Hello and welcome! I’m excited to be sharing with you as I launch this new space! This blog is all about Restoratives for the Body, Mind, and Spirit: Restoratives that strengthen us when we feel weak and build us up to blossom into our best expression of ourselves. It’s about learning to be mindful of what we allow into our lives, our bodies, and our minds, and the role that our values, relationships, community, diet, sleep, stress, movement, mindfulness and more have towards the goal of that optimal expression. It’s about always learning and reflecting and exploring and pushing our limits!
I transitioned from my career as a teacher and instructional coach to become a health coach and wellness advocate because conventional health care wasn’t working for us. At its root, our family found healing of physical and mental limitations when we changed our diet from what would be considered a standard American diet to a paleo/primal diet. We eliminated all sugars, processed foods, grains, and legumes. We discovered so many metrics of our health that improved including reduced need for psychiatric medication of our then 11 year old son, more balanced energy throughout the day, more regulated moods, improved blood cholesterol numbers, and better sleep to name a few. Our experience has inspired me to share what we have discovered along the way so that others can experience the same benefits too.
Just to be clear, we found a lot of things that didn’t work before we made the big dietary shift. In fact, we had been through a lot of traumatic experiences related to our son’s mental and behavior health and were truly astounded that not a single therapist or doctor in 5 years had suggested that we try changing the diet. At some point I heard about some different diets and checked out a book about the Paleo Diet from the library. I think I read about long enough to see what I would have to eliminate (bread and pasta and even beans!) and promptly returned it. This time was different though, we had tried so many things to stabilize our son who had been on medications for bipolar disorder, had been hospitalized , and was clearly not thriving. This time I devoured a great deal of research about what to expect and why those changes were important. With a lot of scientific evidence I became convinced that this was an important step for us and that we had to follow the plan consistently to really know what results would be possible.
When we started on the restorative part of the journey, I had already taken a break from my job to be available to manage his many appointments and to stay home with him when he wasn’t able to go to school. So I focused on 2 things. First, I continued to read voraciously to learn as much as possible about paleo, primal, ketogenic, low-carb diets, and ancestral health. Second, I dedicated myself to preparing meals without pasta, rice, beans, bread, flour, and more. We noticed results in the first six weeks. My husband and son had both lost more than ten pounds, my son’s cholesterol numbers were no longer in the danger zone, in fact, his triglyceride count when from 157 to 80 during that initial period (those of you familiar with triglyceride numbers will know that is significant). The only change during that time was the new diet.
At that point I knew a few things to be true. I knew not only that this new way of eating was working for us, but also that we were in it for the long haul. This was not going to be a 30 day program to endure before going back to the same ole habits. For the first several months, I focused on maintaining our diet to continue to get the benefits. After several years of disruptive behavior and outbursts, it was a huge relief to have something that was working. I menu planned, shopped, chopped, cooked, and washed all those dishes to provide my family with real nourishment. Every week was full of new recipes. I learned to make riced cauliflower and bone broth and homemade mayonnaise and other sauces without sugar or wheat or soy or canola oil for example. I mostly tweaked the familiar favorite recipes because I really didn’t want to rock the boat and end up back where we had started.
As I gained clarity, I yearned for more restaurants to ease my burden and serve food that would serve us better. It’s amazing how far we have come from the original purpose. The word restaurant comes from the French word restaurer which means to restore. Restoratives are historically referred to as broths and soups and stews that restore loss strength possibly due to illness, injury, or traveling. Throughout history, food consumed has been nourishing and given strength to us humans. In the last century, and specifically in recent decades with industrialization and massive profiteering, we have experienced something unknown before in human history: our food supply is not only not nourishing and restoring our strength, it is actually making us sick and weak due to the inflammatory nature of processed foods. Diet is linked to quality of sleep, energy levels, alertness, mood, weight management, mood regulation, digestion, respiratory wellness, skin irritation, blood pressure, cholesterol, cognitive performance, stamina, immunity, and more.
As I have experienced this first hand, both for myself and my family, I am now on a mission to learn about nutrition and understand it in the context of biology, history, politics, media, and culture. We live under a predominant medical model of prescribing medications any symptoms that come up. While this model works well in emergency medicine and for acute symptoms, it is less successful for more superfluous health situations. Long term exposure to pharmaceuticals often leads to a myriad of side effects leaving us in a state far from our authentic selves and even farther from the very best expression of ourselves. At this point, we are no longer being restored. And just to clarify clarify a couple of definitions that were shared at the Paleo f(x) 2017 conference in Austin, TX :
- A substance that interferes with normal system function is a drug
- A substance that restores normal function is a nutrient.
It’s very easy to get caught up in potential benefits of various treatments and medications, but when side effects are creating problems where none existed previously it may be time to reconsider which path is the best one moving forward.
This blog is about informing you, my audience, of that variety of options that are available to you to restore your whole wellness: body, mind, and spirit.
We are all travelers on this life path and daily restoration is required to keep on moving. A lot of words that have been related to wellness have become diluted and there’s a lot of confusion. Take a minute to reflect on the following works, what they mean to you, and how you hear them used in your community and in the press: Healthy – Diet – Fat – Exercise. We will be here all day if I take the time to unpack each of those in this entry, but know that my aim is to provide some clarity on each of these and also support and lead each of you closer to your best self expression. That’s going to be different for each of us because, guess what? We are different. Our eyes are different colors, our noses are different shapes, and the same diet and number of days will result in different outcomes for each one of us. This is about a way of thinking, it’s about really trying something over a period of time and assessing the results. Some changes can take 6 or 9 months or even longer to achieve. How will we ever get there when being bombarded with quick fix messages everywhere we turn? It’s like the tortoise and the hare and the commitment to make attentive and reflective progress rather than focus only on speed. Slow and steady wins the race.
Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom. There is good nourishing food to be had and it’s not likely to be found in a package. Many medications will relieve our symptoms in the short term and sometimes we need that, but they may also be missing the element of healing and restoring. On the flip side, there’s a lot of wonderful wisdom that has been preserved and many people making a living by supporting others on a restorative journey. My goal is to share new ideas, perspectives, products, and natural solutions that will lead us all to being and living our best lives in our fullest energy and vitality.
-My son Owen on a trip to The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland in 2011.
