http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Television writer Ariel Dumas (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) asked a seemingly innocuous question on Twitter last week that brought out almost 7,000 responses while getting at an adorable but very true point: Kids have an extremely skewed view of reality. “What was the thing you thought was very fancy as a kid that turned out not to be?”
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Humans will never give up their quest to find the secret to a long life. Could it be the Mediterranean diet? Could it be drinking a glass of red wine every day? There will likely never be a definitive answer. Regardless, people will probably never stop dispensing their family wisdom about how to extend your lifespan.
Case in point: America’s oldest woman, Lessie Brown. She lived to be 114, before sadly passing away last week. Now, her family says that she lived so long because she stuck to one simple rule: eat a sweet potato every day.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
By now it’s pretty clear that cauliflower can be turned into just about anything if you set your mind to it. You can use it as a substitute for chicken, or to make a lighter version of mac and cheese, and even as a replacement for rice. Just when you thought we’d reached peak cauliflower, a new grocery product comes into town and totally blows our collective minds: cauli tortillas!
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Creating a beautiful, minimalist home can be done in one fell swoop with the help of some major de-cluttering, but maintaining a minimalist home is a whole different story. Clutter is an inevitable part of life. It tends to accumulate rather quickly, which is why implementing a few mindful habits at home — like these five below — is essential for preserving the minimalist look and functionality.
Whether you’re a seasoned minimalist or just want to dip your toes into the minimalism movement, these easy habits will keep your home looking its best.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
It’s Monday, 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 Monday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!
My primal journey started in 2010. I had just attended my last Weight Watchers meeting ever. I had been doing Weight Watchers since 2005, and was at my highest weight ever. I was massively obese, I was severely lethargic, and I lived with daily brain fog. I was having miscarriages, but was being told there was nothing wrong with me. I went to a new doctor who told me that when I got pregnant again, I should come in and immediately start running tests so that when I lost it, we might have some insight as to why.
That was at the end of April. I was depressed and desperate. My dad had stumbled onto Mark Sisson’s website and pushed me to try Primal eating. I was extremely skeptical. In 2001, when I had first started dealing with health issues, I had been diagnosed with peripheral insulin resistance and had tried the Atkins diet. I was living in a dorm room at the time and failed miserably. So I was skeptical about trying another low carb restrictive diet.
But what did I have to lose?
Within a month of going Primal, I had lost several pounds, my brain fog was slowly clearing, and my gut was healing (another problem I hadn’t realized existed!).
And in July, I got pregnant again. This time it stuck. My son was born 9 months later. After 3 miscarriages, I am firmly convinced that I stayed pregnant because of my diet changes, and I became a full Primal convert.
After my son was born, I immediately resumed my Primal lifestyle. His first real food was bacon, and he loved liver as soon as he was old enough for real food. I continued the Primal journey, and continued slowly losing the weight and regaining my health.
Then I got pregnant again. This pregnancy was a whole different situation. I had hyperemesis gravidarum for both pregnancies, but this time I couldn’t eat anything. I lived off of cinnamon rolls, as they were the only thing I seemed able to keep down, and I drank nothing but gatorade. I was miserable, I was unbelievably adverse to the smell of all meat so I couldn’t even try to be Primal. I developed eczema on my arm so badly that I had to wear sleeves to work so my clients wouldn’t think I’d contracted ringworm! Luckily, my daughter was born healthy. I ended that pregnancy 10 lbs above where I started. And then my health disappeared.
The rash on my arm never really went away. I soon had eczema on my legs as well. Furthermore, I was so constipated that I wouldn’t go to the bathroom for days at a time and had constant crippling, severe stomach cramps. I had horrible brain fog, and who knows how much of that was a daughter who wouldn’t sleep versus dietary issues.
But more importantly, when she was not quite a year old, I broke out with hives. At first we didn’t know what they were and thought they were bed bug bites! Finally we clued in and I went to the allergy doctor. I knew I was reactive to wheat. As soon as I had cut it out in 2010, I noticed I got sick every time I ate it. I was suspicious of eggs and dairy. But I tested positive to literally every single food, plant, and animal they tested me for with the exception of white fish!
He immediately confirmed that it was an allergy problem. But that night I ended up in the emergency room with full body, raised, angry red, large diameter hives (like inches in diameter). He put me on all sorts of steroids, antihistamines, and beta-blockers. I cut everything out of my diet, and literally ate nothing but unflavored ground beef and vegetables for months.
And the huge, angry, red, full-body hives never went away.
I went from the allergist through eight other doctors. I went to conventional doctors, homeopathic doctors, acupuncturists, herbalists, etc. The hives never went away. I finally took myself off of all meds because they were turning me into a zombie. Unfortunately, even off of meds, nothing improved. One doctor started me on progesterone, thinking it was a hormonal problem because my cycles were so irregular (they had been like clockwork up until my daughter), and that made me much sicker. Unfortunately, those side effects didn’t go away once I took myself back off the meds.
Finally, out of sheer desperation, I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I cleaned my diet up to be 100% Primal. I started meditating daily. I changed my job to reduce the stress.
And between less stress and diet improvements, finally, the hives started to go away. It had been a year and a half. They weren’t gone completely until after the two year mark, and even as recently as a few months ago they’d still pop up if I became too stressed or ate the wrong things.
Since then, my health has been a slow improvement. The eczema slowly disappeared. My gut slowly healed. But my weight wouldn’t drop. All the signs that showed up when I was put on hormones (heavier periods, breasts that were so sore you couldn’t look at them for a full 2 weeks each cycle, twenty day cycles) were still present. And I was plateaued. I would drop to 188 lb (I’m 5’3), but could never get below that number.
I was stuck there for nearly 3 years. I was feeling better overall, but I was stuck. I would be extremely clean for about 2 months, then I would give up since my weight wasn’t shifting anyway. Then a week later I’d be back to Primal eating because the brain fog and low energy would have come back.
Finally, this last spring, I broke that plateau. I had been 100% Primal for a few months, finally, and everything suddenly balanced. My cycles regulated, I stopped being in pain, and my weight finally started to drop again.
It’s still a journey. I’m not quite to my ideal weight yet as I’ve hit several other plateaus since. But for someone who has been obese since they were 16, now that I finally know what works for me, I can be patient. And more importantly, being Primal allowed me to heal up such severe disease after nine doctors couldn’t help me that I became an even stronger advocate than I’d been before.
I was already a licensed veterinarian and was using Primal principles in my animal patients, but after finally healing my own body, I became a certified Primal Health Coach so I could help the humans as well!
So what have I done since I received my certification? Since I received my certification, my life has gone in all sort of directions!
I was already using Primal principles in my holistic veterinary practice. I have absolutely continued using those principles to help heal the pups who walk through my door, and I have created an educational website and Facebook group for owners interested in healing their pets through diet!
However, I still wanted to help people, too.
When I first graduated, I obtained two informal coaching clients. One was a friend of my mother’s who had suffered from IBD, allergies, inability to lose weight, and masses around her thyroid (although they said her thyroid values were normal).
When we first started talking, she was eating grains with most meals, avoiding fat, and filling her diet with things like vegetable oil!
The first thing we did was cut the grains and vegetable oil, reintroduce real foods, and increase the healthy fats.
Within a month, she had lost 20 pounds, her energy was returning, and her IBD was feeling more controlled than ever!
My other client was a friend of mine who had also suffered from IBD, but who also had her gallbladder removed a few years before. In addition, she couldn’t lose weight and had all sorts of fluctuations in her hormones.
Again, with nothing more than diet changes, she slowly started to recover. Her weight decreased more slowly, but it was the first time she had ever succeeded in getting it off! More importantly, the IBD that flared with every menstrual cycle started staying controlled, and her hormones started to balance.
However, that wasn’t the end of coaching for me.
Around this time, I started having other veterinarians approaching me, asking how I had changed my life around. I had gone from severely burned out and feeling trapped and desperate in my job to outsourcing myself from my own business, moving to another state, and learning to love life and travel again!
And they wanted to know how I had done it.
Well, the first answer to that question was that when I started to get my stress under control (which started with getting my diet and health under control), then changes just started to take place that allowed me to completely turn my lifestyle around.
So I also began coaching veterinarians and other health care professionals on how to change their lives around. That coaching isn’t just about health, but health is almost always a piece of what we have to cover since these are women under massive loads of stress, and we have to deal with the health effects of that stress.
Today, I do both health coaching and mindset coaching. I believe in helping people live their best lives, and I will use whatever means necessary to help them do that! So while much of my focus is on veterinarians and other health care professionals, I still do regular health coaching as well.
I teach people that it is definitely possible to live the life of your dreams, and in my case, it all started with learning about ancestral health!
– Jenny Elwell-Gerken
Jenny’s listing in the Primal Health Coach Institute Directory
Website: www.drjeg.com
The post Nine Doctors Couldn’t Help Me appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
“Biscuit-topped” is one of my favorite word combinations. In cookbooks, it is the friend I’m always delighted to run into. Oh, hi there, are you a hearty stew plush with grounding root vegetables and maybe handfuls of tender slow-cooked chicken, all hanging out under a blanket of warm biscuits? Let’s be friends.
Four years ago, I stumbled into an accidental tradition. Once the weather starts edging towards fall, the nights stretching until they brush against the late afternoon, I make the biscuit-topped tofu miso stew from The Tassajara Cookbook. The cookbook is written by Edward Espe Brown, a celebrated chef who just happens to also be a Buddhist priest.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Trader Joe’s prides itself on offering fair prices, especially on frozen foods, snacks, and wine. They don’t have sales, they don’t have coupons, and they don’t do discounts. They say so, loud and clear, on their website.
“Sale” is a four-letter word to us. We have low prices, every day. NO coupons. NO membership cards. NO discounts. NO glitzy promotions or couponing wars at our stores. We offer the best everyday values, every day.
Still, tenacious shoppers have found a way to make the cult grocery-store chain even more affordable. Here are five ways to save money.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
There are many things the microwave does really well. When you’re facing dinnertime at the end of a long day, it can even venture into that life-saver category. From weekday omelets to five-minute sides dishes, snacks, and mug cakes, these are some of the most essential recipes to make in your microwave.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
When it comes to wine tasting, there’s a lot of terrible wine out there. And there are even more terrible wine accessories. Even the worst wine will give you a decent buzz, but a lot of wine paraphernalia is a true waste of money. From decanters that look like Rube Goldberg machines to overhyped, overpriced aerators and wine preservation systems (if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably a Coravin), there are catalogues and websites full of crap for people to panic-buy because they’re pretty sure their Uncle Tony likes wine, right? And don’t even get me started on the offensively gendered world of gift bags.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
You know those kitchens that you save to your #kitchengoals Pinterest board and wistfully visit (and revisit)? Whether your dream kitchen trends toward Scandi-cool or is more farmhouse-chic, chances are it’s neat and tidy, with nary a stray spatula in sight. Are we right? We thought so.
While you might not be able to transform your tiny rental kitchen into a palatial space with its own walk-in pantry, you can get it in tip-top shape. Here are 30 of our smartest tips and hacks to help you (and your kitchen) take a step in the right direction.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
Book your class NOW!
click this ==>
