Life brought me to my knees in 2023. Years of burnout. Unstable home life. Very little help or support. My body was sick and my capacity for normal life activities dwindled to nothing. Something had to give. My children, grown, still needed me to function just as I was abruptly and unexpectedly put in a position to have to provide for myself entirely. I couldn’t just give up and quit, no matter how tempting. The culmination of my life’s events forced me to make a change. Little did I know it was going to require a LOT of change to get my mental and physical health back on track. 

The first thing I had to address was my diet and medications.  I was on an obscene amount of medication for someone my age (44 at the time) and, although I thought I knew how to eat well, I was not fueling my body with foods that would help my cells regenerate and function properly on a metabolic level. So a deep dive into the body’s nutritional needs along with an education on the processes in which our food is grown and produced in the United States was my next step. The easiest way to learn about what was in my food was to start reading the ingredients and labels. What even is carrageenan, sodium benzoate, and hydrolyzed vegetable protein?  A few hours of research (not Google AI’s response) told me they weren’t ingredients that would help my body heal. In fact, they were part of the problem that made me so sick. Learning about what ingredients and chemicals are allowed in foods and about product labeling laws enabled me to discern what foods would actually help my body heal versus cause it to regress even further. BTW, did you know that “Grass Fed” doesn’t mean the cow only ate grass? The package must say “Grass Finished” for the cow to have only consumed grass products and thus contain the higher quality nutritional composition.  “Free Range” doesn’t mean chickens are happily foraging in lush green pastures.  It only means that chickens had “outdoor access”, which in some cases is literally just a “pop hole” the chicken can stick their head through to get some fresh air. I don’t know about you, but I found it incredibly infuriating to know that companies are legally allowed to use misleading and confusing labeling to make you think you’re getting a much better product than you actually are. I learned more in 6 months about truly good foods and my body’s nutritional needs than I had in all the previous 43 years.  I was fired up and ready to take on the food industry. 

In the months following my research I completely changed my diet, started regularly fasting and stopped taking all of my medications (I am not a doctor and am not advising you on your medication).  There were dramatic changes in my physical and mental health.  I lost 100lbs, gained significant mental clarity, experienced a drastic decrease in depression and anxiety, increased my daily exercise capacity, and felt like a human again.  I learned how to cook and prepare delicious meals that would adequately fuel my body. Part of learning about the shortfalls in our food system was coming to the understanding that the vast majority of the public was not aware of the literal addictive poisons they are consuming on a regular basis. Nor were they aware of the misleading, yet legal, packaging and marketing terminology.  I knew I had to share what I’d learned.

One way we are sharing what we’ve learned is through an affordable digital library of cooking videos and nutrition education content. This online library comes with a built in community of individuals pursuing the same path toward food awareness as you.  Another way we will be educating people about healthy food and lifestyle is through our regeneratively run, permaculture focused micro training farm. At the farm we will sustainably grow organic food for our team, families, surrounding communities, and local food deserts in Arkansas.  In time, as seasons of growth permit, we will expand to facilitate many educational initiatives from the farm as well as go out into the community to help those with food insecurity learn how to collaboratively grow their own fresh foods in their yards or containers.  Urban Homesteading is a practice we are excited about promoting and teaching.  Self sustainability practices, individually and as a community, are the only way to ensure food insecurity is eliminated. We have already begun serving and educating communities with in person fresh recipe instruction, online cooking videos and in-person speaking engagements. A current project in the works is a 28 day anti-inflammatory cookbook complete with 28 days of meal plans for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, grocery lists and information for how to select the most nutritionally dense ingredients and where to source them.  This book can be pre-ordered now if you are interested.