Trim Healthy Mama Plan (23 page)

T
he crunchy type! We know you well. One of us is a staunch disciple of all those sprouting, culturing, sourdough-catching, chicken-plucking, kombucha-mushroom-growing ways. It won't take you long to guess who when you watch one of our YouTube videos or hang out on our website.

Grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, wild-caught deep-sea fish, and raw homemade
kefir and cheeses will anchor the THM plan for our Purist Mamas. You're sure to be sipping a small glass of your homemade kombucha and garnishing your plate with a portion of sauerkraut fermented in your home crock. Your grains and beans are soaked, your sourdough starter is bubbling, your garden veggies are home-preserved, your hens are laying golden eggs, and your goat's udder is full and ready for milking. Right? Ha ha ha! This is a purist fantasy. In reality not all who are instilled with an “all-natural” mindset get to experience this puristy perfection.

Dreams are fun, but sometimes purists bear this mindset as a burden of idealism that their circumstances and finances halt or at the very least hinder. They are left anxious and longing for the greener pastures afforded by getting a raise, moving to the country, or receiving a Deepfreeze for Christmas with a full grass-fed cow tucked nicely inside. If you are not living on your hobby farm or blessed with the finances to shop solely at the organic market, take a deep breath and let's reassess together.

If the full purist fantasy can't be had in your season, there are some things you can control. You can have fun learning to be savvy and find your way around high-priced retailers. Many times there are Amish farms in surrounding smaller towns that sell very reasonably priced raw milk that you can turn into kefir. Google any orchards or berry farms that, even if not certified organic, use no or very minimal crop spray and are within a couple of hours of your city. There you can pick bushels and buckets of berries or fruit for a very low cost. Freeze, dehydrate, culture, or preserve your bounty for a fun and inexpensive way of stocking your natural kitchen. Find a few like-minded friends who want to go thirds in a grass-fed cow to cut down on the price.

Even if you can't find a source of raw milk, you can still make homemade kefir and bring regular pasteurized milk back to life and teeming with enzymes by using the double-fermenting method. We share that method in the “More Drinks” chapter of the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook.
For more info you can check out our website, where we have a
hands-on, practical video showing you step by step how to do it—or you can search it online. Don't worry if you don't have the bucks to fork over for
organic store-bought
milk. Usually these brands are sterilized at an ultra-high temperature (UHT), at very denaturing degrees from 280 F to 302 F.

Regular old milk is heated at much lower temperatures in one of two types of pasteurization. It can be “low-temperature, long-time pasteurized,” which is called “vat” pasteurization, during which milk is heated to 145 degrees F for at least thirty minutes and then instantly chilled. The more common “high-temperature, short-time,” or “flash,” pasteurization method is when milk is heated to roughly 160 degrees F for at least fifteen seconds. These methods leave the milk with more nutrients and a much better taste. More than 80 percent of all organic milk brands are UHT and are an expensive and unhealthy scam. Most of the milk from these brands is not from grass-fed cows anyway, and you pay double the price for a burned and deranged liquid that bears an organic stamp designed to make all its miserableness go away.

Many fellow purists are overtaken by multiplying kombucha mushrooms and kefir grains. They would love to give them away for free so they don't have to have fifteen cultures on their countertops. Start putting feelers out on who the mad scientist purist is in your area and then you'll have too many yourself. You'll be giving mushrooms and kefir grains away to another fledgling purist.

Once you fork over an initial investment for bulk organic grain from an online co-op (do your homework, because some are way cheaper than others) and look online for a secondhand grain mill, your own artisan sourdough bread is just pennies a loaf. Serene has perfected her artisan sourdough recipe over the years so it is now streamlined and easy enough for anyone to make. It appears in the “Breads and Pizza Crusts” chapter of the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
, but there are also plenty of authentic sourdough recipes online.

Carve out an afternoon to spend online or check out a book from your local library on the
wild edibles in your area. You may be surprised at the bounty you have at your fingertips. Here in our Tennessee backyard we gather and eat in-season wild persimmons, blackberries, autumn olives, passion fruit, purslane, plantain, dandelion greens, sumac, a yummy mushroom called chicken of the woods, and black walnuts. We do not have deep botanical expertise on wild edibles, so we are probably tramping right past many treasures. But we look forward to the different seasons when nature's gifts drop for free from our surrounding trees or pop up their pretty foliage in the ditches on our roadside. Their
nutrition benefits could defy any packaged superfood from the most elite organic market and slapped with a price tag of thirty dollars. Oh, and while we are talking wild, the king of wild is
wild game! Hunt down or hound a hunter and get that freezer full of ground venison and that dehydrator full of jerky.

It looks like you will be happily busy with all these relatively inexpensive purist projects, so no need to sweat all those other ideals right now. You've got your hands full proactively doing the positive things you can do today. Our advice is to be a “can-do” joyful soul, not a “can't-do” anxious worrywart.

Rest in the fact that you are taking healthy doable steps in your purist journey. Obsessing about the depleted soils, the toxins in most foods, and the cell-phone towers stretching their radiation tentacles into the atmosphere brings your health down. If you belong to e-mail lists from “everything-is-out-to-kill-ya” health gurus and they bring excess tension into your life, then delete your name from their file. You can find anything wrong with anything if you search the Internet and blogosphere for it.

Sensational blog posts evilizing even healthy foods are all the rage these days. It is good to research, but it is not good to obsess.

Straining over the gnat of a little soy lecithin in your favorite dark chocolate but swallowing the camel of burdensome mental torment called worry is an injurious choice. Go ahead and do away with plastics in favor of glass if you feel strongly about it, but don't—please don't—fall into a purist neurosis that can be as unhealthy as drinking a daily shot of 100 percent liquid BPA. We believe in being wise and educated, but anxiety over things that we can't ever change or at least can't change now needs to be eradicated. We both spent too many years with that mindset and it did nothing for our health but compromise it. Abolish purism
stress. It KILLS.

Our Creator did not create this generation in the time of the
Little House on the Prairie
. He created us for now with all our modern techno iClouds and frustrating laws hindering the easy access to raw milk. The Bible says, “Above all, beloved, I wish you to prosper and be in good health.” He has plans and purposes for you to fulfill in the here and now in 2015 and beyond. God is ultimately in control and numbers our days. We are never in control, even though we sometimes think we are.

Your eyes will glaze over when they spot the quick microwave muffins in the companion cookbook, but you'll love to bring a full batch of steamy and fragrant Chocolate Chai-Glazed Cinnamon Muffins out of your oven (see the “Family Muffins” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
). Slather them with raw pastured butter or virgin coconut oil. You will make a Skinny Chocolate icing that will set hard when the muffins are cooled. If you love soup, you can get your stockpot simmering with your own chicken, beef, and wild venison bones and throw in veggie tops and skins from your own garden. This gelatin-rich stock can be the nurturing base to many of our soup and stew recipes.

Kefir superfood smoothies are as easy as it gets and fill you up with all the nutritious goodies you love. You can throw in your pastured, golden yolks from free-range hens and even some wild edibles if you've found some backyard treasures. For speedy S lunches on the go, you won't be buying store-bought low-carb wraps but making Wonder Wraps (see “Breads and Pizza Crusts” in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
) stuffed with avocado, fresh garden greens, and leftover free-range chicken. They are the yummiest things ever; we're getting hungry just writing about them.

If you don't have your own jersey cow or a source of raw pastured cream, you don't have to mar your morning coffee with ultra-pasteurized store-bought cream if that messes with your brain. You will drink the guilt-free Healing Trimmy, which is simply coffee blended with a little pastured butter or MCT oil and grass-fed collagen—and you can add some healthful, brain-protecting sunflower lecithin to keep your coffee a creamy color.

Your love for all your raw pastured cream, butter, cheeses, egg yolks, and home-reared marbled steaks makes S meals the most appetizing for you. You know by now that fuel ruts of any kind are metabolism-slowing dead ends that say sayonara to your weight loss. Your challenge will be to not get bogged down in an S rut. You will need to learn to balance your weekly meals with lighter E fare and in these meals just use a tad of the superfood fats that you usually use liberally in S recipes. Sourdough ancient-grain bread is a
true superfood and so is the humble lentil and simple sweet potato. Learn to relish your nourishing E meals that supply their own unique source of sustenance and invigorate your metabolism.

The common purist myth that low-fat anything is finagled, denatured, and unhealthy loses any ground when we look at nature. It is not rocket science and doesn't take civilized machinery to separate an egg yolk from a white. It takes only a little jiggle between the egg shells, and shazam, there you have it. Cream is designed by our Creator to rise naturally to the top. From there we can skim the precious treasure and churn it into butter or ladle it over fresh berries. What is to be done with all that leftover low-fat milk? Shall we chuck it out now because it is deprived of its fat? We'd be crazy! For centuries, low-fat cultured kefir, yogurt, and cheeses were crafted from this skimmed milk and nourished thriving civilizations. The term “low-fat” does not always mean it is a modern warped food.

Another myth that is taught and believed by many purists is that protein should never be eaten without sufficient fats, as these macronutrients are always paired in nature. That is not the case. The truth is that there are just as many lean fish as fatty, and lean game as greasy duck. Many whitefish are completely fat-free! In one of the famous meals in the Bible, Jesus fed five thousand people with dried fish and loaves. We would call it a yummy E meal.

Interestingly, tilapia was one of the three main types of fish caught in biblical times from the Sea of Galilee. In ancient times they were called “musht,” but they are now nostalgically coined “Saint Peter's fish.” These species of fish are very lean and have been the target of small-scale artisanal fisheries in the area for thousands of years.

Who could say that a poached, lean river trout atop a bed of steamed quinoa and sautéed tomatoes, drizzled with lemon juice, sea salt, and just a hint of olive oil was health-destroying? Low-fat all the time is dangerous and unbalanced. High-fat all the time is equally unhealthy and unbalanced. Enjoy your S fat-fueled meals, even use them to cross over sometimes; but rev your metabolic furnace with the energetic electricity of pure E meals.

Okay, go milk that cow, decorate your balcony with lots of potted curly parsley, and ask for a year's subscription to “How to Become More Puristy.” We get you because one of us got the bug real bad and the other has to live next door to her.

Note: For puristy concerns regarding THM-approved sweeteners, visit
Chapter 13
, “Sweet Mama.”

P
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M
AMAS
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Day 1

BREAKFAST—E

Super Prepared Purist Grains with blueberries (“Good Morning Grains” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
)

LUNCH—S

Superfood-Loaded Salad (“Quick Single Salads” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
) with pastured hard-boiled eggs or leftover free-range chicken meat

DINNER—S

Rich and Tender Stew using wild venison or grass-fed meat (“Crockpot Meals” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
) / Golden Flat Bread (“Breads and Pizza Crusts” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
) drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh herbs

Day 2

BREAKFAST—S

Three fried eggs in pastured butter or extra-virgin coconut oil and garnished with raw sheep's cheese (Pecorino Romano is a good variety) / Healing Trimmy (“Hot Drinks” chapter in the
Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook
)