It’s time for another book review and giveaway! This time it’s about energy healing. How does the doctrine of the LDS Church fit with alternative healing, which means healing that is beyond allopathic medicine? You will find the answers to that question in the above pictured book by Tamara Laing. Tamara also wrote the book, The Healing Arts: a Gift from God. You can read a review of the first book here.
Here is what Tamara says about her second book, pictured above:
Over the summer of 2016 I wrote a second book, An LDS Approach to Energy Healing. The new book includes MANY generational healing and spiritual gifts quotes. There are step by step instructions on how to do Deep Emotion Release (DER) on yourself or others. This is my favorite method to clear Generational Issues, and does so through the eyes. It is what the spirit has taught me to do over the years as I’ve worked with family, neighbors, clients and helped conference attendees.
This new book is a “HOW TO” book on one form of Energy Healing. It teaches one approach (while my first book, Healing Arts – A Gift from God contains LDS validation for many energy techniques). Like my first book, this second book also has two chapters on darkness vs. light. The new book has a few unique lists which may be helpful for facilitators. This book also has practical steps on how to “dance in the rain” even while life’s seeming chaos surrounds you.
Here are some of the chapter topics from the book:
Power
About Doctrine
Spiritual Gifts
Deep Emotional Release
Forgivness
Gratitude
Praise
Faith Talk Statements and Imageries
Charity
Quotes About the Eyes
Mental Illness
Generational Releasing
Generational Quotes– General Authorities and Scripture
If you are into energy healing, this book will empower you. If you don’t know anything about energy healing, this book will open your eyes to a whole new world. Please enter the giveaway by making a comment below. Drawing will be held on Sat. August 26, 2017.
Here it is the first week of August and our summer is winding down! Noooo! I hate this! Summer must last forever! For some odd reason, Arizona loves to start school the first week of August. It’s crazy! Normally as a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool homeschooler I pay no heed to what the public schools are doing. But when I have a kid who loves to play on the high school football team, I do have to go with some of the public school flow. Sigh! Good bye summer!
High school started today, with released time seminary, and then our once a week family homeschool group starts next week almost two hours away. I have a feeling life is getting a lot more complicated! (I will be driving a lot more! Especially with another kid starting football soon!)
Thank goodness we still have a book I’m reading aloud to the kiddos that helps me hang on to the season. This book is the best read aloud for making me feel like I’m still on summer vacation. I blogged about it before when I read it to my older kids, and now I’m reading it to the younger ones. It’s Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright.
What I love about this book is that it combines two of the funnest elements in the world: cousins and summertime! You can’t get better than that, right?! I have such fond memories of staying at my grandma’s home, trying to go to sleep but talking late into the night with my best cousin-friend my age, Lisa, giggling under the covers when we could hear Grandpa snore because he would make the whole house shake! The guest bedroom we shared was right underneath his bed!
I am so grateful my kids have cousins their age. We’ve made some great memories this summer working and playing together, on both sides of the family tree. We played with our St. George cousins in May and then our Utah, India, and Maine cousins in June and July. The book, Gone Away Lake, is about two cousins who have a grand summer adventure of exploring together. It has the best line ever in the history of literature about how cool a cousin is:
“If cousins are the right kind, they’re best of all: kinder than sisters and brothers, and closer than friends.”
So in honor of this cool quote about cousins, I am posting pictures of adventures with our cousins this summer.
It also has a yummy quote about the kindness of others:
“Maybe we benefit from the providence of others more often than we know.”
There’s also a baking tip in the book. Mrs. Cheever, one of the characters in the story, says that the proper way to ice a chocolate cake, is to do so generously with chocolate frosting, so that it looks “built” like an adobe home. Mmm, mmm, yess! Lay it on thick please!
This is one of those books where you have to read it while you suspend your parental judgment of safe reality. It reminds me of the book My Side of the Mountain. A few years ago one of my friends in my homeschool group, Katie, asked all the moms of the 12 and unders to read that book. Another mom friend, Kim, delved into it and then came back saying, “There’s no way this would happen in real life! Would any of us really allow one of our children to leave home, go live on a mountain for months on end, and not go searching to bring the kid home?!”
I feel the same way about this book. There’s no way I would just let my kids go wandering through fields and be gone for hours on end, striking up a friendship with two complete strangers, without searching for them and then checking out these people. It bothers me that the main characters hide the friendship with strangers from their parents. That’s definitely something to talk about. Other than that, it’s a great book!
I love all the little mentions of different plants and birds. I look them up on my tablet while I’m reading the book and show the kids the pictures, and then sometimes I draw the image for my drawing lesson of the day, hoping to inspire them to draw more. This is a delightful book that I hope you all read! May cousins and summer live on forever!
One of my most favorite things in the world is listening to a great audiobook with my kids while we get ready for the day, prepare meals, and do other chores. Or go on a road trip. We have listened to a lot of books and stories on CD, like The Story of the World, featuring the voice of Jim Weiss. I have found it a superbly stealthy way of teaching my kids history. It’s painless! I just pop a CD in the morning while my kids did their morning chores or in the car while we drove to an activity. If I am really on top of my homeschooling game, I pull out the corresponding activity book and quiz them at the next meal. My kids have a great grasp of history just from this method. The 19 year old can even quote portions word for word because he’s heard it so often. I love that they learn history this way! They see history in terms of a story, which is the way it sticks in the brain. We’ve also loved all of Jim’s retelling of classics available from his web site. One year for Christmas everybody got one of his autographed CDs as a stocking stuffer, after I met him at a homeschool event in Utah.
Despite my love for books on CD, more and more I am loving listening to books on my tablet and phone, whether at home or on the go. Why? Because I don’t have to deal with scratched discs that skip tracks or freeze up. I don’t have to find storage space for the discs. And if the books on CD are from the library, I don’t have to remember to return the discs and make sure I have all of them. (I can’t tell you the number of times the library has called my home letting us know we returned a case with a missing disc. I think they knew us by our first names just for that reason alone.)
For our last trip to Utah and Idaho, I didn’t load up on CDs from the library like I used to always do as in the photo above, because I knew I had some great goodies magically waiting for us on my phone. My husband actually got the stack above, before our trip to Nauvoo, I’m not that ambitious, LOL, I usually get about 1/3 the amount for a road trip.
I love using these two resources.
First, the Classic Tales podcast. A few months ago, I listened to Pride and Prejudice on this podcast. So delightful! It was the complete unabridged version. Lately, my two youngest have been listening to Peter Pan on this podcast while they do dishes and clean the bathroom every Saturday. Fun!
Second, books from Audible using the Audible app. You don’t have to be an Audible member to buy and use Audible books and the app. You can read all about that here from homeschooling mom Sarah Mackenzie. Then go here to see all the great deals Sarah has rounded up.
You have to buy the deals through the links from Sarah, if you just go to Amazon or Audible you won’t get the savings. You will see great deals like Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water for only $3.95, The Moffats for $1.95, and Little House in the Big Woods for $3.95. There a a ton more, so go get some! Sweet!
Happy road tripping and working as you listen away!
Whew! I’ve been busy traveling the past week, to Utah, then Idaho, for my daughter’s graduation from BYU-I! Remember when I took here there to check it out? It was four years ago exactly to the week when she graduated! Here’s where I wrote about that. Then when we dropped her off six months later in the first week of January 2014, I wrote about that here. By earning her bachelor’s of science degree in software engineering, in 3 1/2 years, she has shown that she doesn’t let grass grow under her feet, that’s for sure. I’m so pleased at her commitment! She is a driven, bright girl. One of those semesters included an internship in Kansas City, where she worked for Garmin, coding programs for their GPSes. She is so smart and hardworking that they invited her back.
We had such a lovely time at her graduation. The speakers were marvelous! I especially enjoyed Elder Devn J. Cornish’s keynote commencement speech about raising our standard to be what pleases God. (You can listen, read, or watch here, scroll down to the ones listed for July 18, 2017 and listen to all the ones for that day: President of BYU-I Henry J. Eyring, (not his father Henry B. Eyring, who is in the First Presidency,) Elder Kim B. Clark, and Elder Cornish.)
My daughter with three of her brothers.
The weather was perfect, even though the forecast on my husband’s phone said it would rain. A bunch of my extended family was there, including my brother who currently lives in India and one of his daughters. Both my brothers were there in fact, with most of my other brother’s family, his sister-in-law who flew in from Virginia to graduate from the online Pathway program, and my parents.
Here’s a picture of most of the entourage. (Sorry the picture’s kind of blurry, when I get the pictures back from my brother that he took with his fancy camera they will be better.)
My daughter received the honor of being chosen as one of two of the students to speak at her college of engineering’s convocation. So she spoke in front of over 500 people. Maybe it was even 1000! She did a super job. Later she told me that her knees were knocking the whole time she gave the speech, but you would never have been able to tell.
As a homeschooling mom who mentored my daughter through homeschool-based high school (she took a few Williamsburg Academy classes but did not get a diploma) this event was definitely Payback Day for Mom (me). Your child can get to college and get through college without a high school diploma! I credit having a homeschooling community, specifically Liber Academy, for providing her with LEMI Scholar Projects. She loved them all! I am excited for the new chapter in life ahead of her.
August 5th | 3:00p-9:30p
SLC, UT
Youth and young adults (14+) Register now
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We believe that your priceless purpose is begging you to live beyond your wildest dreams.
We believe that your power to choose victory in the battles of your life can never be taken from you.The Lionheart movement is designed to champion heroes across the world as they strive to embody their divine identities. The movement’s next major leap will happen August 5th , 2017, when 1,000 heroes, warriors, champions, and friends of Lionheart rally at the South Towne Expo Center to create the event that will unite and equip the leaders of our generation with the power to live with purpose, triumph over obstacles, manifest virtue, love unconditionally, cultivate unconquerable souls, and ultimately, choose to be free.It’s time for you to rise to your very real, very unique destiny – and to do so now.We need you because YOU are a HERO.
Here are a few videos to watch tomorrow to remember what the day is really about. You probably won’t watch all of these, but I am compiling them anyway for future use for me to use over the years with my own kids, so they are finally in one place! I hope somebody else benefits from these as well.
This next video is from the musical “Cries of Freedom” which is performed at the Colonial Fest in the SCERA Park in Orem, UT every year. I highly recommend it! It traces the movement of freedom through Western Civilization. You can see my pictures of it here. (If you live on the Wasatch Front, the Colonial Fest is the best event you can attend for the holiday. It is full of exhibits about life during the Revolutionary War, with people dressed up in full costumes, and lots of activities for the kiddos to do. The best part of all is that it’s free!)
How about a little levity for the day?
The next videos are probably the best reenactment of the Declaration ever on film:
Buy the John Adams HBO series, part 2, Independence, on Google Play, if you want to watch more where of where the above clips came from. I don’t recommend the whole series for kids, but older kids might sit still for the whole hour of part 2. which is the salient part relating to the holiday.
Here’s David Barton, a Christian historian, below.
Here’s why Paul Revere is so important:
The video below is from Disney’s “Swamp Fox” series. It is based on a real man, Francis Marion, nicknamed the “Swamp Fox” who helped fight the Revolutionary War battles in the south. He was an elusive, guerrilla fighter. Most people have seen Disney’s Johnny Tremain movie, but few know about this other Disney production based on the Revolutionary War. Johnny Tremain was not a real person, but the Swamp Fox was.
Now, a blast from my childhood past with Schoolhouse Rock videos:
Lastly, more from the Muppets! Happy Independence Day!
I got the following text from Tom Woods, PhD in history from Columbia and New York Times best-selling author. I am passing it on because he so succinctly covers what Independence Day/the Fourth of July is really about:
Independence Day is coming up, and I wonder how many people really get why it matters.
In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”
Zzzzzzzz.
The real principles were more like the following.
(1) No legislation without representation.
The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government.
This is why a Supreme Court ordering localities around is anti-American in the truest sense. It operates according to the opposite principle from the one the American colonists stood for.
(2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one.
(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality. The Parliament’s view, on the other hand, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional.
So the colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution. Sound familiar?
So let’s recap: local self-government, secession, and strict construction. Not exactly the themes you learned in school.
So listen to the above video clip and as well as the one below about the author of the Declaration of Independence to learn more. Let’s forever preserve the spirit of ’76!
I love the idea of having an Independence Day Ceremony, like a Passover Seder, with your family and friends gathered around. The idea is to have special words and food that we repeat every year to help us remember the deep spiritual meaning of Independence Day. You can find the script here, thanks to Dennis Prager of Prager University. I will be going shopping on Saturday to get these special foods and I hope you will be too! Help your kids know that the day is more about hot dogs and firecrackers.
This is the Smarty Pants Stroganoff recipe from the Trim Healthy Mama cookbook, with a simple spring mix and cherry tomato salad and homemade ranch dressing. We had it for my husband’s birthday and it was divine!
So you have skimmed or read the Trim Healthy Mama plan book or cookbook and your head is swimming with all these unusual new to you foodie words: MCT oil, oat fiber, pressed peanut flour, gluccie, not naughty noodles, stevia, erythritol, Super Sweet blend, Gentle Sweet blend, collagen, THM baking blend, gelatin, whey protein powder, psyllium husks, and more. I have been immersed in the whole food world for years, but I had never heard of most of these foods, considered healthful foods by the THM authors. If you are like me after reading the book, you want to do the plan but you know you can’t afford to go buy all of these new foods at once.
OK, take a deep breath and reeee-lax. Don’t let all those pretty pictures in the cookbook get you thinking you have to bake all the recipes today! Tell your saliva glands to calm down! You couldn’t possibly eat all of these beautiful foods at once, so don’t worry about not being able to make them all at once. Know that this is a beautiful journey you get to be on every day, enjoying the foods one day at a time.
This is the Chocolate Chip Baby Frap, basically a chocolate chip milkshake. Yum!
You can do the THM plan with what you have in your kitchen cupboards right now, as long as you are somewhat into whole foods. If you just have Twinkies and Doritos and your idea of a vegetable is corn chips, then yes, you do have some shopping to do right away. Otherwise, take what you have and get to work. Go to this great study guide here and start classifying your food as carbs, fat, and protein, after you study the guide. Toss out your white sugar. I promise you can find a healthier substitute. You don’t have to have all of those ingredients I listed in the top paragraph. Start with what you have, and incorporate these 10 tips below to gradually make room in your food budget for all the specialty ingredients you want to try.
Greek yogurt is such a nutritious food and a staple in lots of THM recipes. It is so versatile. Just know that on the THM plan, you wouldn’t eat it with all the fruit I have pictured above. You can have fruit with an S meal (high fat meal) and even then, it’s just lemons or limes, or a cup of strawberries or a 1/2 c of blueberries. With an E meal (high carbs) you can have liberal amounts of berries or 1 piece of fruit (I took this picture before I was into THM so that’s why it shows lots of fruit!). 0% Greek yogurt is one of the foods that you can eat with any of the meals. You can have Greek yogurt in S, E, or FP meals. In S or Satisfying meals (high fat), you would eat full fat Greek yogurt made from whole fat milk. In E or Energizing (high carb) or FP (fuel pull) meals, you would eat the Greek yogurt made from 0% fat milk. Greek yogurt is just yogurt with the whey strained off. It’s great for a grab-and-go meal to eat on the run. Many a time I have taken yogurt with me for a lunch in the car. It’s so easy to make at home and you will save a lot of money too! Go here for the recipe. It’s important to remember that you want Greek yogurt, not just regular yogurt, because you want the whey, which has lots of carbs in it, strained off.
2. Order the THM products from azurestandard.com. Azure Standard is a huge company based on a farm in Oregon. The company sells grains, produce, vitamins, supplements, and pretty much anything you can find at your local natural foods health store, from Panda licorice to natural healthy and beauty care products to grains, beans, and spices, from the bulk room. The Azure folks even have health related books, fencing supplies, barrels and buckets, and outdoor yard and farming tools! I have compared prices of the THM line of food products on amazon, the THM web site, and Azure Standard. Azure often has the best prices! Azure doesn’t deliver to your home, however, unless you arrange you to be a drop off point for them. Another drawback is that the delivery is just once a month. So if you plan ahead, this can be the best way to get THM products. If you aren’t a drop off point you will have to drive to a drop off place. So if you don’t have to drive too far to pick up your Azure order, spending gas money, and can wait a month between orders, since Azure orders are shipped monthly to your area, then Azure is the way to go. Azure does not charge shipping and handling costs. You do end up paying for the gas of course to drive your car to go pick up the product. If you have a group of friends who rotate the pickup, then you don’t have to pay for shipping or gas every month. The THM people have frequent flash sales of their products, so sign up for their newsletters on their website so you can take advantage of those. The THM collagen was recently offered at a sale price of $14.99 instead of $17.99. With Amazon Prime you pay $25.99! If you absolutely have to have the products within two days, then you may find it worth it to pay the increased costs of Amazon Prime. You can also find THM products or similar products at iherb.com or swansonvitamins.com. Prices at all these places probably continually change, so check all of them before making your order.
3. Make your own THM baking blend. Just Google it. I have seen a range of variations, from using equal parts flax meal to almond flour to using those two flours plus a bunch more added in like coconut flour and glucomannan. It is fun to try out all the THM cake and muffin recipes. The picture below shows the cinnamon muffin in a mug recipe. If you are allergic to coconut and almond flours like my teenage son is, then an alternate is equal parts golden flaxmeal and oat fiber. I can buy golden flax seed at my local Kroger chain grocery store in the bulk section, then I grind it in small batches in my blender. Don’t try grinding it in your NutriMill, it will gum up the workings and make a huge mess. Ask me how I know. :-). I get oat fiber from Amazon.
4. Make your own golden flaxseed meal by buying in bulk at your local health foods store or even your local grocery store. Even Walmart has golden flax seeds, but the package isn’t very big. Then grind like I mentioned above.
5. Use sweet potatoes often for your E meals. They are cheap! You can’t have white potatoes on the THM plan, but when the rest of your family has potatoes, you have your sweet potatoes and use the same toppings, limiting the fat to 1 tsp for an E meal.
6. Use zucchini or spaghetti squash for your low carb noodles or pasta instead of the Not Naughty Noodles. Spaghetti squash naturally separates into noodle-like strings when cooked, but to make zucchini noodles, use a veggie spiralizer.
7. Use cauliflower for your rice. Just cut cauliflower into florets and then briefly pulse in a food processor to turn into rice-size bits that you briefly cook.
8. Make your own nut milk instead of buying it. Just whiz 1 nut in a blender to 1 c water. Soak your nuts first if you are a Purist.
9. See if your sweet tooth is simply satisfied with your own skinny chocolate sweetened with liquid stevia or a minimal amount of sweetener like maple syrup, honey or sucanat (not THM plan approved but many mothers have found they can lose weight with those real food sweeteners). Then break up the skinny chocolate into small pieces to make the THM Chocolate Chip Cookies.
10. Use lentils and beans for your E meals that you buy in bulk from azurestandard.com. Lentils and beans are so cheap! Properly soaked, cooked for a long time, and seasoned they taste fabulous!
May you have a delicious food journey through life and constantly feel nourished!
I just saw that Wardee Harmon of the Traditional Cooking School did a new video on her top 3 favorite “go-to” traditional foods for doing the Trim Healthy Mama plan. See the video embedded above. This THM Plan is how I am maintaining my 70 lb weight loss eating a variety of delicious foods, including carbs, without the weight creeping back on. Contrast that to the low-carb diet rut I had been in, where I was only eating about 10 foods. I love Wardee’s suggestions, they are similar to mine. I would have to say mine are:
Eggs. I usually alternate this with oatmeal for my morning meal or my sourdough bread toast with THM jam from the cookbook and trimmy drink from the same book. For S breakfasts and if I have time, I will eat 2 scrambled eggs, cooked with diced onions, diced red and green bell peppers, or diced yellow squash, previously sauteed in butter. This is so good! I learned from the authors in their THM membership site (their “In the Kitchen Videos”) that thinly sliced summer squash sauteed in butter makes a great substitute for hash browns. If I have even more time I will add a small diced avocado and/or grated cheese. If I am having an E or FP breakfast I use 3 egg whites with the same veggies, and add nutritional yeast to give the dish that “cheesy” taste. Of course I add salt and pepper, and sometimes cumin or chili powder or Italian seasoning. That’s basically the recipe for Serene and Pearl’s eggatable scramble from the cookbook.
2.My whole wheat sourdough bread toasted to a wonderful crispness. It feels so good to eat my sourdough bread again! I didn’t eat it for about two years when I was on diffrent variations of a low carb, no grain diet. I can have 1 tsp of butter on one large slice or divided on two half slices for part of an E meal. Sometimes I top the toast with the THM Slim Belly Jelly from the THM Cookbook.
3. Greek yogurt. Here’s the recipe I use to make my own from scratch using 0% milk for 0% Greek yogurt (E or FP meals), and whole milk for full fat Greek yogurt (S meals). It feels so weird buying 0% milk after being immersed in the full fat world of the Weston A. Price diet, but I can’t afford the time and money it takes to buy raw milk, separate all the fat off, and make it into 0% yogurt for my E and FP meals.
Then for the next three of my “go-to” foods I would say:
4. Hot cocoa in a 1 qt Mason jar with stevia and collagen and 1 tsp of Kerrygold butter, for E or FP meals. I have this every morning. It’s my Mormon version of their Trimmacino/Trimmy recipes. But I have found that it tastes better for me if I cut back on the cocoa and up the stevia, so it’s 1 tsp cocoa to 1 tsp stevia, and then a few pinches salt, added to a quart jar of 3/4 boiling water and 1/4 room temp water. If I am having an S meal, I will add raw cream that I get from my cow herd share at a raw milk dairy. If I am having an E meal, I will just add collagen. Note: since I wrote that, I have discovered I can use less stevia when I make sure to buy stevia extract powder, which has no fillers, instead of the powders that are simply labeled “stevia.”
5. soaked oatmeal, soaked according to Nourishing Traditions guidelines, cooked with 1/2 of an apple, and then flavored with pumpkin pie spice and stevia. Or sometimes I will use a small amount of real maple syrup. The first time I had oatmeal after not having it for so long because I had been low carb/no grain, I seriously felt a “buzz” in my body, like my body was humming along at a new level of energy, thanking me for giving it some slow-burning carbs to soothe my adrenals.
6. Gluccie puddings. Oh my, I have been having fun with these! “Gluccie” is short for glucomannan, which comes from the konjac root, an Asian plant. It acts as zero calorie thickener. The puddings you make from these are creamy and sweet. That’s my favorite dessert texture. Yet they don’t have any fat! They are FP so I can eat them whenever I want without regard to the THM recommended 3 to 4 hour timing between meals. The picture above is a lemon pudding, with turmeric added to make it look yellow, and more stevia added to counteract the turmeric taste. In addition to this lemon flavor pudding, I also love others! The salted caramel recipe is sooooo good. I enjoy the peanut butter flavored pudding using pressed peanut flour. I am searching for a Purist caramel flavoring on Amazon Prime or Azure Standard, I’ve yet to find one. I like to make the pudding in a big batch and divide into small containers to cover me for the next few days, so when I have to run errands during lunch time I can grab one and eat later in the car. Watch the videos below to learn how to make the puddings.
7. spring green mix with cherry tomatoes and lunch meat thinly sliced. Again, lunch meat is not really Weston A. Price/Puristy approved, but there’s the budget thing again. That’s an FP meal if the meat is lean. To make it S, I add avocado and homemade ranch salad dressing made out of sour cream, salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning, diluted with water. To keep it FP, for a dressing, I use raw apple cider vinegar splashed on with Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. I plan on getting salmon a lot more often to eat with this salad. If I have time, to add the “fun” factor to my lunch, I will make a wonder wrap from the THM Cookbook to wrap around the salad. This is a gluten-free, nut flour free tortilla or wrap. It tastes super yummy if I put 0% Greek yogurt on the wrap before it put the salad on it. As you can see, mine are not perfect and sometimes I get holes in them. I am still perfecting the art of making them to be thick enough not to tear any holes as flip them or slide them on to a plate when both sides are done cooking.
To round out my top ten (OK, 13!) Trim Healthy Mama favorite go-to items, I would have to add:
8. skinny chocolate, but I like to make mine with cocoa butter instead of coconut oil. I guess I am just tired of the coconutty taste after having coconut oil for so long. But I just read that extra virgin coconut oil doesn’t taste so coconutty. We shall see. I thought that was what I was already using. The chocolate tastes more like real chocolate with cocoa butter. Wardee says she like to just use Sweet Leaf stevia for her dark chocolate. I used Pyure this time and it tastes good, but it’s not as tasty as using honey, like in the recipe here. There’s still that slight stevia aftertaste, but it’s not that bad. I will probably just use stevia from now on, because Pyure (a blend of stevia and erythritol and “natural flavor” which can be a code word for MSG) really doesn’t meet my Purist standards.
9. popcorn, which can be part of an E meal, or an E snack, as long as you don’t add more than 1 tsp of butter over 4 to 5 cups of popped popcorn
10. sweet potatoes. I missed these in my low carb days! I love to eat a small one for lunch with 1 tsp of butter, and salt and pepper as a side dish, topped with lentils or sliced lunch meat. If the family has baked potatoes, I will have a sweet potato instead. White potatoes are a no-no on the THM plan but sweet potatoes can be easily subbed. Just don’t pile on the butter, use only 1 tsp to keep the serving in the E mode.
11. lentils made according to Serene and Pearl’s recipe in the cookbook with chicken broth and nutritional yeast. If you cook it long enough they get really soft and taste almost creamy, almost as if you were eating an S meal, but you aren’t, it’s E, yet it feels so satisfying! So yummy! I think it’s the broth and the nutritional yeast that makes it taste so good. Even if I am out of chicken broth, I will make the lentil soup recipe with just water. I just made a big pot full over the weekend and we have leftovers so I will be having that for lunch as an E meal every day this week!
12. homemade salsa. I use the recipe here and it’s so flavorful.
13. cheese. I am not so Puristy as Serene in avoiding cheese made from pasteurized milk. Maybe someday I will get there. When I am super “hangry” and want something before I verbally bite somebody’s head off, chunks of cheese are my “go-to.” Of course, the goal is not to get to the “hangry” point but sometimes it happens because of life’s little emergencies when you can’t be in your kitchen preparing food and are still out running errands to the point of being hangry.
I am loving the THM Plan! It is a way of eating I can see me keeping for life, so that I keep my tendency to diabetes genes at bay. You can truly adapt the principles of the diet to wherever you are in your budget and purist-y state. There are so many more recipes in the cookbook I have yet to try!
I just tried out the THM Pancake recipe that uses cottage cheese and oats this morning and was pleasantly surprised at how yummy they are. They look just like white flour/IHOP pancakes. Yet they don’t spike your blood sugar. I can see that I will be making these for my family, as they still haven’t adapted to the taste of my sourdough pancakes. I also tried out Pearl’s THM recipe for French toast which is not in the cookbook, but available in the “In the Kitchen Videos” on the trimhealthymamamembership.com site. They were super yummy!
I was vegan for many years, just like Serene and Pearl, but I found it was not a sustainable way of eating, especially since I was repeatedly having babies and nursing. As a pregnant and nursing mama being vegan, I was constantly hungry! I wish I had known about the THM plan back then when I was having babies. I think it’s interesting that Serene and I have different definitions of Purism. I’m OK with using pasteurized cheese but I am still not sure about the pureness of the sugar alcohols used in the sweeteners. I will definitely not be using xylitol ever again, it really did a number on my digestive system when I tested it. Xylitol is used in the THM Super Sweet Blend. Wardee, who is definitely a Purist, says she only used stevia as her sweetener on the Plan. If you want more ideas about what to eat as a purist on the Trim Healthy Mama plan, Wardee is offering a free 1 week menu plan of Purist THM foods here.
3. Greek yogurt. 
Tree of Life Mothering 