free radical reactions, damaging large sections of your brain. With enough damage or malfunction all at once, we get all kinds of neuro-degeneration. When depleted, the brain suffers slow death from oxidative stress, which plays a major role in almost every disease we can name.

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What’s encouraging about this? We can eat those antioxidants, in foods like flavor rich veggies, herbs and spices.

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The scary part? When your diet is high in cheap “cooking” oils (like canola), no matter how many antioxidants you get from food or supplements, they may not even reach the brain to aid in the constant battle of protecting tissues from this oxidative stress.

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By eating sugar and cheap vegetable oils, we are not only providing many more sparks, but also preventing the good guys from protecting us. Processed foods and fried foods prevent vitamin E from protecting us. You can fix this by throwing out canola oil, and replacing it w better oils like olive oil, avocado oil or butter, and eating lots of those greens and colorful veggies! #sciencesimplified #foodscience

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own county as a foreign land. -G.K. Chesterton ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Realize the culture around you does not define you, it is not normal or right, just common. You get to choose where you are (for the most part). 

Real food is simple, and delicious! Find a good food list, the ones with most nutrients per calorie, and circle all the foods you love. That is your grocery list. Doctors and nutritionists have studied this to find the most nutrient dense foods, all you have to do is pick your faves you already love, and try some new ones when you’re ready.

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The ANDI scale was created by doctors to rank popular foods based on their macronutrient density.

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More of these you eat, the more satisfied you will feel with less calories. Fill up on these, then add in some good protein, good fats. But you won’t need much!

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These topped the list:

• Kale (1000, top score possible)

• Collard Greens 1000

• Mustard Greens 1000

• Watercress 1000

• Swiss Chard 895

• Bok Choy 865

• Spinach 707

• Arugula 604

• Romaine 510

• Brussels Sprouts 490

• Carrots 458

• Cabbage 434

• Broccoli 340

• Cauliflower 315

The best book is the one you can’t put down.

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The best exercise is the one you enjoy doing every day.

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The best health food is the one you find tasty.

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The best work is the work you’d do for free.

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Every person is unique. Find the things that set your soul on fire.

A note to you. You are opening yourself up to disrupt much of what you believe in the world.

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What is a disruptor? Synonyms include anarchist, trouble maker, instigator. To destroy temporarily, throw in disorder. But what about forward, positive, purposeful, important, change known as progress? Society will always push back, and gives great reasons to make you want to stay where you are and uses tactics to make you wonder why you ever questioned them in the first place. Don’t we want security and order?

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This is just the way things are done, it’s what they’ve done for years, my whole life, my parents whole lives, how could it be so bad? Well what about the thousands of years before that? History is written by she who holds the pen.

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Clearly we don’t believe what is societally acceptable is the only truth. We want more than a closed, safe life full of lots of stuff that bogs is down. We don’t JUST want to follow a sensible career path and watch tv non stop to figure out how to live. To eat the foods that are so heavily marketed to us so we can get right back to the couch as quickly as possible.

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I would like to spend my precious time doing what I want to do- or figuring out what I want to do. But we often don’t know where to begin. How do you question where you are being inauthentic?

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Society was created by ppl that are no different than any of us. In that instant, we understand we can change everything society said we should and can provide complete fulfillment.

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Just starting the book called Disrupt-Her and in love

What you seek is already within you.

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We cannot appreciate our wins if we are constantly wanting more and never pause to give gratitude to what we already have.

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I feel like finally in my 30’s I have cracked the code of a fully functioning brain, the clarity and appreciation of my body. I also accidentally cracked my own code of weight loss, the code of acne that plagued me my whole life. I feel so much less distracted by vanity and instead empowered by health. I like how strong I feel and how my brain feels when I eat good food. My mental space is opened for creativity rather than clouded by nagging thoughts. It’s much easier for me to notice my body feeling crappy when I sneak some bites of the tempting food everyone around me is eating, the food that used to have such a control on me. The answer to so much pain was simple food and nice, simple thoughts.

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I remember seeing my yoga instructors, celebrities, beautiful people and wondering what their secret was. Sure they prolly had private chefs and their own personal trainers and spa sessions, even plastic surgeons, but there must be something in their products i should buy too. Turns out I don’t need a private chef to have beautiful skin. I can make make simple meals at home that do the best things for my body.

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We all know money doesn’t make us happier, healthier or less stressed. Your body on the inside does not know if you live in a mansion or a shack. Your body does not get more satisfaction when your hair is a different color or if you are dressed in certain clothes. What your body knows is how happy you are, how stressed you are, how depleted your environment must be of nutrients, and responds accordingly. Just like if you’ve ever owned a puppy, that puppy loves you no matter where you live, no matter how much makeup you are wearing. It just cares about you paying attention to it, feeding it and taking care of it. Your body should be treated in the same loving way as you would treat that puppy. Speak to it nicely, tell yourself nice things. Sure, you may have to train it sometimes, but you also must move on, celebrate the good and and enjoy the little things.

what you seek is seeking you. 

So much new science is just confirming what we already know in our hearts.

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A new review last year found that spending time close to big bodies of water: lakes, rivers and the sea has a positive impact on mental health and promotes physical activity and wellness.

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These “blue spaces” seem to get us to want to be active, whether it’s go swimming, running, hiking, maybe just walk to the edge to watch the waves continue to flow. What is it about the sound that is so soothing? Why are we so drawn to it? Is it because it means a fresh source of water and food?

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Whenever I visit a new city that is near water, especially a beach town, I plan a hike, or go for a morning run to go see it. I love to get up before the sun is too strong and I can get a new gauge on where I am in the town. It feels like you have the whole space to yourself while the rest of the town is still sleeping. Running along the water in the sand is much better for your joints than concrete or even asphalt. Asphalt is a bit softer than concrete, but sand is even softer. You can even secretly try some handstands or cartwheels, play in the sand and it’s ok if you fall. If there’s no water, search out a park that you can still be surrounded by trees and maybe a fountain.

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We don’t have a way yet to quantitatively study blue spaces and our bodies, but we do know green spaces allow us to breath in terpenes (tree essential oils) that help our blood cell activity. I would love to see what’s happening in these big open blue spaces that makes us feel so drawn towards them. Even if that research never comes, I’m happy just by looking at such a beautiful place.

Healthy and delicious can go hand in hand. This nutrient dense, restorative, humble, easy-to-make staple is one of my favorite ways to stay a healthy human.

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My mom would just grab a rotisserie chicken and throw the bones into a pot with a bunch of veggies, and the four of us would have a fragrant warm soup to come home to. She’d add in a whole onion, a couple large cloves of garlic, celery and baby carrots, lots of herbs. She also added in angel hair pasta and gold fish crackers, but I leave those out today.

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Slow cooking animal bones in water until they break down has tons of healing powers known for centuries. A South American proverb reads, “Good broth will resurrect the dead.”

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Science started catching up with this ancient wisdom when researchers in the last hundred years studied gelatin, the thing that makes a well-made broth gel when it cools. This jiggly stuff transports nutrients easily from cartilage and tendons and has minerals in the forms that our bodies can easily absorb.

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But we found a way to simplify this staple. Since World War II, American food scientists discovered ways to pack synthetic flavor enhancers that allowed everyone to cut corners. Broth could now be made with a bouillon cube or straight out of a can. Nobody seemed to have patience anymore for the time intensive traditional healing foods like normal veggies and broths. And our collective state of health has taken a nose dive since then.

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I can’t think of anything more simple than adding a simple broth recipe to your rotating menu. Then you can add even more good stuff: turmeric and ginger, chili oils and roasted garlic, leftover veggie stems and infused coconut milk. It can be a stand alone beverage or part of a full meal.

This is what the start to every meal should look like.: mostly veggies.

I didn’t learn to cook veggies until into my 30’s. I didn’t realize how easy it was!

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To cook basically any veggie, chop them to the same size (to cook evenly), add some avocado oil, garlic and salt, and voila. Maybe add a piece of healthy protein to the baking dish (or sauté pan stove top). 75% of plate should be veggies. No counting calories needed. Natural foods allow us to express our full versions of health, allow the body to heal itself. Real food is our natural medicine.

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My mom would cook almost everything from scratch, and never allowed us to eat out of a can. She hated the taste of store bought foods. She grew up on a small farm in Croatia, and mostly did not like American convenience foods. But I did not bring those habits to college. I considered “eat your veggies” to be something to roll my eyes at. I was healthy (or so I thought bc I was skinny and never got sick). I could work off any excess weight (obvs genes right? Wrong.) I assumed I was fine. In fact, many people hide their bad health under fit bodies. Maybe they do have amazing genes, maybe they were fed great foods growing up, but nobody can rely on that forever with a terrible diet.

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We need phytonutrients from plants to slow down everyday oxidation reactions that cause aging (and wrinkles). That is unavoidable. But we can slow down the process. Instead, in our American culture, we starve ourselves of veggies, the custodians and little repair guys. Then we add in our toxic foods like sugar and canola oil that speed up those oxidation reactions, causing inflammation and pain. The cheap foods quickly deliver more of those aging free radicals (Tasmanian devils rather than nutrients) inside our cells. The way to hold them back? The phytonutrients in veggies slow down that damage. If we can remove the bad guys, great. But if you have a hard time giving up the addicting bad foods, combat their control every time you eat the bad (“food” or alcohol). Each time you grab a bad food, grab a handful of greens too! That would be an amazing first step. Arm your tummy with greens.

Let’s use ancient wisdom coupled with modern technology to better understand our bodies through food. Use science to learn what nature already does for us.

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I’m always interested in cross generational knowledge (and how it is sustained, how it didn’t get lost, ignored or squandered). I believe the most difficult problems have already been solved, and the beauty of our language and maintaining of written records helps us exponentially grow. But up until the last 2000 years, arguably even 10,000, everything we had was passed down by words and experience, hands on learning from our tribe. It’s fascinating to look at cultures that have survived longer than a mere 200 years, the average length of a leading power house empire. Let’s look at what allowed us to survive millennia to understand real longevity.

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Realize we really don’t need all these conveniences and overdoses of empty calories. In fact, our Frankenstein food combined with lack of physical work is making us weak, lazy and malnourished. Empty calories do not give your body what it needs. Being sedentary does not build muscle.

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We have more people dying from over eating (and the diseases associated with eating empty calories non stop) than dying from lack of food around the world.

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How did we survive almost 200k years? How about millions? What did we eat, what did we value? Because at our rate of innovation and frustration, we are only looking to last as long as we can without poisoning (by pollution or food) or nuking ourselves out of existence.

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We like to think of ourselves as superior and advanced, as constantly finding ways to live longer and smarter. But we’ve actually reached a peak and have begun dipping down. And we will continue down this path if we follow the status quo. We are the first generation expected to live shorter lives than our parents. We will continue to fall until we can remove our barriers to health that WE created.

We have a chronic disease epidemic caused by our food system.

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Everyone may have a near death experience. For me, I came to an understanding that my being an American woman, following all the rules and expectations, was a risk to my life. The culture I was living in was leading me faster to my death by activating pre-cancer cells in my body.

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We can measure this problem in several ways. Both the number of people sick, as well as money spent on healthcare on relevant preventable illnesses can be attributed to our food.

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We are losing more people dying to preventable diseases than every war we have ever experienced in all of American history COMBINED, losing all of those people and more every single year. There is a war on health being completely ignored. We could say (as we always have) that it is the fault of the individual. But if you look deeper, would we leave the safety of the building of our homes to the individual? The safety of our cars? Would we leave the safety of our children’s toys to the individual companies with no oversight?

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We see that the amount of money that we spend on chronic disease is increasing. The World Economic Forum says our chronic disease epidemic is our biggest threat to global economic development. We will spend $47 TRILLION dollars on it over next 20 years.

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Warren Buffet says that the ballooning cost of healthcare is a hungry tapeworm on our economy. We’ve gone from 5% of GDP on healthcare to almost 20% in 50 years. How is government and industry combatting this trend effectively?

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I believe we are a smart species, and should make it easy on ourselves to make good decisions. 90% of those diseases could be prevented or lessened with the right dietary changes. What would a 90% increase in health mean for you and your family? The first step is realizing we have a problem.

The benefits of being surrounded by trees can be measured in your blood.

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Natural plants emit these things called terpenes (aromatic essential oils) that have strong effects on the body. We already knew being in nature is calming, but studies have shown breathing in these plant compounds activates and strengthens blood cell activity, and reacts with receptors and neurotransmitters in the brain, mimicking antidepressants (or pills mimicking nature ). Even stranger, just looking at trees outside a window calms us in stressful situations, as if our bodies remember breathing in that air??

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Terpenes in the forest are highest in concentration 3 to 6 feet off the ground, at the exact height of our noses. Our immune system responds to even short walks in the forest.

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The increased effect of red blood cell activity after breathing in terpenes from a forest has been measured to last up to a month! That means... get out there in nature at least once a month to feel like a normal person again.

Imagine what being surrounded by good people does for us! Our heats syncopate with those within 5 feet of us. We can tell when someone is looking at us even if we cannot see them. We can feel the vibe shift when someone with a different energy enters the room. We have way more than 5 senses: we are energetic beings, electricity literally sparking between neurons, we ground when barefoot on the earth, gravitational forces can be felt underground, but not in sensory deprived zones - where we no longer tell when it is day or night, when to sleep or wake. Praying makes measurable changes- especially when praying in groups - with syncopated breathing and singing. Something changes in us when surrounded by others, especially when eating, singing, sweating, or going through shared emotional states: like a rock concert or war zone or yoga session.