Nutrient Rich Life

Recently I have been looking into pregnancy complications related to Gestational Weight Gain (GWG), or weight that women gain during pregnancy. This is of personal interest to me because during my first pregnancy, I gained over 50lbs, (and then stopped looking!) well over the guidelines. However, I had a very healthy pregnancy, a complication-free home birth, a beautiful smart baby, and I lost all the weight a little over a year. Despite the GWG guidelines, I propose that poor outcomes are actually caused by poor health, especially high blood pressure and diabetes (aka metabolic syndrome/insulin resistance). Each of these can be prevented by living a nutrient dense active lifestyle. Pregnant women should be educated not on the numbers on the scale, but on how to eat a nutrient dense diet to foster a healthy baby. Photo by  i yunmai  on  Unsplash Here are the official American College of Obstetrics and Gynocology (ACOG) guidelines: Prepregnancy Weight Catego...

If you have been following me for a while, you may have noticed that I like to use lard when I cook. It is truly the most economical nutrient dense fat, especially when you render it yourself. There are many instructional videos and blogs out there, but I just wanted to show you how I do it, so you can see just how easy it can be to make a TON of shelf stable, vitamin D rich, versatile LARD! YAY! Some farms will sell you a big piece of  "pork fat" or "pork leaf fat", this is what you want. It is seriously a big hunk of fat. Below I'm rendering 2.5 lbs of fat, which makes pretty much the same weight in lard. This cost me about $4 or $5 from a local pasture-centered farm. If you compare this to butter, which, at this level of purity costs about $10-15/lb, or olive oil, at best $5/lb, you are getting an incredible deal on fat here at about $1.80/lb!!!! Polyface, a great farm with dropsites throughout Virginia, sells 5lbs for about $10. I encourage you to inquire...

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about intermittent fasting was what I would call food freedom. When I would fast, I wouldn’t have to eat, prepare food, think about food, or buy as much food. Food became less pressing and my attention could go toward other things! It was so freeing! There is particular spiritual value in this freedom, too, as evidenced by almost all religions having a tradition of fasting. Now, I'm a nutritionist, not a Bible scholar. BUT I think that scripture contained this wisdom long before IF became popular.  Jesus, in talking to His disciples said, "and when you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do... they have received their reward in full... your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you." Matt 6:16 (NIV) The Hebrew word for fast is here is “nhsteuw”, which Strong’s Concordance defines as “ to abstain as a religious exercise from food and drink: either entirely, if the fast lasted but a single day, or fr...

A while ago I wrote about Intermittent Fasting for women because, I believe, there are some consideration for us that are slightly different than for men. Today I want to share with you a bit of my hormonal health and healing journey, and I want to discuss why it is so interesting that I could conceive while fasting daily. When I was 21, I still was not getting my period regularly. This is a medical condition called Amenorrhea. My feelings were exactly that, "amen!" no period? no problem! But it is a problem and my mom encouraged me to seek attention from gynecologists. I went to a few. One said I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). But I didn't actually meet the diagnostic criteria for  PCOS . One said I needed to gain weight. One said I needed to stop exercising. They all said that I should take progesterone or "the pill".  these are photos of me age 21 Well, I am pretty firm about some things, and at this point in my life, I felt strongly...

Do you feel like you've failed when it comes to feeding your kid optimally for his or her health? Man. I do. My sweet boy has struggled with vomiting since shortly after introducing solid foods. It took us forever to identify food allergies and finally stop the daily puke fest. I have battled a ton of "mom guilt" all along the way. Yes, before conceiving this beautiful child, my husband and I did a gut microbiome restoring diet called GAPS for two years. I did a series of detox therapies to remedy hormonal imbalances, involving fasting and lots of enemas one weekend every month for a year. After this, I started grinding my own flour for sourdough bread and we transitioned to a 95% organic diet where most all of our animal products came exclusively from local sustainable Amish farms. If there was more I could have done to prepare for a healthy child, I would have done it if I had known about it. You may say I am a bit gung ho. At times.   But for whatever reason, and I...

Listen to your body. If I ever write a book it will be about respecting and honoring our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. You know how intricate the design of the Jewish Temple is? There were so many details to how it would be laid out and each piece of construction and adornment had purpose and meaning and symbolism. And our bodies are like this too. Certain things happen at certain times and in precise perfection in order to sustain life. This is how our Designer God is. He's so cool. Wow. I'm a female, and I'm 32 years old. So my body is on a cycle every 28 days (ok for me it is more like 32 days, but you get it). I can do the same workout every day, eat the same food every day, sleep the same amount, but the reality is that my body will still be on this cycle. It will behave differently each week of the month. I think we, as women, try to escape this in our post-modern world as if we have control over everything. But why? Why escape what God has pe...

This recipe is ideal special diets such as GAPS, SCD, paleo, and ova-pescetarian. The nutrient profile is anti-inflammatory and promotes fertility and incubating smart babies! I try to eat small wild fatty fish each day. And there is no more delicious and low-mercury way to get this, but from anchovies in a Caesar salad dressing. Please use pasture raised, local eggs from a farm you trust. 1 egg 1 egg yolk 2 tsp Dijon mustard juice of 1/2 lemon 1 tbs whey/plain high quality yogurt (optional) 2 cloves of garlic 2 oz. tin of anchovies (I used Trader Joes) 3/4 cup olive oil  (I use Zoe's because it is organic and comes in a tin) black pepper to taste Place all ingredients, except the olive oil, in a high speed blender. Start it on low and increase to high, blending it together for 30 seconds. Lower speed to about 3 and slowly pour in olive oil. Season with pepper to taste. Store in a glass jar with a secure lid. If you added whey, leave the jar out for 8 hours to ferment....

Check out my other post on how I and why I started this Intermittent Fasting journey and what I did. The pictures are separate here, because, honestly, they are an after thought. I hope that when you read this you aren't thinking "skinny b****" why is she worried about losing weight? Because that's not what this is about. I did not embark on this to loose weight. I wanted to get my sleep back, and get my blood sugar under control. I wanted to feel healthy and not hungry all the time. I learned that while "what we eat" is really important, "when we eat" can undo a lot of the good! But I did want to show y'all how health is so visible. Can't you tell, when you look in the mirror the morning after poor nights rest? Health is so much more than weight and size. It's holistic, it's who we are at the very core, body, spirit, soul, and mind. So here goes, and please do read my prior post for more of the story. September 2017, I was...

This post is long. I have learned so much on this topic, and I feel that God wants me to share this for your health and well being too! There will be more to come including some pictures . But here is how this recent journey began. I weaned my son from nursing when he was about two years and three months old. At that point, I had lost all of the 50+lbs of baby weight. Little Man has egg allergies and I was avoiding eggs along with him. This meant that my breakfasts went from eggs and veggies to a yogurt parfait or a piece of sausage, or fruit and almond butter. (READ: less protein!) Our church was doing a 21 day fast and I used this as a chance to try a way of eating which I had read about that required smaller portions of protein (3oz instead of my usual 4-8oz at a meal). You can imagine that I was snacking like a pregnant lady, but I wasn't pregnant or nursing any more. YIKES! Even after this restricted protein thing, my sleep got worse. and worse. I started waking during the...