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The other week I was teaching a workshop to 25 women who were under 40 years old  (they were new moms) and I asked the question, “Who here feels like their mom taught them how to cook?” Only ONE woman put up her hand!!

I was shocked, but not really as it supported the fact that we are now spending more money on take-out and restaurant food than we are on groceries. No wonder we’re in a health crisis!

In a study published in the journal BMJ Open, scientists found that nearly 60% of an American’s daily calories come from “ultraprocessed” food,  and only 1% of their calories from vegetables!!

This is exactly why Sarica Cernohous and I are talking Simple Food Prep Tips in this podcast episode!! We need to spend time in the kitchen. We need to cook real food. AND, it doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. 

In this episode you will…

  • Learn what traditional food prep is – (it’s not as complicated as you might think)
  • Hear the debate around “Ancestral Eating” – crazy or the cure for the health crisis North America is in?
  • Understand how Traditional Chinese Medicine could benefit you
  • Know what you should eat  first thing in the morning (no, it’s not coffee – you can have it, but eat this first!) – this is especially helpful for women
  • Realize how we’re culturally set up to fail and what you need to do to succeed with your health goals

Episode Resources: 

Simple Food Prep Tips [Full Text]

Jen: Welcome back. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of my Energy to Thrive Podcast. I am beyond excited to share with you a really special woman that I met at a conference this summer.

Sarica, hello, welcome and thank you for being here.

Sarica: I am so happy to be here. I’m really glad we made this happen.

Jen: Me too. I’ve already shared a bit about you and your story, but I thought for listeners it’s always such an amazing thing to hear about what created the passion for you to do the work that you do and to learn a bit more, in your own words, about who you help, how you help, and what brought you to this.

Sarica: Absolutely. Don’t we all have our story about how we get to a certain place in life? I was actually thinking about that this morning. I was fortunate, I was raised in a home where my parents really did a pretty good number of taking care of us with more natural means. It was the ‘70s, so we did have some sugar, but it wasn’t like what a lot of other families were eating. That was good. It immediately got me in that frame of mind of the choices we make and how that has an influence on how we feel. Then my parents also did a little bit of alternative practices in terms of acupuncture and chiropractic when I was growing up, so I had exposure to these things.

Of course, exposure doesn’t mean that you’re going to be safeguarded against having things happen in your life. What started happening for me when I was a teenager was I really started experiencing a lot of different digestive concerns. I ended up having my appendix removed, I had my gallbladder removed, I had some very significant surgeries, pancreatitis, and very significant digestive issues. I can look back on it now and I can see why it happened, but at the time that wasn’t clear.

But it’s like anything, that pain that we experience is enough to get us to change our behavior and to really dig deeper. That is when I began receiving acupuncture treatments regularly. I was so impressed by it that I actually started study. I went and got my masters degree in traditional Chinese medicine in my 20s after I had gotten my business degree. It really uncorked a whole new way of looking at the world for me. It was like someone had given my back a language that I had lost and didn’t know it had gone missing.

Jen: That’s so cool.

Sarica: I was so grateful for that. The medicine was foundational, but it also helped me to see the world in a completely different light. It was a five year program and it was very intensive. It really did shift how I looked at the world, and part of that is food.

Jen: That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. I just have to share a quick story. I did not know much about traditional Chinese medicine. I went to school, I did my Kinesiology degree, I did a masters, all through my twenties I spent years in school. I sheepishly admit that I probably would have been skeptical if somebody would have told me that somebody can look at your tongue or feel your pulse and be able to see what’s going on or know what’s going on in your body.

It was for me a very personal traumatic event that I was at a loss with how to get better, and a friend of mine said, “See my husband,” who was a TCM doctor. I was a changed person and I was so hungry for the information to understand.

To anybody out there who is sort of skeptical of alternative therapies, I invite you to really listen, because I was too at one point in my life. I just didn’t understand, I didn’t have the exposure of parents who dove into alternative therapies. It was really very foreign to me, I would say I was western indoctrinated.

I wanted to bring you on my show because of your expertise and training, and also because you are so food oriented. We were just talking before we got started here about how food has become so confusing, and health, wellbeing, and weight. I know that you specialize in traditional medicine and in traditionally preparing foods.

Can we start talking about that?

Sarica: It’s wonderful. You’re exactly right. I gave you a little background, but believe me it’s not like I was raised on a farm, I had a pretty suburban ‘70s upbringing and Cheerios and we ate TV dinners. But, there was something about food preparation, even as a kid I knew that there was something about that.

My sister and I when we were teenagers we would come home from school and we would put on PBS and watch all of the cooking shows after school. She has now been a chef for 25 years, so we’ve had this long thread of interest in cooking. Then of course also recognizing the power of this thing that we do regularly every day to support us, it’s going to have impact on how we feel.

Traditional food preparation is something that definitely I dove into hook, line, and sinker when I continued to have digestive issues, even with receiving traditional medical care and with acupuncture and chiropractic. It was that that allowed me to experience the pain so that I had to dig deeper and see what I thought was enough actually wasn’t in terms of what we were doing.

Jen: Let’s stop right there, because people might be wondering what we’re talking about. What is traditional food preparation? Maybe just share what that actually is.

Sarica: Absolutely. For our family what it was, I started looking at food and what we would call ancestral ways of eating. People would say that’s eating more whole foods. That’s a huge start right there, just getting people to eat more fresh produce, foods that don’t come from boxes and bags and cans, and that sort of thing. For me that was the start, really going back to that.

Beyond that goes into how those foods are prepared. When we look at how our ancestors did things and we see traditionally cultures continuing to do today, they will often culture and ferment things. For our family the first thing that I went into with traditional food preparation was making yogurt at home.

That’s our gift for today, a little yogurt ebook, because I want everybody to do this. To me it was such an amazing thing to say I’m going to take some milk and a little bit of this culture starter, put it into a jar inside an incubator, and in the morning I’m supposed to have yogurt, and sure enough that’s what happened. It was such a leap of faith, you can’t stop sniffing it and making sure everything is okay before you eat and feed it to your kids. But it was good and it worked out.

It gave me confidence so that I could continue going down this road. The other things that I started looking at were not just using whole grains or legumes, but also how those foods were prepared. That would be getting into very simple things like soaking. Soaking is a very simple thing and it actually makes things much more digestible. It can be as simple as just letting the bean or the grain sit in the water for 12 hours before you cook it, it’s just going to make it more digestible.

Jen: I love this. Really what we’re talking about is things don’t have to be hard. There have been a few books that I’ve read recently, one of them being Sugar Fat Salt by Michael Moss, and talking about how convenience foods really came to be. There is a stat there from one of the CEOs of the companies of that time who said convenience foods were meant to be just that, once in awhile foods. Instead we now have this standard North American diet (which us Canadians partake in) where it’s convenience foods every hour. We’ve gotten so far removed from that form of traditional preparation that we often don’t even know about things like fermenting and soaking.

Sarica: Low heat dehydration is another one. When we’re doing this what we’re doing is making food so that they are preserved but they maintain so much of the good that’s there that gets knocked out through the conventional kind of cooking processes like frying or using foods at high heat. It sounds like a lot of disparate threads, but actually what I’ve found in my years of practicing these methods is they all really coincide with one another.

Another one is making broth. Broth has become incredibly popular, and for good reason. It’s such a wonderful way to keep our bodies nourished and it tastes good. It’s a base that can be used for making things like properly prepared grains and beans, and of course making soups and things like that.

Jen: I want to jump in real quick with a funny story. Bone broth has become huge in the weight loss world, it really has. I was like, “How do I not know this? What is this bone broth people are talking about?” So I finally go to Google and I have been making it.

My mom taught me how to take bones and make turkey stock and chicken stock with the vegetables and the bones, roasting them, so I learned that from my mom. I had no idea that people didn’t know how to do it. I truly thought there was some sort of magical elixir out there of which I had no knowledge that I was like, “Seriously? They’re talking about making broth. This is it?”

Sarica: Just making stock.

Jen: Making stock. But, cooking is an art form that a lot of women who are younger than I am now haven’t been taught.

Sarica: No, they haven’t. It’s one of those things that as a practitioner it’s very important for me to always kind of get to know the person. I want people telling me hour by hour how their day looks so I can get a feel on them, because you’re exactly right. One person’s understanding, their education and life experience around this, can be wholly different than the next person, so we have to give grace on that. Just give each other some space and just know it’s going to be okay.

It’s important to meet somebody where they are with that. It wouldn’t be right for me as a practitioner to overwhelm someone with four or five different techniques out of the gate. I have to know where they are. It might be a really big deal for them to give up their cold cereal first thing in the morning and to put something more nourishing in that place. It’s true, we do come to these things with a different education.

Also, it’s the terminology. I mean, bone broth, oh my gosh. That has to be a marketing term.

Jen: I just laughed. I truly felt so ignorant and then I was like, “Making stock, why didn’t I think of that?” For anybody listening, if you have been wondering, you could be laughing at us or me right now, I understand that.

Let me ask you about when somebody comes to you. I’ll sort of describe to you a lot of my clients. They’re women in their 40s most often, they’re busy, they have kids, they’ve often struggled with lifelong weight loss challenges and often have a very rooted story that somehow their body isn’t working for them.

What’s your process, how would you take that person and in your way sort of guide, teach, and help?

Sarica: When a person is in a state of overwhelm in that way, I don’t want to start with we’re going to be making all of your foods from scratch. I know at a biological level, at a cellular level, that would benefit them, but at an emotional level it’s going to cause a state of overwhelm.

I usually start with just breakfast. I want to see what is happening at breakfast, because if folks are starting their day off in a way that causes their blood sugar to rollercoaster throughout the day then everything we do later is going to be impacted by that. If we can just start making some good foundational changes at breakfast – and quite honestly most people are blowing it at breakfast.

Jen: Let’s hear what maybe your top three ideas, because often we know better but unless we hear the idea or we see that recipe we’re so confused now with food that we don’t know if it’s good, bad, right. I’d love to pick your brain.

Sarica: That’s the thing, too, I think we also have to take into consideration that each person is constitutionally different. In Ayurveda East Indian medicine they would say I’m very vata type, my tendency is to think a lot and to be on the thinner side. That’s a person who definitely needs to start their day with a more substantial breakfast. As opposed to someone who is by their nature a much fleshier heavier person, we’d call that person more of a kapha type or an earth type in Chinese medicine and they’re a person who has more reserves to pull on so they can maybe go a little bit longer, they can maybe use a little bit more stimulation.

I think it’s a very important thing for us to recognize our innate constitutions. There are lots of quizzes out there that you can begin to do that so that you can discern more about you, which I think is really a good thing to do.

Kind of as an overview, generally, the thing that I see a lot of people do is they start their day off with just having coffee first thing in the morning. They will often add cream, sugar, or things like that. For women, especially women who are beginning to experience fluctuations in their hormonal patterns and the fatigue at a very deep level because of the demands of the modern lifestyle that we have, starting your day off with a jolt of caffeine is going to send you on a rollercoaster for the rest of the day.

I can almost make that carte blanche statement. Then what happens is it spikes your blood sugar and so it will be a couple of hours usually until you might start feeling that you’re getting hungry, but the rollercoaster is well under way by that point and you’re going to be playing catch up, feeling snacky in the late afternoon. You may even find that you’re waking up through the night because of this type of adrenal fatigue and taxation on the thyroid that happens with this type of behavior.

I don’t tell folks to not have coffee, but I do want it to be after the breakfast, I want it to be part of the breakfast. Not a lot of it either. I really want to see people having a good nutritious breakfast first thing in the morning, and that isn’t cold cereal. I’m not a person who is against eating grains or anything like that, but if we could move that cereal into an organic oatmeal with a little bit of clarified butter or a little bit of coconut oil on it, maybe have an egg or two on the side, something that is substantially going to hold that person so that they feel very stabilized in their blood sugar.

Jen: Sarica doesn’t know this about me. You don’t know this about me, but you basically just textbook diagnosed exactly my past six years ago completely. I had two little kids, I was sleep deprived from nursing, I nursed both of my kids for a long time. I was starting a new business (not this one) back then, so I was financially stressed, emotionally stressed, and I would make them perfect balanced breakfast and I would drink coffee. I was carrying 35-ish extra pounds and exactly what you said was what I experienced; played catch up all day, snacked all day, had the adrenal fatigue, I wasn’t making DHEA, which is a hormone that is a precursor for testosterone, totally deficient and depleted in all of that.

If you’re wondering, I can tell you that I spent a lot of money to figure out what the hell was wrong with me because I felt like I was going crazy. I have degrees in this stuff, but it was my first time really connecting the pieces between what I was putting in and how I felt.

Sarica: That is it. And we have to honor this; culturally that is what we were raised with, it’s what everyone does around us, and so there isn’t a lot of information that we get coming back to us saying don’t do that. In fact, we have to buck the system to do this, you become kind of the weirdo. But, as I’ve told my kids, the world has gotten weird so we have to counterbalance that. Honestly, by the time you get to your 40s and 50s…

Jen: You don’t care anymore. That’s the best thing about 40, you just don’t give a shit as much anymore. It doesn’t matter, you just want to feel good. I’ll do whatever it takes to feel better. Thank God, right? And thank God for people like you who are sharing this.

You touched on so many points, I’m hoping I’m going to be able to circle back.

Sarica: We have so much to talk about.

Jen: I know. One of the things you talked about was the emotional taxation of the modern day woman – I’m paraphrasing. I hear it all the time. It sounds like you hear it all the time. We see it. Even right now, we’re in that Fall season and everybody when you ask, “How are you?” says, “Oh, busy, it’s crazy with activities,” and we have this dialogue about what life is like. What do you do with that?

Sarica: This is the counterpoint we have to have to that because there is something in our puritanical society that says busy is better and that’s where your value lies. We have to say no to that.

When we look at the traditional Chinese philosophy, and I hope everyone can visualize this, that yin-yang symbol where we have the black and the white, but in the white there is a little dot of the black and in the black there is a little dot of the white. This is the yin essence, but there’s a little yang in there, and this is the yang essence and there’s a little yin in there.

Women in our nature our essence is to be predominantly yin, which is the dark, receptive, quiet, female, soft, sleepy, but kind energy. We have grown up in a society that is very yang, very man, very masculine, very hot and fiery. What we’re doing when we start our day off with coffee as a woman is we’re trying to keep up with that and it is not in essence to do so.

Some women are a little more yang than others, some are a little more yin than others, but at our essence as women we are that darker, more receptive, quieter, more reflective aspect to the human nature. When we push and push this way we are denying who we are, that in itself is going to further burn our energy because then we get frustrated, and that is no way to live.

For me, I know a few years ago I just got into what I think is the most excellent habit. I get up in the morning and before I do anything I will meditate for a few moments, I read some spiritual book that is important to me, and then I do five sun salutations, because in that yang-yang effort in my 20s one of the things that I did as well as having a few organs removed is I also blew out my back and ended up with back surgery. It was so much tension that I was holding because I was not honoring myself, I can totally see the pattern for what it was. Now here I am on 45 and now it’s time to knock that off and it has been so fantastic.

What I try to get people to do, especially women but men too, is to start carving out just a little bit of that time for themselves and allow the deliciousness of how that feels to kind of take over. I feel completely off kilter if I don’t start my day that way now. It has been one of the big movers of the dial for me.

Jen: Let’s stop there for one second, because this is huge. What I hear all the time is as women we’re smart, we’re educated, we’re often very intuitive, we’ll know better and not do better. Somehow we’ll have this inner knowing that life is just not adding up, we can feel it, and yet we seem very unwilling to change patterns. I know I was, I was stuck in a pattern and it was rooted in a lot of my value comes what I do not who I am, like you mentioned. For you and I, it sounds like each of us have had these moments of pain in our life where it has prompted a deeper exploration to find an answer, to get relief from the pain.

What do you say to a woman listening right now who maybe hasn’t hit that rock bottom of do anything to escape the pain but who wants to be proactive about it? Let’s really make this simple and hand-hold somebody here.

You have a morning routine. People, listen to Sarica; create a morning routine. Honestly, transparently, I’ve struggled with this because sometimes I’m going to bed too late, I’m sleeping in, then I’m rushing. It has to be a real inner commitment to a reset. How do you do that? How do you start that?

Sarica: You make it happen for 21 days.

Jen: Great.

Sarica: You don’t make it an hour long thing. Believe me.

Jen: Say that again, because this is huge.

Sarica: I’m not joking when I say five minutes. For years I was at the five minute mark, I couldn’t get past that. It was in part because I didn’t have good tools around meditation, which I do have now and I use that and it was a game changer.

It was my continued commitment to knowing it was I needed even though I wasn’t quite doing it right. Am I still? No, that’s nonsense. There is never a language of doing it right. All I know is it is something that at this point I have to make myself stop, like “Oh, I better get going, I really have to get the kids out the door.”

Just three weeks of five minutes of just sitting away from the bed. I think if you stay in bed you might fall back asleep because we are tired. I think it is important for us to pull ourselves out of that state and recognize that conscious rest is a whole lot different than collapsing in bed. For me, I have a little pillow that I sit on, I make sure sunlight gets on me if I can make that happen. I want that energizing force on me, we are creatures of the solar system so I want that on me.

Just allow that five minutes. It’s going to maybe feel uncomfortable at the beginning. It’s possibly going to feel like, “What am I doing? This is a waste of time, I could be sleeping.” There’s a whole lot of things you could be thinking. At some point you’re going to find that you begin to appreciate the way that you feel when you take that time for yourself. You might feel that straightaway, you may honor that.

Jen: I love this. So many people think that these changes in life need to be massive, whether it’s exercising, or going from processed to completely homemade and organic, and the stretches seem so big that they do nothing.

Sarica: Right.

Jen: What I love is that you’re saying five minutes, quiet your mind, maybe do some light stretching, do a yoga pose if you know it, don’t drink coffee until after you’ve had breakfast, and have a good breakfast.

Sarica: You summed up my morning.

Jen: And it sounds like a really nice morning. Nothing in there sounds like me having to drink gross tasting herbs or potions or buy anything, it’s all very doable.

Sarica: It’s super doable. That’s how we have to start, and give ourselves that grace. The  thing of it is that I do set aside time, I get up before the kids do so that I can have that time. They’re well trained at this point, they’re 10 and 11 now, and they know that if my bedroom door is closed that means that I am still meditating and they’re not going to step in and bug me, but I really do try and just have that extra 15 or 20 minutes before they’re awake just so it’s for sure as settled as can be. I love that feeling.

The morning time is the yin energy of the day, we’re moving out of night and it’s the building of the yang for the day. If we can do that in a way that nurtures our essence we are going to have more to pull on for the yang (fiery active) movements of the day. It’s really creating a good foundation for ourselves every day.

Jen: I totally love that. I think that this is amazing and you clearly have so many things to share. One of the things that you and I were talking about before we started the interview was around this idea of metabolic balancing – knowing that food is confusing, often we’re using food to numb, fill a void, distract – can you share a little bit around what that is and why it’s important?

Sarica: One of the beautiful things about the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, the paradigm of it, is that all of the organ systems are associated with different emotions. When I see someone who is really frustrated I am going to be looking at the tone of their wood element, which is the liver and gallbladder. When we see someone who is always wanting to maybe snack on carbohydrate rich foods what they’re doing is trying to ameliorate the earth element, which has to do with digestion.

One of the ways that I know a person is needing some balancing with that earth element is they may ruminate a lot, they’re thinking and thinking. One of the ways we try and stop that is we put food in our mouth to calm that thinking down. That does have a yin action, a sedating effect on us, but that yin action, that sedating effect when we’re always putting food in our mouth also has a sedating effect on the body’s energy.

It gives us a quick little boost of carbohydrate, but very quickly over time what it does is it stifles the digestive fire of our body, we never get an opportunity to fully step into digesting a given meal, we’re always kind of bringing something down the chute. When we do that we can get bloated, we can feel kind of ooky in our bones and our joints, nothing feels fluid, and it’s because we continue to flood the system this way, we never give proper opportunity.

Jen: I’m picturing such a great visual in my head right now of this constant churning in my gut. One of the things we talked about is so often women will think that their bodies are broken and that metabolisms aren’t working. What you just said is you’re flooding the system. Just like if you have a perfectly great car and you’re trying to start the car and you flood it and keep trying to start it, the car is fine, you just flooded it.

Sarica: That’s exactly it. What you’ve done is given a lot of yang and now you’re flooded in a yin.

Jen: I love this yin-yang thing, it’s perfect.

Sarica: It is true, though. To allow this kind of fallow period where you’re not sipping on coffee, you’re not sipping on tea, you’re not taking a sip of some kind of diet beverage or anything like that. The only thing in between is water.

If a person can’t do that for a solid five hours or so, then what that says to me is that their previous meal wasn’t as nutritiously dense as it should have been, because we are designed to be able to pull on our reserves. All of us have a fatty tissue that we are designed to pull on. When that’s not happening what that says to me is you’re not eating nutritiously enough. We have to bring better nutrition into your diet so that you’re not going to feel like you need to put something in your mouth every two hours or so.

Jen: This links right back to your traditional food preparation, because one of the things that I know from my work and my research is we are chronically overeating and massively undernourished.

Sarica: Yes, absolutely that. Going back to the good old bone broth, one of the things that is so great about that is broth is something that when we drink broth, or if it’s used in the cooking of whole grains or something, it brings such a depth of flavor and a sense of nourishment and fulfillment, it is a truly visceral and emotional feeling that we get from something like that. I want you to compare that to eating a snack bar, like a granola bar. It’s a night and day difference.

Jen: Absolutely. I’m going to have a trick question for you. Tell me the difference between making your own stock and then what you can buy in a package. For people that are out there and busy, can you purchase this and get any of the same benefits, or does it need to go back to the art of making it yourself?

Sarica: Again, I don’t want to make people crazy, that’s not what I was put on this Earth to do. I’m here to support. If that is where somebody starts, then that’s where they start.

The thing that I see as part of the issue around that is that it’s not going to have the fatty acid composition, it’s just not going to have that fat that would be there and that fat is incredibly healing and incredibly nourishing to the cell membrane of every cell in our body. That’s an important player that is not going to be there, but if that’s where someone starts, that’s where they start.

Jen: There are now actually bone broth powders that are being marketed, which I know that some of them say they are organic. Is that sort of meet me where I’m at?

Sarica: I think it is. To me it really is. A lot of people do live rurally, they live remotely, but my golly if you live in a city there are people who are making these products for you to get fresh.

Jen: Farmer’s markets, etcetera.

Sarica: Yes. We have a couple of restaurants here in northern Arizona that we can get this. I will tell patients, “Please, go in there and I want you to get some broth. Just get a quart of it and let’s get you started on it.”

So there are ways. It’s always good, better, best.

I think the powder is nice if you’re traveling, that sort of thing. That’s going to be dictating what you’re eating, as opposed to you saying, “I think I really need to focus a little bit more on the collagen aspect, so the broth I’m going to make for myself is going to have more cartilaginous tissue,” or a person might say, “I’ve heard so much about liver being good for you, maybe I’ll put some liver into my broth,” or, “I want a chicken broth.” There are just so many different ways you can do it when you do it on your own.

Jen: I was just curious, because it’s one of those questions listeners might ask, “What do I do? Is it okay, is it not?” Even with the all organic versus not. Sometimes it’s like if you have these hard and fast rules that if the only way you can get healthy is to eat all organic, well then why even bother because I can’t do that. Whereas, every little baby step…

Sarica: Every little baby step counts. It does. The thing that I will say about the organic question is I always direct folks that if we have to choose between am I going to buy organic produce or organic animal products, please make it the organic animal products because you are eating at the top of the food chain. Everything that animal has been exposed to is going to be in its tissues, most notably its fat and its bones. When we’re making a broth from a commercially raised chicken, ick, that’s going to be rich in things that you don’t want there.

Again, I don’t want to make people crazy, but to me it’s worth it. I have been to some rural places and it’s amazing to me how I can always locate what I need. We can always order online as well. And to get to know the farmers in your area is a great thing, too.

I just want to put a plug out right now for an outfit called The Westin A. Price Foundation, and their website will connect you with a chapter in your area that will help you to source locally from farmers and ranchers so you can get the highest quality foods in your area.

Jen: That’s awesome. For my American listeners, fantastic. I don’t know if that’s going to apply to Canada too?

Sarica: It’s worldwide.

Jen: Amazing. Oh my gosh, I did not know about this. Thank you so much.

We have scratched the surface, honestly, of so many different things. I think we could go deep dive into adrenals and thyroid, but we won’t for today. Instead, what I would love for you to share is how people can find out more about you and how can we get access to your free how to make yogurt book.

We’ll also have that in the show notes where you can access all of these resources. Let’s hear it so that it’s verbal and out there.

Sarica: The button for the yogurt book is going to be right there, so please take advantage of that. It’s mostly the yogurt chapter from my book, The Funky Kitchen, which is available on Amazon so you can find it there.

Then I created a six week online course around that called Fresh Fun and Flavorful in the Funky Kitchen that allows people to dive more deeply into all of this. Folks really appreciate how I just take it step by step, little baby steps as we go along, and I engage with them. Please, let’s do it, let’s try it, we won’t know how it goes for you until we do. I’ve gotten really good feedback on that class.

Then the place to meet me is NaturallyLivingToday.com, the blog that I’ve had for a good long while.

Jen: Awesome. I can say that I’ve had a peek through it, because I was sort of cyber-stalking you, as we do in this day and age, and there are some really great resources on there and really well written articles that are super informative.

It’s been awesome. Sarica, thank you so much. I really could talk for hours, but I think I want to leave our listeners with the idea that baby steps add up, it doesn’t have to be hard. Little shifts and little decisions to make little changes can have profound impact and effect on your health and wellbeing. Ultimately, we’re alive, we might as well try to feel good while we’re living this life and bring what we can bring.

I’ve got a real soft spot for the journey we take as women and I know, as I’ve gone through my 30s and into my 40s, that challenges have changed. I’m looking for different resources to support me in so many different ways now, because I was so tired of that yang energy that I was driving myself to live with.

Sarica: That’s right, it will burn you out, it’s so true. The thing about taking those tiny steps is you get to feeling a bit more energy and it helps you to feel good about taking another little step, so it builds. It’s an upward spiral.

Jen: That’s it, because we’re so tired often we don’t have the energy to start. Yet that one step will create more energy. Perfect final sound bite there.

Thank you so much. Everybody, thank you so much. If you’ve liked this podcast interview, please like it and share it. Definitely go onto your Facebook page and let people to know to give a shout out or to tune in. We’ll be back with more great interviews in the weeks ahead. Thank you so much. I am so happy to be here and to share these awesome people with you.

Take care, everybody. Remember, it’s our job to try to live with energy to thrive. Bye for now.