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Imagine browsing the market stalls in Marché Bastille — overflowing with local cheeses, colorful veggies, and piles of crispy baguettes — then heading home to your snug pied-à-terre to cook up a fancy French feast. No fair, right? Then imagine that said pied-à-terre was one of these places. Even less fair!
At least you can try to bottle some of these kitchen’s je ne sais quoi for your own home.
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It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!
Five years ago, a young and “healthy” 22 year old, I was working as a groom at a high end horse ranch in Western Colorado. I suddenly found myself with debilitating migraines. I’d never had migraines before so it was a bit shocking for me. But they were bad. Really, really bad. Like, 10-14 days long. I couldn’t function. My boss was as understanding as can be so I didn’t lose my job (thank goodness), but I remember my head felt like it was splitting in two, even dim light was painful, and I’d have to get a horse, go into the barn, shut the doors, turn the lights off, wear sunglasses anyway, and try to do my job. That’s neither sustainable nor a solution. It was horrendous. And ridiculous.
But the many doctors didn’t have any solutions. Migraine meds didn’t do a thing. The neurologist ordered a battery of blood tests and an MRI of my brain. Everything normal, nothing to fix here. Just keep trying the migraine meds. In the meantime, I was frantically trying to find a way to improve my health. I figured, What do healthy people do? They run marathons right? Let’s google how to do that. I didn’t really want to run (who was I kidding, running sucks!) so when one of the results was an MDA article about training for marathons with a link to an article against chronic cardio I checked that one out. I figured it might give me an excuse to not have to take up running. Ha! I had no idea it would lead to something way better.
From there I checked out the rest of the site. So, if lions are designed to eat meat and zebras to eat grass, what are humans meant to eat? What a common sense question, why hadn’t I ever thought to ask that? I signed up for the introductory emails but didn’t even wait for them before I binge read everything on the blog, cleared my pantry, and started in. There was a local rancher that sold grass fed steaks at the grocery store. I liked veggies. I really liked bacon so if this new diet said that was in, I was in. It’s funny to think back to all that now.
But I tell you what, as much as that low carb flu kicked my butt, I felt better. And I didn’t get a migraine that first week. Or that second week. Or ever again.
Then I discovered the missing piece of the puzzle. On the way to the neurologist’s office to hear my MRI results, I hadn’t had time to eat at home so I grabbed some convenient chicken fingers on the way. 80/20, I figured. The neurologist was out of town so the nurse practitioner saw me. When she gave me a look over, my thyroid was swollen. Like, huge. Scary swollen. And I was starting to get a headache. We started talking. And then she figured it out. (I tell you, nurse practitioners can be pretty amazing people.) It was gluten. I was having an autoimmune reaction to gluten—celiac. I had celiac. As it turns out, and I later found a Chris Kresser article explaining it, the gluten protein looks similar to something thyroids are made of, so when your body attacks the gluten your thyroid can get attacked too. How about that.
It all made sense now. As a kid I had what I now know to be symptoms of celiac in children. Underweight, constant stomachaches, etc. And before I started getting those migraines, it was summer time so I was with the horses at the high altitude portion of the ranch living in a tiny 120 square foot cabin. The grocery store was a long trip down the mountain. And with only a small mini fridge and no freezer, I ate a lot of shelf stable food. Processed food. Mostly pasta and granola. Really, my diet was about 80% wheat. And my body had finally had enough.
So Mark’s Daily Apple led me to find that I was celiac. But just as important it gave me a way of eating that made me feel healthy.
But I also helped in a far bigger way. A year and a half ago my husband and I found out we were going to be parents. And I kept eating primally. And I had about the healthiest pregnancy I could imagine. Alright, so the morning sickness was miserable and persistent. But otherwise it was perfect. I was one of those “belly only” pregnancies I hear people aim for. I was like a walking beach ball. But I felt great. And the delivery went great. I chalk it up to good nutrition and faith in my body’s ability to do what it was made to do. We had our baby at home with a midwife because that’s what I was comfortable with. After a short 3.5 hour labor (which was uncomfortable but honestly not painful. I now hate the expression “the pain of childbirth.” I think it sends the wrong expectation to women about how birth feels but I digress) we had a healthy 7 lb 12 oz baby girl. She’s so perfect and so healthy. I feel so lucky.
When I was pregnant I read a lot of Weston A Price articles. They brag a lot about how their nutrient dense diet produces healthy pregnancies and healthy babies with a wide jaw (which is an indication that the mother had good nutrition, especially plenty of Vitamins A and K). While I was pregnant I did take dessicated grass fed beef liver, occasionally some Dr Ron’s freeze dried organs and glands, a high quality prenatal with 5-MTHF folate (as recommended by Chris Kresser), fermented cod liver oil, and some high vitamin butter oil in addition to the Primal diet. So I did follow a couple WAPF recommendations. But I was not interested in buying raw milk. I don’t even like drinking milk so I did not want to pay the local raw milk producer the equivalent of $25 a gallon. I didn’t want to hunt down fresh organ meats and eat them. Yucky taste, no thank you. And I didn’t bother soaking/fermenting grains because, well, I’m Primal and I don’t even really do grains. Occasionally I do rice but it’s not that exciting so meh.
I know every parent says this, but my baby is the cutest little sucker in the world. I don’t think it’s just luck either. I think the nutrient dense diet I learned from MDA and the PB are why I’m so healthy and why my daughter is so healthy and so beautiful.
I’ve lost all the “baby weight” with zero effort. I actually weigh less now than I did before I was pregnant. I walk my daughter in the stroller a few times a week for 5 miles while she naps. She keeps me active and busy. I never have time to sit down. Lift heavy things? That baby’s a heavy thing and I carry her constantly. Sprints…Well I’ll get back to those and normal workouts eventually. But I’m not worried about it. I’ve got my walks and my yoga for now.
So I might catch a little flack for my five toe shoes and my obsession with bone broth but gosh dang I couldn’t be happier or healthier. Thank you again and again Mark, you changed my life.
Kate
The post I Didn’t Get a Migraine That First Week. Or That Second Week. Or Ever Again. appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
This month we’re looking back on all the strange and wonderful food jobs people have held during the summer. Whether it’s a job at a local scoop shop, a grocery store, or the concession stand at a baseball field, the skills and memories you gather in those short, hot months usually turn out to be invaluable. Here’s Naomi Tomky on her experience on learning a new language on the job.
I balanced a dozen still-steaming pizza boxes on one knee while a guy ribbed my terrible Spanish pronunciation. “Y tu?” he asked, “And you? Are you Hungarian or Hawaiian?” I was selling pizzas at a professional basketball game in Queretaro, Mexico, and no matter what, the two styles we sold — Hungarian and Hawaiian — were near-impossible for me to pronounce in Spanish. All night, I’d shout and repeat myself, open boxes, and point to the flyer I’d started to carry with me. If it wasn’t for the sheer spectacle of the gringa selling pizzas at the game, I’m sure they would have left me back at the restaurant.
Other days, I would learn new words in a trial-by-fire of hangry customers: “Cubierta?” I repeated in the kitchen on my first day. A coworker laughed and handed me silverware.
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Even a small farmers market can be a little overwhelming. Which way should you go first? Did you bring enough cash? Which stand is going to have the best tomatoes? Before you bail and run for the nearest supermarket, take a breath and do what I do: Take a totally noncommittal loop around the place before you make any decisions.
Here’s how I do it.
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The second summer hits, it feels like a rush to the farmers market to stock up on berries, melons, and stone fruits galore. But when it comes to baking up sweet treats, you might want to reconsider reaching for fresh. Not only is it easy to swap frozen for fresh in most recipes, but frozen fruit also typically works just as well as, if not better than, its fresh counterpart. Here are three times when frozen fruit is better than fresh for baking.
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If you’ve watched even a few episodes of NBC’s cult-favorite sitcom Friends, then you know the group often hung out at their local coffee shop, Central Perk. As you’re probably aware, the six leads indulged in a lot of coffee, but some characters were seen drinking more java than others throughout the series.
Ever wonder which character on Friends is guilty of drinking the most coffee?Writer Kit Lovelace did a bunch of “research” (ahem, watched a bunch of TV) to solve this important question.
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The only thing you may actually look forward to cleaning this summer is your freezer. When you think about it, summer is the absolute perfect time to purge and organize your freezer space. We’re getting a thrill just thinking of the chill!
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Cooking — and baking, especially — is all about getting the timing right. Time things just a minute or two off and the rolls will burn, the soufflé won’t rise, the milk will scald, or the onions won’t caramelize. That’s why you should get yourself a quality kitchen timer, like this vintage-looking option.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
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