Remember – If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please leave us a review in iTunes. Thanks!

Having battled ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease, the modern-medicine way for many years, Danielle Walker took matters into her own hands and set out to regain her health through the medicine of food. She runs the popular grain-free recipe blog Against All Grain and has a cookbook by the same name hitting shelves July 30th.

Links mentioned:

Danielle’s website and book.
Specific Carbohydrate Diet - book Breaking the Vicious Cycle

Topics:

• Danielle’s battle with ulcerative colitis and playing detective with her own food sensitivities.
• Managing flare ups.
• What Danielle eats now to keep herself healthy.
• How Danielle feeds her son, Asher.
• Danielle’s take on grain-free treats.
• Egg substitues.
• Paleo foods Danielle avoids with her UC.
• Quick & easy meal ideas when busy/on-the-go
• Her new book, “Against All Grain,” due out this summer!

Click here to download this episode as an MP3.

The episodes are currently available in iTunes, Stitcher & Blog Talk Radio.

Complete transcript coming soon!

Cheers!
Diane & Liz

This recipe is a great choice to enjoy while on The 21-Day Sugar Detox. 

hot & sweet ginger-garlic chicken

grain-free • gluten-free • dairy-free • nightshade-free* • sugar-free • sweetener-free • 21DSD

PREP TIME: 5 minutes
COOKING TIME: 30-35 minutes
YIELD: 3 servings
NUTRITION INFO: coming soon!

ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon ghee or coconut oil
• sea salt & black pepper to taste
• 6 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (or other cut, cooking time will vary)
• 1 small onion, finely sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced or grated
• 1/2 teaspoon ginger powder or fresh ginger
• 1 teaspoon white sesame seeds
• 1-2 pinches chili flakes (*omit for nightshade-free)
• 1/4 cup coconut aminos (available at most Whole Foods Markets or local organic grocers/co-ops for around $5-7/bottle)

preparation:

• Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
• In an oven safe cast iron or stainless steel skillet, melt the ghee, then season both sides of the chicken with sea salt and black pepper, and place skin side down into the pan for 5-6 minutes or until the skin browns and releases easily from the pan.
• While the chicken cooks, combine the onion, garlic, ginger, sesame seeds, chili flakes, coconut aminos and more sea salt and black pepper in a small mixing bowl.
• Flip the chicken thighs over so that they are now skin side up in the pan, then pour the sauce mixture over the chicken evenly and place the pan into the oven for 30 minutes or until the internal temperature of the chicken reaches 165 degrees.

Yes, you can enjoy this recipe while on The 21-Day Sugar Detox.

PS – Don’t miss out on the SexyBack Summit videos while they’re free!

Note: I earn a small commission if you use the links in this post to purchase the products mentioned. I only recommend products I would use myself or that I recommend for clients in my practice or at workshops. Your purchase helps support my work in bringing you real information about nutrition and health.

Remember – If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please leave us a review in iTunes. Thanks!

Last week’s episode post now has a written transcript available. We will be playing a lot of catch-up, but bear with us as they’re on their way! We’ll also be trying to get current episode transcripts up-to-date and loaded with each podcast but it’ll take another couple of weeks before we catch up there as well. We hope you’re enjoying them!

Topics:

1. Bringing the wrong mind-set (diet vs. lifestyle)
2. Going low-carb…by accident
3. Carb-loading for your desk job
4. Hidden gluten (and vegetable oil) exposure
5. Calcium sources
6. Dairy decisions
7. Alcohol

Links: 

Diane’s Paleo carbs post
Liz’s calcium post

Click here to download this episode as an MP3.

The episodes are currently available in iTunes, Stitcher & Blog Talk Radio.

Full transcript coming soon!

Cheers!
Diane & Liz

Don’t miss out on The SexyBack Summit, a free online conference happening from Sunday, May 19th through Saturday, May 25th – for both women AND men!

We’ve brought together 24 functional medicine doctors, naturopaths, nutritionists, trainers, and sexperts whose mission it is to bring your sexy back naturally — without pills, potions, and risky prescription drugs!

What is it?

The SexyBack Summit features 24 presentations from functional medicine doctors and healthy hormone experts and authors.

Topics & speakers:

50 Shades of Better Sex: Secrets of a Harvard Gynecologist (Not for Women Only) with DR. SARA GOTTFRIED, MD, Harvard-trained Medical Doctor & Author, The Hormone Cure

How to Cross Train Your Menstrual Cycle for a Better Sex Life with ALISA VITTI, Integrative Nutritionist & Author, Woman Code

Embracing And Communicating Your Sexuality with Integrity and Without Shame with ADAM GILAD, Executive Dating Coach

Exercise & Sex: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly with BRETT KLIKA, CSCS, Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist

Restoring Sexual Vitality: A 4-Doctor Approach with PAUL CHEK, Founder, C.H.E.K Institute & Author, How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy

Natural Birth Control Alternatives with JANE BENNETT, Co-author, The Pill: Are You Sure It’s for You?

Super Foods for Super Sex with YURI ELKAIM Founder, Super Nutrition Academy

What’s So Sexy About Vulnerability? with MATTHEW SANDERS, Psychological Consultant

Chasing the Big O: Overcoming the Inability to Orgasm with CYNTHIA PASQUELLA Clinical Nutritionist & Author, The Hungry Hottie Cookbook

How Male and Female Sex Energy Is Magnified Through Deep Breathing with ELLIOTT HULSE, Strength Coach & Video Blogger

Why We Get UTIs, Yeast Infections, and Candida…and How to Knock Them Out for Good! with CHRISTA ORECCHIO, CN, Clinical & Holistic Nutritionist

The Painful Pelvis, the Paleo Pelvis, and Sex. with KATY BOWMAN, MS,Biomechanical Scientist & Pelvic Floor Specialist

Low T: Causes, Symptoms, and Solutions with REED DAVIS, FDN, Founder, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition

Let Them Eat Fat! The Big Fat Truth about Low Libido, Low T, & ED with KIM SCHUETTE, Clinical Nutritionist & Certified GAPS Practitioner

Female Phase Training: Using the Natural Hormonal Fluctuations of the Menstrual Cycle to Accelerate Fat Loss with DR. JADE TETA, ND, Naturopathic Doctor & Co-author, The Metabolic Effect Diet

The Pre-Menstrual Myth: Causing, Overcoming, & Debunking PMS with STEFANI RUPER, Women’s Health Expert & Author, PCOS Unlocked: The Manual

Get in the Mood, Stay in the Mood: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Her Libido with DR. DANIEL KALISH, DC, Functional Medicine Practitioner & Founder,The Kalish Method

Bulletproof Sex: Upgrade Your Orgasm with DAVE ASPREY, Biohacker & Host, The Bulletproof Exec Podcast

Rejuvenate Your Vagina with DR. ANNA CABECA, MD, Medical Doctor & Creator, Sexual CPR

Rewire Your Desire: Bring Your Sexy Back and Change Your Life Forever with DR. JEN LANDA, MD, Medical Doctor & Author, The Sex Drive Solution for Women

The Ovarian-Adrenal-Thyroid Axis: How Adrenal Stress and Poor Thyroid Function are Stealing Your Mojo with CHRIS KRESSER, Integrative Medicine Practitioner and Licensed Acupuncturist

Let’s Make a Baby! with DR. CARRIE JONES, ND with Naturopathic Doctor

How to Make Super Sperm with BRIDGIT DANNER - Fertility Expert & Blogger/Podcaster

Beyond Bad Breath: How Poor Oral Health Leads to Sexual Dysfunction with WILL REVAK, Founder, OraWellness

When it takes place

LIVE from Sunday, May 19 through Saturday, May 25th!

How it works

For each day of the summit, 2 presentations will be posted on The SexyBack Summit website. These presentations will be available for free, streaming for 24 hours (from midnight to midnight Pacific time).

At the end of the 24 hour period, 2 new presentations will be posted and this will continue each day until the summit ends.

The final day of the summit will feature the TOP FOUR fan favorites to be re-aired – so if you miss one, you will get this last chance to tune in again.

How you can participate

To register for the summit for free, simply click here. You’ll then receive an email with instructions on how to watch the videos.

Don’t miss out…

Sean is kicking the SexyBack Summit off with some cool free videos covering the top 5 ways to supercharge your sex drive. There’s a video for men (with functional medicine expert Reed Davis), and another for women (with celebrity nutritionist Cynthia Pasquella). To watch the videos and register (for free) for the Summit, just CLICK HERE.

Note: I earn a small commission if you use the links in this post to purchase the products mentioned. I only recommend products I would use myself or that I recommend for clients in my practice or at workshops. Your purchase helps support my work in bringing you real information about nutrition and health.

Remember – If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please leave us a review in iTunes. Thanks!

Arsy Vartanian is the author and chef of the Paleo recipe & lifestyle blog, Rubies & Radishes and the cookbook, The Paleo Slow Cooker. In an effort to achieve optimal health and wellness, she discovered Crossfit & the Paleo diet in 2008. Arsy started feeling better than ever and was eventually able to recover from health issues that she had struggled with for almost a decade.

When Arsy is not busy at her day job or being a mom to her new baby, you can find her in her kitchen developing healthy recipes for her family and her blog readers.

Links mentioned:

http://www.westonaprice.org/childrens-health/vitamins-for-fetal-development-conception-to-birth

Topics:

1. About Arsy & how she found Paleo/Primal lifestyle
2. Preparing for pregnancy with diet
3. Feeding baby & nutrition while nursing
4. What have you learned so far about being a mom with this lifestyle?
 5. Breastfeeding & diet
6. Questions Arsy gets from others about Paleo motherhood

Click here to download this episode as an MP3.

The episodes are currently available in iTunes, Stitcher & Blog Talk Radio.

Welcome to the Balanced Bites Podcast with Diane Sanfilippo and Liz Wolfe. Diane is a certified nutrition consultant and The New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo. Liz is a nutritional therapy practitioner and the author of Modern Cave Girl. Together, Diane and Liz answer your questions, interview leading health and wellness experts, and share their take on modern paleo living with their signature friendly and balanced approach. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only and are not to be considered as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Liz Wolfe: Hey, everyone! Welcome to Episode 86 of the Balanced Bites Podcast. I’m here with a special guest. As some of you may know, Diane has her tan booty on the Low-Carb Cruise, so she’s not here with us this week. I’ll introduce our guest in just one second, but first a little news: For those of you who have been asking and following my little homestead adventures on the blog, I have two new members of my family. You’re the first to know. Their names are Gob and Buster, and they are guinea fowl. Not foul, like smelling bad. They’re guinea fowl, fowl as in birds. They’re supposed to gobble down ticks and, I guess, serve as a little bit of natural pest control. For people who heard my downtrodden discussion last week over this tick infestation that we have on our new homestead, we are being very proactive while still remaining crunchy, hippie, natural and such, and of course, keeping up our irrational obsession with Arrested Development, which is the best show ever. So that’s what’s going on in our adventures in tick control. You may hear in the background at some point the sound of guinea fowl running around the yard. Long story short, and I’ll write about this here this week probably or next week on the blog, we did what any intelligent person would do and drove two hours to meet somebody who advertised guinea fowl on Craigslist, number one smart move. We put some guinea fowl in a cardboard box in the truck and drove them to our chicken coop here on the property and tried to get them used to it and then set them free in the yard, and it’s all just ridiculously hilarious. Guinea fowl have an incredibly distinctive call. It’s not even distinctive. It’s actually really horrifying. It’s like a really bad trumpet sound. So if you hear the sound of a really talentless marching band in the background here, that’s the guinea fowl hopefully hunting down ticks in the backyard. Anyway, on to the important stuff.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, really quick, Liz, I have to tell you I love the names. Buster is by far my favorite character, and Gob is actually my husband’s favorite character.

Liz Wolfe: No way!

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah!

Liz Wolfe: You know what’s funny about that is that they’re actually… We don’t know which is which, but one of them is really loud and obnoxious and stupid, and the other one’s a little bit quieter. You know those episodes were Buster is seen and not heard and he hides behind the doorway and you can’t see him?

Arsy Vartanian: Totally, yeah!

Liz Wolfe: So it kinda works out. So everyone, let me introduce you to Arsy Vartanian!

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, sorry.

Liz Wolfe: This is the other voice on the podcast here. No, I love it because you know when you love Arrested Development and someone starts talking about it, you just have to jump in.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, yeah.

Liz Wolfe: There’s no way to stay quiet.

Arsy Vartanian: For sure.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. So, Arsy, I’m really excited to have her here. I’ve been following Arsy since forever. Arsy, I think you and I first connected when you did a giveaway a long time ago of Acquarella nail polish.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah! That’s right. That is when we connected.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, so Arsy and I are both hippie, crunchy types, and so we connected a while back, and I’ve been following her blog Rubies & Radishes, her website, ever since. And so I’ll give you guys a little bit of a rundown on who Arsy is, and then I’ll have her expand on it a little bit. Arsy is the author and chef of the paleo recipe and lifestyle blog, as I mentioned, Rubies & Radishes, and she wrote the new cookbook, The Paleo Slow Cooker. I did a review of it on CaveGirlEats.com. It is awesome. The bulgogi is amazing.

Arsy Vartanian: Awww, thank you.

Liz Wolfe: Love it. So, Arsy started out with paleo and CrossFit in an effort to achieve optimal health and wellness, like many of us, so she discovered CrossFit and paleo in 2008, started feeling better than ever, and was eventually able to recover from health issues that she had struggled with for almost a decade. Arsy is a new mom. She also has a day job – so you have several jobs right now.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: And we can find Arsy on the blog, in her kitchen developing healthy recipes for her family and her blog readers, and now here on the Balanced Bites Podcast. So Arsy, thank you for coming on today!

Arsy Vartanian: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

About Arsy and How She Found the Paleo/Primal Lifestyle [5:40]

Liz Wolfe: So talk a little bit more about your introduction to paleo, how you got here… Just give us a little bit of a flavor of what your life was like before and what it’s like now.

Arsy Vartanian: Sure. Well, I started CrossFit in 2008, and I think you probably know CrossFit started in Santa Cruz…

Liz Wolfe: Yep.

Arsy Vartanian: … and so I would always hear about it from a couple of my really gnarly athletic friends, and I was always afraid to try it, but I was intrigued by it, so I finally got the courage to go in 2008, and I totally got into it from the beginning. And it’s funny, but shortly after starting to work out there, I overheard a guy talking about the caveman diet, and actually he would talk about it a lot, and I would think: What a weirdo. Like, what does this guy eat?! I really thought this was so absurd. And I remember thinking if he doesn’t eat grains, what does he possibly eat?! Yeah, that was kind of my attitude about it when I first heard about it. But then I was talking to one of my trainers and he was really into it, so I decided to try it, and I actually went and got Dr. Cordain’s book, and as soon as I read the book, it was almost like a light bulb went off in my head. I had been a vegetarian for 10 years prior to that. I had been maybe eating meat for a year before I started CrossFit, but yeah, I was a vegetarian all through my late teens and most of my 20s, and I had really just a host of health problems that doctors couldn’t diagnose. I was in and out of doctors’ offices, and I mostly would get constant headaches, like almost daily, and just felt really lethargic all the time. And of course, the doctors wouldn’t even do extensive blood work, and they would just try and give me medications for headaches that I wouldn’t take. A couple times I took it here and there, and they just made me feel terrible instead of better. But when I read The Paleo Diet by Dr. Cordain, it just all kind of started to make sense that this is all related to nutrition and lifestyle.

So yeah, I started doing the paleo diet, like, not even with an intention of 30 days. I was like: I’m just going to do it and see how it goes. And I really started to feel better immediately. The headaches really reduced, and I wasn’t feeling tired anymore, I had a ton of energy, you know, all the typical stuff you hear about people adopting a paleo diet. But a year into it, I still wasn’t feeling 100%. I was definitely feeling better, but I was still feeling like there’s more wrong with me. And that’s when I connected with Chris Kresser. It was earlier on in his practice, so he took me on as a patient, and after doing extensive blood work and everything, he found that I had a severe B12 deficiency that was causing anemia. Even though I had been eating meat, I wasn’t properly absorbing it, and I also had a low performing thyroid. So after working with him and just making some more changes to my diet… Before working with Chris, I was taking a really traditional paleo approach, which was more focused on taking toxins out of my diet, but once I started working with Chris, I think I added the next important step, which was adding lots more nutrients to my diet, which, through him, is how I discovered the Weston A. Price Foundation, and I started implementing a lot more of those principles, and then from there is when my health really peaked.

Liz Wolfe: I think that you touched on two really critical things that we talk about a lot on the podcast there. Number one, people make these changes, and they feel better, but they still have that feeling that it could be even better, and I think a lot of that has to do with what you had to do, which is getting digestion in line, making sure hormonal imbalances are corrected, that type of thing. And I think people that come to this podcast, a lot of times they’re ready to do that extra digging…

Arsy Vartanian: Absolutely.

Liz Wolfe: … with their health, so that’s fantastic. I think so many of us come from that same place. And it’s really interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot more lately, because honestly – and not to say this is a dark side of paleo, because it’s not, it’s just the truth – we as a society are not just addicted to flour and sugar, but we’re addicted to easily digestible food. So we’re always eating these things, the grains and the more sugary stuff and the carbohydrate and things like that because they’re just deployed into our bloodstream so quickly. For all intents and purposes, it’s predigested food because it’s that heavily processed. And not only are we so stressed that our digestive system, our digestive capacities are suppressed, our stomach acid is suppressed, and all of those things, but we also aren’t asking much of our bodies in the way of digestion when we’re eating these more refined foods, many non-paleo foods, and a lot of times, less meat. So when people get into paleo and they start eating more meat, for example, in your situation where you were eating meat but you weren’t absorbing the nutrients, because it is a food that requires our digestive capacity to be working.

Arsy Vartanian: Right.

Liz Wolfe: So you found that that was pretty critical, then, getting digestion up to par to make sure you were actually absorbing these nutrients that you were eating.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, absolutely. I think that was probably just years of eating such a terrible diet. My digestion was just such a mess. So even though I started eating paleo foods, I wasn’t getting most of the benefits out of it. I think I was feeling better by taking the gluten out of my diet, and I wasn’t getting headaches, but my digestion still wasn’t up to par, and I think that was a big part of why I wasn’t completely healed.

Liz Wolfe: That’s so important. OK, so let’s talk a little bit about how you got… number one, we’re going to talk a lot today about your experiences pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, post-pregnancy, breast feeding, and all that good stuff because you are a new mom!

Arsy Vartanian: Yes!

Liz Wolfe: So talk about your family quickly. Give us a little intro so people know what we’re talking about.

Arsy Vartanian: Sure. Yeah, well, I have an awesome little 10-month-old, Indyanna Valentine. And yeah… I don’t know what to tell you. She’s awesome! She’s a paleo baby! She’s an easy, easy baby, and I really that has a lot to do with my diet before getting pregnant and my diet during pregnancy. She’s just really mellow, happy, and it’s been really fun being a new parent. It’s much more fun and rewarding than I expected it to be.

Liz Wolfe: So a real quick plug, actually, before I get into the questions that I want to ask you, about The Paleo Slow Cooker, your cookbook that just came out. How much do you feel like that has enabled you to keep good food on the table, to use the slow cooker as much as you have?

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, my gosh, 100%. That is what has kept us on the paleo diet because both my husband and I work full time. We both have our hobbies. I CrossFit, he skateboards, we just have a lot going on, and we have a lot more going on now. But even before the baby and when we first started eating this way, it was a transition for us because even though we always liked to cook, on a busy weeknight, cooking for us was, like, making a panini. And when I first started doing paleo, I was cooking elaborate meals every night because I thought that’s how you had to eat a paleo diet, which is nice and I enjoy cooking elaborate meals, but it really isn’t that doable at the end of a long workday and a 2-hour commute, so that’s when I started implementing the slow cooker and I just became obsessed with it because it was so easy. I could make all kinds of different meals. I could make interesting things, and it was just so simple. I would really just prep before I went to work in the morning, throw it in, and then I’d come back and we’d have dinner on the table really easily, and it kind of opened up our weeknights again because I was really spending so much time in the kitchen when I first started following a paleo diet. And I do really enjoy to cook, but not everybody actually really enjoys to cook, but they want to eat healthy, so I feel like it’s just such a good tool to help people get healthy, easy, and delicious meals on the table.

Liz Wolfe: I’m really obsessed with the slow cooker right now because we just moved. I mean, I don’t know what we would’ve done if we had moved and done all this stuff with a child in tow, so good on your for managing everything that you do! It sounds like a silly question, like, how easy has the slow cooker made your life? But I just realized the other day when I got a frozen chicken out of the freezer, put it in the crockpot with just some stuff, and then we had dinner. And for some reason, it was like sun breaking through the clouds, like a my-life-changed type of thing because I had no time.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: I just got up and it was 7:00 in the morning. Let me just put some stuff in the slow cooker and then we had something to eat that night, and my mind was blown because it’s not just that everybody can’t cook elaborate meals all the time. It’s that some people can’t cook at all, and that would be me because I burned water today, and I’m not even kidding.

Arsy Vartanian: Did you just forget about it?!

Liz Wolfe: I forgot about it! I burned something else earlier, and somebody told me to boil water in the pan and it’ll get all the crud off the bottom. So I was doing that and then the guineas started making noise, and then somebody pulled up to the house, and then all this crazy stuff was going on, and I was halfway across the property. Luckily, my husband realized that he forgot something, so he had come back from work. He walks into the house, and a billow of smoke comes out the door, and I see it from across the property, and so obviously I got in trouble. But I forgot about water on the stove… and smoke alarms. I mean, I almost burned down our brand new house. Well, not our new house, our new old house, which just would’ve been terrible.

Arsy Vartanian: Well, at least in a slow cooker you really can’t burn things.

Liz Wolfe: Exactly. You cannot burn things. Yes, so that’s why I’m super obsessed. So thank you for reigniting my memory of the slow cooker, because it’s always around, but I kind of take it for granted, like it’s just this big clunky piece of equipment that I have to move so I can mess up something else on the counter.

Arsy Vartanian: Totally.

Liz Wolfe: But it’s so useful and great for bone broth, too.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, yeah. It’s just awesome for bone broth. I just throw it in for 24 hours, and it’s all ready.

Liz Wolfe: And then you’re done.

Arsy Vartanian: Totally.

Preparing for Pregnancy with Diet [16:38]

Liz Wolfe: You talked a little bit about your transition to paleo, and then at this point you’re really… Diane and I say you’re a nutrient seeker.

Arsy Vartanian: Yes.

Liz Wolfe: You’re really looking for nutrients. So talk a little bit about why that became important to you and how it was important to you before and during your pregnancy and then after Indy came into the world.

Arsy Vartanian: OK, sure. Like I said, I had really started out just on the traditional paleo path, just removing toxins from my diet, but as I was trying to heal my gut, that’s when I started learning from Chris all the other things I needed to do, like include bone broth and start having bone broth every day. So I first started adding the nutrient-dense foods just to heal my gut, and then as it got to a point where we wanted to get pregnant, I just became more militant about it because since I had already been eating all those foods, I didn’t have to make that many changes, but I just wanted to be kind of more strict and making sure I always included them. And I know you guys talk about all these foods a lot already, but again, it’s just bone broth, cod liver oil, egg yolks, liver, salmon, all that stuff.

Liz Wolfe: Love ‘em.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, exactly. I was eating a lot of them, and I know in the paleo world not everybody does dairy, but started doing raw milk, so that was something I added once I felt like my gut was healed and I was preparing more for fertility and pregnancy. I started doing a lot more raw milk and then even some raw cheese. But yeah, so I started doing that to prepare for pregnancy, and I really continued to eat that way through pregnancy, but of course, things change a little bit when you’re pregnant. What I decided to do once I was pregnant was to kind of really just follow my instincts. I felt like I had already spent several years following what I felt was a really good diet, so I felt like I was really in tune with my body and what my body needed, and I found in my first trimester I actually was craving much more carbs and fat and less protein. So I was still eating some protein. I mean, I was definitely eating protein every day, but I wasn’t forcing myself to eat more protein than I wanted, so I just started eating a lot more starchy vegetables and lots and lots of fat on them. When I was pregnant, I was eating butter by the spoonful! I just loved it.

Liz Wolfe: Awesome.

Arsy Vartanian: So that was kind of the big change when I before pregnant. In the first trimester, I didn’t want a lot of protein. And then I started craving oranges. And it was interesting because at that time I was taking a physiology class and then I remember reading in there that you need vitamin C to digest protein. I read that in a physiology book, and I never confirmed it anywhere else, but it kind of made sense to me because I was eating less protein then and I started to really crave citrus.

Liz Wolfe: That’s so cool.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah. That was the only craving I had through my pregnancy, and I also had a really strong aversion to chicken. I do not know why. I just did not want chicken, and it was really actually difficult because that’s when I was developing recipes for my cookbook, so that was a little task that my husband did. He was willing to eat, so he was a good taste tester for me.

Liz Wolfe: He didn’t mind.

Arsy Vartanian: No, he didn’t mind at all! So that’s kind of what I did through… And then I personally was tolerating raw dairy well and raw cheese, so I was eating cheese through my pregnancy, too. I just was really feeling like I needed fats during my pregnancy. That’s what I was craving or what I felt like eating, so I just kind of went with it, and I was eating more cheese than usual , and I was doing fine with it.

Liz Wolfe: I love how in tune you were with your cravings and your body. I think a lot of women are. I think that they maybe have those same instincts as you had, but we haven’t really been taught to trust those instincts. And sometimes, I think, actually they get drowned out in the noise of everything else we think, like, are we supposed to do this? Are we not supposed to do that? And we kind of forget to listen to ourselves.

Arsy Vartanian: Right, absolutely. And I think you and I chatted about this a little bit on your blog when you had posted that article about fat. But I found that a lot of pregnant women I know crave ice cream like crazy, and then I always wondered: Well, do they just need more fat since so many people are used to eating such a low-fat diet, and then they get pregnant, and then they just want to eat ice cream every day? I mean, I just know a few women that have been like that.

Liz Wolfe: And I so think there’s absolutely no reason why that wouldn’t be true. And you were talking about how in your first trimester you were craving more carbohydrate and fat, and there are some really cool physiological reasons that pregnant women during certain points in their pregnancy want less protein than other times during their pregnancy. And there’s a really great article called, I think, Vitamins for Fetal Development: Conception to Birth, or something like that, from the Weston A. Price Foundation, which is fantastic, so I’ll have to remember to put that up. Yeah, so with the ice cream, not only is fat nourishing, but we were talking about how dairy fat, in particular, has fat-soluble vitamins – or should hopefully have fat-soluble vitamins. Hopefully they haven’t been stripped out and replaced with something else weird.

Arsy Vartanian: Right.

Liz Wolfe: Hopefully they’re not going for low-fat ice cream that’s filled with xanthan gum or something else. But it’s totally appropriate, and it makes sense to me that those carbohydrates from the ice cream and that fat, that dairy fat with the fat-soluble vitamins, that people would crave it, because even though we’ve been taught not to eat fat, people still want to cheat.

Arsy Vartanian: Right.

Liz Wolfe: Even people that grow up eating margarine their whole lives, and hopefully not soy milk ice cream, but we’re all exposed to ice cream, we all have that memory.

Arsy Vartanian: Right.

Liz Wolfe: So we know to crave it. I loved that little discussion that we had. That was so interesting.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, it was. And do you know why – because I never looked into this – but do you know why women at certain points of pregnancy do not want as much protein? Because actually a couple of my girlfriends that have recently been pregnant had a similar experience in the beginning.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I actually believe it has to do with some kind of suppressed kidney function. It’s biologically appropriate suppressed function, and I honestly don’t remember why it’s appropriate or why it’s necessary, but it’s kind of one of those innate wisdom type of things that the body does to protect itself and to protect the baby. I’ll have to see if I can find… I think somebody may have written a post on it. Maybe Food Renegade or somebody from Real Food Media or from the Village Green Network would know.

Arsy Vartanian: OK.

Liz Wolfe: You and I can probably put out the call for that answer. But I believe it has to do with kidney function, and actually the ability to process protein is less during certain points of pregnancy.

Arsy Vartanian: How interesting.

Liz Wolfe: Super interesting. And I don’t even know that that’s something that a lot of physicians talk about. Did you have any kind of pregnancy care where they mentioned these types of things or any mechanism for them?

Arsy Vartanian: No, absolutely not. Actually I had an OB. I wanted to have a home birth, but my husband didn’t, so what we came up with was the first one we’ll have at a birthing center and the second one at home. But we were able to find an OB who actually herself is really into home birth. She had all home births, and she studies traditional cultures on her free time, so she was awesome. But I had to meet with her midwife sometimes, and the nutrition advice was really poor. I mean, they did tell me to eat more salmon, but they were like: Oh, you eat really healthy. You must be eating low fat, right? And I just kind of brushed it off like: Yeah, totally! Because I just didn’t want to get into it with the doctor or the midwife. So I felt like the nutritional advice from the medical establishment was really poor.

Liz Wolfe: Man. Even in the more holistically oriented birth environment, there’s still that missing component.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, absolutely. I met with a couple midwives before I found our OB, and I felt like some of those midwives were… and not at all to generalize midwives, but just the couple I met with, they were just like doctors, their attitude about nutrition. They just weren’t well informed. So yeah, I think a lot of women look to their OBs for that advice and how to eat when they’re pregnant, and they’re just not getting a lot of proper information.

Liz Wolfe: When we’re talking about self-care, really the accepted way to care for ourselves is with medicine, so I get that. That’s the paradigm that we’re in. So it makes sense that we would have the instinct to ask these people that we go to for care about nutrition because I think deep down we all have that innate understanding that food is the fuel for every bodily process we have. So it makes sense that we would ask those questions, but the fact is many of these practitioners are not educated on food and how it works in the body, and a lot of times that’s not their fault. They have to know a lot, and nutrition is an entirely separate discipline.

Arsy Vartanian: Absolutely. Yeah, I don’t blame them. I mean, it’s not something they learn in medical school, so unless they’re passionate about it themselves, they don’t go out and get really informed about it.

Feeding Baby and Nutrition While Nursing [27:06]

Liz Wolfe: Definitely. So, let’s talk some specifics here. You have a post that we’ll link to in the show notes that’s fabulous, and it’s about first foods, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but what I think is interesting is that a lot of babies’ first foods are also fertility foods for women trying to get pregnant, and they’re fantastic foods to eat during pregnancy. So let’s talk about that a little bit. What did you eat and why? And what do you continue to eat as a breastfeeding mama? Talk a little about that.

Arsy Vartanian: Sure! So, the foods that I ate… yeah, I feel like it’s really, like you said, the same foods for fertility, pregnancy, and breastfeeding, so I still kind of eat in a similar way as I did a couple years ago when I was preparing for pregnancy. Fermented cod liver oil. I think that’s really important because it’s not only a good source of omega-3′s, but it’s also a good source of vitamins A and D, which are really important while you’re pregnant as well as when you’re nursing. I know this is a personal choice for people if they’re going to eat raw milk or not, but I drank raw milk through my pregnancy. I know if my OB heard that, she would freak out! I didn’t tell her that, but I was drinking raw milk, and I was comfortable with that. I did my research, and I felt like that was safe for me. I ate lots of grass-fed butter. I really was just very liberal in how much grass-fed butter I ate. Again, I feel like that’s a really good source of vitamins A and D and vitamin K2, in particular. And vitamin K2 is one that’s really important for the development of strong bones and teeth and even the facial structure. It’s funny because when people comment on how cute my baby is, I just tell them it’s because I ate a lot of butter when I was pregnant, and they probably think I’m such a weirdo!

Liz Wolfe: That’s amazing, though. You plant the seed.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, totally! I think it really does influence the symmetry of the face. I read that in some of the Weston A. Price stuff, but it makes sense to me. Another important food that I ate a lot of was eggs, more particularly the egg yolk. That just has a lot of different important nutrients, but I think one really important nutrient in egg yolks is choline. And I think that’s one that we don’t talk about that often. It’s really important for brain cell development and the nervous system, but I’ve read it’s also similar to folate in the sense that it works to prevent or at least drastically reduce… what am I trying to think of? Spina bifida and all that stuff. What does that all fall into?

Liz Wolfe: Folate and choline are both in that B vitamin family.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, so that’s another important one. I did a lot of egg yolks. And then bone broth. We eat a ton of bone broth. I mean, I eat bone broth on its own before a meal as a little appetizer, we cook with it a lot, because bone broth is just a good source of collagen, gelatin, amino acids, lots of minerals, a really absorbable form of calcium. What else did I eat?

Liz Wolfe: How about liver? Did we do any liver?

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, yeah. I did a lot of liver. I actually grew up eating liver. I didn’t eat it when I was a vegetarian, but when I started following a paleo diet, I reintroduced liver. So I did a lot of liver. Liver is just a powerhouse of nutrients, as we know.

Liz Wolfe: Choline and folate, too, which is phenomenal, and you were talking about neural tube defects earlier.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, that’s what I was trying to get earlier, neural tube defects! Yeah, so I actually did a lot of liver. I’m trying to think of anything else… Oh, salmon. I did lots of salmon for the vitamin D. I was trying to shoot for a pound of salmon a week, and the omega-3′s in that. Coconut oil. Coconut oil was actually a little tough for me because I don’t really like cooking with it, but I wanted to have it in my diet every day. So what I started to do is I would either make smoothies with it, I would do an avocado, coconut oil, berry smoothie, or I would just put it in my tea.

Liz Wolfe: Smart. I like that. That’s what’s fun about coconut oil and butter and ghee: They’re so versatile. You can add them to your tea, your coffee, hot drinks, and you can do that as well with gelatin. So if you’re not making bone broth but you want to make sure you get a little bit of that extra gelatin, you can actually get the collagen hydrolysate from Great Lakes. Obviously we always want to do the closest thing we can do to the real thing, bone broth, as often as possible, but I have had some people do just the collagen hydrolysate and dissolve it into their tea with some coconut oil or even some butter.

Arsy Vartanian: Actually I had not thought about doing that before, but I think I read in your Skintervention Guide, I think somewhere you mentioned about adding that to something. Actually I did that recently, so if I don’t have bone broth made, I’ll do that now.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. I love that. I think that’s a really good option.

Traditional Armenian and Persian Foods, Specifically Organ Meats [33:00]

What else was I going to ask you? OK, so let’s talk really quickly about… You’re Armenian?

Arsy Vartanian: Yes.

Liz Wolfe: I think there is an advantage to folks who were actually raised with more traditional diets, so let’s talk about, number one, what you grew up eating and if you think that set any kind of foundation for you to kind of ease back into those foods later, and also how you prepare liver and maybe what your mindset is around it, because I think a lot of folks – myself included – have or have had a little bit of trouble conceptualizing exactly how they’re going to cook and consume organ meats.

Arsy Vartanian: Right. It is tough, and I think it’s such an acquired taste, and I think people that grew up eating it have an advantage because they definitely taste a little different. The funny thing is I grew up on a much more traditional diet, which was way healthier than the vegetarian diet I adopted, but I had become so brainwashed about how fats are bad and meat is bad. I thought my parents were eating so unhealthy, and I didn’t want to be like them, and that’s why I became a vegetarian. And I remember my dad being like: It’s really unhealthy. You can’t just not eat meat. And I remember thinking: Oh, he’s from the Old World. He doesn’t know anything! But growing up, we had Armenian and Persian foods from my parents. I’m Armenian and my parents are from Iran, so we grew up eating a lot of Persian food. A lot of stews, bone broth-based stews are a really big part of the cuisine, and there are just very typical stews. There’s stew with lamb and eggplant. There are just a bunch of different stews. We do actually do a lot of organ meats. We barbecue our organ meats, and I know that’s a lot different than how other people prepare them. Barbecued liver – that’s just my favorite way to eat it.

Liz Wolfe: Barbecued liver. Wow.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah! I know, people think it’s really weird, but the taste is so familiar to me in that way that I actually prefer it over a pate. A pate feels really heavy to me. So we barbecue our organ meats a lot. And it’s just interesting, all this misinformation. I was having lunch with my cousin and her husband recently, and he’s a phenomenal home cook, and he’s like: Oh, I love organ meats. We get together once a month and we barbecue organ meat with my buddies, but we know it’s really bad for us so we just do it once a month. And I was trying to explain to him: That’s probably why you’re pretty healthy even though you don’t eat a perfect diet, you know?

Liz Wolfe: Yeah.

Arsy Vartanian: It was just really shocking to him. I felt like he didn’t really believe me, actually. But I was trying to explain to him about all the different nutrients he’s getting from that. And I actually hear this a lot in my family, where they feel guilty about eating organ meats even though it’s part of the cuisine that they really enjoy. They think it’s bad for their cholesterol and bad for all these things that their doctors have told them. Yeah, so I barbecue liver, but yesterday actually I made sautéed liver and onions. And for Indyanna, I make liver. She loves liver. It’s actually one of her favorite foods. So for her I first tried doing the more typical… what the Weston A. Price Foundation recommends is grating it into egg yolk, and she didn’t really like that, so now what I do is I just kind of lightly sauté it in ghee and then add bone broth and make what I call a baby pate!

Liz Wolfe: That’s awesome. So here’s the argument, then, for starting paleo babies on these traditional foods because you developed that memory growing up.

Arsy Vartanian: Um-hum.

Liz Wolfe: So she loves it. You said Indyanna loves liver.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, she loves it.

Liz Wolfe: So did you always expect that she would, or was it just kind of like: I’m going to put this on the plate and see what happens?

Arsy Vartanian: You know, I felt like I had a really positive attitude about it, and I coached my husband on this because he’s more finicky about food. And I told him: Don’t act like, oh, my God, this is so gross! Who’s going to eat that?! Because I feel like kids get really influenced by our attitude.

Liz Wolfe: Definitely.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, and the way I approach foods with her in general is I just try and be really neutral about it because solid foods are such a new experience for babies, and you know, sometimes they’re just not going to like things right away. And I think I read this in a French baby book, but it takes 10 to 15 times sometimes for babies to enjoy a food because the tastes are so unfamiliar. So my attitude is always really neutral. I’m going to introduce it. If she doesn’t want it, I don’t make a fuss. We’re not allowed to say: One more bite. If she doesn’t like it, we just remove it, and we don’t make a big deal. We just offer her something else that she does eat. Most foods, including egg yolk and liver, which are her absolutely favorites now, it took her two or three times because the first couple times… she always will take a bite or two. She was just unsure and didn’t want anymore. Yeah, so I just introduced everything a few times, and she’s liked everything so far, but most things she didn’t like the first couple times. So I think that’s important for parents to not feel like: Oh, my kid didn’t like this. I’m not going to introduce it again. I just wait a few days and introduce it again.

What have you learned so far about being a mom with this lifestyle? [38:46]

Liz Wolfe: To that end, what else have you learned so far about being a mom with the paleo lifestyle? How you’re feeding and watering your little one, any lessons that you’ve learned around that, because I know we get these questions on the podcast all the time.

Arsy Vartanian: Ok, so lessons I’ve learned… I don’t know. I feel like it has actually really made my life so much easier because honestly she never gets sick, she’s never had a diaper rash, she’s super calm, she rarely cries, and I truly believe that that has to do with her having a really healthy nervous system from the diet I had before we conceived and my diet during pregnancy and my diet during nursing. So I feel like it might be more work preparing foods, but it actually isn’t because it’s a lot of the same foods we’re eating anyway. I’ve found that I think it makes our lives way easier because it’s made her a so much easier baby. And people always tell us: Oh, you’re so lucky your baby’s so easy. I want to explain to them that I really don’t believe that it’s luck.

Liz Wolfe: Stacking the cards as much in your favor as you possibly could.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, exactly, and some of it might be her personality and her temperament, but I think it has a lot to do with her having a really healthy digestive system. I mean, I don’t know the science behind it, but just from observation, I think a lot of babies that are fussy and whatnot have to do with not having a healthy gut. I think babies’ guts are developing and they’re so immature, and I think we just need to treat them with a lot of respect. And I think that’s what people want to do, but I think it’s more a matter of the misinformation they get from the mainstream.

Breastfeeding and Diet [40:39]

Liz Wolfe: Definitely. I think women are probably counseled in how important breastfeeding is now more so than they were maybe a couple of decades ago, but I love what you just said about respecting their little guts. And I think breastfeeding is a huge part of that, if not the deciding factor in how well we are able to guarantee infant gut health. So without… you know, I don’t want to make you talk about your boobs!

Arsy Vartanian: Ha!

Liz Wolfe: But as far as breastfeeding goes, how important was that to you, and how have you kind of fueled that process nutritionally?

Arsy Vartanian: I think to breastfeed was so, so important to me, and I think you actually made a really good point right now about how that’s become so much more important. There are advocacy groups that are doing a really great job promoting how important it is, and it’s just really nice to see how many more moms are breastfeeding. But what I think is actually kind of lacking in the whole breastfeeding advocacy movement is they don’t emphasize the importance of a mom’s diet. They actually do quite the opposite. Some of the major breastfeeding advocacy groups actually have statements that say diet doesn’t matter. When I had Indyanna and I was home from work on maternity leave, we would go to some breastfeeding groups, and it was just fun to go connect with other moms and everything, but the lactation nurses who were awesome, who helped me a lot when we had some problems early on with Indyanna latching, and I’m happy to share about that if that’s relevant to your audience.

Liz Wolfe: Do it! Let’s talk about boobs and babies!

Arsy Vartanian: Awesome! So I’ll tell you about that next then. But although the lactation nurses were so helpful, they would say in the support groups all the time: Oh, diet doesn’t matter. And people would be talking about: Oh, my baby’s so colicky, or this or that. And they would just say: Oh, there’s no science to prove that diet matters. And I don’t know that that’s true or not actually because Sally Fallon does source a few studies in her baby book that do talk about how the composition of the breast milk changes with diet. But I just really wish that they would also… and I don’t know if they’re afraid of discouraging people if they feel like they have to change their diet.

Liz Wolfe: Could be.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, but I do really think that’s really important because the quality of breast milk, I really think, is incredibly important. I think in Sally Fallon’s book she talks about a study that shows when they study breast milk based on the mother’s diet, I think that the protein and the carbohydrate content doesn’t change that much, but the fat content does. And especially if you’re eating unhealthy fats, that could really impact the quality of your breast milk. And if you’re eating healthy fats, that can make your breast milk more fatty, which helps the baby stay full longer and all those types of things. And all the nutrients that you’re going to pass along to your baby, because if you’re not intaking those nutrients, they’re not going to be present in your breast milk for your baby to intake. So I think that’s really important, really just the emphasis on eating healthy fats and fat-soluble vitamins. Vitamins A, D, and K are just so important to a growing baby.

Liz Wolfe: I think it’s really cool what you said about maybe they don’t want to discourage women, you know, that whole perfectionism think where if I can’t do it 100% correctly all the time with all the boxes checked, I’m not going to do it at all.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: And I think this is really important. I just wrote an email about something like this. I do a newsletter every Monday where I basically write a post for the people on my email list, and all of these will be available at some point for people that sign up kind of in the archives. So if you’re interested in this post, it’s not gone forever. We’ll find a way for you to access it, but what I talk about is this perfectionism idea just permeating people’s lives to the point where they don’t enjoy experiences and they are fearful of the experiences that they’re poised to have because of this perfectionism, this ideal that they have in their minds. And the fact is if we could just encourage people to just always do the best they possibly can with the equipment and with the tools that they have and always just try to strive for a little bit more but understanding that it’s so much better to try than it is to not try at all, I think that that’s how this needs to be approached. Like you were talking about earlier with Indyanna, the way you approached the types of food that you give her, it’s not with any kind of expectation one way or the other. You’re not coloring her experience before she even has it, so I think that’s all about the way you approach somebody and the attitude with which you approach them. If we can just reframe the discussion and the way women are approached with what they need to try to do, I think that could go a really, really long way. Just try and take the cod liver oil/butter oil blend capsules – that would never happen because it’s not mainstream enough – but just try to do these one, two, three things. Drink full-fat goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk, whatever.

Arsy Vartanian: Right, just healthier alternatives.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, and I also think it’s actually a time when people are really willing to make a change. In my experience, what’s been interesting is a lot of people have reached out to me recently, like old friends from high school that are pregnant, people I haven’t talked to in 10 years, seriously. They themselves don’t eat a healthy diet, but they’ve seen that I have this blog and whatnot, and they email me like: Hey, what should I feed my baby? So I think it’s a time where women are more willing to make a change because when they understand that it’s for the betterment of their baby, they’re really ready to do it. I know a few people who they themselves don’t eat a whole foods, paleo, Weston A. Price, whatever diet, but they’re actually feeding their kids that way because I’ve sent them some information, and they’re totally doing it because it’s that important to them. So I think that if the information was more accessible to nursing moms, not maybe all of them, but some of them would be willing to make these changes that you just said, like just take the cod liver oil.

Liz Wolfe: Just one or two things, those top few things that you can try and do when you can.

Arsy Vartanian: Exactly.

Liz Wolfe: We need to get a paleo breastfeeding moms community out there.

Arsy Vartanian: Totally! That would be awesome.

Liz Wolfe: If there is one that we just don’t know about and anybody out there listening knows of that kind of connection, that kind of group, leave a comment on Balanced Bites or on CaveGirlEats.com on the blog post for this podcast episode. And also even beyond that, just start talking about it here and there. I keep my personal Facebook profile a little bit separate from the blog because I don’t like to assault people with stuff that they just don’t care about. I keep those things a little bit separate, but now and then when I feel like something’s really accessible and not so fridge, crunchy, hippie, cave girl crazy, I’ll put it on my personal profile, and that will a lot of times spur some reconnections with, like you were talking about, people from high school, people that are curious. Just kind of let people know what you’re thinking about and what’s out there because you never know what kind of ripple effect that could have, and it could affect the health of a growing baby.

Arsy Vartanian: Absolutely.

Liz Wolfe: So put your stuff out there. Talk about your boobs, people! Talk about ‘em.

Questions Arsy Gets From Others About Paleo Motherhood [48:50]

So what kind of questions do you get through your page from other people about paleo motherhood or this type of stuff? What kind of questions do you see the most coming through?

Arsy Vartanian: You know, like I was just mentioning right now, the thing I’ve been seeing the most lately is I’ve had a lot of people reach out and ask what to feed their babies. Actually my best friend I grew up with, she has a daughter who’s a few months younger than my daughter, and how I ended up doing this recent post is she called me to say: Hey, the doctor said I could start giving her rice cereal. Is that something I should be giving her? And I was like: Oh, no, no, no, you don’t want to give her that. So I started telling her all this information, and then I could tell she was getting overwhelmed. Like, she wanted to do it, but it was really overwhelming, so that’s why I was like: OK, I’ll summarize it in a blog post. But that’s a question I’ve been getting a lot from new moms is what should babies be eating. And then I also get the opposite reaction. People at work will be like: What does your baby eat? And I tell them, and they’re like: Oh, my God. That poor baby! Yeah, but for the most part, I think maybe because that’s where I’m at in my life with my daughter and that’s what I’ve been blogging about is first foods and on my Facebook page and stuff, but that’s mostly kind of what I’ve been answering questions about lately. I’m trying to think about if any other baby questions have come up. And just what we just talked about, that’s also another big thing actually, diet during nursing. I’ve had a few questions about that from blog readers that I’ve recently answered via email about just how important that diet is while you’re nursing, just making sure that you’re getting a lot of those fat-soluble vitamins so you can pass them on to the baby.

Actually, I’ve had recently just some questions about how to introduce solids. And I can share what’s worked for us. I know there are just different philosophies out there. We do choose to spoon feed, and I know there’s a big movement towards not doing that, but that’s just something that’s worked for us with our daughter. But besides the spoon feeding, I think the philosophies we’re implementing, it doesn’t matter if you spoon feed or let them feed themselves. I think the important thing, too, is waiting until the baby’s ready to eat and not rushing them because they’ll start showing interest, and if you try introducing solids and they’re not that into it, I would say just don’t force it. Just wait a little bit before you try again.

Oh, another big thing while talking about solids, I think it’s really important to introduce a new food every few days and not sooner so you can observe your baby for adverse effects. Because their guts are so immature and they’re really developing and not every baby’s gut is going to be perfectly ready at 6 months for food, they might not have an adverse effect to really healthy foods. My daughter with egg yolks starting getting kind of some dry skin. And I’m not sure if it was the egg yolk or if I wasn’t doing a really good job with getting all of the egg whites out since the egg whites are highly allergenic, but when I noticed that she was reacting to that, I pulled that out of her diet for a little bit and then introduced it again, and she did fine. Yeah, so I think waiting every few days to introduce new foods and observing them to make sure they’re doing OK with them. The other thing that I mentioned earlier is offering the same food many times. Because this is such a new experience for babies and new flavors are exotic, they really just might not take to them in the beginning. I would just keep introducing it really nonchalantly. I never force it and never make a big deal out of it.

Another thing that we do is we actually are really adamant about never praising her for eating because we just don’t want to give her the impression that she needs to eat to get our praise. We never tell her: Oh, good job. You ate that. We really want her to learn to eat when she’s hungry and not to eat because we tell her she did a good job. That’s a big thing for us that we really avoid doing because if you have a baby and they’re doing all this cute stuff, it’s just so easy to tell them they’re doing a good job about everything! But eating is a time where we really try to not do the praise and be very neutral about her eating experience.

And one other thing that’s really important to us is we really try and encourage mindful eating. When it’s her eating time, we create an environment with really minimal distractions, not a lot going on. We really let her take her time eating. We really want it to be a relaxing, intimate, stress-free experience for her because that’s the habit we want her to have about eating her food. I have to say that wasn’t my habit, and it’s been really hard working on being a more mindful eater, so I would just rather her not have to do what I’m going through now because I’m really bad. I just scarf down my food unless I’m really focused about eating mindfully!

Liz Wolfe: Oh, my gosh, it’s so hard to break that habit. My entire family, when I go home to visit my parents and have dinner with my parents, we will stand at the counter eating dinner and not even realize it. We’re just standing there eating food together. We don’t even sit down, and I don’t know when that habit developed, but like we were talking about earlier with the types of foods that you learn to eat when you’re really young, you also learn habits when you’re really, really young.

Arsy Vartanian: Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of a question I’ve gotten recently about how to introduce first foods, and I think that’s really important, not just the food choices, but creating a really healthy environment for babies to learn how to eat in.

Liz Wolfe: Agreed. And really quickly, I want to plug your book one more time because it really is fantastic. The Paleo Slow Cooker by Arsy Vartanian. A fabulous book. I’m loving it. Try the bulgogi; it’s amazing. And definitely check out Arsy’s blog as well, Rubies & Radishes. Phenomenal stuff. She’s also a crunchy gal like me, very dedicated to nontoxic body and home care as well. So you just have the whole package going on over there.

Arsy Vartanian: Oh, thank you, Liz. Thank you so much for having me on. Like I said, I’m a huge fan of your podcast. It was just a real pleasure being on and talking to you about all this stuff.

Liz Wolfe: Yes, and thank you so much for coming on. We’ll be back next week. Diane and I will be back together. Well, maybe I’ll take a week off. Who knows? Maybe I’ll go on a little cruise with Gob and Buster and my husband. Who knows? We’ll see. But thanks, everybody, for listening. We’ll be back next week.

Cheers!
Diane & Liz

In case you’re wondering why I’m not sharing much this week, it’s because I’m on a boat. The Carnival Magic to be exact – on The Low Carb Cruise.

Today I gave my talk entitled: Who needs low carb paleo and who doesn’t?!

I’ll share my thoughts on the topic in a post in the near future – so stay tuned!

Until then, keep following my cruise photos and update posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram – and stay tuned for the Balanced Bites Podcast this week on Thursday.

Remember – If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please leave us a review in iTunes. Thanks!

Topics:

Last week’s episode post now has a written transcript available. We will be playing a lot of catch-up, but bear with us as they’re on their way! We’ll also be trying to get current episode transcripts up-to-date and loaded with each podcast but it’ll take another couple of weeks before we catch up there as well. We hope you’re enjoying them!

1. Dating and Paleo [16:40]
2. Popsicles pre-colonoscopy? [32:16]
3. Can you be a Paleo Wine-o? [36:27]
4. Probiotic cleansers & can you live “too clean?” [46:08]
5. Coconut oil drain clog? [50:46]

Click here to download this episode as an MP3.

The episodes are currently available in iTunes, Stitcher & Blog Talk Radio.

Welcome to the Balanced Bites Podcast with Diane Sanfilippo and Liz Wolfe. Diane is a certified nutrition consultant and The New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo. Liz is a nutritional therapy practitioner and the author of Modern Cave Girl. Together, Diane and Liz answer your questions, interview leading health and wellness experts, and share their take on modern paleo living with their signature friendly and balanced approach. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only and are not to be considered as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Liz Wolfe: Hey everyone, it’s Liz and Diane. Diane is back this week. Welcome to Episode 85 of the Balanced Bites Podcast! Hey boogie, how’s it hanging?

Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, it’s awesome. Oh, Target lady.

Liz Wolfe: Happy birthday!

Diane Sanfilippo: Thank you! I’m so old.

Liz Wolfe: Shut up.

Diane Sanfilippo: Ahhh! The Target lady.

Liz Wolfe: She’s our old standby.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yep.

Liz Wolfe: How many times have we watched that video?

Diane Sanfilippo: As many times as we’ve done a road trip or probably been sitting in an airport waiting for flights to take off to go teach. That’s kind of our no-fail comic relief. I’m pretty sure there’s a self-picture of us in a hotel room watching it and cracking up, and we were like: This is too funny!

Liz Wolfe: Oh, my gosh.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. Well, now we’re going to have to link to the Target lady.

Liz Wolfe: Tissues for tears! Welcome to Turget!

Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, my gosh. I could die. That’s so funny. So hopefully people are enjoying the transcripts. We are typically about a week behind, and in case anyone isn’t sure what that happens, it’s because we like to be very timely with our podcast and make sure that we’re up to the minute with current events. I’m just kidding. We actually tend to get so busy that we record the podcast literally the day before it goes live… or it gets posted. People get confused about the term ‘going live.’ Going live is different from airing live. But anywho, tonight is Wednesday and so our transcriber has to get a little bit of time to go ahead and do that, so we’re kind of one week behind right now, and we promise within maybe a month or so we’ll try and get ourselves ahead so that we actually do have the transcripts up at the same time as when the podcast goes live, but we also have amazing plans over the next few months to have the first 80 podcasts all transcribed. We have another person who’s going to help do that, and it’ll just take some time because as you know, episodes are about an hour long, and it takes a while to get all of our ramblings down into black and white text.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I cannot imagine that task.

Diane Sanfilippo: I’m grateful for those who are doing it.

Liz Wolfe: And I’m sorry to those who are doing it!

Diane Sanfilippo: Only when you try and speak German.

Liz Wolfe: Oh, yeah. That.

Diane Sanfilippo: Brackets – laugh.

Liz Wolfe: Hahahaha. Back to serious. So, did you hear my news?

Diane Sanfilippo: Which news?

Liz Wolfe: That we have ticks in the country. Apparently God wanted ticks to live on my homestead.

Diane Sanfilippo: This is why I live basically on concrete and have a grassy patch next to the condo.

Liz Wolfe: I get it now. Next year I’m going to be talking about our dream of owning a condo in a high-rise building!

Diane Sanfilippo: Yes.

Liz Wolfe: It’s OK, though. It’s OK. It’s just funny how much I hate ticks. They’re the one thing that I cannot… I cannot take it.

Diane Sanfilippo: The thing I think might be worse than ticks… Well, listen, not really worse than ticks, because if something happens from a tick and you have to deal with Lyme disease and it becomes chronic, OK. But I’ll tell you what could be worse. Do you want to guess? Bed bugs.

Liz Wolfe: No, because you can just put some diatomaceous… OK, we’ll get to this.

Diane Sanfilippo: All right, you can’t just put diatomaceous earth down and then they just die.

Liz Wolfe: Don’t you freakin’ tell me that because I spent all day putting… Let me tell you what I did. So I spent the day basically alternating between freaking out and putting diatomaceous earth and neem oil all over everything. I ordered probably my entire month’s salary worth of beneficial nematodes, you know, so Googling ‘holistic, organic tick treatment, homestead,’ and I found this website that sells…

Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, my gosh.

Liz Wolfe: This is cool, though. But it’s weird how much I hate ticks when you consider how much I love vampire fiction. It really is kind of silly. So I got these beneficial nematodes, which you basically spray them and these little nematodes parasitize all of the ticks and the baby ticks and all that stuff, and they eat them, and then they go away.

Diane Sanfilippo: Well, they die, right?

Liz Wolfe: They leave forever, and they never come back. That’s what’s happening. So you’ll understand why I’m doing this podcast with a jug of wine and a pack of Hail Merrys in front of me. I’m just kidding.

Diane Sanfilippo: I think it does sound really freaky. The flipside of your homestead coin was being in San Francisco for seven years, and at one point a really good friend of mine had a bed bug situation, and it has nothing to do with how clean you are or any of that stuff. One of my friends who happened to travel a lot, which as you know, Liz, from staying in hotel rooms with me, I consistently check the creases of the bed to make sure there’s nothing creepy, and I also don’t stay in questionable hotels, not that, again, it’s a cleanliness issue, but if there was an issue in the hotel, if it’s a reputable place, they’re probably going to take care of it pretty quickly because they don’t want word spreading about a bed bug issue. Anyway, long story short, I was really worried about getting bed bugs this one year I was living there, and my cat was sick – not Paleo Kitty, but the cat I had before – and she came home from the vet and apparently probably brought a couple of fleas home. And this was in the whole bed bug scare, and bed bugs were kind of at a peak at that point, too, just nationwide. I think New York City was having issues. And so I basically kind of freaked out because I saw these little dead bugs at the end of my bed where the cat had been sitting, and I freaked out and thought they were bed bugs and did a ton of research on that and just kind of did the same thing with all kinds of weird oils and just really had a time of it just being completely freaked out. I mean, I had some bites on my leg, and I was really convinced that that’s what was going on. So yeah, for people who are looking for the solution to that, my big solution that I discovered, and it was watching a documentary, actually, on an airplane one day, was that if you heat your entire house to, like, 120 degrees – obviously you would not be inside of it when this happens.

Liz Wolfe: Thanks.

Diane Sanfilippo: You have to pump some kind of hot air tubing that comes in the windows, and you literally heat your entire house to 120 or 110 degrees, something like that, and the bed bugs cannot live and the eggs cannot live. So if you’re looking for a nontoxic way to kill bed bugs!

Liz Wolfe: So, tell me how that helps me. Am I going to put a… What’s that Pauly Shore movie with the dome?

Diane Sanfilippo: Bio-Dome?

Liz Wolfe: I have to put a big bio-dome over my homestead and heat it up really hot and kill all the ticks?! I hate you.

Diane Sanfilippo: With ticks, I think, isn’t the biggest thing just kind of checking your body and your skin pretty much every day?

Liz Wolfe: Yes. But that means they’re already on you. I want to stop them from getting on me.

Diane Sanfilippo: Well, you just moved to the country, honey. I’m just telling you right now: You’re in for it.

Liz Wolfe: My husband goes: What did you think was going to happen? I was like: I don’t know.

Diane Sanfilippo: You were like: I was going to have chickens and goats! And that’s all I knew! I don’t know, man. You’re stronger than I am because I cannot imagine. Look, I love taking hikes, but sleeping outside isn’t my thing, and bugs coming into my house…

Liz Wolfe: Not your thing.

Diane Sanfilippo: No. It freaks me out.

Liz Wolfe: I will say, though, my husband has found ticks on him, the movers that came and dropped off all of our crap today… I highly recommend culling through your crap and getting rid of the super crap before you ship all of your crap across the country and have to unload all of your crap.

Diane Sanfilippo: I’m getting the heebie-jeebies over here about the ticks.

Liz Wolfe: Oh, no. Well, I don’t think they’re inside, but everybody else has gotten them except for me and the dog, and I’m telling you it’s because ever since we got here I’ve been spraying this… I think it’s called Equiderma. It’s like horse fly spray.

Diane Sanfilippo: Ha!

Liz Wolfe: It’s crazy! It has neem extract… I’m glad that my vampire bug problem is amusing to you.

Diane Sanfilippo: I’m sorry.

Liz Wolfe: No, but it’s good, though, because I’ve been spraying that all over myself and all over the dog, and I’ve been outside all day, every day, and so far… I did catch a tick trying today.

Diane Sanfilippo: Augh!

Liz Wolfe: But it was not on me.

Diane Sanfilippo: I think I would instantly tell my husband that I was ready to move back. I think I would be crying, like: I can’t do this. I think I would just freak out.

Liz Wolfe: I just have to get used to it. That’s all it is. It’s one of those things where a month down the road…

Diane Sanfilippo: You’ll just become an expert!

Liz Wolfe: Yep, pretty much. But if anybody has some kind of miracle tick treatment, if anybody has figured out how to reason with those guys and wants to send me a script on that, just please let me know. Come leave a comment on the podcast post at CaveGirlEats.com, so I’ll be more likely to see it if you have some advice for me on these ticks. And please don’t leave something all about how scary and awful Lyme disease is and how I have to be really vigilant because I do know that and I’m already completely terrified, so I only want to hear good news. Tell me about the magic root that grows in my front yard or the magic music I could play.

Diane Sanfilippo: Liz, you’re going to be so used to just doing a tick scan pretty much every day that it’ll be just like taking your cod liver oil. It’ll just be part of your routine and you’ll just check yourself, and it’ll be OK.

Liz Wolfe: It’ll be fine.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: We’re getting some guinea hens tomorrow.

Diane Sanfilippo: So will they eat them?

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, they eat the ticks, except all of my diatomaceous earth is going to kill all of them, so maybe they won’t have any ticks to eat. I don’t know.

Diane Sanfilippo: Then the ticks end up becoming nourishing food for you when the chickens, hens, whatever they are, eat them and enrich the nutrient value of their eggs.

Liz Wolfe: How many people do you think are still listening to Episode 85?

Diane Sanfilippo: We’ve lost everybody.

Liz Wolfe: Sorry, everyone. This is actually a fun episode, too.

Diane Sanfilippo: The funny thing is, for people who don’t know – and nobody listening to this podcast is unaware of this situation – but we were teaching seminars together for about a year and then now we haven’t for a couple of months, and it’s like we actually don’t even get to talk very often, so here we are catching up.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah.

Diane Sanfilippo: And so for those of you who are not interested in us sort of catching up on the goings-on of the homestead and everything else, I supposed you’ll just be able to fast-forward.

Liz Wolfe: I suppose. Maybe you should wait for the timestamps. By the way, I was thinking of you because there’s a new New Girl episode.

Diane Sanfilippo: We’re missing it.

Liz Wolfe: We’re missing it?

Diane Sanfilippo: I think so. Well, Hulu. It’s always Hulu.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. Whomp, whomp. So anyway, what’s going on with you?

Diane Sanfilippo: Well, I’ll try and be brief then. How have you been? Other than Friday evening dropping a 90-pound barbell on my head… yeah. So basically my two biggest fears in terms of the weird, semi-dangerous things that I do all the time – having nothing to do with ticks or homesteading – are number one, dropping a barbell on my head, which has been this thing that I’ve said to my mother: If there’s one reason I’ll get insurance, it’ll be catastrophic just in case I drop a barbell on my head. No joke! So what did I do last week? I was overhead squatting and I had 90 pounds up there. It was actually the last rep of all we were doing for our strength workout, and for whatever reason, I had to be a hero for a change. I’m usually really quick to bail on a heavy weight. I’m like: Eh, I have nothing to prove. I don’t really care. And I just didn’t let go and bail, and I’m sure it wasn’t a full 90 pounds of force, but this barbell hit me straight in the noggin, right on top of the head. The bruise isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. We iced it pretty much right away. My coach tossed me an ice pack. So that happened.

Liz Wolfe: Get back up. Here’s an ice pack.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, and then I proceeded to do a whole bunch of front squats and not really many handstand pushups because that was not really going to happen so well. But the other huge thing I’m scared of is for some reason there being a short in the electric that runs my garbage disposal one time when I happen to reach down there for something. I just have this huge fear that suddenly that motor will just turn on and chew up my fingers because I dropped a spoon and I’m trying to fish it out. But somebody on Facebook today that I’m friends with was talking about how they basically chopped up their hand because they forgot to pull the blade part off of their Magic Bullet and didn’t unplug the thing. And if you know how the Magic Bullet works, you basically screw the blade and the cup on and then turn it in and twist it, and that turns it on. It’s not this separate button.

Liz Wolfe: Yep.

Diane Sanfilippo: So she basically turned the thing on by accident, and I was like: Noooo! That’s my other biggest fear besides dropping a barbell on my head.

Liz Wolfe: I’ve actually done that before with my hand.

Diane Sanfilippo: Awh!

Liz Wolfe: It was a stick blender, and I reached in to clean it out…

Diane Sanfilippo: Dawh!

Liz Wolfe: And was holding it…

Diane Sanfilippo: Mmh! I don’t know how those noises will be transcribed. Oh, man. So anyway, that happened. That was actually last week. And then other than that, I’ve been feverishly sort of working on recipes and photos for The 21-Day Sugar Detox book that’ll be coming out… I think it’s the end of September it’s coming out. And shooting the pictures for that… Boy, I’ve had to let go of the perfectionism that I’ve often been plagued with, having to just kind of shoot them, make sure they’re clear and look pretty good, and then just move on to the next one. So that’s kind of been my life, and I’m packing up to head out on the Low-Carb Cruise. We leave on Sunday out of Galveston. And so I’ve been packing and kind of getting ready for that. And then this Friday, so this podcast will air on Thursday, so if you’re listening on Thursday or Friday and you’re in the Pittsburgh area, Bill and Hayley from The Food Lovers Kitchen are having a huge party for the release of their book, Gather, and I think it’s 7 p.m. at this place called Bar Marco. There are all kinds of information about it on their website and Facebook and all that. So if you are in the Pittsburgh area, come to the party. I will be there, and I believe Stacy from Paleo Parents will be there, and we’re going to have a good time. We will miss you, my dear.

Liz Wolfe: Of course, you will. You’ll all get fizzy on kombucha and call me. You’ll kombucha text me.

Diane Sanfilippo: OK, so shall we answer some questions for people?

Liz Wolfe: I guess. I was really hoping we could do 52 minutes of catch-up nothing. This is terrible. I’m sorry, everyone. Episode 85!

1. Dating and Paleo [16:40]

Question #1: Dating and paleo. I was so excited for this one. This is from Ms. Cohen. “Hi, girls! I have a question, and while I realize this is not exactly your area of expertise…” Umm, yeah, it is.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, it is.

Liz Wolfe: “… I still have a feeling you might be able to help. I’m 28, single, and I’m having trouble dating with people that are non-paleo. This disqualifies about 99.9% of males in my age group. I’m looking to find someone that shares the same lifestyle and understands why I don’t drinking alcohol, I don’t eat processed foods, and I go to sleep early, etc. Any tips on how I can raise my chances of finding this? Someone should really create a paleo dating website.” I think there have been several of those that kind of didn’t work out. “Any advice? PS I really love to say Anonymous.” Woops. Did we…? Is that anonymous?

Diane Sanfilippo: I think the ‘Ms. Cohen’ thing… I’ll tell you what: Cohen is actually a name in my family lineage. I think it’s like basically being a Smith or a Jones but, like, Jewish.

Liz Wolfe: Oh, my gosh. That makes me miss Seth Cohen on The OC.

Diane Sanfilippo: Good stuff.

Liz Wolfe: Good one.

Diane Sanfilippo: I didn’t actually watch The OC.

Liz Wolfe: You didn’t need to.

Diane Sanfilippo: No. I mean, I can talk about this from the ‘I was single for the first almost three years of being paleo’ perspective, or pretty much single. And I was a little bit older than she is. I just turned 35. Yikes.

Liz Wolfe: Shut up.

Diane Sanfilippo: So try being over 30 and trying to date when you’re not only paleo, but… I don’t know what to call myself! I mean, people still proclaim me the paleo police or some kind of guru, which I don’t consider myself to be. But people get around me, and if they know anything about paleo, they kind of freak out like I’m not going to be able to socialize, or they think that they’re not going to be able to feed me. I mean, consistently people are worried about feeding me. They’re like: She’s got a cookbook, so I have to make something exciting. So add all of that to the stress, and I feel you, Ms. Cohen or whatever your name may actually be.

The things that I can typically recommend… If this is your priority, and obviously for me it was, I really thought I have to date someone who’s either pretty much paleo or totally gets it or is very willing to learn about it, right? And I’ve had a lot of guy friends who for some reason think it’s not that big of a deal or not that hard to teach a girl they’re dating about paleo and get them to change, and I think part of it is that girls are just much quicker to change their ways for a guy or want to than the opposite, and I’m not a sociology/psychology expert, but it’s just what I’ve seen. And women are also pretty typically, you know, if they have a fit guy that they’re dating and they think he knows something about working out and nutrition, they might listen to him. And I know that in many households, the woman is the one who kind of leads the health crusade and she’s trying to make changes for better health, but interestingly enough, in the community that I run in now, primarily in the CrossFit community, a lot of times it is the men who are at the gym and they’re going home talking about paleo, and the wife’s like: What the heck? What is that? So long story short, my best advice would be kind of the following: Number one, put yourself where they are. Put yourself where men who already eat paleo are. I think it’s probably the easiest to find somebody who already gets it. Obviously it’s not the only way to go, but if you are considering CrossFit, now would be a good time. There are lots of guys who if they’re not paleo, if they don’t eat paleo, if they maybe eat paleo most of the time, quite often they’ll at least know about it or know that it’s something they should be doing, so you won’t get the same weird response about it. Maybe you’ll find someone who’s ready to kind of dive in. Who knows?

I don’t know what your background is. I mean, if your name really is Cohen, then church might not be the place. Maybe a synagogue. Who knows what? But when it comes to just this whole idea of a healthy lifestyle that’s not revolving around junk food or partying, whether it’s alcohol or drugs or that kind of thing, and those things all do kind of go hand in hand sometimes. People who are eating a lot cleaner tend to maybe not drink as much. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t drink alcohol ever, but perhaps not as much or as often or whatever.

Liz Wolfe: We probably don’t play beer pong… as much as we used to.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, I mean, it’s a whole different lifestyle, right? You change your food, and then a lot of things about your lifestyle change, so go to a place where that kind of person kind of maybe hangs out. I had in my notes here: “Church??” I mean, it’s a great place to meet nice people who might have some similar interests. What else? When it comes to paleo, sometimes there are paleo Meetup groups, and they’re not meant to be dating groups, but what I would say about that is just meet new people who are paleo, and they will have friends. They’ll have friends who maybe aren’t paleo but they’ve watched their friends make a change, and then maybe they’re interested. And you can’t always assume that somebody who isn’t paleo today won’t make the change. Although obviously you don’t want to go into a situation or a relationship trying to change somebody, seeing what kind of mindset they have – Are they an open-minded person? Are they somebody who thinks they know everything, or are they willing to learn some things from you and are you willing to learn some things from them?

I actually think it’s really fun to try and give some dating advice versus health advice for a change. And for me, I find that what has worked the best in the last couple of years, I can say, I suppose, is having friends introduce me to people that they know. And that’s really something that I always knew was probably the best way to meet people once you’re out of high school and college and once you perhaps don’t work with as many people who might be of interest to you. I’ve worked in some environments where nobody around me was attractive to me in terms of lifestyle and shared interests, but then I started working for myself and mostly by myself, so I wasn’t going to meet somebody through work. So that’s kind of what I’m thinking. I don’t know, Liz. Do you have any other thoughts on that, what you would do at this point?

Liz Wolfe: What I would do. Don’t ever do what I would do, people. Children, take a message from your Auntie Liz: Don’t ever do what I would do. Actually, do. Like I’ve said before, I advise everybody to marry my husband. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but he’s definitely a guy that was always willing to learn from me, and he inspired the same thing in me. I wanted to learn from him, and we just kind of… I think looking for someone who is willing is probably the number one thing. It doesn’t have to be a paleo guy already, but someone who is just a willing spirit and willing to talk about something and give it a whirl and doesn’t have some kind of sense of offense that maybe his way is wrong you’re wanting to do something else, just somebody who’s open first as a quality.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: And that can be an adventure.

Diane Sanfilippo: I think that’s a really good point because this is something that has come up as a challenge in my life, too, and it has not been specifically about nutrition, but just some other ways of thinking in my life, and I think a lot of times we have those preconceived notions, right? So perhaps you meet somebody who you think is really great and he doesn’t eat paleo. He can still be a really great person, right? But what matters most is, like what you just said, the willingness. It’s the whole thing about is that person open-minded and also kind of wise enough to know that they don’t know everything and that there are things to learn and that perhaps if they’re interested in you, he’ll open his mind up to the fact that there might be another way that he never even knew about. This is stuff that we kind of talk about at the workshop sometimes where we’re talking about that level of awareness. Like, maybe this guy that you might meet somewhere doesn’t even know what paleo is, so if we just discount people right away who never had an awareness, never had any thought about it, then we might really be missing out on some great people. But then again, if you try and date this guy for a month or two months or three months and he’s just not open-minded, he’s not showing signs that he likes you enough to learn something or get interested in the things that you’re interested in, then it’s not going to work. But if you give it a little bit of time and then you discover that he’s actually really open-minded… I think, obviously the first pieces of advice I had about where to find people who are paleo and how to make that a little bit easier is great, but at the same time, I think the point that you just made, Liz, was really almost just as important, if not more so, that you have this person who can learn and grow with you about things.

Liz Wolfe: You just have to seek the right qualities, you know?

Diane Sanfilippo: Because neither of you were paleo, right? When you guys met?

Liz Wolfe: No.

Diane Sanfilippo: How did that evolution happen within your relationship? Because a lot of the relationship will hinge on what you eat. I mean, that’s what fills your house up. It’s how you choose to be social. So how did that transition kind of happen for you guys?

Liz Wolfe: I honestly am not 100% sure because he was in to CrossFit, but it was kind of when it was still the Zone Diet stuff before all the paleo stuff came out, and then I got into CrossFit in Kansas City and gave it a whirl, and then it’s just one of those things where – a lot of people listening understand – it’s just so fascinating and it’s so fun that you just kind of stick with it permanently, which is why it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle. But I think my big win was landing a guy with the right overall qualities, like, just a good man that wanted to listen to me and learn together and try new things together. And you know what? If you’re into someone other than you… You know, we say if he’s into you, he’ll want to learn this, this, and this. Well, if you’re into someone other than you, then you’ll want to learn, too, you know? I got over myself a little bit, a lot, in my relationship with my husband and realized that I was really for a long time only worried about what I cared about, and I wasn’t really a listener. I was kind of more of a talker. So yeah, it’s those overall qualities that I think are important. I don’t know. I don’t know anything, man. I’ve got ticks in my yard.

Diane Sanfilippo: No, I definitely agree with you, and I think there are a lot of other qualities… Like, just to kind of throw this out there in terms of the way that I framed things about the type of guy I was looking for – and this is not to be offensive. I’m sure people will be offended, but I had been saying for years I don’t want to go out with a banker. And it’s not to say there aren’t plenty of guys who work in finance who are awesome, amazing, smart, interesting, fun, great people, but I just knew in my heart that somebody who had that type of a job and was passionate about it and loved it, they probably wouldn’t jive with me, because of just the way I think, the way I live my life, all this other stuff, really having not much to do with my food. And I did go out with this guy on a date, and he was basically a banker. He worked for a hedge fund. And he was awesome. A really, really great guy, but it just wasn’t clicking. And I always knew in my heart that somebody who was an entrepreneur or who worked in this sort of holistic, health, wellness type of field was more of a right fit for me. And it really didn’t have as much to do with the specifics of, like, he needs to do CrossFit, he needs to eat paleo, he needs to do this, that, and the other thing. It’s just the type of person, like we’ve been saying, and I think that is really kind of at the crux of it.

So hopefully if you’re out meeting people… You know, I don’t know that meeting someone at a bar is the best way to go about it. Obviously, all kinds of great people can be at a bar, but I just think it’s not… I always said about myself I don’t feel like I’m myself or my best self if I’m at a bar. It’s not really the person I want to introduce to somebody else. I’d rather meet somebody at the gym or at a restaurant where I’m much more myself. Like, that’s me. I wear Lululemon all the time. I don’t wear the high heeled shoes and the cute outfit all the time. That’s me 2% of the time, if that, so I want to meet somebody where they’re going to see me really in my element and how I feel best. I think that’s really important.

Liz Wolfe: I always look the best at bars drunk with makeup on under dark lights.

Diane Sanfilippo: Nice, Liz. Obviously that’s how you met your husband, too.

Liz Wolfe: Clearly that’s where we met.

Diane Sanfilippo: Well, hopefully that helps.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, we probably could talk about that all day.

Diane Sanfilippo: You know, it would be great if there were a paleo dating website, but I’m sure you can search for paleo or CrossFit or primal, and if somebody’s read The Primal Blueprint, at least it’s not totally new to them. Not like I would know from being on dating websites years ago or anything like that. But yeah, I think that should be helpful. Good luck! Report back when you’re no longer single… in, like, five years. Look, I was basically single for about three years… basically since I went paleo!

Liz Wolfe: Wow, if we’re taking a random sample here, if we’re gauging cause and effect within a population… being paleo causes singleness.

Diane Sanfilippo: But you get hotter… I’m just kidding.

Liz Wolfe: You get hotter and way more judgy and way more obsessed with bacon-wrapped dates.

Diane Sanfilippo: Mmm, bacon-wrapped dates.

Liz Wolfe: Bacon-wrapped dating.

Diane Sanfilippo: Ohhhh, what!?

Liz Wolfe: That is the name of the paleo dating website. Oh, my gosh.

Diane Sanfilippo: Bacon-wrapped dating? That’s the name of this podcast right now.

Liz Wolfe: Yes, it is.

Diane Sanfilippo: We are punchy today.

Liz Wolfe: Punchy. Speaking of dating, how about question #2?

Diane Sanfilippo: OK.

2. Popsicles pre-colonoscopy? [32:16]

Liz Wolfe: Titled “Doc says to eat popsicles and milkshakes?”

Diane Sanfilippo: How is that speaking of dating?

Liz Wolfe: I don’t know. Somebody’s mind will go there.

Diane Sanfilippo: Whoa. OK, all right. This podcast just took a turn!

Liz Wolfe: Oh, lordy. All right, this is from Janet.

Diane Sanfilippo: We have to have fun when we do this or we won’t do it, right?

Liz Wolfe: Yes. OK. “I’m finishing up my 21-day detox tomorrow. I’m receiving my colonoscopy in May, and I was wondering what alternatives are out there for me besides popsicles and milkshakes.” I swear to you, I didn’t know what this question said when I said speaking of dating. Swear to you.

Diane Sanfilippo: OK.

Liz Wolfe: “… besides popsicles and milkshakes, which are what they told me to eat. As you know, you cannot have solid foods the day before your scheduled test.” Yes, this is true, but Diane, do you have any idea why they would tell her to eat popsicles and milkshakes besides they’re not solid food?

Diane Sanfilippo: No, it’s just they don’t have other alternatives to keep your colon from getting filled up with, obviously, stool. They don’t want there to be much sticking around or possibly any kind of insoluble fiber clinging. I don’t know. I mean, they just want to keep everything cleared out, I guess. Liquid food.

Liz Wolfe: I mean, I don’t know a whole lot about this topic at this point, but this is something you can do fasted, isn’t it?

Diane Sanfilippo: I’m sure you can do it fasted. I don’t know if she has to do that for 24 hours. I don’t think that would be comfortable for me. But popsicles and milkshakes, I mean, you can do any kind of liquid, pureed food that you really want, as far as I know. I wouldn’t do a pureed soup with something like leafy greens, but I bet if you wanted to do a sweet potato soup or butternut squash soup, you could probably do that. I mean, milkshake? What are they telling people? I’m going to get a little crazy here, but if you want to make a sort of paleo-fied or healthier type of milkshake, take some coconut milk and some ice and a little bit of fruit. I personally don’t think something seedy like strawberries is a good idea. I would probably opt more for bananas, peaches, mangos, that kind of thing that doesn’t have much of that insoluble fiber in it, but I would just go with liquid food, what we generally tell people not to eat a lot of unless they have impaired eating issues, you know, if they’re elderly or they’re very young or they’re trying to put weight on. But yeah, it’s probably just a day, so make a couple of smoothies or puree up some soup. You could freeze the smoothie into popsicle molds and have a pop, and that’s pretty much it. I don’t think it’s really a huge deal. That’s kind of what I would do if for some reason I was getting a colonoscopy and was trying to kind of follow it up with this. That’s what I would do.

Liz Wolfe: And of course, homemade bone broth.

Diane Sanfilippo: Oh, yeah, bone broth. That’s not as much fun as smoothies and pops made out of smoothies, though.

Liz Wolfe: No, it’s not.

Diane Sanfilippo: No.

Liz Wolfe: No, it’s really not. OK, next one.

Diane Sanfilippo: This podcast really is down the tubes.

Liz Wolfe: It is. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do at this point.

Diane Sanfilippo: To save it?

Liz Wolfe: No.

Diane Sanfilippo: No? Go for it. Question #3.

3. Can you be a Paleo Wine-o? [36:27]

Liz Wolfe: Let’s ask a question about liquor. Emily says: “Regarding wine or avoidance thereof, I’ve been studying the different meal plans in your Practical Paleo book, and almost every one of them says to avoid alcohol. I feel that I’ve given up so many food pleasures to follow a paleo lifestyle – grains, sugar, nuts, dairy, fruit, etc., but the thought of not being able to have a glass or two of wine every day is almost too much to bear. Is it really that big of a deal? Thanks.”

Diane Sanfilippo: Shoot. I guess this one’s directed at me, huh?

Liz Wolfe: I guess so.

Diane Sanfilippo: And I think she just meant to say wino. Can you be a paleo wino?

Liz Wolfe: That would’ve worked. I see visions of Steve Martin from The Jerk come into my head shuffling along the street in his bathrobe.

Diane Sanfilippo: So, here’s the deal with avoiding alcohol: The meal plans in the book are intended to be therapeutic meal plans. They’re not intended to a lifestyle. They’re written as a 30-day intervention. Obviously, if you have a different type of health condition, if you’re dealing with a thyroid issue, if you’re dealing with digestive problems, blood sugar dysregulation, any of the health conditions that I’ve outlined in the book, if you’re following a meal plan to try and recover from one of these conditions, then I stand by what I said in the meal plan. I don’t recommend that you drink while you’re trying to recovery from an issue that’s very specific. Alcohol is a known irritant to digestion, and it’s also going to impair blood sugar regulation. When you’re drinking, detoxifying alcohol is going to take precedence over some of the metabolic functions of your liver in processing carbohydrates, and so this is one of the big reasons why we know about fatty liver disease, and it’s something that’s typically happening in alcoholics, but there’s nonalcoholic fatty liver disease when we’re taking in things like too much high-fructose corn syrup. Your liver is processing all types of things, and it’s processing both the alcohol and the carbohydrates. It doesn’t mean that it’s doing one and not the other, but detoxifying the alcohol is a very prioritized function of your liver. It’s what’s going to happen to kind of clear your system out.

I’m not telling people they need to give up alcohol for forever. You have to decide where you are with that. If you’re on a path to healing something, if you want to lose body fat, wine every single night? Yeah, I think that’s too much, a glass or two especially. And what I usually say to people who do have a glass or two of wine every single night is that I challenge their lifestyle. The same reason I challenge the lifestyle of somebody who is drinking coffee every single day or multiple cups of coffee. I know people really enjoy the taste of it. I started drinking it again myself right now, and it’s definitely a lifestyle issue. I’m working on two books. It’s a very isolated thing for me. I absolutely plan on not drinking it when I’m done writing these books. We’ve all this conversation. I didn’t have any almost at all for, like, nine months. And it’s something that I do love. I love the taste of it the way a lot of people love the taste of wine. I don’t personally like the taste of alcohol that much, so maybe I’m just lucky in that way. I think it burns my throat, and I just am not a fan. But for purposes of social interaction, relaxation, enjoyment, etc., alcohol can be a positive thing in many people’s lives; the same way for a lot of people eating more carbohydrates is really beneficial. It depends on your situation, your health status, how honest you’re being with yourself about why you’re drinking one or two glasses of wine every night. If it’s to be some sort of unwinding escape from whatever is stressing you out all day, then deal with the stress that’s happening all day. Figure that out first rather than dealing with it by drinking wine at night.

And I can tell that people are going to think that I’m being judgmental, and I’m really not. I don’t really care what people do. I don’t have this set feeling that drinking wine every night is unhealthy, period. It really depends on the person. For one person, it could be the worst thing that they can do. And for someone else, it could be completely innocuous for them. It might not matter at all. It might not affect their health because they’re in a completely different situation. And so, saying: Is it really that big of a deal? I don’t know. And if this sounds that hard to you to give up the one or two glasses, it might really be that big of a deal. And this is one of those things, too, where I don’t know how old Emily is, but I know this is something Dan Kalish talks a lot about in his books on hormones, and I would bet – I didn’t get through all of Sara Gottfried’s book. I bet there’s something in her book about this, too. But a lot of women who are dealing with menopause or premenopause tend to self-medicate hormonal imbalances with wine or alcohol at night, and it really just makes things worse. So, whatever the situation is here, I think it’s just about being honest with yourself, being honest about what your goals are, and knowing how much the wine may or may not be contributing to reaching those goals. And if your goal is more to just enjoy the day and there’s not some other health issue or aesthetic goal that you have that’s primary, then you do what you want to do. That’s your choice. But if you’re trying to heal and start getting yourself out of pain and suffering, then no, I don’t think wine every single night will help that process. Now I’m the mean one.

Liz Wolfe: No. I just hate to add to that because it was so good. But I did want to say… a lot of this is just the way it’s framed in her mind. Like, “I’ve given up so many food pleasures to follow a paleo lifestyle.”

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: Well, first of all, grains and sugar? Yeah, those are things that definitely don’t really jive with the paleo lifestyle, grains and simple sugar, processed foods. But then nuts, dairy, and fruit? I’m not 100% sure. I mean, that kind of maybe speaks to the fact that she’s trying to achieve something very specific.

Diane Sanfilippo: Fat loss, maybe.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah. But for me, I have some nuts now and then. I have some dairy now and then. I have some raw goat’s milk in the fridge that I have a little bit of. It’s extraordinary with Hail Merrys, FYI. I eat fruit. But those are because I know how those things affect me, number one. We get really obsessed with this paleo tag because we’re all used to following a set of rules, that is, a diet, but really paleo has become this movement where people understand – first of all, if we really want to talk about what’s paleo, caveman would eat anything if he could. So it doesn’t matter what’s “paleo” and what’s not. It’s what’s food and what’s not. And like you and I have always said in the workshops, how does this food support your digestive function? It’s far more than what is and what isn’t “paleo.” So nuts, dairy, fruit, all these things that you have to “give up,” that’s, number one, a little bit debatable. It depends on what you’re actually trying to accomplish, but also this whole idea that the food pleasures are grains and sugar. If I hadn’t been willing to give up grains and simple sugar, I never would’ve discovered bacon-wrapped dates, for one. But also it’s like there this whole world of amazing food that I didn’t know about four years ago, you know, when I was taking stuff out and wasn’t yet adding things in that I didn’t know about before. So I think a lot of this is just framed in a really kind of negative light in her mind, and maybe this is a question of changing thoughts.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, and if she is doing a fat loss plan, for example, the plan is not meant to be for forever, as I said. It’s meant to be an intervention. My book exists to be a little bit of a clinical gateway. It’s a lot of information that I would be giving a client one-on-one, and so it’s not a lifestyle book. It is about a lifestyle, right? We don’t want it to be about a diet, but we were talking about Bill and Hayley’s new book, Gather, and that’s a lifestyle book. There’s probably wine in a bunch of pictures, and that’s because as part of this lifestyle where we’re giving up refined foods and grain products and refined sugars as kind of this big primary crux of things, enjoying a holiday and having a glass of wine is one thing, and having it every single night as part of your kind of regular routine is another. And whether that’s something that, again… It just has to be does it fit with your goals or not, and be honest with yourself about it.

Liz Wolfe: Yep.

Diane Sanfilippo: And that is all.

4. Probiotic cleansers & can you live “too clean?” [46:08]

Liz Wolfe: And that is all. All right. I’m going to skip down, actually, to the last two questions because this one is a little bit long, so I think we’ll have to save it for another time. Talking about ticks for 20 minutes will do that. And we’ll skip down to this question from Evan. “Can you live too clean?” And this is kind of a… I guess this is a lead-out from the last one. “Liz, in one of your blogs you mentioned SCD probiotics for cleaning your home, and in the Healthy Life Summit interview you mentioned using a probiotic hand sanitizer. With the theory of humans living in too clean of an environment, do you think these products can help us come in contact with more beneficial bacteria like our ancestors, or are they just a better alternative to chemical cleaners? You guys’ podcast has made my hour commute to work more enjoyable than my job itself. Love you guys and your approach to the paleo lifestyle.”

This is a really cool question that Evan asked. Yeah, so in the blog and in some of these podcast interviews I’ve done about the Skintervention Guide, I’ve talked about probiotic housecleaning products, and yeah, I think this is a cool idea. Really I was looking at this more from the perspective of when we’re just trying to eradicate germs. Oh, my gosh, germs. Don’t get germs, which I think is funny, you know, when people freak out about something falling on the floor and you pick it up and eat it, and yet you walk outside in bare feet and you touch your mailbox and you touch your car handle, and it’s just like you cannot rid yourself of bacteria in your environment. You just can’t do it. But I think it is a bad idea to try and wipe your counters and bleach the tub and just completely eradicate because what you end up with is a breeding ground for bad bacteria to grow. One of the kinds of buzz words around it is biofilm. It’s some really gnarly stuff if you Google it, but that’s part of the reason I like using probiotic cleansers because no matter what, you’re going to have some critters on your countertops. They might as well be the beneficials. So that’s always kind of been my take on that, and that’s why I recommend the things that I do. One of the companies that I really like is Probiotics In Progress, PIP, cleaners, and they also have some probiotic skin spray that I like. So yeah, I like this idea.

Diane Sanfilippo: That’s interesting. I have not heard… I use some kind of natural counter spray just basically to get gunk off the counter and grease. I’ve never been the Purell person. I’ve never been the crazy, obsessive hand washer. I wash my hands after the gym mostly because they’re literally dirty, like, there’s black stuff on my hands from the barbells and whatever from the floor, not because I’m worried about the germs. I think that’s really interesting.

Liz Wolfe: Isn’t it?

Diane Sanfilippo: A probiotic cleaner as opposed to an antibacterial. Really interesting.

Liz Wolfe: And they work.

Diane Sanfilippo: Sounds good to me. I mean, I would just as soon just kind of wipe things down with water and distilled vinegar. There are some cleaning products in my house because other people have brought them here, but I don’t really buy any of that stuff.

Liz Wolfe: I think just wiping stuff down, if that’s what you’re comfortable with, I think that’s probably OK. But I think it really is that difference between using those really aggressive cleansers, and like I said, if everybody’s interested, Google ‘biofilm.’ It’s yucky.

Diane Sanfilippo: I just wonder, too, what kind of stuff they’re cleaning, and this is where food safety is important, having separate cutting boards for things. When you go to cut your veggies and whatnot, you cut your veggies first and then you can keep the same knife and same cutting board and go ahead and cut your chicken, for example, but you can’t do the opposite. You can’t cut raw chicken and then go ahead and cut the veggies. And I just think there’s also an element of, like, if you take steps to avoid more need for cleaning things all the time, then you maybe can reduce the use of them a little bit.

Liz Wolfe: I am just wildly unsanitary as a person.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, me too. I haven’t showered in, like, three days.

Liz Wolfe: You’re disgusting. Well, I’m covered in diatomaceous earth and ticks, so I have to shower. Ay-yay-yay.

Diane Sanfilippo: OK.

5. Coconut oil drain clog? [50:46]

Liz Wolfe: Last one. This one’s for me, too. This is from AJ. “For Liz, one of the three go-bare basic skincare ingredients, the coconut oil, is messing up my plumbing, and I mean the plumbing in my bathroom, not a metaphor for anything bodily in nature. I read your Skintervention book, and I’ve been trying to use more simple, safe, economical options for skincare. My skin is down with the change. My drains in my bathroom sink and tub do not seem appreciative, and in trying to avoid using harmful – to me or the environment – chemicals, I think I’m sort of limited to hot water, baking soda and vinegar, maybe some orange oil, maybe some kind of an enzyme-based drain cleaner or, gasp, either snaking or otherwise cleaning my drains myself, or hiring someone else to do it, which I assume would be either expensive or unpleasant. I also think that if I continue to use coconut oil that drain maintenance will be a bigger part of my life. I’d like to know if this is a problem for you. If so, what do you do? If not, what is your after-bath, after-sink trick for preventing the problem?”

I found this question quite interesting because I’ve never heard this before ever, and my first instinct was AJ is using a crap ton of oil is that much is getting into the drains. And that’s great because I use what I think is a ton oil, too, but this has definitely never happened to me. And I was thinking about it, and not a whole lot of oil ends up in the drain. The way I use the oil to do the oil cleansing method and when I do oil treatments in my hair is I put enough in the palm of my hand that it just stays in the palm of my hand. I rub it in my hands, and then I put it on my face, rub that into my face, and then I’ll put a little washcloth under the water and steam my face and then wipe it off. So what ends up taking on most of the oil in that scenario is the washcloth, obviously. And I will – and I say this in the Skintervention Guide also – I use Dr. Bronner’s castile soap. I’ll use that to clean my washcloth. And what you’re doing there is you’re saponifying the oil, and it should just whisk right down your drain no big deal. So it may be that there was already a drain issue that just popped up at the exact same time by coincidence. Or it might be that a ton of oil… maybe you can tighten up on that a little bit, save a little bit of supply there and use a little bit less. That’s about all I’ve got. I mean, even when you do laundry you’re saponifying the grease so it becomes flush-away-able. I don’t know. Diane, does this happen to you? I know you’re an oil person like I am.

Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. No, it doesn’t. I definitely think my washcloth is taking most of the brunt of that. And I do the same. I use the Dr. Bronner’s, and I use Dr. Bronner’s also on my body as well, and so I don’t really find any issue with it. I mean, maybe if AJ’s in a really cold place and the pipes just somehow get cold more easily… or not using hot water and maybe the oil is just really solidifying for some reason. But yeah, I just don’t think that there should be that much oil being used. I maybe use, like, a dime-size amount or a nickel-size amount, but then, as you said, it’s melted in the palms and on my face, same kind of deal. I don’t imagine chunks of oil going down the drain.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, so this is interesting. AJ, if you have any post-answer insight for us, please feel free to leave it in the comments on one of the blogs. I’m interested, very intrigued.

Diane Sanfilippo: I guess I’ve been sitting still long enough that Paleo Kitty has come made a home here on my lap.

Liz Wolfe: Aww, that’s cute.

Diane Sanfilippo: If you sit long enough in one place, he just decides to come snuggle. But he also wants dinner.

Liz Wolfe: Hi, Mason. Well, on that note, you can go feed your cat, and I will go do a once-over for ticks… which I think my husband’s kind of excited about at this point. You know, we’ve been married for a good couple years now. It’s time to spice things up a little bit. Check me for ticks!

Diane Sanfilippo: The nightly tick check. Aww, yeah. It doesn’t get much hotter than that.

Liz Wolfe: I’m terrible. All right, well, that’s that, everybody. We apologize profusely for this podcast. We’re so excited to talk to you guys again because I missed you last week, Diane. It was me and Kendall, and it was fun, but I’m glad that you’re back.

Diane Sanfilippo: I listened. It was great. It was fun to listen in for a change.

Liz Wolfe: Kendall rocks. Next week you’ll be on the cruise, so I will likely be doing another interview of some sort. We’ll keep that a secret for now. I’ve got some ideas. But we will be back again one day after the cruise with more questions. Until then, you can find Diane at BalancedBites.com, and you can find me, Liz, at CaveGirlEats.com. Thanks for listening! We’ll talk to you later.

Cheers!
Diane & Liz

I regularly burned dinner, which mostly consisted of ingredients from a box.

I lived on fat free yogurt, and swore by bagels as being the ultimate health food.

Thank goodness for a wake-up call from the Paleo community.

I have the typical story: I started cleaning up my diet about three years ago after discovering Paleo through the CrossFit world. My family, including my two young children (ages 4 and 5), transitioned away from boxes and started enjoying delicious new recipes and playing in the kitchen.

We immediately started seeing positive changes in our health. As my kids started asking me, “Mommy, why are we the only ones that eat healthy?” I started asking myself the same question, wondering why more people don’t know about the benefits of real food and Paleo. I decided it was time to start educating others about how to break away from the SAD and the many chronic diseases that accompany it.

I work as an ER nurse, and a public health nurse in the School Based Health Clinics.

As a nurse, I get a lot of insight into how people take care of themselves. Since 2004, I have seen the number of people on prescription medications rise, along with skyrocketing rates of obesity and chronic disease. I have seen too many people suffer due to these modern problems knowing that, in most cases, this pain could have been avoided by implementing more effective diet and lifestyle choices.

I also get a lot of insight into how the medical world may be doing our society a disservice by providing outdated, inaccurate information on how to properly fuel the body for health and maintenance.

Over time, I realized that my nursing education did not provide me with the necessary nutrition education to truly help people. So, last Fall I enrolled in the Nutritional Therapy Practitioner program via the Nutritional Therapy Association.   This started my journey to providing healthcare, instead of sick care.

It was the beginning of my NTP program when Practical Paleo arrived at my doorstep and a light bulb went on.

I poured through the beautifully presented material and was pleasantly surprised at how simple and delicious the recipes were.  While reading the digestion section, I thought to myself, “This should be a textbook,” as it paralleled much of the information that I was studying in my NTP course.

So, a few months later, I have developed the Real Food Academy. I am thrilled that Diane has given me permission to use her “encyclopedia of Paleo” as a textbook to teach a class on nutrition.

This will be a 6-week course, during which time participants will go through a 30-day “reset.” The participants may choose a diet change for 30 days, and use the classroom and textbook information to guide them to better health.

The 30-days will give their bodies time to adapt to new fuel sources, and they will be able to observe and feel the changes that will be taking place. The “reset” can be anything from working on improving hydration to implementing a strict Paleo diet.

The Practical Paleo tear-out guides and meal plans will assist the class members in navigating the marketplace and creating culinary masterpieces. The content in the beginning of the book will be required as homework to supplement the concepts of the course, which focus heavily on the base of nutrition: digestion, blood sugar regulation, and fat.

I am also excited to be able to spread the word on local food resources, and the class will be held in our new local food hub’s classroom, Central Oregon Locavore, which has it’s own Weston A. Price inspired section. Participants will be able to step next door for pastured eggs before learning the benefits of this particular food in the health of the body.

I think back to all that the Paleo community has done for me in terms of teaching me about health and nutrition, and I look forward to giving back to it by spreading the word on how life can be free from modern health dilemmas by making the right choices.

Of course, I realize that we “nutrient seekers” (as Diane and Liz would say) are few and far between. However, I hope to change that by providing people with good ideas and information on how to break away from the SAD world we live in.

• For more information  
  
• FAQ about the Real Food Academy
• To register for the Real Food Academy
  
• Check out www.facebook/primalplaygroup for ideas on fueling hungry kids while following a Paleo/Primal/Real Food diet.

Remember – If you’re enjoying these podcasts, please leave us a review in iTunes. Thanks!

Don’t forget to check out last week’s episode post now has a written transcript available. We will be playing a lot of catch-up, but bear with us as they’re on their way! We’ll also be trying to get current episode transcripts up-to-date and loaded with each podcast but it’ll take another couple of weeks before we catch up there as well. We hope you’re enjoying them!

Topics:

Kendall works in local food policy and just received a grant for her work. She also does urban homesteading. She will have a poster presentation at AHS 2013. (One of my favorite people ever. – Liz)

• Food policy and teaching kids to garden
• The power of urban gardens
• Grant from Burt’s Bees to design and implement a program for urban garden development
• Urban homesteading, chickens, compost
• Paleo perfectionism and raising a family of 4 girls plus husband
• Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
• Kendall’s AHS poster presentation

Click here to download this episode as an MP3.

The episodes are currently available in iTunes, Stitcher & Blog Talk Radio.

Welcome to the Balanced Bites Podcast with Diane Sanfilippo and Liz Wolfe. Diane is a certified nutrition consultant and The New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo. Liz is a nutritional therapy practitioner and the author of Modern Cave Girl. Together, Diane and Liz answer your questions, interview leading health and wellness experts, and share their take on modern paleo living with their signature friendly and balanced approach. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only and are not to be considered as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Liz Wolfe: Hey everyone, Liz Wolfe here. And the intro is a little bit deceptive because Diane is actually not here with me today. She’s doing all kinds of important New York Times bestseller type of things. But I’m so excited because I have my friend and colleague, the amazing Kendall Kendrick from Primal Balance. She’s on with me today, one of my favorite people that I’ve met through this whole fantastic ancestral health movement. She has a really impressive résumé, and I’m going to try and give a little bit of a rundown on it, but I’m also going to leave a little bit of that responsibility to her because… dang. You have a long list of stuff that you’re working on, Kendall. Super long list.

Kendall Kendrick: Thank you, Liz!

Liz Wolfe: I just adore you.

Kendall Kendrick: Aww, I’m swooning.

Liz Wolfe: I’m serious.

Kendall Kendrick: You make me swoon always. You always make me swoon!

Liz Wolfe: You’re totally my girl crush.

Kendall Kendrick: Aww, you’re my girl crush!

Liz Wolfe: Oh, my goodness.

Kendall Kendrick: You were mine first.

Liz Wolfe: This is just silly. Well, I met Kendall in Charlotte at a Balanced Bites workshop and just totally fell in love with her right away. She knows so much about so many things that I’m interested in and want to learn about. She’s also a compadre in the push to affect public policy when it comes to health and food, and Kendall is working in kind of moving towards a healthy diet for little ones, which is very important. I think we’ve really connected on that as well, my work with Steve’s Club and what you’re doing now as well, which we’ll talk about as well. What else? Mom of four.

Kendall Kendrick: Yes.

Liz Wolfe: You’ve overcome a ton in your life, and you know so much about paleo parenting and, as your blog says, about balance. I love so much of what you talk about, about avoiding that pitfall of paleo perfectionism and having a fully healthy, well-nourished family but still keeping that element of balance. So I’m just going to ask you to do a little introduction of yourself and just kind of let me know what you want everybody to know about Kendall Kendrick!

Kendall Kendrick: All right! Well, I will say the things that you and I most have in common is that I am soon to graduate from the Nutritional Therapy Association, and you are already a nutritional therapy practitioner.

Liz Wolfe: Ta-da!

Kendall Kendrick: You were one of my inspirations for actually doing that program, and it’s been fantastic. So I’ve been doing that this year. A lot of big kind of life changes have happened for me in this last year. I started working in food policy back in the fall. Farm to school and school gardens are a huge passion of mine because I do have four daughters. My oldest is 11-1/2, and my twins just turned 9, and in fact, tomorrow my baby will be 5, which is so hard to believe. And so, because we’ve always sort of had this natural lifestyle and been able to expose our kids to some of the things in that lifestyle, like eating locally, going to the farmers’ market, growing our own food, and I have an urban farm and I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but I really felt like other kids deserve that opportunity who maybe wouldn’t get that, because I think probably the majority of children don’t have access to those kinds of resources. And so I really got involved with the school gardens at my children’s Montessori school, which is a public school, it’s a magnet program, and through that, I started to become involved with the farm-to-school initiatives that were happening in my city, and I landed my dream gig, and I am now the project coordinator for childhood nutrition for our local food policy council, which is a nonprofit. And just recently I received a grant through Burt’s Bees to implement some different programs in our local schools to really just put some education pieces together to help kids, again, just understand more about gardening, where food comes from, and it’s so exciting. It’s the kind of job that I just wake up every day and pinch myself and say: Is this a job? I don’t think I can call this a job because this is just so exciting. I was at PaleoFX a couple of weeks ago, and I would start talking to people about it. And in my head I was like: Just shut up! Just shut up! Just stop talking! I can’t stop when I start because it fills my heart so much to see children know where food comes from and how it’s grown, and it’s just something that our society is missing out on so much, and I think that it just links back to this ancestral diet that we’re all trying to work on here.

Liz Wolfe: Most definitely, and I think that I even have forgotten, and maybe at some point I knew, but for a long time I forgot where food comes from.

Kendall Kendrick: For a long time, my food came from a McDonald’s bag!

Liz Wolfe: Absolutely!

Kendall Kendrick: That was most of my life until I started having children 12 years ago, and I was a total junk food junkie, and I say that all the time, and I grew up on a farm! And just completely lost all of that and just didn’t understand nutrition whatsoever, and to have a family that’s just riddled by diabetes and autoimmune diseases, and it’s all nutrition based.

Liz Wolfe: So, growing up on a farm, what kind of memories are kind of coming back to you while you’re working with these kids and designing this program to reach them with nutrition and where food comes from and how to grow good food? What’s coming back to you? Because you know that I have my little homestead going right now, and I have forgotten. I need to learn. Maybe I need to hear a little bit about what you’re working with these kids on.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah. We started our little urban farm at our house. We live very kind of intercity and we have a third of an acre, which is more than probably a lot of people in this city have. But we have 16 chickens now, actually 15 because we had to give one of our roosters away last night.

Liz Wolfe: Last night?!

Kendall Kendrick: Last night actually. Yeah, we live in the city so we can’t have roosters, and we got several new chicks in January, and there was one day we were like: Oh, those are roosters.

Liz Wolfe: Shoot.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah, now we’re giving them away and we have to get more hens to keep our egg production up. But anyway, my husband is just now venturing into aquaponics and growing tilapia and growing greens and whatnot with that, so that’s kind of exciting… when he’s not flooding the basement! They have to be temperature controlled, so for now we’re just working in the basement trying to get all the kinks kind of worked out, and growing our own food. So taking those pieces into the schools and the programs and just getting those kids into the dirt. And I will say, when I was a little girl, I wanted nothing to do with being dirty or being in the dirt, and all of my cousins would be barefoot all day, running around on our grandparents’ farm, and I was just like: Uh-uh. Nope, nope. But I have these amazing memories of spending evenings and sunset out in the field getting all the cows back into their pens for overnight with my grandfather, and I think that that is probably what got me back into food. I know that’s inside of me, and so just putting those memories into the kids now so that they’ll carry those with them through and pass it on as well and do big things with it. You know, it’s totally different than being out in the country, which you’re learning now, Liz.

Liz Wolfe: Uhh… yes.

Kendall Kendrick: You’re out there in the middle of nowhere on a farm versus doing these small gardens, but the lessons are still the same. And so it’s just really important that we teach these kids that it’s really simple to plant some seeds and get your food out of that and to create healthy, nutritious meals. So what we really do is we emphasize tastings in the classroom, taking the food that’s grown in the garden and doing really fun stuff with it, like making kale chips. Kids love kale chips! They get so excited. Making smoothies out of them… You know, the possibilities are endless. And it’s so funny because you have parents who are like: My kids are so picky, and they won’t eat anything. Well, when they get in a classroom with their peers, pressure is a beautiful thing in that case. Because when everybody else is tasting it, they don’t want to be left out, so they taste it and: Oh, wow! This is fantastic! And you go home and say: Well, guess what? We had these really great green smoothies today. Or, we had these carrots, and we ate them right out of the dirt. So it’s very exciting.

Liz Wolfe: I love it! I wish I could be among these little kids. I’m envisioning those AT&T commercials where those little kids are talking to that weird market research guy.

Kendall Kendrick: Yes!

Liz Wolfe: If more is not less, then you might want… you want more! I just can see myself sitting there soaking it in. I love it. And we’re going to get all set up for our chickens here in about two weeks. So let’s just take a quick homesteading detour. Can you please teach me how to have chickens? How am I supposed to love these little feathered lizards?

Kendall Kendrick: Well, I actually make fun of mine on the regular, but they’re my husband’s babies. I made a joke… We gave the rooster to a good friend of ours who’s a farmer out in the country, and so I told her when she took the rooster away in the crate, I said: I think my husband packed a little snack bag for him and wrote him a little love letter. So just know, if my husband’s calling you crying tomorrow… No, I’m just kidding! But the urban farming thing is really his thing, and so he’s more attached to them. But it’s so exciting! They’re so cute when they’re chicks. We got so excited about watching them grow every day. And if you go away for a couple of days, you come back and you think that they’ve grown, like, two months. So they’re fun to watch, and then all they do is poop. It’s just lots of poop. Eat, poop, eat, poop. And then, the next thing you know, they’re ready to go outside. And then, you get eggs! And that’s when you really love them! Because you start seeing them as production options. So, I grew my relationship with them once they started giving me something in return and I wasn’t just feeding them.

Liz Wolfe: It’s a mutual relationship.

Kendall Kendrick: It is.

Liz Wolfe: Good. OK, I’ll remember that.

Kendall Kendrick: You know, I think chickens are so easy. The hardest part is just getting set up. We’ve always kept ours inside. We have a really nice-size basement, which is fortunate for us, and so we just kept them inside in the beginning in sort of a little pen we made and kept bedding in there until they were feathered out and ready to go outside. And even most recently we had to integrate the babies with the birds that were a year old, and that went great. That went fine. So, yeah, I think you’re going to do just fantastic. Do you know how many you’re going to get?

Liz Wolfe: Husband is very adamant that we stick with five.

Kendall Kendrick: Wow!

Liz Wolfe: But that means we’ll get five and then five and then five.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: He likes to pare down just to kind of lower those expectations because he knows we’re going to go and I’m going to get my, you know, 20 chickens.

Kendall Kendrick: Right! We started off with nine, and then my husband went and did some work on a friend’s farm, and so he sent them home with seven. And I said: Really? Seven?! So then we had 16, but two were roosters, so they’re going away. And then he said he wants to get four more so we just have a dozen and a half eggs a day.

Liz Wolfe: Just a dozen and a half.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah, and I mean, there’s only six of us. We don’t eat a dozen and a half eggs a day. But apparently we’re going to have 18 chickens soon. And there’s always some talk about wanting a pig and… yeah. So I think you are my husband in this scenario, and I’m your husband in this scenario.

Liz Wolfe: When we went out to get – I wrote about this on my blog way back when – and I was telling you earlier off the air that I get my dog back today. I’m so excited!

Kendall Kendrick: Aww.

Liz Wolfe: He’s been away from us since we’ve been preparing to move and moving and in temporary housing and then moving again and now kind of half-in, half-out of the new homestead. But he’s been away, just kind of trying to give him some kind of semblance of stability for a couple of months, and I haven’t had him, and this guy is 95 pounds of just pure brawn and muscle, and he’s a super tall dog and the coolest dog in the world, but we went out looking for a small-ish… you know, a lab or something like that, and we went to the animal shelter, and I see this fully grown, gigantic dog – that’s Cal – and I looked at my husband, and he goes: No. Because at this time we lived in a shoebox and there was just no way he was going to fit in our house, and of course, so the next day I went back and got the dog and surprise!

Kendall Kendrick: Aww, how sweet!

Liz Wolfe: Yeah.

Kendall Kendrick: When it’s love, it’s love.

Liz Wolfe: It was love.

Kendall Kendrick: And it might be that way with the chickens, right?

Liz Wolfe: I think it could be, and hopefully it’s love between the chickens and the dog.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah, well, I will say I have a little 8-pound Chorkie, and he tried to maul a couple of chickens. And our chickens don’t totally free range. We have so many hawks, and all of our friends’ chickens keep getting taken away by hawks, so we built sort of this PVC pipe and chicken wire mobile coop that we stick them in and just kind of move them all over the yard. There are all kinds of options you can work with.

Liz Wolfe: And you’re in an urban setting.

Kendall Kendrick: We’re in a completely urban setting!

Liz Wolfe: OK. And that’s great because you are also kind of teaching. You’re not teaching kids how to have 15 acres and some guinea hens.

Kendall Kendrick: No, not at all. And we’re really fortunate. We have a group that works in our district, and they just procured a chicken tractor, so we actually have a chicken tractor that’s going between seven different schools right now on a weekly basis, and it have four hens in it, and it’s a mobile tractor, and the farmer who built it and put it together comes and picks it up every week and takes it to the next school. And so the kids collect the eggs during the week, and they do science research and all of this work taking care of the chickens, and then at the end of the week they make the eggs and scramble them and eat them and do different things with them. And so, again, it’s just saying you can be in a totally urban setting. Now, I live in a neighborhood that’s very cool. A lot of people have bees. Other people have chickens. We have a huge community garden. We have a floodplain where some houses were lost right next to the creek years ago, and so the city let us have it, and now we have probably at least a full acre of community gardens there. We each just have our own plot, and we garden our plot and help out with the garden. I just feel really fortunate, but I feel like anybody could have that. I feel like there are so many opportunities out there, and all you have to do is be willing to go find them.

Liz Wolfe: I think a lot of cities have some kind of urban garden connection. It would be really easy. Anybody that’s interested, start out by Googling urban gardens in your city, and kind of see what comes up.

Kendall Kendrick: Absolutely.

Liz Wolfe: I’m sure there are volunteer opportunities and even teaching opportunities. Master gardeners a lot of times are involved with that type of stuff.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah, if there’s an extension service in your county, like I work closely with our extension service, and they’re a great resource. If you have 4H where you live, they’re a great resource, even if it’s in a city. We have 4H here, and they’re amazing. So there are so many resources. I just heard Josh Whiton speak at PaleoFX, and he runs an urban garden here in North Carolina, but in Raleigh, which is about three and a half hours from me. He spoke at PaleoFX on sustainability and creating these gardens. And it was great! This guy lived in an apartment complex, and he just took an area where people were taking their dogs, this little grassy area, and he started a garden there, and now he has this huge urban garden in Raleigh. I’m just blown away by the work that he’s doing. So it just takes a vision, you know? It takes so little.

Liz Wolfe: And I want to talk about AHS, which is the next kind of paleo, ancestral conference that’s coming up, because you have a ton to say about what you’re going to be doing there.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah!

Liz Wolfe: I want you to definitely give people the rundown, but first tell me, tell all of us black-thumbed jerks out here who are not… I have no faith in my gardening skills, and I now have many, many acres with which to work. So give me a couple of nuggets, because I’m going to plant something and something’s going to grow, and I want a whole legion of people to do this with me. So tell us what to do.

Kendall Kendrick: Well, I always joke because I kind of am the black thumb at my house, but I like policy. That’s what I say. I don’t think that you have to be… Like, every time I’ve gotten an orchid, it’s dead like within a week or something. And I’ve killed very houseplant I’ve ever had, but somehow I’ve managed to keep children alive and animals alive, so I have something going for me.

Liz Wolfe: Animals are easier, man.

Kendall Kendrick: I’m like: Just put a bunch of chickens on your land. Don’t grow stuff. Just eat eggs all day long. Get some cows and goats! But I have grown stuff and I have been successful, and really there are so many guides out there that you can look at. If you want to do some soil testing, generally there’s a university in your state that will do soil testing. I can’t even get that complicated. We’re just like: Dig a hole in the dirt, stick the seed in, stick the plant in, water it every day and let it grow, and see what happens.

Liz Wolfe: See what comes up. I think that’s good!

Kendall Kendrick: I mean, what do you have to lose? I think it’s really simple. I like composting. That’s my favorite thing to do. I don’t know why that is really easy for me. I think because the whole point is things dying, so it works really great! Like, you want the stuff to die! And so I’m always like: Well, I’ll do the good compost. Then you go make that compost, and get that on your garden, and you’re going to be golden.

Liz Wolfe: Well, I’m making some compost, so that’s good.

Kendall Kendrick: I saw your video, you and your worms! That was great!

Liz Wolfe: That was bad, was it not? And that was completely genuine. I was recoiling every time I tried to pick up that worm. My hand wouldn’t let me do it. I’m better now. I’ve picked up many worms in the ensuing weeks.

Kendall Kendrick: You were reminding me of my little girls. It was very cute.

Liz Wolfe: Oh, my goodness. And my mom, you hear her in the background because I’ve been back and forth to my parents’ house. Our new home is within a couple of hours from my parents’ house, so of course, we didn’t have our house yet. We were just getting ready to close on our little homestead. But I wanted to start composting now! I wanted to start ordering all the stuff now because apparently being totally self-sufficient requires a lot of Amazon purchases, which is completely not self-sufficient at all.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah!

Liz Wolfe: But I’m doing the compost thing.

Kendall Kendrick: OK, good. That’s great.

Liz Wolfe: Do you do vermiculture?

Kendall Kendrick: I thought about doing vermiculture. I have a lot of friends who do, and I wanted to get into it. I just have a couple of tumblers, and also I do compost all of the chicken bedding. I do the deep bedding method, so I don’t clean it out regularly, and it doesn’t smell. It’s fantastic. So every few months we’ll clean it out, and we put that in a separate compost because you want that to really, really break down before it goes anywhere near your garden. So I just have several piles. I have sort of a slow pile in a black container, and then I have the tumbler. You know, I’m super slack about that. I have four kids. I’m just like: I get stuff done when I get stuff done.

Liz Wolfe: All right, so let’s talk about that. I was reading one of your blog posts, and I promise you we’ll get to the AHS stuff as well because I want people to hear about what you’re going to be doing at AHS as much as I want people to get to know you and love you as much as I do because you’re a fantastic resource. You’re so balanced. You write about so many different things, the different things that have happened in your life, your perspective on birth, your perspective on female hormone balance and imbalance. You’ve done a guest post for RobbWolf.com as well on your journey to balancing your female hormonal issues and whatnot. But just as a mom, I was just reading one of these posts that you wrote fairly recently, and you were talking about – and I think this applies to anybody – but you were basically saying there are many, many things in life that are a hell of a lot harder than just being a mom and eating the right food. So give us a quick glimpse into how Kendall Kendrick the mom handles all of this stuff.

Kendall Kendrick: Well, I will first say that I share custody of my three older children. The reason that I write about balance often in my life is because it’s very hard to maintain balance in my life. So I think I feel like if I write about it enough that it’ll happen naturally! And I kind of tend to always swing one side or the other, and I think getting older and having been a mom for 12 years now, I’m just trying to find the middle a little more because I like being there. It feels a whole lot more stable.

Sharing custody of my girls has been a challenging road the last six years, almost seven, so I don’t get to control what my children eat when they’re not at my house, so the only opportunity that I have… well, my three older children. My youngest child is with my husband now, and she’s the one who’s going to be 5 tomorrow. So I do have full say over what she eats, and she’s completely gluten free and paleo. But you know, with my other kids, it’s just a journey, I think. I do the best that I can when I have them, and I send them on their way, and they have a great life all in all. Really, I think people take this paleo thing so far sometimes. While I do think there are a lot of things that are a lot harder than making these choices, there are also times when you can’t make these choices. So there is a balance in that, just like my children don’t have a choice when they’re not with me about what they get to eat. So, we just have to accept that and move on and do the bet that we can when they’re with me.

So yeah, that’s just kind of the life I live, and a lot of people are always trying to figure out how to best feed their kids, and I say just do the best you can, and don’t stress and worry about it. I have had friends whose kids would eat broccoli, and my kids weren’t going to go near broccoli. And I was just like: What is wrong? Why don’t my kids eat broccoli?! But my kids eat farm bacon every morning, and they make their own eggs every morning. I mean, they get up and scramble the eggs from my backyard, and I’m like: OK, so we know they’re getting great protein and great fat. I’m not going to stress about a little broccoli. It’s not that big of a deal. I mean, you and I both know that what kids really need at this age is good health fats to grow strong and to make their brains develop in an appropriate way. And so, again, you just try not to stress about it because honestly, they’re going to be OK! There was this tweet when I was at PaleoFX. I sent something that, I think, Dr. Terry Wahls said, something about if you want stupid kids, feed them sugar. It got re-tweeted, like, hundreds of times, and I just thought: Well, gosh, my kids have had so much sugar in their life, you know? And they’re not stupid! And obviously it was just one of those nuggets, and I know what she meant, she meant it a lot deeper than just that, but I think people cling onto those things.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah.

Kendall Kendrick: They get so caught up in it, and then you become this perfectionist. And here’s the problem: Perfectionism just breeds shame. When you’re trying to be a perfectionist, you’re missing out on being in that moment and enjoying life, and it’s something that I struggle with on a regular basis. I’m a perfectionist at being a perfectionist, you know?!

Liz Wolfe: That’s such gold, that it just breeds shame. It’s so true. I’ve never heard it put that way. Did you make that up?

Kendall Kendrick: I heard it somewhere. I didn’t make it up!

Liz Wolfe: Well, you can take credit for it. That’s just fine with me. I think that’s so gorgeous, and – what is it? – not letting perfection being the enemy of the good?

Kendall Kendrick: Right. Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: We really do get that black-and-white thinking, that on-wagon, off-wagon behavior, and that still creeps in for me sometimes, too.

Kendall Kendrick: Absolutely. I have tried for a really long time to be the good paleo girl, and my husband and I went away to the Dominican for our first vacation away ever this last weekend, and I kept eyeing this pizza out of the corner of my eye at this buffet for, like, two days straight, and I finally just said: I’m doing it! We’re on this trip, and I’m doing it. And it was so fun, and I wrote about this in a blog post recently, but it was so fun to give in and do that, but then I felt terrible and I came home with swollen feet, and I just was like: Oh, my gosh. I don’t think I can do that again. I came back, like, three pounds heavier. And not that that matters, but I felt that and it didn’t feel good. So sometimes you have to give in just to be reminded of what your goals are and who you’re trying to be, and not because Robb Wolf says so, you know?

Liz Wolfe: Right. Most definitely.

Kendall Kendrick: And people just take it so far, and I want to remind people that it is about the balance factor and that we want to do what’s right for our bodies and listen to ourselves.

Liz Wolfe: Yes. I said in the last podcast someone had mentioned to me through my blog about this whole homesteading journey that I’m going on now that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly at first.

Kendall Kendrick: Yes!

Liz Wolfe: Having a “cheat” or not feeling like you’re completely gung-ho paleo or whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there’s no shame in kind of working up to something and just doing the best you can moment by moment. People get so stuck in these really miniscule details. I wrote a whole post about the question, is it paleo?

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: I see people say: Wait. Spaghetti squash is paleo? I didn’t know that. Or people want to have absolutely no sugar in their diet whatsoever from sweet potato, from any kind of starch, and we get so dogmatic and so partitioned in our thinking, and really I just want to say: All of this comes down to do what you think is right moment by moment and what makes the most sense to you. And just kind of guide yourself gently that way because you just can’t get lost in the minutiae. That’s diet dogma behavior, and it can be really toxic.

Kendall Kendrick: It’s dangerous. And then I always say if you fall off the __________, you have to go pick up a paleo white chip. There’s nobody keeping track of your time. It’s just for you to figure out that template for yourself. There’s a lot of conversation, I think, because this movement is really becoming so much more mainstream now and people have been doing it for a while, and there is this sort of new movement coming in that’s kind of anti-paleo that I see, and I’m disheartened just because there’s negativity in it, and I just want people to do what works for them and not be hateful towards others who are choosing differently, especially because there are people who are coming in here that are sick, that are really sick, and they just want to feel better. They just want to get out of bed. And we’ve seen it happen over and over again.

Liz Wolfe: Well, with Terry Wahls!

Kendall Kendrick: Exactly! And her story is so inspirational to me. I’ve written about it a couple times. My mom has lupus and fibromyalgia and several other autoimmune diseases. I begged her for two years to at least go gluten free. She finally just decided to do it, and she hasn’t had a flare in months! She’s healthy and she feels amazing, and it’s just like: Yeah, it works, people. It works. But you have to figure out what works for you.

Liz Wolfe: So, so critical. It works, but figure out what works for you. Because, like we were just talking about, you went and you had some pizza because you’re a grownup, you can make that choice, and you know where you are with your health and with how food affects you, and that that was going to bug you a little bit but it wasn’t going to cause some massive problem, whereas maybe with your mom, she has to know herself well enough, that maybe her choices aren’t going to be your choices.

Kendall Kendrick: Right. I don’t have celiac, but I feel almost certain that my mom does. She’s not tested, but I can see that she really kind of falls into that category, and if she does have gluten, it really does affect her. If she has it accidentally, she’ll call me and go: Oh, my gosh. My stomach hurts so bad! And then she’ll start telling me what she ate, and I’ll say: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you got glutened. No, that’s not going to happen to me. In fact, I didn’t feel anything as it was happening. It was more of like two days later, like: Whoa! What did I do? Yeah, and I’ve also been healing my body for a long time, like you said, my hormone imbalances. I had estrogen dominance, which Robb Wolf in his podcast helped me figure out a couple of years ago, and that was just life changing for me, because I was already paleo and I couldn’t understand why my moods weren’t getting any better and why my cycles were getting worse. And I kept doing research, and Robb gave me some great pointers, and I followed through, and within a couple of months it was completely gone, and I’ve had no problems since. Paleo is kind of that first step, you know? You take that, but then you actually have to keep peeling those onion layers back to get down to what the issue is. And that’s really what got me involved in wanting to go into nutritional therapy because sometimes you specialize a little bit more beyond just what we consider the basic paleo diet.

Liz Wolfe: Yes, absolutely. And back to your area of specialization; let’s talk about your AHS presentation.

Kendall Kendrick: Yes! I’m really excited. I’m doing a poster presentation this year, and it is basically a blueprint of the childhood nutrition program that we’re creating here in Charlotte, where I live, with implementing more school gardens and connecting our school gardens together. So I’ll just be presenting about that and sharing with folks the work that I’ve been doing all year.

Liz Wolfe: I imagine that that work with the kids is probably of extreme benefit to the educators as well, because I would think there are a lot of teachers that have no experience with this type of thing whatsoever.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah, one of the things that we’re trying to create here is actually a green teachers network as well so that we can give them more resources. We’re still focusing on putting together our curriculum and how all that looks. One thing that we really strive for is to not put any more work on the teachers. We really try to have parent volunteers involved because there are a lot of teachers who just don’t have time in their school day to go out and garden with the kids. I know for the school that my children attend, it’s completely run by parent volunteers who do all the gardening, and it’s amazing to me. I mean, we have parents out there when – it doesn’t get that cold here, but it’s cold for us – and parents out there in the rain and gardening and not taking a week off. I have a grandmother who is there almost every day gardening with these kids.

Liz Wolfe: That is awesome.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah. We know we’re really fortunate. Not every school has that kind of participation, so we’re trying to involve the community and figure out ways that we can offer that throughout the district. We have about half of our schools that currently have school gardens, but we don’t know exactly yet how many of those are being maintained, so the goal is to really figure out ways to keep them sustainable and get more created. Really the ideal would be to have the entire school district gardening.

Liz Wolfe: Would that be one giant communal garden in my front yard?!

Kendall Kendrick: We’re just going to come to your… How many acres did you say you have now?

Liz Wolfe: Fifteen.

Kendall Kendrick: I could do a lot with 15 acres and a bunch of kids.

Liz Wolfe: No kidding, right?!

Kendall Kendrick: Maybe you should just fly your Steve’s Club kids out to help you garden and get that all set up. I bet they’d dig that, right?

Liz Wolfe: They would totally dig that, and they are some seriously hard workers and they’re up for it. They’ll try anything. I mean, they’ll work on handstand walks and… It’s just crazy what they’re willing to try.

Kendall Kendrick: They’re better than I am at CrossFit!

Liz Wolfe: Well, there’s no fear. There’s just no fear at all. And of course, since everything has to come back to me and what I feel like talking about and learning about right now, but I struggle with fear of failure and even fear of starting sometimes, and kids just don’t have that. Youth don’t have that. They’ll just go gung-ho, and they’ll figure out how to do something, and that’s why I’m so fascinated with what you’re doing because I want to get back to that place where I’m like a sponge.

Kendall Kendrick: Right.

Liz Wolfe: Like I’m not all preoccupied with all of the stuff that I have to do in front of the computer and stuff like that, so I think this deliberate physical extraction that I’ve imposed on myself and my husband to live in the country and start this new way of life is going to bring a lot of peace to my mind. It already has, and I have think that a lot of those self-imposed limits have started to fall away, which is great, but I want to get back to that place where I’m like these kids that just soak this stuff up.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah. And you know, my husband and I, we really wanted to live off the land, and I’m this sort of urban hippie mama. I’ve home birthed all my babies and extended breastfed and wore them in slings and did all that kind of stuff, and so it made sense that I would want to go do that next step, but because, again, I’m sharing custody, we’re in the city, and so we had to make the best of what we wanted. And we would always go out in the country and drive around, look at land, and just pine for it and fantasize about it, and finally one day we were like: Let’s just do it where we are. Let’s do the best we can with what we have. And we didn’t know anything. It wasn’t like I picked up all this wisdom from growing up and just walking through a field in my childhood and shucking peas with my grandma. I didn’t. And so we’ve had to start from scratch, and I’m really fortunate I’m married to a very smart man who is handy with tools! He spent weeks and weeks working on a chicken coop at night and on weekends when he was home from his corporate job. But you know, you just pick it up, and you do it and you go, and you don’t have fear about it. And if you have fear about it, you acknowledge the fear. Thank you, fear! And you keep going. We have a lot of stuff we have to move out of the way in our brains in order to go forward, and the kids just don’t have that yet. And so the best thing that we can do is help them not get that and continue to educate them that worms are awesome! Even if you and I are totally scared of them, right?!

Liz Wolfe: Skeeved out.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah! When I first started gardening with kids, there were things I’m like: Ahhh! But you just watch them, and then you just move forward.

Liz Wolfe: And you just kind of remember that a lot of that really is kind of conditioned, I guess.

Kendall Kendrick: It is completely conditioned! It is. It’s just kind of how we grow up, and that’s why it’s so important for me to get kids back to ancestral living in one way or the other.

Liz Wolfe: What this really makes me think about is what it actually means to teach. And I think that’s something that you’ve really taught me and something that I’ve observed you doing through your blog and the way you reach out to people what you’re doing with the kids, with AHS and everything. I guess, teaching is really doing and representing something that you care about. I think that’s kind of the most powerful way to teach people, and it’s probably the most powerful way to learn as well. I mean, Diane went out there and wrote a book.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: And you’re out there having the urban gardens and working in policy and just trying to kind of cultivate all of that in your personal space. And that’s something that I love about the entire community, is you see people are blogging, they’re putting their voice out there, they’re showing people what they’re doing through social media or whatever, and that’s kind of how this community has built so quickly but in such a tight-knit way, which like you were saying before, there can be a little bit of hostility crop up with people who don’t feel like they’ve found their place in a particular movement. And that’s OK, but I love to hear about what people are doing in this community, especially when it involves actually doing.

Kendall Kendrick: Yeah, it does. And I’ve always tried to be really honest with people about my past. I got into radio when I was 17, which back in the ’90s was a crazy place for a 17-year-old to be, and hanging out with rock stars when you’re 18 and 19 is not the healthiest thing in the world probably! And I had an issue with drugs when I was young, and I got clean when I was 21 of my volition. So in years of recovering, there’s something that’s always said, and I just keep it with me: Principles before personalities. And I think that if we could just remember that in this community sometimes, to just take what you need and leave the rest and remember that it is about the principles. We’re trying to find health. We’re trying to find a lifestyle movement, all of these different pieces of the ancestral community. And if the personalities don’t work for you, then just take the message so it does work for you.

Liz Wolfe: I completely agree. Well, we will wrap it up there. I love everything that you’ve said, and I’m so grateful that you were able to come on with me today.

Kendall Kendrick: Thank you so much, Liz! I had a blast. Always!

Liz Wolfe: I’m so glad we got to talk again. It’s been way too long.

Kendall Kendrick: Yes. I’m going to escape and come to your farm, too.

Liz Wolfe: Please do. Everyone is welcome at the homestead. Hopefully I will not have ruined my chickens and my guinea hens and my dog. We’ll see how it all goes, but I have a really good feeling and I’m really excited about it.

Kendall Kendrick: Are you getting a goat?

Liz Wolfe: Yes!

Kendall Kendrick: You have to have a goat, right?!

Liz Wolfe: Yes! We’re actually going to go out to the farm that my family has been getting goat’s milk from. I emailed them and I said: I heard that you all have some does out there and that you’re selling them. Because to keep goats producing milk, you have to breed them year after year after year to have a consistent supply, so there are always little babies. So we’re going out there, and I was prepared for her to say: Yeah, they’re $400 each. And I’m really thinking: Well, this is a real investment. And it is. But they’re, like, 50 bucks! Something like that, so I’m like: Score! Husband, we were planning on $400, so should we get eight goats?!

Kendall Kendrick: Should we get 20?

Liz Wolfe: Should we just bring all of them with us? Yeah. I’ve been reading a blog that’s just hilarious. It’s Weed ‘em and Reap.

Kendall Kendrick: Oh, yes! I think I’ve seen that. Yeah.

Liz Wolfe: Hilarious. She does everything that I want to do. She has goats. She has chickens and all that. She’s very handy, and she has all these stories about the most hilarious goat birth ever, and she just paints the most hilarious pictures of how goats are and her life with all of her animals. I think she’s out of Arizona. So that’s one of my favorites to read, and it’s just hilarious.

Kendall Kendrick: Well, I can’t wait to read your story.

Liz Wolfe: Yes!

Kendall Kendrick: Because you are hilarious. I don’t know what we would do without homesteading in the 21st century. I’m thinking of my grandparents building their first farm in the 1930s with no Internet, no help, no nothing.

Liz Wolfe: And they built their own houses. They built everything.

Kendall Kendrick: Actually my grandfather passed away a couple of months ago at 94, and my father just brought me the saw that he used to build his house. So I have that saw. And he died in that house. The house he built was the house he passed away in.

Liz Wolfe: Wow.

Kendall Kendrick: But we have the Internet!

Liz Wolfe: So we can all live through one another. Yes. I like it. Oh, this has been so much fun.

Kendall Kendrick: Thank you!

Liz Wolfe: Everybody check out Kendall’s blog. It’s Primal-Balance.com. She’s on Facebook as well. Look out for Kendall at AHS coming up this year.

Kendall Kendrick: Yay!

Liz Wolfe: And I’m sure we’ll have you on again, Kendall. This was a blast!

Kendall Kendrick: Thank you so much. Have a great one!

Liz Wolfe: You too!

All right, that’s it, everybody. It was so much fun having Kendall here. Next week we’ll be back, me and Diane once again as usual. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.

Click here to submit questions.

Cheers!
Diane & Liz

Fast forward four months and we still laugh about it – how good that cookie was to her, and how she was expecting it not to be since it wasn’t made from wheat.

I bet this is a familiar scene for some of you. You end up “tricking” friends of family by feeding them your grain-free goodies, and let them know after-the-fact that it was made from almond coconut flour.

That’s because (almost) everyone wants treats. I even overheard one very popular Paleo recipe blogger discuss recently on her Facebook page how, of all the amazing recipes she shares on her site, her grain-free chocolate cake is the number one visited page every single day.

There’s almost no way around the tendency most of us have to want treats now and then. I say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Better yet… help them!

In Gather, Hayley and Bill have presented the ultimate guide to creating and re-creating many of your favorites for holidays and special events – all free of grains, refined sugar, and other highly processed ingredients.

Eating a Paleo or Primal diet doesn’t need to create barriers to an enjoyable event for you and your loved ones – whether they eat “this way,” or not.

For most of us already eating Paleo or Primal is actually something we consider a lifestyle – not a diet.

We find ways to make it work for us when we’re on the road, in the air, at friends’ homes, and at holiday gatherings. Sometimes, we sneak our grain-free versions of your old favorites onto the buffet or dinner table – and sometimes, if you’re lucky, we tell you “this is Paleo.”

We want to share how delicious, nourishing, and pleasurable our food is with you.

Gather helps us do just that, without fumbling or missing a beat.

A few of the recipes I’ve spotted in Gather that I think you’re going to fall for instantly include:

• “Wonton Soup and General Tso’s Chicken
  - from the Takeout Fake-Out Chinese food menu
• Braised Pork Belly
  - from the Casual Sunday Brunch menu
• Orange Scones & Cranberry Scones
  -from the Springtime Tea Party menu
• Honey Glazed Ham and Meyer Lemon Tart
  - from the Easter Lunch menu
• Teriyaki Country Ribs and No’tato Salad
  - from the Backyard Picnic Menu
• Pizza Margherita and Chocolate Chip Biscotti
  - from the A Night In Tuscany Italian menu
• Watermelon Salad with Mint and Apple Pie with Lattice Crust
  - from the Midsummer Garden Party menu
• Stuffed Red Snapper and Fried Plantains with Mango Salsa
  - from the Tropical Getaway menu
• Costillitas – Cuban Baby Back Ribs – and Yuca con Mojo – Yuca with Garlic Sauce
  - from the A Taste of Cuba menu
• Crab Stuffed Artichoke Bottoms and Pan-Seared Lamb Chops with Rhubarb Chutney
  - from the Urban Escape menu
• Apple Glazed Pork Loin and Pumpkin Torte
  - from the Harvest Dinner menu
• Spaghetti & “Eyeballs” and “Bleeding” Cupcakes
  - from the Spooky Supper Halloween menu
• Stuffed Turkey Rubbed with Duck Fat & Herbs and Pecan Pie
  - from the Thanksgiving Feast menu
• Sweet and Tangy Venison Meatballs and Creme Brulée
  - from the Hunter-Gatherer Feast menu
• Pork Sliders & Veggie Sliders and Checkerboard Cake
  - from the Birthday Celebration menu
• Standing Rib Roast with Horseradish Sauce, Yorkshire Puddings, and Sour Cream Coffee Cake - from the Winter Holiday menu
• Crostini with Goat Cheese and Fig Compote and Mini Chocolate Martinis
  - from the New Year’s Cocktail menu

And that’s just a small sampling of the amazing recipes you’ll find in this book!

This past weekend, we cooked from the Chinese food Takeout Fake-out menu for family – most of whom are not Paleo, by the way. 

Click on the graphic to the right to view the menu larger.

A few of us got together in the kitchen to chop and prep all the ingredients, then we got to work on the recipes. We tackled the General Tso’s Chicken first, as it’s the most time consuming, but well worth the wait! The Stir-Fry Veggies and Shrimp Fried Cauliflower Rice each cooked in under 10 minutes, so we prepared them while the chicken was finishing up. The meal came together in perfect timing, and everyone feasted.

What I loved about this menu is that there are a handful of more complicated recipes paired with a few very simple recipes – which is exactly how you want to approach a dinner party or gathering.

You want to wow your guests, but you don’t want every dish to take an hour or more to prepare. Pairing an intricate dish with something simple, fresh, and delicious makes for an easy entertaining experience as well as very satisfied bellies!

The General Tso’s Chicken was shockingly (to our family) similar to what we’ve had dining out -  without that icky sort of “fake food”/heavy feeling- and there were only leftovers because we made extra! Let’s be serious, who doesn’t love Chinese food leftovers?!

The Stir-Fried Vegetables were flavorful, clean, crisp, and light – not bogged down with heavy oils like you’d have dining out.

To our surprise, the Shrimp Fried Cauliflower Rice was the “sleeper hit” of the table! Everyone raved about just how much the cauliflower took on the role of rice on their plates and only a few bites were left after we ate.

Click any of the images of our meal or prep to view larger.

And that’s not the only menu we’ve already sampled! In the video below, we used recipes from the Harvest Dinner menu to actually feed Hayley and Bill a few weeks ago (how lucky and I to have these two as friends?!).

Insider information: I actually helped to prepare the Takeout Fake-out menu with The Food Lovers on-location several months ago – what a treat! We had a blast and I even snuck my hands into a few of the photos. You may also spot me in the New Year’s Cocktail Party menu spread – I got to eat all of that as well, and it was delicious!  

Gather: The Art of Paleo Entertaining is available now for pre-order and shipping in just a few days from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and in book stores locally on sale as of April 30th!

TO ENTER THE GIVEAWAY FOR A SIGNED COPY OF HAYLEY & BILL’S NEW BOOK, “GATHER: THE ART OF PALEO ENTERTAINING”:

Comment below on this blog post and tell us how you’re looking forward to using the recipes in this book. Your comment must have an email address associated with it when you enter, otherwise we won’t be able to notify you for the prize.

NOTE: Only one comment per person will count as an entry. Posting more than one comment will disqualify you from the contest, so please just post once! Thanks!! 

That’s it! No purchase necessary.

Note: This contest will be open for entries through 5pm Eastern time on Friday April 26th and one winner will be selected using random.org and emailed and announced here on the blog. If you do not reply to the winning announcement email to claim your prize within 48 hours of the announcement, a new winner will be selected in your place.