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The VH Podcast, Episode 16: How to Eat Healthy (without losing your mind!) // deliciousobsessions.com

Sheesh. Eating healthy can be so dang complicated, can’t it?

I think the mindset of “perfectionism” raises its head all the time when it comes to eating “healthy” (see the last two week’s of podcasts). Many people get so frustrated and confused that they toss in the towel altogether.

This week, Lydia and I are here to give you some practical tips that will allow you to EAT WELL and STAY SANE! 🙂

Let go of the pressure and tune in!

Missed previous episodes? You can find them all here.

Links From This Week’s Episode:

Listen to The Vibrant Health Podcast :: Episode 16

Read The Vibrant Health Podcast Transcript :: Episode 16

Jessica:  Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 16 of the Vibrant Health Podcast. I am Jessica Espinoza from DeliciousObsessions.com. I’m here with my co-host, Lydia of DivineHealthfromtheInsideOut.com. And today, we want to talk about how to eat healthy without losing your mind.

This episode is kind of a follow-up to last week’s podcast, which is episode number 15, where we discussed why your diet may be killing you. So we kind of got into the nitty-gritty of dietary styles on that one.

But because so many people are struggling with “eating healthy” and keeping their sanity at the same time, we felt that this was a perfect podcast to follow last week.

So I’m here with Lydia and we’re going to dive right in.

Lydia, I’d like to kick off our discussion by just talking about what “healthy” eating is in the first place. A lot of people don’t really even know what healthy eating is.

Lydia:  Sure! Well, I think healthy eating is more than just the food you put in your mouth, but let’s start there. You want to eat food that is nourishing to your body. Our body runs on nutrients. It doesn’t run on fumes and it doesn’t run on processed ingredients and preservatives and all this other stuff. We actually need nutrients. It’s a physiological need. So we want to look at our food in terms of nutrients as our fuel to run our bodies in a healthy way.

So healthy eating, to start, would be real food. And what is real food? Well, it’s food that comes from nature. Anything that you can pick, pluck, and shoot, as a whole, is real food. And we are omnivores. Our bodies physiologically show us this. We have plenty of indicators in the human anatomy showing that we need plants and animal proteins.

So we want a mixture of these foods. We want meats that are healthfully raised. And unfortunately, today, we have conventionally raised meats that are a real problem. We have bad fats which we’ve had for a long time. We’ve got these processed hydrogenated fats, which actually are very horrible for us. Hydrogenated oils do so much damage to the body, so you want to get good, clean healthy oils. I do have a list of those in one of the posts you’ll see below to save time.

You want to eat plants. You want to eat fruits and vegetables and legumes and seeds and grains and all these things. It’s just a matter of finding the mixture that works for you.

But let’s just start at the very beginning and say eat these real foods, a good blend of them. Just get the real food into your diet. Source the best quality you can and go from there.

After you’ve understood that, you need to eat food that is real, it’s not processed or packaged with 800 ingredients on the list of the label that you can’t pronounce or know what they are –

You know, your great, great grandmother should recognize the food that you are picking up. If your great, great grandmother has never known what on earth that is, chances are, you probably don’t want to eat it.

We’ve been in the processed food era for a good while now, so we have to go back several generations beforehand. And you may never have met your great, great grandma. So talk to your grandma or your great grandma and see what they ate. You’ll probably have a little bit of a clue as to how different things were or read Nourishing Traditions or look up Weston Price and start doing your research.

Anyway, food is important obviously because we need nutrients to have energy and to run optimally. But we also need to consider our modern day lifestyle and how we eat our foods.

Number one, are we eating enough food? So really quickly, if you think about this, our current modern day food is kind of devoid of optimum nutrition simply because in 1936, the Senate put out a document (there’s actual documentation of this) that there was a lack in minerals in the soil. The solution has only ever been adding nitrogen, phosphous and potassium (N, P, K). Well, we need a lot more than that in the soil. So we’ve never really resolved this problem stemming back in 1936.

So any food that’s grown is going to be only as rich in nutrients as the soil that it was raised in. We have to realize today we really want to eat these nourishing real foods raised as optimally as possible, but we need to eat a little bit more than we think we do. A lot of people will get up in the morning, they’ll drink their coffee, they’ll skip breakfast, they just don’t have time. And then they get in their car and they dash off to work in this crazy, stressed commute usually. At least, around here, it’s not traffic. I am so thankful I don’t have to commute. Even if I get in my car in the morning, I’m like, “How on earth do people do this everyday?”

Jessica:  Yeah, I know. I think the same thing.

Lydia:  When you’re in that stressed mode, your digestion takes the back seat and your body prioritizes essentially saving your life because you’re in this sympathetic mode where you’re like dashing to work, just trying to drive and not die. I know, that’s dramatic, but it’s really kind of true.

So even if you slob down a quick smoothie or a donut or whatever you’re eating (please don’t eat donuts, but some people will, it’s not really food), the point is if you’re doing this and then you’re getting in your car and running off to work, well, you’re not really going to be digesting this food well. So then you’re going to have problems because the foods that you do eat is not getting digested properly, so then you’re going to have all this stuff going on.

So, it’s important to understand that we prioritize so much in our life, but we do not prioritize eating in a non-rushed state and actually putting meals before all these other activities in our lives. Really, food should be the very first thing we think about because without it, we cannot function properly.

I have a lot of people who will skip meals, will skip breakfast for various reasons or they will go all day – run, run, run, go, go, go – especially the people who have really busy jobs and they don’t make time to stop and eat a meal or even a snack. So then, they’ll get home at the end of the day, long, busy day and they’re starving. Their blood sugar has probably already dropped and they overeat and maybe even drink a couple of drinks, alcohol or something. So that’s just one common scenario I see.

Well, we have to think about this because we’ve put so much ahead of nourishing our bodies. So healthy eating would include the quality of your food, the timing that you eat and the way that you eat, meaning are you sitting down, is there a lot of stress when you’re eating and then you’re rushing off or are you actually sitting down enjoying a meal?

It’s very hard to do in this modern life. I will admit, I don’t always do it perfectly myself, so please don’t think I’m judging anyone. But it is something to think about. It’s important, very important.

Jessica:  I agree. And I think that you can actually go through and look at some other cultures like, as you’re talking about, making sure you’re sitting down and are you not stressed and stuff. If you see what people would typically think of like a big Greek family or a big Italian family or even in France, food is a priority and the way that they eat is a priority.

And granted, this is probably a trend that is maybe dying out as the modern world continues to get crazier and crazier. But if you really look at some families and some of the cultures that are keeping it really traditional, they put a big emphasis on gathering the family around the table – you’re all sitting down, no one is on your phone, you’re eating, you’re laughing, you’re enjoying just through the piece of food and the chatter of the people that you love.

Especially here in America, that’s pretty much gone. It’s rare that families sit down together. And if they do, somebody’s got their iPad and somebody’s got their phone.

So we really can take some cues from other cultures in the way they approach food. In France, food is a big thing. You will go to a restaurant and you may be there for five or six hours eating dinner, a long time!

So we just have to slow down and maybe look at the way other cultures are treating food and see if we can adopt some of those habits.

Lydia:  Sure! And you can go back in history and see a lot of cultures where they would recline on one side when they ate or even the Japanese where they sit on the floor and they cross their legs. They’re kind of grounded in a way.

So it puts you in a more at ease state when you’re sitting in these certain ways these cultures did. You’re not dashing.

Even as a mom, for example, we’re feeding our kids dinner and a lot of times, we’re rushing around – rushing around, rushing around. I spend a lot of time cooking and a lot less time sitting at the table eating it. It drives me crazy! And the kids are like, “Oh, I need this,” I don’t know, or someone is getting up or someone is – it’s crazy! It doesn’t feel peaceful.

So there are times when I literally will feed my children and I will eat apart from them. I’m not kidding. I do this often actually. And my best meals are when I eat by myself.

But think about the times when you go out to a nice restaurant. Maybe you get to go to a really cool French restaurant or whatever it is. You’re sitting around with your friends. People are serving you. You’re there to have a good time. You’re relaxed. Maybe you have a little bit of a glass of wine maybe or something, but you’re getting food that you really enjoy. You didn’t have to work hard to make it yourself.

Think about how you feel when you eat those types of meals. Usually, you don’t end up with some kind of indigestion (unless you overdo it or something). But usually, you feel pretty good. You feel pretty calm. You feel pretty relaxed. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

And it’s not to say that anybody’s going to sit down and do that kind of thing all the time, but there are little things that you can start to slowly put in place in your own life to kind of create a little bit more zen, a little more peace when you’re eating or be a little more mindful.

“Am I shoving down food while I’m driving to work just because I have no time?” If that’s a typical scenario for you, that needs to stop and you need to step back and say, “What can I do different so that I’m not doing this, eating in fight-or-flight mode?”

It’s so important the priority of eating in a different category than we have in this culture.

So it’s something to think about. I do have some posts that you can check out to at least open your mind to this concept a little bit more.

And then too, skipping meals and things like that, a lot of people skip breakfast. It’s very common in this culture. Or they just eat a really lame breakfast. They’ll have coffee and a baked good or something. That’s a very common breakfast for Americans. You hear the “America runs on Dunkin” or whatever.

We kind of have this whole breakfast thing all screwed up and we’re starting our day at a deficit and creating a vicious cycle to get through the day. We’re now crashing our blood sugar or ramping it up too high or whatever just from these either skipping breakfast or these coffee donut breakfast.

So I have a great post about that, Feel Like Skipping Breakfast? Find Out Why because it really is common.

Jessica:  We actually did a whole episode on that. I was just looking back at the archives. So episode number seven, we discussed that skipping breakfast was a huge thing, but it was about creating a routine for health and why that’s important.

Lydia:  Right, right.

Jessica:  So that might be a great place for you guys when you’re done listening to this one to hop over and listen to that episode. We talk about how to create a routine that doesn’t completely turn your world upside-down. We all have obligations. We all have things we have to do every day. We have to figure out how we can make it all fit and keep us not stressed out about it.

Lydia:  Right! And really, honestly, I find it’s a matter of constantly evaluating – not scrutinizing, not judging, but evaluating – your lifestyle. Am I creating a lifestyle that’s really optimal for my health and my kids?

For me, I was just telling Jessica before we even started recording, I get up around 5:30, between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. every morning on school days. I have four kids and they all get on a bus at a different school and they all go to four different schools.

I’m feeding them all breakfasts. They all have different breakfast preferences to some degree (I mean, I generally make a big breakfast). But I’m feeding them each at a different time as they’re getting up and packing lunches and making sure everybody’s got what they need. It’s a crazy couple of hours.

My last child does not leave until 8:30 in the morning. So that puts me at about two and a half to three hours after I’m waking up before I actually sit down and eat my own breakfast, like a full, real breakfast.

Most people can’t handle that. Their blood sugar would crash. They need to eat before that. I do have a little snack, something small just to get me through until I can sit down. But I don’t want to eat during that time because it’s extremely busy.

So for me, I’ve had to figure out what works. It’s tricky. It’s not probably optimal, but it is what it is and I make it work. So that’s something you have to evalute for your own life, how do you make it work within your current schedule?

Jessica:  I think that’s the perfect segway for transitioning into your tips for maintaining sanity. Your morning is really busy. You’ve kind of figured out a system that works for you.

And then I also know that you have some burst cooking strategies that have really, really helped you. And since you’re a single mom of four kids, you’re going to resonate with a lot of our listeners. So I want you to share about that.

And then I’m going to share some of my meal planning strategies and how even though it’s just me and my husband, I’m trying to grow my business, so I’m working a lot right now.

Especially over the last six months or so, meals have kind of fallen by the wayside. Five o’clock rolls around and both of us are hungry and I’m like, “Oh, crap! I don’t have anything planned for dinner.” So I just recently have gotten back into my meal planning and all of that. I want to talk about that and see if we can offer you guys some tips.

So dive right in. You’re a busy mom. How do you do it all?

Lydia:  That’s the million-dollar question. I wish I knew!

So I don’t do it all, just so you know. I don’t have everything figured out. But I do prioritize feeding my family well. And I do what I like to call ‘kitchen bursts’ or ‘circuit cooking’ or even ‘batched cooking’.

What I generally do is I’ll get up in the morning, I’ll make a big breakfast I already thought out the night before. It’s quick. We’ll usually do some type of protein, maybe some starch. And usually the boys will have a little bowl of frozen or fresh fruit (berries usually). They’re getting berries while they’re waiting for the other stuff. They get their vitamin C that way, little fresh fruits.

And then, once they’ve all been set, I kind of just pack each kid’s lunch as we go. So each kid plays a role in their own lunch-packing, so I don’t do everything.

But getting the stuff together for kids’ lunches is really quite daunting. I can see why many people would rather probably just send their kids with money. They go to school and they’d eat at the cafeteria. It’s a lot easier than packing lunches.

But I have done both. We used to get the free lunches way back when i was starting out on this single parent journey. My kids came home so crabby and moody and miserable. It was not worth it. It was just not worth it.

So each year as I went along, I got better and better and better about really, really trying to make sure I send as much food as possible with them to school, so they weren’t eating the processed carbs and preservatives and food coloring and all this stuff, which really wasn’t nourishing them. I made it a priority.

Now, I didn’t get there overnight. It wasn’t fast. It was hard. I had to do a lot of planning and budgeting and all that stuff. So I will feel for everyone out there that it is very difficult to do. But please hang in there and don’t give up on it and put forth your best effort because I am making it work. I don’t always love it, but I like the results. It’s worth it.

So the packing lunches thing, I don’t really have any strategies for making it easy other than I have to plan a little bit ahead of time every week. I had to purposefully purchase the ingredients that they need. It takes a little figuring out to know what the kids are going to need, how much you need and making sure that they don’t steal the lunch food because that’s a big problem.

The parents out there will know what I’m talking about because the kids want the easy stuff, so they’ll grab the stuff that you buy for the lunches or you make homemade or whatever. See, I had to guard my stash. I had to purchase vessels that they can put everything in and all this stuff.

So it’s a bit of an effort. There are some people out there who have great websites that are doing this really well. They have these lunch pictures and ideas. So you may want to look for some of those if you’re struggling with packing lunches. It’s definitely hard work, I will say.

But once you get into the rhythm of it and get used to it, it really can be doable.

So my own personal food, I do these little weekend batch cooking sessions. I eat separate breakfast and lunch from the kids at least five or six days of the week. I invested in Pyrex rectangle glass dishes. I have probably 20 to 30 of them. I did it over time. I didn’t just buy them all at once. I just kept building to my stash.

And what I will do is on a weekend, maybe twice a month, I will take about two hours and I will burst in the kitchen. I will make four to five different dishes and divide them into four or five different containers and then I’ll end up with 20 meals for myself and I’ll stick them in the freezer. And I have an extra freezer so I have the space.

So this will only work for you if you have space in your freezer to do something like that. I made that a priority years ago of having an extra freezer to make sure I could do stuff like this and stockpile.

So I feel like I have a savings account, in a way, when I have all this food in place. And so I can go and I can thaw my individual meals out and always know that I have food ready for myself.

I work from home. Some days, I have scheduled days where I have calls back to back to back. So it’s nice for me to know I already have a meal made that I can quickly fix. I don’t have to eat it fast, but it’s already prepared. And that saves me so much time so that I don’t have to shovel it all down.

That’s what I do. I do that for myself. Whenever I’m making a meal for my family that I know they really like and I can, I double it or triple it or quadruple it. If I’m making homemade granola, that one, I’ll just go hog wild on because it’s pretty easy to get those ingredients. I’ll just make a huge batch. I’ll divide it into four bags, freeze some and keep some out. So I have these little savings of something quick either for breakfast or snacks or whatever, lunches and that kind of thing.

If I’m making chili or taco meat or spaghetti sauce, I always make more. There’s no point in me not to because I have four children and they’re always going to be eating, so why not cook more now and save time later? I always do that in batch, in bulk.

Now, I understand some people may not have it within their budget to do that always. But there are certainly meals that are more budget-friendly like soups and stews. You can stretch them further, add more vegetables, use the broth and things like that where you can make a large quantity of something for a reasonable cost that you can save some for later.

As a woman, we cycle. We have a wonderful hormonal shift in our life every month. Some of us struggle a little bit at certain times of the month. And as a single mom, there have been certain times in my life that I am tired and I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to cook! Do you ever feel that way? “I don’t want to cook! I’m sick of feeding people. Can someone feed me?”

So that’s when I love having these meals already ready. I know it’s going to happen at least once a month when I’m going to feel that way. So I try when I’m feeling great to do more so that when I’m suddenly not feeling great or life gets busy, something happens (you have a flood in your basement, which we both know very well, Jessica and I)…

Jessica:  Mm-hmmm… unfortunately.

Lydia:  …you have a healthy meal all ready for you. You don’t have to order takeout. You don’t have to succumb to buying some junk food meal just because you’re tired, “Argh! Just go to the drive-thru” or whatever.

So it’s really just strategizing. I hope that’s helpful. I do have some blog posts on healthy meal planning and things like that. Hopefully, we’ll have some more of my burst cooking templates available at some point.

But that’s kind of what I do. It works really well. It leaves flexibility within that structure for me.

And I work with the seasons and purchase foods that are more available in different seasons and kind of go with what’s available.

I also purchase bulk meat as well. I have a half cow coming. When you have four kids, it really saves you money in the long run, so I figured out how to make it work. It’s a large chunk of money upfront, but it’s worth it to always have that food available to you whenever you need it and to save a lot on grass-fed meat. Grass-fed beef is not cheap, but when you buy a half a cow, you can save a lot of money.

So those are just a couple of my broad tips. I hope that was helpful.

Jessica:  Yeah. It sounds like it’s very similar to how I do things too. I would say my top tips for eating healthy without losing your mind, you touched on the freezer thing. I actually have two separate freezers. I have a full stand-up freezer and a chest freezer. If you at all have the space, I highly recommend getting another freezer.

And it doesn’t have to be expensive. You don’t need to go buy a brand new one. I got both of my freezers – let’s see, the chest freezer was used. I bought it from a lady when I lived up in the mountains. She charged me $25 for it. It works just fine. And then the stand-up freezer, I think, we got for $50. So look on Craigslist and look at garage sales and stuff like that.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money on a second freezer. Boy! It will save you a lot of money and a lot of time. So I highly recommend a second freezer if you can swing it at all.

And then, I buy a lot of bulk. I do one to two meat orders a year. I usually do one in the spring and one in the fall. So I’m ordering 200 lbs. of meat potentially at a time, just a bunch of ground beef and we get some steaks and some roasts and stuff.

And so I pack that freezer full. And then when I’m really, really organized – and it really saves me so much time and money whenever I do stay organized, so I really try to make myself stay on top of it. But once a month, I do a quick tally of what I’ve got in the freezer and then I tailor my meals around what I’ve got.

We had to recently take a really hard look at our budget and realize that we really needed to cut back in a lot of areas, especially groceries. I decided a long time ago that I was willing to sacrifice other things in order to have more money to spend on food because food is a priority for me.

I view food more as an insurance plan for myself. So, we don’t buy new clothes. We don’t drive fancy cars. We don’t have the latest gadgets and things like that because I want to have more money to spend on groceries.

But even with that, we still have a budget that we have to follow. So I do a ton of just really big batch cooking. It’s just me and my husband, so I might actually make – I made this pot of kind of like a chicken stew last night. I had leftover veggies from a pot roast that I made on Sunday and then I had leftover chicken thighs that were in the freezer. I just chopped everything up and put it in with some chicken broth and added some thickener and we have like a stew.

I have enough that we had dinner last night, we’ll have dinner tonight. And then we’ll probably have enough for two servings to go in the freezer for either a lunch or a dinner next week or the week after.

So whenever I’m cooking things, I always make double or triple what I’m cooking and then just portion it out. I just stick it in the freezer. That way my husband could grab one. At least I know that he’s eating something nourishing for lunch.

And then for my lunches, I eat soup almost every single day. So on Sundays, I might just make 10 or 15 gallons of soup. I know that sounds like a ton. I’ll use a little bit of meat, a ton of vegetables and then chicken broth because I always have chicken broth in the freezer.

And then I’d portion it up and stick it in the freezer. And then every morning before I start my day, I run down to the freezer, I grab my bag out because I freeze. I freeze them in ziplock bags so it’s flat in my freezer. I just grab the bag out, stick it next to the stove. By the time it’s lunch time, it’s thawed out. I just heat it up and I eat.

I don’t have to worry about what I’m eating for my meals. I try to really plan out ahead.

I think really the key to eating healthy without going crazy is you have to be willing to do a little bit of planning. It doesn’t take me long. I do my planning on my Fridays. I may go grocery shopping on Friday afternoons or Sunday morning. It takes me maybe 10 minutes to just peek in the pantry, peek in the freezer, look at my little inventory sheet, jot down what we’re going to eat for our dinners for the week and then make my shopping list. Really, 10 or 15 minutes, I’m good to go.

And then I’m saving money because I’m not buying a whole bunch of random things at the grocery store. I’m specifically getting what’s on my list and that’s all I get.

So, really, our strategies are pretty similar as far as like doing the batch cooking and then kind of keeping things on hand for those days that we just don’t want to cook or we’re really busy and we know we need to eat something nourishing. At least we have something there. We have something in the freezer that we can take out and thaw out and eat and enjoy.

Lydia:  I will add to that really quick. Bulk buying, obviously, I do that because I have a big family. But that’s where you’re going to save on real food, organic food, the best quality food. If you can slowly, over time, start to build up a repertoire of where you’re buying these foods in bulk.

I think this can be very overwhelming when you’re getting started. The first priority for me was healthy fats and meats to start. And once I got that under my belt, then it was like, “Okay, what about everything else? Where do I buy it in bulk?” and all this stuff. I kind of cycle through my purchasing in bulk.

So I’ll buy them, like Jessica said, she buys the meat two times a year. I kind of do that more like three times a year really because we have a lot more people.

But I also burst bulk buy other things. For example, I have a list, I’m waiting until I have the finances to buy a lot of some grains and pseudo grains from Cue Your Health, which is a great resource. I thought I’d throw it out there. You can buy non-GMO, organic, already sprouted, soaked and all this stuff. I’ll buy my oats and some baking – we don’t bake a lot, but I do like to have good quality flour. I don’t grind my own and do all that stuff. I just haven’t gotten that far.

Jessica:  Yeah.

Lydia:  So you have to decide what your family is going to use the most. And then you can start to source how to buy it in bulk. I bought 50 lbs. of salt a couple of years ago. I don’t need salt for a long time.

Jessica:  Yeah, that’s going to last for a while.

Lydia:  You know what I mean? I kind of circuit through my bulk buys. And it’s kind of nice because then some stuff lasts you quite awhile. And some stuff is fresher stuff that you really have to buy more often.

And then another quick tip (and I won’t go into this too much to save time), but purchase something, either a crock pot or a pressure cooker. And really, the best one you could get would be the Instapot.

Jessica:  Yes, I love Instapot.

Lydia:  Instant Pot can be a seven in one. It can do a lot of stuff. It’s a little bit more pricey than just an individual crock pot or an individual pressure cooker, but you’re going to have a lot more options of how to use it. It can be a rice cooker, it can be a slow cooker, it can be a pressure cooker, be a yoghurt maker, you can steam things in it. There are so many things you can do.

And if you’re busy, busy, busy and you aren’t totally on the ball with your planning, you can make a meal really fast in your Instant Pot once you kind of figure out how to do that. It’s a lifesaver.

You can even pull frozen meat out of the freezer that you forgot to thaw earlier (and I’ve done this) and make an amazing meal! It’s incredible.

So that’s an investment worth thinking about for anyone alive today because we all are busy regardless of how many members of our family we have. So that’s a thought there, too. It’s an awesome tool in your kitchen.

Jessica:  I totally agree. I have one as well and I absolutely love it! It’s probably my favorite kitchen tool right now. So it is great.

So yeah, that’s great. Hopefully, these tips can give you some ideas of how you can eat healthy, but not really let it pressure you enough, stress you out and all that.

So if you’re looking for some help with meal planning because I know not everybody knows how to plan their meals and what goes into that, definitely check out Lydia’s blog post. She has a lot of posts about how to meal plan and how to batch cook and stuff like that.

And then I also have my other site. It’s 20dishes.com. I created that with two other wellness bloggers. We created it specifically because we saw a need in our community for – it’s essentially meal planning meets batched cooking. So we’re teaching you. We have a system that’s really unique compared to a lot of other meal planning sites. We’re teaching you this system that will make you really, really fast in the kitchen. You’ll be able to get a week’s worth of dinners prepped in an hour or under every week.

And then you’ll also get pre-made dinner plans or meals plans. You’ll get step-by-step instructions on how to prepare every meal and then your pre-populated grocery list, which is customizable so you can add. If you needed to get butter or you needed to get other ingredients, you can customize those grocery lists too.

But it really is kind of, if you are struggling to do it on your own, you feel like you just don’t have time to create a meal plan every week and to make your shopping list and to know exactly how to prep the dinners so that you can get the most out of your time in the kitchen, then this is a great option for you.

So definitely check that out at 20dishes.com. I created that with two other people. It’s really been helping me and also helping a lot of our community members as well. Definitely check that out.

Lydia:  I will jump in, real quick, to say this: I haven’t personally used 20dishes myself. I’m a more intuitive cook. I’m a more creative cook. I literally can go in the kitchen and figure out how to make something taste good. And Jessica can too. She’s a very good cook.

But we recognize that not everyone has that ability. And so I had a client who was expressing to me she uses 20Dishes. She is so grateful for it. She actually has tried a couple of different types of meal planning resources and she found it to be quite useful.

She said to me, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t just cook something. I always mess it up. I always do.” And there are people out there who don’t know how to pair things. It’s just not something that they have the knowledge to do, so they want a template. And this is where something like this comes in so great. You literally can just go in and follow directions step-by-step-by-step.

So if that’s you, if you’re that person who’s like, “I just need someone telling me exactly what to do” and you want to follow something to the letter, then yes, I will say there are people who are really appreciating that service. It’s affordable and it saves a lot of time.

Jessica:  Awesome! Thank you. Yeah, that’s exactly why we created it. I was raised in the kitchen, so I know how to do all of that. But there really is a fundamental need. People aren’t learning how to cook. It’s generational information that’s not being passed down. So we have a couple of new generations now who have no idea how to even make broth or anything really simple.

So that’s exactly it. We saw a need. We polled all of our readers and this was, by far, the place that people struggle the most.

I appreciate your feedback from your clients. Tell her ‘thank you’ for me.

Lydia:  Yeah!

Jessica:  That’s great!

So we’re going to go ahead and wrap it up for today. But as always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know. You can leave a comment down below or you can shoot us an email through our site and we’ll be happy to help you out.

If the information that we talked about today resonated with you or you happen to know other people who could benefit from it, we would love it if you’d share this podcast with them. We’d also really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. If you’re on our site or YouTube, we’ll have links down below where you can leave the review. It only takes a minute. It’s really easy. And your shares and your reviews help us reach more people with our message of health and wellness, so we really appreciate your support.

Make sure you check out the links for the episode and read the transcripts on the blog. We’ll have all of that, all the articles that we’ve talked about. Things that we may have mentioned, we’ll have links to all of that information.

And then if you’re looking for more information on health and wellness or natural living or you need more real food recipes, make sure you check out both of our sites. You can find me over at DeliciousObsessions.com and you can find Lydia at DivineHealthfromtheInsideOut.com.

So we are going to sign off. We’ll be back again next week. We hope you have a great day.

Lydia:  Thanks for listening.

 

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