When Wellness Culture Replaces Nourishment With Hypervigilance

We've been trained to treat every meal as a risk calculation. Every plant has a compound you should know about. Every body becomes a collection of labels and syndromes — MCAS, SIBO, histamine intolerance — segmented into compartments until there's no cohesive whole left. The result is a culture drowning in wellness information but starved of actual nourishment.

I explore the gap between cognitive participation (researching, scanning, memorizing pathways) and embodied participation (chopping greens, cooking without a recipe, trusting your hands). I share why the kitchen could be a regulating environment for a nervous system stuck in hypervigilance — and how the land itself, especially in spring, is offering exactly what our bodies need if we'd stop pathologizing every compound and start paying attention.

This episode covers:

• Why the oxalate police show up every time someone says "eat spinach" — and what that reflex actually costs
• How labeling every symptom dismantles your sense of being a whole person
• The collective trauma in wellness culture that's made real food feel unsafe
• Why plant compounds aren't universally bad — the terrain of the person in front of you is what matters
• How cooking a simple seasonal meal can settle your nervous system more than another night of research
• My Meat & Veggie Hash framework: a flexible, seasonal method (not a recipe) for anyone who needs to get back in the kitchen

This episode is for you if you feel overwhelmed by contradictory wellness advice, scared of foods you used to enjoy, or stuck in research mode without ever feeling nourished.

If this episode resonated, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more people who are stuck in the same exhausting loops find their way here.

Rewilded Wellness — everything comes back to nature's way.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. And folks, we just entered Gemini season, the last leg of spring, before we transition into summer. So we are deep in it, deep into the spring, my friends. And I don't know about you, but here where I live, Southeast Pennsylvania, it is quite lush, and it really feels like gardening season is just taking off. After a long winter and a slow start to spring, it just finally feels like, yes, woohoo, things are happening. Now I live in zone 7B on the East Coast. And I probably have said this before, but I I get up in the morning and I kind of just let the garden tell me what needs doing that day, like what's going to be ready to harvest, you know, what do we need to be eating? So it's kind of dictating my menu. Um, and right now it's greens, greens, glorious greens. So, so, so, so many greens. Not just lettuce, you know, and of course, there's so many varieties of lettuce. I have probably, oh, I don't know, a lot. I've got, you know, romaine and red leaf and buttercrun, and then, you know, I've got different mixes of baby greens and so on and so forth. Uh, arugula, gorgeous arugula. Uh, I've had spinach all spring. We've been eating so much spinach. And then, of course, there's your darker leafy greens like kale and swiss chard and escarol. I didn't do any collards, I'll probably do those in the fall. Uh, not to mention things like dandelion. Um, I even have sorrel. I don't know if anybody knows what that is, but it's beautiful and it's kind of lemony. It's really nice. And then, of course, uh herbs as well. I count herbs honestly as a green, to be quite frank. Um, I've got a ton of parsley, ton of cilantro. The dill is just now starting to, you know, be prolific enough to utilize uh things like sage and oregano and thyme and um, gosh, I'm probably forgetting some. But, anyways, they're all like starting to really pop off. In my last episode, I talked about lemon balm. Honestly, I sometimes chop it up and eat it, right? And it's just the land is like handing us exactly what our bodies need after a long winter and a slow early spring to now, right? It's these foods that are very cleansing. Honestly, believe it or not, they are nutrient dense just in a different way than people think about, you know, meat and fats and other things. Um, they have a whole different role to play in our bodies, right? And they're just incredibly abundant right now. So what does that tell you, right? Now, also, I want to say if you and I were to go foraging together right now, which is something I love to do, the vast majority of what you'd be able to find, collect, and eat would be greens, leaves, leafy things, right? We're not really able to collect much else right now. Like we don't collect the nuts or the tubers, berries, very few flowers, right? It's mostly greens. And that's what nature seasonally provides in the spring, and it makes sense, right? And as you know, I've been a proponent of eating as seasonally as possible for years. It does take some relearning because we lost a little bit of track with that because we've had our food, you know, in stores that are just from the a global market versus local ones, right? And so eating seasonally is a core rewilded principle. It's like really just coming back to what nature is actually doing in where you live, right? Um and so I posted an Instagram video the other day. I was just chilling out, wanted to share some things that had been percolating for me. It's a rainy day. Otherwise, I would have tried to stand in the garden just to show you guys. And I wanted to just talk about greens, right? Just a simple embodied conversation around food that I think we genuinely need right now because I think a lot of people are just getting overwhelmed by internet information, trying to intellectualize everything to the nth degree. Um, when maybe something simple like eating more greens, especially in the springs, would just be a great idea, you know, to get out of that overwhelm, that information overload, and just take some kind of action. Right. So I did the little video, and of course, someone commented something to the extent of like, I agree, except for spinach. It's high in oxalates, and that's a huge problem, right? Now, I've noticed this over the years. Anytime it seems like I talk about food specifically, there's always someone who disagrees and points out one of the foods I mention and why it's a problem. And for some reason, the oxalate police always show up whenever I say the word spinach. I'm serious, like it's it's kind of comedic at this point. Someone feels the need to point out that oxalates are a huge problem with no further context, no curiosity, no conversation around it, right? So I want to sit with that for a second because that one sentence, seemingly maybe they think they were being helpful. Maybe they, I don't know, maybe they were well-meaning, seems small, uh, probably just like a reflex, like a knee-jerk reaction, right? Like it's really a loaded bomb of everything I think is broken and how we relate to food right now. And I want to talk about it honestly, not because I'm necessarily mad at the individual person saying it. I'm I'm not, but really the comment itself is a perfect snapshot of where we've landed as a culture around nourishment. I'll talk about oxalates so briefly, because that's not even what I'm really here to talk about. But there's nuance here. And I'm not saying that they they don't sometimes matter, but the real conversation is bigger than a single compound and a single plant. And I just don't think anyone is naming what this kind of relationship to food is actually costing us. So the comment isn't about spinach, it isn't about oxolets, it's someone like me shows up and says, eat more greens, right? It's a pretty uncontroversial statement, really, you know? It's it's even just like generous and kind. Like it's just very intuitive. And a lot of times the problem is the response isn't like, oh, cool, what's your favorite way to cook them? Or oh, I've never tried Swiss char, right? Like the response is a warning, a correction, like this micro correction about a single compound and a single plant. And it's delivered like it's like this was like the responsible thing to point out, like as if the person's saying it needs to be slapped on the wrist. You know what I mean? And I want to just say, like, how is that really helpful? Like, what does that comment actually do in the world? It doesn't teach anyone anything, it doesn't teach them how to cook, it doesn't make anyone feel safer in their body. It doesn't help someone who's scared of food exhale and try something new. It just drops a little fear grenade into the conversation and then it just walks away. But to me, the deeper problem, and this is the thing I actually want to spend this episode on, and that's this it's like it's how people are relating to food right now in the modern times, especially if you've spent a lot of time on a health journey researching or like, you know, spending any time in this world, okay. The way that we are relating to food is less nourishing than I can ever remember. And it's even like not about sensory pleasure either. It's it's not being framed as like a participation in our own well-being. But it's more like being put out there as like all these hidden threats that you need an expert to navigate them all. And every food has a dark side, and every plant has a compound you should know about, right? Because it could be bad for you. Right. So now every single meal you try to put together is a freaking risk calculation. It's like you're doing this mathematical equation, psychological threat thing in your freaking head every time you try to figure out what to eat. Right? Oh man. Anyways, I want to say this plainly because that you, my friends, is not awareness. That is hypervigilance. It's dressed up as like being informed. And I think it's making us collectively sicker. Now, here's the part that really gets me. Um, the same, that same like hypervigilance, that same like instinct to uh pull things apart into individual compounds and find the bad guy. It doesn't just like show up in how people relate to spinach, for example. It shows up in how they relate to their own bodies. All right, so take this a step further. So it's a it's something that I see all the time in my practice where somebody will come in and they can tell me what they have, right? Like they know all the technical terms, right? Whatever it is. Lately, it's like MCAS, histamine intolerance, dysautonomia, SIBO, my adrenals, my thyroid, my hormones, right? They know the terms, they know the labels, they know, or they might even mention, oh, I have a genetic mutation, blah, blah, blah, right? Whatever it is, right? And it's not wrong to put this information out there. I'm not slapping anyone's hands here per se. I'm just trying to make this connection where it's like people have learned. It's almost like we did it in school. We learned verbatim, we memorized shit, right? Like we learned all this stuff. And it takes time to really understand what it really means, right? Like people are researching like crazy, right? They're following people, they're trying to like literally accumulate information like crazy. They know all the trending supplements, they know all the health experts, right? But here's what I'm getting at. They know what it's like to live inside their own body. Like they know the sensations. I don't think we're disconnected from witnessing what we're actually feeling, these symptoms. Um, we can name them once we get into it, right? Like you can say, oh, I have this label, and then I'm like, well, what does that mean to you? Like, how does that express in your body? And then they'll tell me, right? Okay. But our instincts have become this like to reach for a label to compartmentalize or name a diagnosis, or, you know, file our symptoms into categories, right? And what happens over time is that what we're doing is segmenting ourselves into all these compartments that we've we're no longer a cohesive whole. Um, it's like this system of the body over here has a problem, and that system over there has a different problem. And this type of food is risky for me for this reason, right? And like this supplement I'm taking for this pathway or this mutation or this reason, right? And like we we kind of aren't asking, well, what's the overall terrain underneath all of this? Like, what might be one thing connecting what looks like 10 problems to get to like how you know what I'm saying? Like the gap is the whole thing, right? There's this cognitive participation versus knowing what to actually do that's an embodied participation, right? You see, you can memorize everything about, I don't know, MC, MCAS. Everyone's talking about that one. Like you can memorize everything about the nervous system. You can watch endless health content, you can know literally every pathway if you want to for some reason, or what markers mean. Like you can even go online and look up HTMA and start studying what the markers mean. Like, right? Like you can come in and be like, I know I have this ratio and it means this, right? And it's like we're trying to cognitively like feel like we can understand what is going on, but yet we still don't know how to make ourselves a grounding meal consistently, right? You know what I'm saying? Um, you can spend, you know, three hours a night researching all the protocols, all the things, and never actually spend 20 minutes in the kitchen with your hands in the food. You know what I'm saying? And I think that we've gotten to this place where we have this idea that the research is the work, right? Like the intellectual knowledge is the same as doing. Like that if you just get the information right and you start to know what the heck you're talking about, your body somehow your body's gonna follow suit. But it won't. Because your body doesn't respond to information, it responds to rhythm, it responds to repetition, it responds to safety, to actually being fed, you know, nourished, food rhythmically, timely, circadianly. And so the other thing that this is taking me into is like what I wanted to do with that video specifically was I wanted to show up and talk about an embodied habit. I just wanted to talk about food. I wanted to talk about greens. Honestly, the joy of what spring is offering us. It is delightful to go out and be like, wow, look at what's growing in my garden, right? Something so simple, something so grounding. And here's what I found over the years is like you can barely have a healthy conversation about food on the internet anymore. There is so much trigger around what's healthy and what's not. And there's always seemingly someone who wants to correct you. You can feel it, this collective tension. It's like we have a collective trauma in wellness culture around food, right? I mean, there's even influencers that if they really were honest and showing you your food, you'd be like, wait a minute, hold up. What? What are you doing over there? You know what I'm saying? And so I feel like it's important to keep as many real foods on the table as possible to sustain us because we've been taught to suspect everything and to eliminate way too much stuff, right? Like we've got the freaking carnivore diet, for example, trending again. Like there's always a diet circulating that's like the one that's eliminated a ton of stuff. And it's like righteously right. You know what I mean? And but we but what that's doing is it's it's teaching us to eliminate entire food groups, to narrow down and narrow down and narrow down and narrow down until somehow like the plate looks safe to fit the theology of the diet, but then the body doesn't feel nourished long term. And modern wellness culture and even modern culture in general have taken us away from the land and the connection to our food. Even growing our own food, the joy of that. A lot of people think that's like, oh my God, I have to grow my own food. Like they think it's a chore and a problem. And not to say that it doesn't require effort, but like there's a huge disconnect. And it's taken us away from this connection to our food, which is deeply relational. It's also taken us away from our kitchen, right? Now we have potions and powders and individual things, like here's my individual electrolytes, here's my bottle of collagen powder, here's my this, this, like 52 freaking products, right? Like we have zero connection to. We no longer are expected to cook because someone else can make it easier for us, right? Do you see what I'm saying? So we've been trained to outsource because we're trying to optimize. And like instead of cooking and learning a skill uh that's very relational, we are just like, let's research, let's research. And here's what I wish more people understood the kitchen can be a very regulating environment, right? There's so many layers to this, but like just actually being present, you know, taking the food, cleaning it, chopping it, mixing it together, you know, stirring, simmering, tasting, like all the things using your hands, your body, right? It it's a profoundly different experience than ordering something online and having it shipped to you, and then constantly scrolling wellness content, right? Like, I'm not saying don't do those things ever. I'm just saying the pendulum has swung too far. And only one of these builds embodiment, right? Like we become hyper-vigilant the more we scroll, right? The more we consume and we can't do something with it. Like that's really what it is, is this overconsumption, right? Like if you think about, we know if someone were to binge a lot of unhealthy food, they would feel gross and bloated and likely gain weight, right? Like, what happens when we over-consume information? Like, what does that do to our mental load and our cognitive load and our psyche, right? So when you're cooking, you're in your body. You're actually participating in your own nourishment. You're learning a skill and you're engaging your senses. And you are making decisions based on what's in front of you, like what's available, what your body is asking for. When we're constantly outsourcing and we're trying to like have everyone else like read everyone else's opinion and read all the information and da-da-da-da-da, we're in our head, right? And it's very easy to start scanning for potential threats. It's also very easy to absorb other people's opinions, maybe their warnings, maybe their projections, maybe their their certainties, right? Like, unless you have a really good filter all the time around everything you're consuming, you're accumulating all this information too that you you don't need and can't even use all of, right? Um and that has a toll. It can definitely have a toll on your system, right? Um, the rhythm of the kitchen, though, it has a sensory experience to it. And there's like this kind of, I don't know, quiet competence of like knowing how to actually feed yourself, right? For someone whose nervous system is constantly tracking threat, that actually is medicine. And it's it's it's because it's no longer about like trying to perfect like the logical food, like the food. Okay, what does this calories, uh, nutrients, uh, you know, blah, blah, blah, what category, you know, blah blah blah, blah, blah. It's just the act of preparing real food that either you grew yourself or grows seasonally or is fresh and beautiful, like it really just tells your body, like, I'm here, I'm present, I'm taking care of myself, you can stand down, right? And a lot of people are not getting there anymore. They're not understanding that, they're not living that because we've been pulled away from the kitchen for so long. And I feel like it's like cooking, it just feels like one more thing to do instead of the thing. That might actually settle someone or stabilize someone or feel like, okay, that was very enriching. I took care of myself, right? And but instead, we'd it's like it's almost like we'd rather scroll or we'd rather hit a button, have someone deliver something, right? Like there's just this huge disconnect. And I'm not suggesting that this is like morally wrong or like some personal failure. What I'm trying to say is this, like our nervous systems are now like trained differently. Like we're we we like we want novelty, we want like stimulation, we we want to feel like if we know something, then we're good. But like instead of like stillness or uh ritualized practical skill, this practical ritualized skill of like putting together a proper meal, like a healthy, nourishing meal, you know, we don't feel the safety in that version of like grounded stillness because we've like the cognitive overload is more stimulating, right? Like, and the novelty of it is more stimulating, right? And we'd rather stay there. But the thing is, is, you know, um, our nervous systems can be retrained from this kind of like place that we've landed in, culturally speaking, nowadays. I think it's important to talk about this because it's only going to accelerate you guys. Like there's way more coming around information overload, in case you're not like in tune with that, that is like only going to accelerate. Um so, you know, the part that really gets me is we've pulled apart every plant and missed the terrain, right? We've gotten really granular. We're pulling individual constituents out of every plant, naming them, pathologizing them, right? Like you can almost talk about, you can't even talk about any food anymore without someone flagging a problem. Now I've lived through this for a long time. I've watched this happen for a long time, right? It's still happening. Um, oxalates, histamine, whatever, foad maths, uh, sulfur, you know, goitrogens, phytates, lectins, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And look, we know about these compounds, right? I'm not saying there's not somewhere where they might matter. There are absolutely going to be people for whom these things are creating uncomfortable reactions, right? I work with those people. I'm one of those people, right? I personally have to be more cautious with high sulfur foods myself in accumulation, right? It's a part of my personal physiology, my story. But I'm not here to walk around telling people all people sulfur is bad. I don't think sulfur is bad. I think my terrain, a lot of that's a big can of worms. Like that's a huge conversation for me to have to be able to explain to you. But at certain times, under certain conditions, you know, it needs some pivots and adjustments so my body can handle sulfur better. And that balance does shift over time, right? And that's a thing that we don't talk about. Like, people aren't saying, especially when they blurt out high oxalates are a huge problem, right? Like, I don't think that they are universally a problem for everyone. They may be in certain people and certain bodies in the way that people are using certain foods, right? Certain terrains, certain conditions, certain patterns, even, right? And the question worth asking to me isn't are axalists really bad for all of us? Like, should we all just freaking avoid them? The question worth asking is like, okay, what is going on in the physiology of the person who can't really tolerate them right now? Like, what needs to be corrected, balanced, supported? Um, so that their their terrain can handle more variety, not less. Maybe, maybe they have to be a little more cautious about a food, but not necessarily super strict about a food, right? Like, how can we, and maybe they do for a time. Uh like there's been times where I had to take things out, but then I became afraid of the thing, and really I could handle the thing. Do you see what I'm saying? I like to keep as many real foods on the table as possible, as long as the body is okay with them, right? Because here's what happens instead when we don't do that. When someone hears whatever food, like we're gonna use oxalates as an example because it's the one that came up. Someone hears oxalates are a huge problem. And now there's like in the back of their brain, sometimes they're thinking, well, shoot, there's spinach in this meal that so-and-so made, or I have all this spinach in my yard that I grew. And now they're like kind of half clocking, like, oh, shoot, should I eat it? Like, oh, is it a bad next thing you know, it's like, well, what other foods have oxalates? And then it's like the almonds, and then the list, and then next thing you know, you know, they're down to like way less, say, foods. Their gut microbiome has a narrower threshold of diversity coming in, right? And, you know, a narrowed ecosystem doesn't become resilient, it becomes fragile. And the hypervigilance itself, that constant scanning, like the tight grip around every food choice, that creates a different kind of stress in the body. And honestly, I think that stress is far more harmful in the long run than the oxalate ever maybe was for someone, right? And so the blanket statement, like this compound is bad, avoid it, doesn't solve anything. It doesn't allow for repair. It doesn't create understanding. It just adds another potential restriction to somebody who's already overwhelmed, right? And it takes what could be a nuanced conversation about terrain and turns it into another reason to be afraid of real food. Meanwhile, here's what nature's doing: it's providing dozens and dozens of greens that don't all have high oxalates. Like it's providing seasonal variety that our bodies evolve to expect, even herbs. Herbs, like, you know, I just listed a whole buy of all of them. I have every herb that you can think of culinary in my garden. And they have powerful supportive properties that almost no one is eating in meaningful amounts, right? Like just the other day, I put like two entire cups of parsley in my meal. And that, like, it's not a garnish. It's a food, it's a medicine. Like I think we would have eaten way differently than we are now because we would have eaten with the abundance that was available to us, right? We wouldn't have just put like a tablespoon of parsley, because you know, when we go to the store, that's all we can buy in those stupid little tiny plastic. Well, hopefully you guys aren't buying those, but you know what I'm talking about? Or like a dried jar. Like I remember the McCormick spices my mom always had, and they were these teeny tiny, itty bitty little, little, little things. And I'm like, why on earth would anyone ever sell something so tiny, right? This is where we are. We're in these, like, it's it's narrowing our our mindset around how much of certain things to consume, right? You see what I'm saying? Anyways, that was a little side tangent there, but it it takes us like living with the land to see what's available and what's sensible, right? Whatever the season is handing us. Um, and you're not gonna learn this nuance when you just get some kind of slap on the wrist, a warning about oxalates, right? Like we learn it by participating, by growing something, by going to the farmer's market, by joining a CSA, by seeing what's available right now locally, and buying even what looks good and fresh to us, right? Even by standing in our kitchen and figuring out what our bodies can do with what's in front of us, you know, by paying attention, by being attuned, not with fear uh like over what thing is in this food, but being more curious. And that way we can really learn to read our own terrain without someone else's blanket statement running the show. Right? There is a time and a place to have the conversation about oxalates, I promise, but it is not in a blanket statement on the internet for all people, assuming that it is wrong for them. Do you see what I'm getting at? You guys get my point. All right. So let me give you something practical because the thing that I'm circling around is like, how do I teach people conceptual frameworks versus like black and white things, right? Like, so that's how I think about food. Um, I'm not like a huge recipe follower. I think the way that we would have created recipes would have been literally by having what was available and making it into something and then writing it down. Not finding the thing that's already written down first and then making it only, right? Like, which is where we're at collectively today. We're like, what's the recipe? How do I make this thing? Instead of like, here's what's available to me, let me turn it into something. Do you see what I'm saying? So I want to give you something practical, something you can actually use. I call it Lydia's Meat and Veggie Hash. It's a method, it's it's not an exact recipe, it's like a seasonal kitchen framework, and it covers a lot of bases for people who've been drowning in information, overwhelmed about what to eat, how to cook. They they need something simple to land on that actually nourishes them. Okay. So here's here's a formula. And I will have this in a blog post written up for you, okay? Something that I have in my client course portal in the recipe uh section, and I've written down probably 30 ways you could make this, you know, just so you can see examples. Um, but it's a formula. It's it's your meat, okay? So it's protein, a fat, vegetables, herbs, spices, seasonings, maybe some broth plus thyme. Okay. That's it. Once you understand the method, you can cook this meal a thousand different ways using whatever's growing in your garden, whatever's locally available to you, whatever's sitting in your fridge. It can also teach you to shop differently uh as well, by the way. But my motto is just keep it real, keep it simple, you know? So the base is this. Let's start with the base. We're gonna start with one pound of ground meat because everyone knows they can buy a pound of ground meat, right? Like those little blocks of ground meat, okay? I buy a lot of my meat from the farmer's market or a local store where the meat is coming from local farms. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I buy meat that's I get it at Costco in bulk. You know, you just do what you gotta do. But you choose the type of ground meat, whether it's turkey, beef, lamb, pork, venison, bison, chicken, I don't care what it is. It's whatever you like, your family likes, you currently have the digestive capacity for, because some of those have a little more fat than others, right? Some of them are a little more dense than others. Okay, so you have your your protein, right? And that can serve four or six people with this formula, right? Like depending on the person's appetite, the size of the human, maybe a tiny human, maybe a regular adult man who works really hard, needs to eat way more. I raised four boys, so this would have fed us maybe all. But we'd have to add something to it, right? So when they were littler, it would have stretched further. You see what I'm saying? Um, sometimes, you know, it's maybe one or two people, and then that gives you leftovers, which is great because you want that. You want to batch the food and freeze it, right? For later. So you've got your meat, your protein, okay. Um if you're not a meat eater, you can use legumes. That's fine. But for the sake of this, we're we're going with animal protein, okay? Then vegetables. Um, and here's where I want you to think differently than a recipe because the goal is more about getting more veggies. One to three cups of vegetables per serving per person. That's anywhere from six to eighteen cups total if you're making a full batch. To keep it simple, I'm trying to combine two categories. We're doing something leafy or green, something lower glycemic, okay? Kale, collard, swish charb, spinach, box oil, what whatever. Okay. And then something more starchy. We have anything from moderate to more starchy, like, okay, we could be carrots, turnips, beets, some type of root, some type of tuber. Uh, it could be a potato, sweet potato, winter squash, rutabaga, uh, whatever you like. Okay. Just start with those two specific categories, just to keep it really, really simple. Those are also going to cover a lot of mineral needs that you have as well. Now, you can expand later when you get comfortable, when you have more capacity to digest more variety of things. So if you start with something green and something starchy, if you want to make it even more simple, it could be orange. Right? Pick those two things. Learn to work with a bunch of them, right? Expand later. So the framework is flexing around what's in season, what your body can handle. If you don't like a particular green or you don't tolerate it, just use what works for you. You don't have to eliminate greens altogether just because whatever, one thing bothers you. There's dozens to try. Okay. Then we want to think about flavor builders, right? We've got spices and then we've got herbs, okay? And even aromatics. Um, so herbs, spices, we've got spices like turmeric and cumin and paprika, right? And even peppercorns. And then we've got our herbs. We've got like oregano and thyme and sage and rosemary, right? Um, and then we have more aromatic things like I'm using a lot of chives. I have chives in my garden right now. I can't eat a lot of those. I have to have just a small amount, so that's what I do. Um, certainly we could also include fat. You do not have to cook with fat if your meat has some fat in it. If you're a slow oxidizer, you have poor fat digestion, you could cook it in broth. You could cook it in water. Just want to put that out there. Everyone seems to think they have to cook with a lot of fat. But you can use fat, you could use ghee, butter, duck fat, lard, whatever type of fat you prefer. I personally prefer animal fat. Um, we'll talk about that another time. But again, it doesn't have to be a fat. You could use this little bit of homemade broth or simply water. That's totally fine. So this method itself is almost too simple to just call a recipe, right? But here's basically what you're gonna do: you're gonna heat a skillet, you're gonna add either your fat or your liquid, you're gonna brown your meat, you're gonna add in your seasonings, then you're gonna add in your more dense things, like your starchy things, because they have more density and they take longer to cook. Uh, dark leafy greens take longer to cook than lighter leafy greens. So, like, you know, kale versus spinach, right? Kale is gonna take longer than spinach. Um, anyways, so you're just gonna cook all that together. You're gonna simmer it. I'll give you the recipe below, and then you're gonna taste it and adjust. Sometimes I'm in the mood. I want to add some apple cider vinegar at the end. I just made some lovely chive-infused apple cider vinegar, and I'm just wanting to put that on at the end to give it just a little more flavor. Some people may not be tolerating vinegar right now. That's fine. You've did you get the point. I'm giving you the base. You can adjust and taste and change it up as you like. Okay. You can top with more fresh herbs, um, eat it as a complete meal as it is, or you can serve it over rice or quinoa, or with some roasted potatoes, or in a salad bowl, or in a lettuce wrap. I have endive, and man, that makes such a good lettuce wrap. Um, right? Endless possibilities. And I'll give you an example. Just this past week, I made um ground turkey. It was one and a half pounds. It was the kind you get from Costco. I think it's called Plainville. Plainville Turkey is the brand or whatever. And I was like, I'm just gonna cook this whole thing up. Um I used one cup of chives, two cups of parsley, eight cups of different greens from my garden, four cups of carrots, and I used broth. I had some turkey broth that I had frozen in the freezer. I think I used three or four cups of that. Um, then we served it over brown rice. Um, and I added chopped fresh oregano when I ate it because I wanted more. Right? You get the point. That's an example. I also add added cumin, turmeric, smoked paprika, salt, pepper for my spices. I didn't use a cooking fat. So there's an example. And the larger point is like this is not this is a framework. There's nothing that's mandatory. You have to do it this way or it doesn't work. If fat feels heavy right now, go lighter. If broth feels supportive, use it generously. If you do better with more starch, add more, right? Because the framework is to flex around you. You don't flex around it. Um, and that's what I mean by embodied nourishment, not researching the perfect meal, like someone giving you a list of foods you have to eat and then recipes to go with those foods, right? Like not avoiding every compound that someone else flagged on the internet as dangerous, like not narrowing and narrowing until the plate looks safe and the body doesn't feel fed. Just like you participating, using your hands, trusting your body enough to try, building the quiet competence of like just knowing how to feed yourself without outsourcing it to experts and influencers who've never seen your kitchen or your garden or your life. All right. So again, I'll have the full recipe framework in the blog in the show notes below. And here's what I want you to sit with. You can know a lot of intellectual information about the body. You can know a lot about chemical compounds and plants, you can know about syndromes and lists and labels and pathways and black and white things, like what's good and what to avoid, you know, right? You can follow all the experts, memorize all this stuff, and still find yourself standing in front of the fridge with no idea what on earth to make, eat, or maybe even scared to try. Right? I know how hard this is, and a lot of people have gotten so triggered around what's going to work for them because their body feels unpredictable. Like, you know, one day a food is fine, the next day they're not sure it's fine anymore. So then the instinct is like, oh, I better go research why this food doesn't feel good in my body, and then they narrow more, they control more, right? But that hypervigilance doesn't settle the nervous system that you just keep scanning. And so the gap is between knowing and doing, and between do I need to keep researching or do I just need to nourish my body, right? There's it's it's the gap between cognitive participation and embodied participation is wide. And this to me is where the real work lives, right? We have to filter out what we're reading and say, is this for me or can I just throw it away? You know what I mean? Because right now, most people don't need more wellness information. They're drowning in it. What they need is to get back into their bodies, to eat more greens, to cook something from scratch, to stop treating every meal like a risk calculation and start experiencing what it actually feels like to be nourished. You really don't have to get it perfect. You just have to start, pick a green, grow a green, chop something, try it with something you've never tried it before, taste it, right? Anyways, all right. Well, I hope this was helpful. Um, I really enjoy creating new things in the kitchen. Like I like repetition, but I also like novelty. So I find that this framework is really nice for both things. Um, it's also very practical. Once you get into a flow, you can make it a million different ways. So if this conversation resonated with you and you are looking to go deeper with a guide to help you get into all that nuance and let your body lead and kind of follow that and create a path. Forward for your you on your health journey. That's the kind of work we do together in minerals and microbes. Um, it's really built around this philosophy that I'm talking to you about today. It's we're reading the actual terrain of your body so we can steady your nervous system and really rebuild from there. A lot of people are trying to optimize in bodies that need to be stabilized. And so I like to take the rewilded approach in the work that I do with my clients. Everything comes back to kind of nature's way, nature's philosophy. And I only aboard a few new clients at a time so I can give appropriate attention to everyone. So as of today, um, Saturday, May 23rd, I'm recording this. I do have space for three new clients in June of 2026. You can find all the details below in the show notes about minerals and microbes. Read it over thoroughly, make sure this is the right fit for you. If you have any questions at all, please email me. I'm totally happy to hear from you just to make sure. Um, and if you're enjoying this podcast, you know, subscribe to it, leave me a review, share it with somebody. Um, it helps more people who are stuck in the same exhausting loops find their way here. So please share it. And until we meet again next time, I hope you guys all are gonna find something green to eat and enjoy. And until then, uh stay wild, stay well, and enjoy the holiday weekend.