Skipping meals, depriving, and cutting calories each day may be the WORST way to lose weight!

What if I told you, you may be the person who can lose weight on snacks? 

Yes, there are people who do well on mini meals!

If you live in a stressed-out body, tackling the constant chaos of corporate and household CEO, than you may be the body type which strives on mini meals.  

Mini meals/snacks keep your blood sugar stable. A stressed-out body craves the constant need for stabilization and energy.  

Here are some of my favorite go to snacks:

• ¹⁄₄ cup raw seeds or nuts with 1 tsp of Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips
• 1-2 Tablespoons sunflower seed butter, almond butter, hemp seed butter, or pumpkin seed butter mixed with ¼ scoop  vanilla collagen powder. Try Ancient Nutrition Vanilla Collagen or Ancient Nutrition Vanilla Protein Powder
• 1 sliced cucumber with sea salt + a dash of cayenne
• Fresh figs + ½ cup coconut yogurt
• 1 apple, ¹⁄₂ banana, ¹...

If you find yourself stuck in the holiday gut rut year over year, a little weight gain and an extra pair of stretchy pants in your Amazon cart, I encourage you to educate yourself on gut health.

Your gut bugs may be the one thing causing you to eat the stale Halloween candy or liking the social media ad for a sweatshirt which reads, “Thou Shall Not Try Me.” 

When there is an imbalance in your gut health (dysbiosis) it can cause an influx of toxins. These toxins can block hunger hormone receptors modifying your eating behaviors causing you to eat Aunt Mel’s fruit cake. The hunger hormones which regulate satiety are activated by binding to bacteria. So the feelings of hunger are coordinated with the diversity of your microbiota. (1)  

Symptoms from gut dysbiosis or toxic bacteria show up as “common” life nags.

Side effects of poor gut health include:

•  Fatigue
•  Weight gain
•  Gastrointestinal issues (IBS, IBD, Constipation,...

Three simple smart moves to avoid the Halloween bloat->

• Buy Halloween candy the day of at 50% off 
• Buy Halloween candy which makes you gag like Wax Lips or Good & Plenty (hint: parents don’t want their kids acting like Chucky from Child's Play anyway)
• Join my new program Gut Revival Holiday Edition

In a study funded by Yale University and the National Institutes of Health, it was found that high consumption of simple sugars could be affecting the composition of the gut microbiome. Sugar is also known to feed toxic gut bacteria and candida. When you create an environment of opportunistic bacteria you’re prone to symptoms associated with gut dysbiosis -> weight management issues, fatigue, digestive symptoms, headaches, skin issues, and more! 

Instead of stocking up on Halloween candy starting Oct. 1, try these Fall Superfood swaps so that you can avoid the Holiday weight gain.

Use Pumpkin in Cake Mixes

Pumpkin puree turns cake or cupcakes into...

I often hear. “I buy healthy food, it just gets shoved in the back of the fridge and by the time I remember it's there, it’s time to throw it out.”

Sound like you?

That’s why I love batch cooking. When you learn to batch cook you’ll be able to buy a few ingredients and spread them across multiple meals with little waste. 

One of my favorite gut healthy ingredients in parsley. Parsley has evidence to help with digestive problems, including irritable bowel syndrome. (1) Curly parsley also stays fresh in the fridge for days!

Here’s one of my favorite side dish recipes which has 7+ variations.

Quinoa Tabouli

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Yield: serves 4

Ingredients:

• 1 cup quinoa
• 1 cup water
• sea salt, optional
• sliced or chopped cucumber
• minced red onion
• chopped fresh scallion
• chopped fresh mint

Dressing:

• juice of several lemons
• Bragg's extra-virgin olive oil
• sea salt

Directions:

1. Bring rinsed and drained quinoa to a boil...

Gut health or detoxing doesn’t have to be hard, it can be as simple as 1 ingredient.

I first heard of mono eating from Fully Raw Kristina. She healed her hospital stricken body by consuming only fresh peaches for a week. Check her out here-> Top 3 Reasons to Eat 1 Fully Raw Mono-Meal a day.

Way back when our ancestors were running barefoot in search of food they didn’t have the convenience of making one of my #bigasssalads with 7 ingredients. Instead they ate from the ripest raspberry bush or the one animal they hunted. 

A mono meal is a snazzy way of saying, stuff yourself up on a meal that consists of ONE item. For example, cutting a watermelon in half, grabbing a spoon, and consuming it out of the core like it was a bowl. Eating four bananas or a big bowl of mashed sweet potatoes. 

The benefits of mono meals are to ease your digestive workload. If your gut is in overdrive from being over stressed by your lifestyle or is suffering from gut dysbiosis, you...

Nutrition bars, energy bars, meal replacement bars...whatever your use, I usually have 1-3 bars shoved in my purse or corporate bag. On the go bars help curb my hunger pains when I’m running meeting to meeting or carting kids around like their personal Uber driver. 

The older my kids get, the more time they spend on the go themselves. My oldest spends 15 hours in the gym a week. At 12 years old, “little kiddie” snacks don’t do his body good. In order for him to perform optimally his body requires nutrient dense foods.  

On the go protein tends to be the hardest for our family to consume. For starters my son and I are lactose intolerant so that rules out a few decent options like yogurt, cottage cheese, or string cheese. Most protein bars also contain milk and are loaded with an abundance of unnecessary ingredients like hidden sugar, additives, chemicals, whey or soy. It’s also a challenge finding a protein bar my son will actually eat due...

"Do I need a probiotic?"

"Do I need to spend a lot of money on a probiotic?"

"Do I need to take a probiotic everyday?"

Common questions I hear from my clients and the same questions I asked myself before diving deep into my gut health journey. Before my gut health education I too was hella confused by all the professional gut health jargon. 

The truth is, you are exposed to stores and websites LINED with probiotics supplements which leaves you confused and empty handed.  It can be a grueling task to choose the right probiotic supplement, so how do you decide which probiotic is right for you?

Here are simple tips to guide you towards choosing the best probiotic supplement.

REVIEW THE COLONY FORMING UNITS (CFUs)

CFUs, or Colony Forming Units, are the measuring unit of probiotics. This number must be clearly displayed on the probiotics bottle. To best suit the digestive system a probiotic should be in the range of 3-50 billion.  

Lower range CFU products can be...

Ding, ding, ding….smart device notifications.   

“Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad!”...kid notifications.

The constant pressure of pivoting from one notification to the other naturally increases stress levels.

When the body is stressed out it increases the release of the stress hormone cortisol. In abundance, cortisol becomes catabolic. It breaks the body down, slows bodily functions, causes depression, digestive issues, weight gain, and more. I often see my stressed-out clients with poor gut health struggling to overcome their chronic digestive symptoms.

Cortisol also regulates blood sugar levels so when you’re physically and mentally stressed it can cause blood sugar levels to increase. The blood sugar roller coaster effect causes an imbalance which increases your chances of binge eating, craving junk food, restless sleep, and uncontrollable mood swings.

The good news is there are natural supplements and herbs right in your kitchen for regulating blood...

“HELP! I love to drink and eat on the weekends. I don’t want to ruin everything I did during the week. “

Are your weekdays like: Get the kids out the door with pants on (shoes are iffy), attend 7 meetings a day while finding time to pee at least once, pick the kids up and cart them around like #ubermom, get the kids fed and into bed before we go bat-shit-crazy. 

No wonder it’s like “mom’s gone wild” on the weekend, look at all you do during the week!  If you continue down the path of “gone wild,” the 7 bottles of wine plus 5 sleeves of cookies every Saturday morning :) will eventually catch up with your booty and you’ll be +20 lbs at the end of the year. 

So, what’s a mom to do?  

6 Ways to Lose Weight When You Need to Decompress on the Weekends

You just completed another week of being SuperMom.  You gave everything you had and now you want to Netflix and Chill. 

Losing weight does...

Do you have trouble falling asleep? 

Or are you the type that tosses and turns between the hours of 2-4 am (that's a sign of gut imbalance)? And no matter what sleep app or supplement you try, you just can’t fall back to sleep which creates that morning hangover effect. 

Unfortunately when you’re tired you turn to the very things which are known to interrupt your sleep patterns.  Items such as coffee, sugar, processed foods, and alcohol. It’s a vicious cycle of “I need energy, I am tired, I need energy, I am tired.”

Your body rejuvenates itself during the sleep cycle.  If you want to be more productive, have more endurance, and be in a better mood, then you need to get quality Zzzzz’s!

The gut microbiome supports the way you sleep.  So when you’re caught up in the vicious cycle of feeding your gut with processed energy boosters the gut gets confused and produces hormones which directly affect sleep. A balance of the...