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Cold plunge for midlife women: good or bad?

I’ve been seeing a lot of conflicting advice floating around social media this week on  ice baths. A source of immunity and longevity, or a stressor for midlife women that’s to be avoided? 

If you can make a salad, you can make sauerkraut. Even if you don’t like sauerkraut, you should! Feed your microbiome and your tastebuds will follow. By adding a tiny bit to a meal or two each day, you’ll slowly develop a taste for it and your gut health will benefit. 

It’s easier than making salad, as long as you follow a couple of simple guidelines. I do recommend some basic and affordable gear to start. It’s not necessary, but your success rate is much more guaranteed with a few tools. Plus, the whole process is much more hands off with the gear. 

Now that my first ever extended fast is over, I wanted to share what I learned, what my results were, and what questions remain. Many of you have reached out to ask. It has taken a while to make sense of the experience. 

Update from Day 5 of a 10 Day Water Fast. What’s going well, what isn’t…

I have resisted meal planning. I have artistic tendencies that don’t like schedule, and my cooking background allows me to pull off a carefree approach to churning out 21 meals a week for four people. 84 individual portions. Cooking for a family is a small commercial endeavor, in terms of scale.

Seven years into parenthood I started a light version of getting organized, planning for three meals a week. Five years later, as I round the corner on 50, my own health has become a bigger priority.

Feeding kids well is an art form and a high wire act.

I grew up with friends who lived in the “healthy house”. Tofu pancakes for breakfast, no refined anything. This was the 80’s when we though healthy meant bad texture and no flavor. Once they were set out on their own, they veered towards McDonald’s and junk food.

The moral of the story being that you have to relax some around food and let things slide or your kids will go running in the other direction. However, we live in a world where kids are offered sweet stuff and carb heavy meals ALL THE TIME.

Up until a few decades ago, women were left out of medical studies because our hormones “skewed” the data. The support modern medicine offers around hormones is archaic and dismal. You can ask your allopathic doctor for a hormone blood test and they will happily order the lab with no attention to where in your cycle you are. Many of us are suffering in silence with no known respite: The highest suicide rates in women are between 45 and 55. Which is the same age when the most anti-depressants are prescribed. What we need is comprehensive hormone support, not ju

Middle of the night wakings? Give your liver some love to improve sleep.

Is your liver keeping you up at night?

How to know, and what to do. Delicious ways to nourish the liver.

A decade ago I started experimenting with gluten free baking. At the time, the most readily available alternative flour was garbanzo bean. The health movement of the 70’s seemed to include the idea that food had to taste weird and off putting to be good for you. Dried, ground garbanzo beans fit right in: gummy, with a slightly strange aftertaste, it made anything you baked with a sad, dense and weird version of the original.

And the even better news is that once you start giving your body what it actually wants, there can be opportunities to forge new relationships with foods you had to put down for a while. 

Stress gets such a bad rap these days. The limitations of the word are doing us dirty. When we provide our bodies with the conditions it has adapted to thrive in, we can gain incredible vitality and strength, both physical and mental. In nutrition, we say it is more important to have lots of the good things than it is to stress about completely avoiding all bad food. Stress is the same. If we focus more on bringing in more hormetic, or good stress, the body will naturally begin to right itself.

As a whole, chefs are a pretty judgmental group of people. It’s hard to work in the service industry and not be somewhat jaded, particularly when you are cooking in the trenches and not having direct contact with the people you are serving. When I started cooking professionally in my 20’s, I had so many misguided thoughts on special diets, people who wanted to eat healthy, and especially nutritionists

Each week the past month has brought news of another chef dying at the top of their game, and for the most part way too young. Having worked in the food industry before crossing over to nutrition, the culprits are now so clear. We can learn all learn from the details. And for the chefs out there who worry about how to stay in their profession and stay healthy, it’s a matter of choosing your workplace as carefully as possible. The jobs where I felt the healthiest had good team social dynamics, time to sit and eat, genuinely nice managers, and healthy food options on the menu.

There was a moment in my parenting journey that shifted the way I feed myself. I was standing over the sink scarfing a half eaten hot dog while craving a salad. A mixture of rage, and self loathing marked this breaking point, as I reflected back at how many quesadilla leftovers and other crap I’d eaten for dinner. No more, I though—I’m going to start cooking for myself.

I would like to share some beauty secrets I’ve discovered in my work, but first— we must talk about poop. I promise, this will make sense if you stick with me.

Parenthood has definitely lessened my squeamishness around all our bodies processes. Even though we are past the diaper years, lately the kids and I have been cracking up to songs about poop on Spotify. There is this one guy, “The Odd Man Who Sings”, who has poop song for almost every name in existence. Search for your name and poop together on Spotify and you will see.

Caitlin Moran on Perimenopause: “When you’re dealing with the menopause, or perimenopause, it’s useful, I think, if you’ve “done some drugs” in your life. The day after doing Ecstasy, when you can feel the drugs leaving your body, hour by hour, and the list of things that you felt inclined to do last night – dance, talk, laugh, jump off a wall because it was funny, kiss and hug people, shout, “I LOVE YOU!” at strangers, because, in that moment, you really do – gradually gets smaller and smaller, until you want to do none of those things any more…

In the 70s, there was a study on refined sugar at Loma Linda University. (Refined sugar is any sugar where vital minerals are removed, such as white, brown, powdered, cane, or turbinado sugar, or corn syrup.) In the study, five groups were given different amounts of sugar ranging from no sugar to 60 teaspoons. Across all groups, white blood cell efficacy decreased as sugar consumption increased. (If you’re new to immune-system biology: white blood cells help fight infection.) The group that was given the largest quantity of refined sugar showed a 50 percent decrease in white blood cells over the course of five hours.