Over the years my food philosophy has evolved… a lot! Most of my childhood I ate a modified “SAD” diet (standard American diet). I use the word modified since my mom was health conscious (i.e., she limited my sugar), but we still ate a fair amount of processed foods, including lots of soy milk, rice milk and Lactaid since we were lactose intolerant.
My senior year of high school (c. 2016), I decided to try to keep kosher (key word “tried”). I had attended a month long Jewish culinary program at Brandeis University the summer before and nearly everyone there kept kosher, so a few months later I decided to try it.
My first year of college (c. 2017), I ate nearly whatever I wanted (still keeping “loosely kosher”). Some days I’d go to the dining hall and eat every single dish, including every dessert. And some days I’d get a kale salad at the campus market to be “healthy” (little did I know that I was actually harming myself by eating raw cruciferous vegetables!). Around this time, I also hopped on the vegan trend. I still ate animal products regularly, so I would not consider myself vegan, but I would go out of my way to eat vegan meals at times.
Then during my sophomore year of college (c. 2018), I started making tons of date & nut bars, granola and muesli. It all started when my boyfriend (now husband) James would eat Cliff bars which I deemed unhealthy since the first ingredient was brown rice syrup. So I decided to make better versions and started making “Simone’s Energy Bars” (and granola and muesli). I would package everything in old cereal and cracker boxes and design labels for each package. That was the first time I genuinely considered starting a business.
Fast forward about a year to Spring 2019, my junior year of college, James decided to start eating paleo. This was right before I left to study abroad in Prague and after I had spent lots of time and money on granola ingredients, so I was not too thrilled. Needless to say, I did not keep strictly paleo while studying abroad, but I did start to trying to adhere to it for dorm-cooked meals. Once I came back to the U.S., I really started my paleo journey. James and I were paleo for a few years. He also followed the AIP (autoimmune protocol) diet for a bit. I loosely followed it along with him, but not fully. In Spring of 2020, James, his sister Kaitlin, and I all tried carnivore diet for a month. I didn’t feel much different, but they had a hard time with it.
Later that year, James started learning about Weston A. Price and suggested we try that diet. He convinced me by saying I could eat ice cream every day (that is, raw grass fed dairy sweetened with honey or maple syrup). We started to get really into it since it’s founded on traditional food preparation methods and we both enjoy cooking. We even bought tickets to the Wise Traditions Conference in Atlanta that year, which unfortunately got cancelled. We successfully attended the conference the following year, Fall 2021, and serendipitously ran into the chapter leaders of the San Mateo Weston A. Price group at the airport coming home. We had just moved to Redwood City a few months prior, so we didn’t know anyone yet. Little did we know, this introduction would be the gateway to many new friendships.
Since then, James and I (or mostly James) have explored other diets, like the thyroid diet and GAPS diet. GAPS is the one that really stuck, particularly for James. He has done various iterations of the diet since December 2021- he went stage by stage according to Dr. Natasha’s book and then he did carnivore GAPS for many months. He was so dedicated, he didn’t even eat the food at our own wedding! I joined him in October of 2022 and together we’ve been going through the stages of GAPS very slowly using a pendulum for guidance, rather than going by the book.
That is where we are at right now. I tried to keep it short (but didn’t really succeed). I could talk forever about food, so if you ever want to discuss, please reach out! 🙂