Long time no see! I’ve been traveling the country visiting customers (shout out to my 2 new favorite customers in Ft Washington!) and quite often forget to update this blog with the latest and greatest.

Since I travel 2-3 days a week for work and am not often home to cook, it’s tougher to stick to a healthy eating plan. I’ve found that cooking at home where you know the ingredients and you know what they are being cooked in is always the best bet, but I thought I’d at least try and share with you some of the “best practices” I’ve been learning from my nutritionist.

Somehow the 2000’s became the era of the lists. Every article I read whether for work or fun is “10 Ways to Sound Smarter,” “10 Foods to Eat for Great Hair,” “8 Reasons Your Cat is Trying to Kill You”….

So I thought I’d make this a little fun and provide 10 easy nutritional habits that if you start doing today, will make a HUGE impact on your health and well-being.

By the way, in case you were keeping count… today is day 109 migraine free and I’m down 20 pounds, so it’s working 🙂

The way that I started making changes over a year ago was from the good advice of my girl, the Food Babe. You might know her as the girl who outed Subway for using the yoga mat material, Starbucks for poisoning us with Caramel Coloring in the coveted Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and got huge corporations like  Anheuser-Busch and SABMiller to list their ingredients publicly.  I quickly became obsessed with her ability to move mountains with a small army of concerned citizens, and followed her blog – only to be highly disturbed with the craziness that is the American food industry today.

However, her book – which my amazing hubby purchased for me for Christmas last year – makes a good point that most people “fail” at FAD diets or lifestyle changes because they try too much too fast. I was guilty of that several times – yes, I knew pizza is horrible for me but it tastes so good and goes so well with Sunday afternoons, football and beer.

If you can commit to making 1-2 changes a week, a month, or even every few months, it becomes WAY easier to actually follow that lifestyle shift. And the best part, is now almost 2 years into diet changes, I don’t die when I see a pizza anymore because I know I just avoided an evening of egg farts and my husband dutch-ovening me in my own filth. TMI? probably.

So here’s the deal. If you can make these 10 changes (hopefully not all of them are changes) slowly throughout the year, so that by this time next year you follow all of them, I guarantee you’ll feel pretty damn good.

1. Read Ingredient Labels Diligently. Food Babe came up with a good rule I liked that I started over a year ago… ” if you don’t know how to pronounce the ingredient or what it is, put the product down.” Over 70% of our grocery aisles are filled with processed crap that should be burned. If there are 6 brands of applesauce, find the one where the ingredients are “apples” and move on. Even if they aren’t organic, at least it doesn’t have caramel coloring, ascorbic acid, and other nastiness. It’s the hardest thing to find the good brands, but they exist in every grocery store. Try to limit everything you buy to 5 ingredients or less to start, and only items you recognize.
2. Stay away from Gluten. It’s the hardest one and maybe not the first one you try. But here’s why: the human body was not meant to digest gluten, so it learns to either store it, dispose of it, or attack it. If you are someone like me with an autoimmune disease, I attack it – hence why it hurts me so much. Even if you don’t have immune issues, do you really want to store it? The great news is that so many companies have mastered the art of Gluten-free breads, pastas, cereals, flours, etc that it truly isn’t that tough. Not to mention almost all restaurants now have gluten free menus or at least options. The only challenge for me, is that those are all made from rice flour -which as I mentioned before came back on my blood work as also something I’m insensitive to along with quinoa. So what do I do? Lettuce wraps, corn noodles, corn tortillas!                                                                
3. Eat grass fed meats. “But they are like 2 dollars more in the grocery store, Amanda!”  To that I answer, “would you rather pay 2 dollars more a week or thousands on hospital bills” 🙂  Yes, eating organic and GOOD is a little more expensive but 1) not that much and 2) worth it considering I haven’t been to a doctor since June when I was visiting several monthly.  So why the grass fed meats? Grass contains Vitamin K, a super duper important vitamin to humans – essential in helping blood to clot, preventing osteoporosis, cancer and other crazy stuff with you can read here (which is ironically another LIST article ha). Obviously humans can’t digest grass (the literal kind) or we’d be taking clippings from our lawn and sauteing for dinner. So, the only way we can get this essential Vitamin K is through grass-fed animal meat. Grass-fed animals also have much higher levels of Omega-3 fats, which are anti-inflammatory essential fatty acids. I’ll tell you now, it’s virtually impossible to find grass fed chicken, so you have to know that you are eating corn and grain fed chicken which could be gluten. No way around it unfortunately unless you find a good source, and if so PLEASE SHARE!
4. Eat regularly. YEAH BABY! Finally one that’s music to my ears. Food all day? No problemo. Believe it or not, since this crazy diet started in June, I eat probably double what I used to in terms of calorie and fat content, just good shit and not processed crap. Why is it important to eat regularly? So many health issues stem from spikes in blood sugar levels. Hormone imbalances, migraines, fatigue, restlessness, pooping issues all tie to spikes or dips in blood sugar. So the only way to regulate is it eat often so as not to deprive your body of sugar and dip into a panic state.
5. Avoid added or refined sugars. That being said…keeping your blood sugar regulated does not mean by pounding a 16oz bag of Skittles the old Amanda way. We’re talking natural sugars that are healthy and not too high on the glycemic index. So while bananas, pineapple, mangos, and potatos are tasty as heck – be cautious of their incredibly high glycemic index (they will cause a major spike in blood sugar level). And avoid ANYTHING processed in terms of fake sugars, white sugars, high fructose corn syrup, etc. If I have to explain why to you, then you shouldn’t be reading this because we won’t get along. Stick to raw organic sugars, cane sugar, ALWAYS unrefined, and it should never be white. If it’s white, they bleached it. Do you want to eat bleach? Me either.  Watch out for “turbinado” or that brown “sugar in the raw” packet too -it’s deceptive but refined. Good words to look for: “rapadura” “sucanat” “whole cane sugar”
6. When you do consume sugar, pair it with a protein or fat.  It’s why doctors are always a huge fan of apples with peanut butter or banana and cashew butter, or why restaurants have salads with fruit and nuts together- it makes up for the spike in blood sugar with something to absorb it and resets it back to normal. *Keep in mind, I’ve been instructed to stay away from peanuts on this diet due to their high mold content and cashews because they are hard to digest, so I have apples and bananas with organic sunflower seed butter from Marianos. Delish!
7. Don’t be afraid of fats. As long as they are good fats. I cook all of my vegetables in a crap ton of bacon fat or grass-fed beef lard. I cook all of my meats and otherwise in coconut oil. Yes it has a higher fat content than olive oil, but it burns at higher temperatures, while olive oil releases free radicals into your food…yummy. The avocado is one of the fattiest foods out there, but sooo good for you. Don’t count calories or fat content, just don’t put dumb food into your body. Just remember, as with sugars we never want refined. Always unrefined and cold pressed coconut oil.
8. Snack before bed. This might not be for everyone so check with your doc, but I was an acid refluxer for years and swore by not eating 4 hours before bed for that reason. Turns out I was contributing to my low blood sugar levels, which is why I would always wake up with a headache.  What I’m learning is that acid reflux is actually caused by Hypochlorhydria- which is too little stomach acid to digest foods, so it shoots it back up. If you eat fermented foods like sauerkraut in the middle of the meal you can help increase stomach acid production so you can naturally ease those symptoms. OR there is a nifty botanical by Biotics Research that you can take in the middle of a meal.
9. If you have an auto-immune disorder or any sort of inflammation in the body (pain, weight, etc) limit or avoid nightshades.  Nightshades are a group of foods like potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, spicy foods, eggplant that are toxic to humans and contribute to chronic inflammation. This one is hard for me as I LOVE tomatoes so I try to limit as much as possible. I can tell you that while I cut them out for the 60 days I felt incredible.
10. Organs. Eat Them.  Yeah, I can’t either. So I take Liver in a tablet form because I’m a pus. But liver has more vitamins and minerals per gram than any other food on the planet. It is the richest source of Folate, important for child-bearing women (the active form of Folic Acid), contains all of the B Vitamins, and contains all of the fat soluble vitamins like A,D,E,K (if grass-fed) and Iron. I get these dessicated grass-fed liver tables from Radiant Life. 3 in the morning and 3 at night is your daily serving. Or just don’t be a chump and hide some liver sausage in your ground beef tacos one night 🙂

Sooo, now that you hate me as much as I hated my nutritionist week 1, I promise if you start slowly making some of these changes, you’ll feel great in no time. Here’s to a liftetime of no migraines!