I finally figured out the super easiest way to fix chicken for dinner! After 25 years of marriage and homemaking, it’s about time. I have used the crockpot for years to make “roasted” whole chicken with veggies for Sunday dinner, but I never thought until seeing a recipe linked below to use it to cook individual chicken pieces. This chicken is moist and spicy. It kind of reminds me of that rotisserie chicken you see at the grocery store close to the checkout line. If it’s near dinnertime, when you are shopping, it is to tempting to buy that chicken. I know! Here’s a healthier recipe not full of toxic chemicals. It just takes some planning earlier in the day, so that when you come home from shopping close to dinner, the chicken is all ready. I stumbled across this recipe by pure accident. Here it is:
When you go buy the ingredients for Ellie’s spicy chicken wings, forget that the recipe called for hot sauce and proceed to buy barbecue sauce.
Get distracted at the store and forget to buy barbecue sauce.
Realize that chicken wings are almost twice the cost of chicken thighs.
Buy chicken thighs instead of chicken wings.
Put chicken thighs in the crockpot at lunch time two days later.
Put a stick of butter on top of the chicken thighs.
When you go to add the barbecue sauce, remember that you forgot to buy it.
Realize that you don’t want to use barbecue sauce anyway because of the carb content.
Decide to use homemade taco seasoning mix recipe from Kristen Michaelis’ blog over here instead of the carby barbecue sauce.
Mix up the taco seasoning in a bowl, adding in 1 to 2 T of Italian seasoning, and sprinkle over the chicken.
Realize that next time it would be better to put the seasoning in first, then the stick of butter in afterwards.
Put the lid on the crockpot and set the temp for “low” if dinner is 6 to 8 hours away, “high” if dinner is 3 to 4 hours away.
Go run your afternoon errands, knowing that delicious-smelling, yummy, non-dry chicken is waiting for you at home!
After long hours of running errands, walk into the door and smell the tantalizing smells of onion, garlic, paprika, and cumin mixed with chicken cooking.
Serve with rice and sauteed, shredded cabbage and onions, seasoned with salt and pepper. Use the liquid from the crockpot to season the rice.
Let’s face it! Being a mom is hard work! We have so many responsibilities and our time is stretched so thin. But the great news is, we as moms have more resources than ever to increase our power and joy fulfilling the hardest and most beautiful job one earth! These two ladies featured above and below with their families, Desi and Saren, have put together an online conference next week with some fabulous speakers to help you be the mom you want to be! Best of all, it’s free! You can register here! Do so by October 9 so you can get some cool gifts! The gifts are a story and teaching guide to teach your kids about honesty and a meal plan and shopping guide for 7 days of healthy meals.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could attend a conference where some of the world’s top authors and speakers would offer you answers to all your most pressing parenting and self-help questions?
Well, you can. And you don’t even have to get a babysitter or travel anywhere. And it’s FREE.
Two organizations I really respect, Power of Moms and Unconventional Kitchen, have gathered 20 top-notch speakers to present about topics every mom needs during the FREE 3-day Mom Conference that is taking place October 11th, 12th and 13th. Each day of the conference, you can watch the seven presentations for that day at your convenience – while your kids nap, while you fold laundry, whatever works for you.
Figure out how to avoid the “me, me, me epidemic” that is producing over-entitled children
Get your house clean – and keep it that way (for real)
Strengthen your marriage
Talk to your children about sex (yes, this is something you really have to do!)
Help your children embrace healthy foods while teaching them to cook
Manage your children’s screen time and smart phone use (without making them hate you)
Develop a budget that really works for your family (yes, it’s possible!)
Live a more intentional and joyful life (and teach your children to do the same)
And much more!
Below is a list of all the cool speakers coming! I can’t wait! Join me for a three day conference to recharge your batteries and fill your brain with inspiration and laughter! Register here by Oct. 9 to get your cool gifts!
Dr Laura Markham, Clinical Psychologist, bestselling author and discipline expert at Aha Parenting (Helping Kids – and Yourself – Manage Emotions)
Katie Kimball, expert on healthy eating for families and founder of Kitchen Stewardship (Want Responsible and Healthy Kids? Teach Them to Cook and Eat Real Food)
Ruth Soukup, NYT Bestselling Author and Founder of Living Well, Spending Less (Decluttering your Home, Mind and Soul)
Ramona Zabriski, Founder of Wife for Life University (How to be a Wife for Life)
Amy McCready, parenting expert, TODAY Show Contributor, author and creator of Positive Parenting Solutions (Raising Motivated and Grateful Children During this Me, Me, Me Epidemic)
Jesse Mecham, Founder of You Need a Budget (Budgeting Made Simple)
Dina Alexander, Founder of Educate and Empower Kids (How to Talk to your Children about Sex)
Richard and Linda Eyre, NYT #1 Bestselling authors who run Valuesparenting (Simple and Powerful Ways to Teach Children Values)
Marla Cilley (a.k.a. the Fly Lady), author, home organization and cleaning mentor, founder of FlyLady.net (Cleaning in a Fun Way)
Shawni Pothier, founder of the popular mom-blog, 71 Toes (Managing Kids’ Cell Phone and Screen Time – Without Making Them Hate You)
April and Eric Perry, life architecture experts and founders of Learn-Do-Become (Building the Life and Future you Really Want)
Saren Eyre Loosli, family organization expert and co-founder of Power of Moms (The Three Basic Sy
stems Every Family Needs)
And to help you avoid procrastination (we know how it goes!), if you register RIGHT NOW, you’ll have access to the following GIFTS as soon as your registration has been completed!
– FREE Audio Story and Family Discussion Guide: These materials will help you teach your children about honesty in a really fun way
– FREE Guide: 7 Day Healthy Eating Meal Plan and Shopping List
Come participate ONLINE and be inspired October 11, 12 and 13th!
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could attend trainings by all the best authors and speakers on motherhood topics? Well, guess what? You can. And it’s free. And you don’t even have to leave your house to participate.
If you believe that motherhood is the toughest and most beautiful job in the world, we’ve got just the thing for you!
It’s the Mom Conference!
What is the Mom Conference?
The Mom Conference is a totally FREE three-day online event featuring some truly amazing speakers and YOU are invited to attend!
Join over 100,000 moms around the world on October 11, 12, and 13th and come away armed with powerful new strategies for everything from sibling rivalry to healthy eating to finding more joy in motherhood.
I have found the perfect podcast to help me in homeschooling! It’s a podcast that makes me feel that it’s fun and doesn’t take a lot of work. If you love children’s books and don’t homeschool, you will probably love this podcast as well! It makes me realize that the #1 reason I love homeschooling is because it gives me all day to read aloud to my children, not just the evenings! I read aloud while they do breakfast and lunch dishes, and I read aloud during our devotional, in between chore time. I do give myself a break sometimes and have them listen to books on CD, while they do dishes, and especially in the car. Anyway, the podcast is called the Read Aloud Revival by Sarah Mackenzie, homeschooling mom of 6. It helps you build your family culture around books! I love to listen to this podcast because it encourages me, gives me ideas of what to read aloud to my children, and makes me happy! I feel like all is right with the world after listening to an episode.
Sarah has fascinating guests who inspire me to read aloud more to my children. The music Sarah plays is cheerful and bouncy, and I always feel motivated to homeschool after I listen. I especially love to listen to the podcast in the evening when I want something mellow yet still fun to listen to while I do evening chores, especially on Tuesday nights, when I do the dish duty with my two younger children, while the big boys who are over 12 are at Scouts and Mutual. This podcast truly is a “spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down!” So here are some of the podcast episodes I want to share with you that I’ve listened to lately:
The most important part of getting kids to read. This episode is just Sarah herself, with no guest, explaining that it’s more important to get kids to fall in love with being read aloud to than to love to read. That love will eventually help them become independent readers, who love to read, more than anything else.
Did you know there’s a Golden Age of Children’s Books? All of the books I’ve pictured on this blog post are from that age. Here’s episode 51 with Carole Joy Seid to tell you all about it! I absolutely loved this episode. She tells us all about her discovery of author Gene Stratton Porter, and why she thinks her books are so grand. Can you believe that Carole has gone on record saying that if a parent has to, the parent should pay a child $100 to read a Gene Stratton Porter book? Porter’s books are that good. I loved A Girl of the Limberlost and Laddie. I haven’t read The Keeper of the Bees, yet. Carole says it’s her best work. Even more than Laddie? How could that be!?
Here’s another episode from Carole Joy Seid. She makes reading aloud sound so lovely! She encourages reading aloud from the womb to the night before your child leaves home. See Episode 21, Read Good Books, the End!
Hearing Carole talk about the Golden Age of Children’s Books with its great authors and illustrators made me think of one fabulous illustrator she left out, Eloise Wilkin. She illustrated some of the books below. She has such a wholesome, innocent, happy style.
I discovered the above picture book at my younger sister’s home about 5 years ago. It makes me glad to have little helpers along! It’s a perfect book for the core phase of Thomas Jefferson Education. You can find it used on Amazon, and it’s also featured in the anthology below.
I was delighted to find a blog post about the effect these books have had on one mom. After I read the whole thing, I realized the author was Karen Andreola of Charlotte Mason Companion fame! I didn’t know she was a blogger! Now I have another favorite blog to read! I lover her quote from Milton Berle, “If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?” Towards the end of the post she points out mothers do have more than two hands, they are on the ends of their children’s arms, as long as we train them right! I am blessed to have 14 extra hands!
I also remembered another great author from the Golden Age, Marguerite Henry of Misty fame. She wrote the book below and it made me think of my 18 year old, because I read this book aloud to him. His dad read aloud Misty to him, and they even got to go see the Misty Museum on Chincoteague Island, when we had a Sudweeks family reunion in Virginia. Fond memories!
Carole also mentioned Genevieve Foster’s works. She was a mother who became an author of history books for children after she saw the boring history textbooks her children brought home from school. I have the one pictured below and aim to read aloud all of Foster’s books to my kids. So many books, so little time! That’s mostly why I homeschool! I have found that homeschool can be super simple. Limit screen time. Have your kids help with the housework every day, help them memorize poetry and scriptures, teach them the gospel of Jesus Christ, help them do math every day, have them practice handwriting, read aloud to them, play games with them,help them follow their passions, and take them to a once a week school so they can have friends who are also homeschooled. It really can be that easy. You don’t have to have spelling books or a history textbook. Happy homeschooling!
How many times have you heard the following in your head:
“I can’t do it! I know I need to lose weight to be healthy but it’s so hard! The cravings for sugar are overwhelming!”
“I want to eat some cookies sooooo much!”
“I know I said ‘no more sugar’ but just this once won’t hurt!”
I have felt/heard those thoughts and feelings and given into them all too often. Been there, done that! I went for many years seeing my weight go up and up. I got frustrated over and over in an attempt to lose weight by eating no sugar and exercising. Finally I had a breakthrough, a year ago. Two elements in my world collided to allow me to lose 70 lbs. The even greater news is that I have kept the weight off, as this past summer I learned even more principles so I can maintain this weight loss for the rest of my life, even while occasionally indulging in treats. I don’t have to say that I will never eat dessert again or swear carbs off forever. I now know the keys to regulating my appetite, timing my eating of carbs, mastering the hormone that burns fat, what the cues of hunger and fullness are, and how to avoid emotional eating.
I have taught 2 sessions of the Eternal Warriors Healthy Eating Class. Now it is time to do a third! The next session will be Wednesday evenings. Please go here to get all the details. We will be starting Wed. Nov. 2 and go until January, with the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas off.
Here is what you get from enrollment in the class…
-10 weeks of once a week coaching on how to achieve your healthy eating goals. These classes are held online, over Zoom (a video chatroom and phone conference room, you can use either one), so you can meet from wherever you are as long as you have an Internet or long distance phone connection. Classes are 2 hours and 15 minutes.
-Knowledge that you are not defective, cursed, or broken
-Skills on how the enemy plays tricks with your mind and how to beat him
-Accountability so that you are motivated to achieve your goals
-Specific principles that you can use the rest of your life on all areas: financial, spiritual, relationships, and physical
-Knowledge of questions you can use daily in your journal writing to increase your success
-Access to my document “How to Lose 70 Lbs Without Exercise and Keep it Off”
-Knowledge on how to stop emotional eating
-4 steps to cure your sugar addiction for life
-the 6 new lessons added to the Eternal Warriors program in 2015
-Knowledge of how to master the hormone that controls fat burning
I am giving away 2 enrollments to this class on this blog, one for a newbie student and one for a returning student. Please comment below if you would like to enter the random drawing for the class. Winner will be announced on Friday October 14 by 9 PM.
Earlier this month of September I got to be in Utah to see 4 out of my 5 boys participate in the Mastering Knighthood Summit. Having them participate every year has become a family tradition. One of them, the 18 year old, got to be the Royal Master Knight. It was so wonderful! Here he is below with King Richard and Queen Emily. They have been wonderful mentors to him as they worked together to put on a knight-based simulation for almost 200 hundred little boys.
So as a side benefit for this quick trip to Utah, I planned a Veggie Gals lunch with my girlfriends. We left during the dark in a monsoon here in southern AZ before 5 AM and 15 hours later we arrived in Utah! (It usually doesn’t take that long, but we had to come back after driving away 30 min. to get our church clothes that we forgot and then we took a detour through Sedona.) I was so looking forward to seeing my Veggie Gals! The very top picture above is from a Veggie Gals lunch over two years ago, but it’s such a great picture I am posting it again, haha. The one that was taken from this most recent Veggie Gals doesn’t look nearly as pretty, because of the way it was taken, with all of us far away around my parents’ dining room table, the light bouncing off the vinyl tablecloth, and all the stuff in the room, which I never thought of as clutter, but it distracts from the people’s faces.
Anyway, we as a group of girlfriends have been meeting, since before my 18 year old son, the Royal Master Knight, pictured above, was 2. He has grown up with these kids of Veggie Gals. He and his friend Kam, Veggie Gal Shauna’s son, joke that they are going to start a “Meaty Men” group in honor of Veggie Gals. My two other older children who have flown the coop have bumped into children of one of the Veggie Gals. Audrey, at BYU-Idaho. They all shared some hearty laughs over the “interesting” health food that we Veggie Gals have dined on over the years, things like stuffed squash, bean fudge, avocado pudding, and spanish moss lasagna! Veggie Gals cuisine is definitely not mainstream! If you are into whole, real foods, then it is the best food you will ever eat! We Veggie Gals always go away feeling physically and spiritually nourished. This in turn allows us to be the best mothers we can be, to raise our children to be heroes.
Here are some of the principles we talked about:
1. Intermittent Fasting (IF). I have experienced the tremendous health benefits of IF lately and share all about it here. I lost 9 lbs in one week by doing IF! if you know anyone who has diabetes or is overweight, please share this information with them. Dr. Jason Fung says diabetes is curable with IF and a low carb, high fat diet. We also talked about fasting in general. Shauna asked if fasting means going without food or food and water. Mindy said she knows someone who fasted for a week, completely going without food or water.
2. Relying on faith the power of the word of God, to allow God to manifest miracles for us. One of our new Veggie Gals, Mindy, shared all about this. Here are some gems from that conversation:
D & C 42:48-52 says that when you are sick, you are to be either healed or die. Have faith to be healed and find out if that is God’s will for you. If it’s not, then we get to have the opportunity to have faith that death is God’s will for us. Either way, we can have peace in God’s will.
Do you like your kids to keep asking you after you say “yes”? God is the same way. If he says “yes,” then have faith it will happen.
A guy named Thurman Scrivner, a Christian preacher from Texas, has lots to say about the subject of faith in the word of God and the power of God’s healing. You can watch his youtube videos here. Here is his web site. All of his downloads of his speeches are free and highly fascinating! Go to his web site and click on “watch and listen.”
I shared the scripture I recently found that totally harmonizes with all of this. It’s Isaiah 55:11, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” That’s the power of God’s word!
One of the Veggie Gals shared an experience with the power of God’s word. She said one day she was driving in her car and pondering her husband. She wanted him to have more missionary opportunities. She then recalled some words from his patriarchal blessing. She prayed out loud as she was driving and reminded God of these words from the blessing that promised he would have missionary opportunities. She said just a short time after this, he was called to the bishopric. A perfect opportunity for missionary work!
We talked about repentance, and God’s word on the subject. in D&C 98 we are told that the Lord will fight our battles for us if we repent or restore “fourfold” for our trespasses and our forefather’s trespasses. Mindy shared a story or two of healing that came by repenting. She told the story of a woman who tricked her husband into having another baby. The baby was born and eventually developed a terrible skin rash. When the woman confessed to her husband what had happened and apologized, the skin rash went away.
James 1:6 says not to come to God double minded. We have to decide if we have faith in Him and his word and declare it.
Hebrews 4:16 says, ““Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” Here is a beautiful General Conference talk on the subject, from Elder Gene R. Cook, called, “Receiving Divine Assistance through the Grace of the Lord.” (That reminds me, that the Ensign recently published an amazing story from Elder Cook about how he lost his scriptures to a thief in South America and was able to recover them through divine assistance. Read this story, The Lost Scriptures! It is wonderful!)
3. The power God has to multiply our resources when we trust in Him and dedicate our resources to Him for good. Mindy shared the story of a man named Bob LeTourneau who, when deeply in debt, made a commitment to pay 90% tithing and live on 10%. He seriously committed to have God be his business partner, and was blessed abundantly, so that he became super wealthy! Then one of the Veggie Gals shared her story of not having much money, having sick kids, and wanting to heal them naturally. She only had a little bit of money to buy some tea tree oil. She said that little bottle of tea tree oil lasted a super long time, by the miracle of God.
4. Beauty Tips by God. Joyce shared her beauty tips that come from inspiration of God. She reminded us of the time, years ago, when she noticed that she had huge creases in between her brows. Instead of turning to Botox, she felt inspired to use BreatheRight strips. I actually remember this! I blogged about it here. Her latest beauty challenge, she said, was a blackhead that she felt inspired by God to remove with a Q-tip rolled sideways. I had a hard time imagining how this worked, and couldn’t find a Q-tip for a demo, so I am still puzzled by that one.
5. New ab exercise from Joyce. Joyce shared her new ab exercise. If I recall correctly, she said it was from Body Flex. Boy, that gave me a jog down memory lane. I still have a set of Body Flex videos I got from my birthday probably 18 years ago!I almost gave them away when I moved but then I decided maybe they are still worth keeping. I am going to have to dust them off and see if they do for me what they have for Joyce. I kind of gave up on them, thinking they might be a gimmick. Have they worked for any of you out there? A quick Google search showed that the creator has had her claims disputed. I think the biggest key point for the ab exercise and other Body Flex exercises is “motionless exercise.” Not sure how you can exercise without motion. Maybe Joyce will comment and enlighten us more?
Bonus Features:
Veggie Gal Joyce now lives down the street from where the Summit was held. Who would have thought Joyce would ever live in north Utah county after being in Orem for decades?! We Veggie Gals all have found memories of her Orem home, with its indoor swimming pool and the xeriscaping of the yard. I had a delightful one-on-one visit with Joyce after dropping my younger son off at the Summit on Saturday. All I had to do was drive down the street, turn a corner, and there was Joyce! I learned the following things from Joyce on that fun Saturday monring:
1. Nuttzo. Joyce showed me this new product she found at Costco. It is made out of seven seeds and nuts. Unfortunately, I don’t think they are soaked before they are made into the nut/seed butter to remove the phytic acid that is natural to seeds and nuts, but the product looks great in that it doesn’t have sugars or fillers.
3. God coming through. Joyce told me the amazing story of her financial miracles as she and her husband sold their Orem home and had some other money come through before the house sold and they were about to run out of money.
4. The new teaching curriculum of the church Joyce told me how excited she is about this curriculum. She heard it was coming for over a year and finally it’s here! She is teaching Primary these days. I taught Primary for three years, so I shared my favorite tip, which was to always give one of the application questions at the end of the lesson as “homework.” Then when they came back to class, I would follow up by asking if they did the “homework.” Usually it was something like “Ask your parents about a time when they felt God answered their prayer,” or something like that.
So those ideas were swimming in my head Thursday through Saturday after seeing the Veggie Gals. Then on Friday night, I got to go to a meeting in “commemoration” of 9/11. This meeting is part of the “Highland Liberty Group” that meets monthly in my hometown of Highland, Utah. The speaker, Susan Lindauer, is a former CIA worker who boldly speaks out that the 9/11 attack was known ahead of time in upper federal government circles. She ended up spending time in prison and talks about that too. Here is a presentation by her on Youtube. It’s rather fascinating that 9/11 was the same weekend as the Summit. The Summit is to prepare youth to be heroes. which is fitting since some of these youth, the ones born before 2000 or so, are part of the “Hero Generation” mentioned in the Fourth Turning. According to Susan, if Hillary wins the upcoming presidential election, she will have the U.S. go to war against Iran. Our young men will be drafted. Hmmm…Perhaps that will be the test of what a hero is.
My visit with Joyce got cut short by a child calling me to remind me to come back home to Grandma’s so I could take him to the Summit where he was volunteering to be a villain. I did stop on the way at a yard sale and found a bunch of Tupperware-type containers for storing leftovers and packing lunches. Hooray! I got a whole bag full for $1. We have been short on those so I felt this was a tender mercy.
We are able to go see my mother-in-law and have dinner with her on Thursday night. I was so pleased that my three older children who were living in Utah at the time all made extra efforts to get there. The oldest rode his bike from Provo to Orem to get there! Then we were off to pick peaches in South Jordan down the street from Veggie Gal Shauna’s home. Free peaches! I am finding that peaches are hard to find here in southern AZ. Shauna had this amazing tool, a fruit picker that we had fun using. It’s like this basket on the end of a long pole. As a bonus I got to take two out of the three older children to pick peaches and talk with us. We dried a bunch and froze a bunch when we got home. I haven’t eaten any during these low carb days but I look forward to making a peach pie this Thanksgiving with what I preserved. I might even grind up the dried peaches into powder and make some kind of peach pancake syrup this winter.
I also of course checked out as many Deseret Industries and other thrift stores as I could while I was there. And lost my daughter at Walmart, and then found her. And got to see where my firstborn’s apartment is in Provo. And got pulled over by a cop for having an expired tag on my Utah license plate in the front. So I showed him that I was up to date on my AZ plate in the back and had a our car fully registered in AZ. But guess what?! I was wanting to find some black Sunday dress sandals with heels to replace my current black Sunday sandals with heels that are falling apart. I found the exact pair I used to have 7 years ago, at the Deseret Industries in South Jordan! Not the exact pair, those broke and I threw them away, but the same style, looking brand new! I loved those shoes because they were comfy and elegant at the same time. My sister-in-law gave me the money to buy them when I was super pregnant and needed bigger shoes for my bloated feet and I have always been so grateful for that. Hooray! I also found a book about Matthew Cowley for $2 that I am super excited to read. Mindy mentioned that he experienced many miracles by exercising faith in the power of God’s word. I also got to hold my new grand niece for the first time. I can’t believe that my brother is a grandpa! My grand niece is three months old and just the cutest thing. It’s amazing how time marches on. I am so grateful to have all of these wonderful people in my life!
I found this great podcast interview with a woman who has an intense passion for rebuilding the health of foster children by giving them real food. Her name is Mandy Blume. With training in nutritional therapy and armed with knowledge of the Weston A. Price diet, she is changing the world! Here’s a link below to the podcast interview on Wise Traditions as well as the description of the podcast copied and pasted from the podcast site.
Mandy loves sharing the importance of the food we put into our bodies. After fostering many children and adopting, each child became her inspiration to step out and reach more people with the message of health recovery through real food. She studied at California Polytechnic State University, and graduated with degrees, along with cooking and nutritional credentials; but what will blow you away is the way she rolls up her sleeves to impact foster children and foster homes. She has a passion for changing the world, starting with those in the U.S. foster care system.
In today’s episode, she talks about how she helps children transition from the standard American diet (S.A.D.) to real food. She has witnessed first-hand the turn-around that takes place when children are fed food that has the power to nourish and heal.
Her simple healing principles can be applied to anyone’s life–young and old alike. Listen and learn about her transformational Real Food Recovery protocol.
Listen here. She just came out with a book detailing her journey with healing foster children, pictured above.
Maybe you as a homeschooling mom have wanted to do some kind of club for your daughter between the ages of 8 and 12. I remember being that age and desperately wanting some kind of club.(Mom wouldn’t let me do Girls Scouts.) I wasn’t homeschooled but I wanted something outside of school to make friends and explore different activities. Here’s a great option for you, the Crowned With Virtue Girls Club, sponsored by the good people of heroicyouth.com.
This is a companion club to the Mastering Knighthood Club for boys I blogged about last week. The club is designed to meet once a week or once every other week. Each month, the girls study a different standard of Christian-based, virtuous girlhood. They read a book about a great woman from history who exemplified that standard, like Mother Teresa or Rosa Parks. The girls learn leadership by taking turns leading the group in activities that they choose. They also learn public speaking by taking turns presenting about something they are passionate about. It is a “love of learning” club in that the girls are not required to do anything, but gently encouraged. The only “homework” is to read the books and prepare to share a presentation and activity. These aren’t required but most girls are eager to share.
So if you are interested, go here and read more about and then click “sign up now” to get enrolled. The fee is $75, which gets you the handbook on how to organize your own club, and a separate curriculum guide to guide you through a whole year’s worth of meetings. You also get access to training by email from Queen Emily on how to run the club. As a culminating activity, it would be so fabulous to take the girls to the Crowned with Virtue Girls’ Summit, but that’s totally optional. The pictures here on this blog post are from that event. It’s held every year on the Wasatch Front in Utah in June.
I really love that the curriculum touches on religion and faith in God. It encourages girls to find strength through faith in God, and to demonstrate that faith through service to family and community. It teaches girls to aim high! I also love that it provides leadership opportunities for teen girls at the yearly Summit.
Huzzah for standards! Huzzah for learning! Huzzah for virtuous girls! Huzzah for feminine strength, beauty, and truth!
Another title for this blog post is “How I Did the Ketogenic Diet Wrong and How to Fix That.” I will explain that later in this blog post, but first watch the above video. You will learn, it’s true, butter makes your pants fall off! This guy in the video above lost 145 lbs in 14 months by eating butter, cream, bacon, lard, other high fat foods, and very low carbs. He also went from a 54 inch waist to a 34 inch waist. He says, “butter is diet food.” He says eating fat is the best thing for:
-joint pain
-lowering cholesterol
-acid reflux
-weight loss
-appetite suppression
I will add to that list. Eating butter and other real fats, and low carbs, will also help with:
-diabetes (as in curing it!)
-risk for heart attacks and strokes
-carb cravings
-neurologic problems, like Parkinson’s disease
This all matters a lot to me because I have relatives and one friend who have died from diabetes and the complications associated with it. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want to be able to hike to a mountain peak with my grandchildren and great grandchildren when I turn 90! That’s what my neighbor did when I lived in Provo, Utah. I want to die of old age, not from a modern illness. All of these health problems I listed above don’t have to happen! We can get rid of them and even prevent them with diet!
When you combine eating high fat with low carbs (a LCHF diet) you can be on the way to losing weight. It might take more fine-tuning, which I will explain. Carbs turn into sugar in your blood after you eat them. Then the blood sugar spikes your insulin. Then the insulin drives the blood sugar into your cells to burn. When your body burns sugar it is not burning fat. The insulin keeps the fat stored in your body, so it is not burned. In other words, the insulin keeps your body insulated with fat. Insulin = insulate with fat. So lower your insulin levels by eating foods that don’t spike insulin (fat and low carbs) and then your body won’t make as much insulin. Then your body will be forced to burn fat, and you will lose weight. If you don’t believe me, please read this article here by a medical doctor, Dr. Jason Fung, who has cured many people of diabetes and helped them lose weight by putting them on a LCHF diet. In that article he explains that insulin is the master hormone that controls whether your body burns fat or sugar. In other words, if you are fat, it’s not because you have a calorie problem, it’s because you have a hormone problem. Your hormones (insulin, but also others, like leptin) are out of balance.
So what do I mean by low carbs? I mean so low that you eat a ketogenic diet. That means measuring your carb intake so it’s 25 grams or less a day. Maybe even 20. So that means reading labels, writing down everything you eat, and doing the math to make sure you don’t go over. To some of you this may sound annoyingly tedious, but I promise you, it is worth the effort, if you want to lose weight. If you try it for a week and it doesn’t work, then you probably need to count your protein grams as well. That’s because protein can turn into sugar by the body, in a process called gluconeogenesis. So….take your ideal weight, and convert that into kilograms. Then eat 1 gram per kilogram of ideal body weight. I got this information from the following book.
Guess what?! You can supercharge/speed up the results of a LCHF diet by combining that diet with IF (intermittent fasting). I tried the keto diet about three years ago and I could never get it to work. I think it’s because I did not count protein and was eating way too much of it, so it turned into sugar. I didn’t follow the guidelines in the book exactly enough. I also didn’t know at the time the power of combining the keto diet with IF.
I testify that combination works!!!! After last month where I indulged in some high carb days to celebrate two kids’ birthdays and my wedding anniversary, my weight started to creep up. I also was dying to test out a new recipe from Melissa Richardson’s 2nd Natural Yeast cookbook for totally wholesome chocolate chip cookies, so I did finally, and enjoyed them! Apparently, my body is super sensitive to all carbs, still, after my huge weight-loss journey. (When I was celebrating these days I wasn’t eating white sugar, but desserts made with sucanat and real fat, and more protein than I normally eat.) I wasn’t stuffing myself but I was still gaining weight. I think it’s because my metabolism is super sensitive to carbs and reacts with too much insulin. One of my new favorite pair of pants didn’t fit any more. I think it’s because my metabolism is super sensitive to carbs and reacts with too much insulin. Also because I perhaps I still have dulled insulin receptors. Sigh! I don’t know if I will ever be able to eat carbs, even whole sweeteners like honey and fruit, with abandon and not gain weight. I have a feeling that my metabolism is still damaged somewhat, because of genetics and probably eating too many carbs for decades. I lost 70 lbs in 2015 and I worked hard to do that, so I am determined to stop any weight creeping back on. I still have to be careful and accept the fact that I can’t eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I’m OK with that, though, because I love my new, slimmer body!
The way I lost the 70 lbs. of my huge weight loss journey isn’t an easy way to go, so I looked back into the keto diet, last month, to lose the weight creep. I did some research so that I could make the LCHF/ketogenic diet finally work for me. I found out what I shared above. Then I experimented on myself. I combined the following guidelines:
1. Ate LCHF by counting carbs and eating mostly real fat (like 90% of my calories)
2. Ate moderate protein by counting protein, according to what it says in the book, which is to convert your ideal body weight in pounds to kg and then eat 1 gram of protein per kg.
3. Followed the hunger/fullness scale and stopped eating at Level 5, “content.” I finally figured out what that feels like for my body. It feels like being 3/4 full. It’s super important not to eat to fullness when eating high fat, if you are wanting to lose weight. When you start to maybe feel full, you are probably at 3/4. At that point, I would tell myself to stop, and set a timer for 20 minutes, and then drink warm water. Then I would distract myself with reading or writing. When the timer went off, if I still felt halfway hungry, I told myself I could eat. But guess what? I didn’t feel hungry any more, because my food had started to digest.
4. Practiced IF by fasting breakfast and lunch every day. Starting at 4 PM, I ate LCHF until 7 PM, and kept within the other guidelines above.
By following the four points above, I lost 9 lbs in 7 days! It was hard, but very doable. As long as you are cleared by your doctor to fast (please don’t do it if you have any type of eating disorder) I recommend following Dr. Fung’s info on fasting here. The hunger comes in waves, and by drinking lots of warm water, and distracting myself with my good activities, I did it. (I did get grouchy towards the end, I admit!) I feel like I have made a major discovery! I did IF again this past week, for one day, as I drove home from Utah to AZ, but this time I ate breakfast (LCHF- spinach cooked in bacon grease and sausage) and then fasted lunch and dinner. I had lost 2 lbs. by bedtime. Then I weighed myself in the morning and I lost 2 lbs while I was sleeping! So I lost 4 lbs in one day! I can now tell when my body is burning sugar or fat. This is amazing! So…if you have struggled with weight loss and really want it, I recommend a combination of the ketogenic diet and IF. The best part is that eating high fat feels good and you don’t have to feel deprived. High fat will turn off the carb cravings, and you won’t have to white-knuckle yourself through a day of dieting. Now I know that whenever I hit a certain weight, I can follow the above points and stop the weight creep in its tracks! Of course, it’s ideal not to have the weight creep up at all so I think that means eating fewer carbs even on celebratory days, at least, for me. Maybe I will have a bacon and eggs cake for my birthday, LOL!
I highly recommend you listen to these two podcasts by a podcaster who lost 140 lbs eating LCHF. The first one, here, Primal Potential Episode 7, is about eating LCHF and when to eat carbs. The timing and amount of carbs is so important. The second one, Primal Potential Episode 9, is about carb spillover. I highly recommend listening to all of Elizabeth’s podcasts. She has mastered how to lose fat naturally! See primalpotential.com.
The even greater news is that turning your body into a fat burner isn’t just for losing weight, it can also help with mental illness.
So here are some benefits from fasting.
-you lose weight!
-you get more mental clarity
-you can get more in tune with God and His plan for you
-you get much more in tune with your body’s cues of hunger and fullness
-you save money!
-you save time from planning what you eat, shopping, fixing food, and eating (if you are a mom, you still have to do all that for your family though)
-you extend your life
-you decrease your risk for insulin resistance, which is the chief cause of obesity and other diseases
-you decrease the signs of aging
-you decrease the risk for Alzheimer’s
You can learn all about therapeutic fasting and tips on how to do it here. Be sure to read the whole series of blog posts on fasting linked at the end of the post, from Dr. Jason Fung’s blog. You can also learn about it in his book, pictured below, In Appendix B.
If you want some accountability and coaching to give you time-tested principles to help you apply my rules, please consider taking my next Eternal Warriors Healthy Eating online class. Go here to learn all about it.
(The information on this web site is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure disease. It is given for informational purposes only based on my experience.)
The past year I’ve learned a lot about money from Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruze. Did you know they are speaking tonight in Dallas about money, and you can watch the live streaming of their Smart Money event on Rachel’s YouTube channel?
This is the first time they’ve done this! It promises to be wonderful! It’s at 4:30 PT, 5:30 MT, 6:30 CT, and 7:30 ET.
Tree of Life Mothering 