Transforming Health Through Food: Elizabeth Bruckner’s Journey to Homesteading and Nutrition for Midlife Wellness

Have you ever wondered how the food you eat can transform your health and well-being? Join host Heather Carey in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, where she sits down with Elizabeth Bruckner, the inspiring author of The Homesteader Mindset. Elizabeth takes us on her remarkable journey from battling chronic illness to thriving through the power of nutrition and self-sufficiency. After years spent bedridden, Elizabeth discovered that the key to her healing lay in the very foods she consumed. Once a vegetarian for 27 years, she made a pivotal shift to embrace nutrient-dense foods and meat, which dramatically improved her health and vitality.

This episode dives deep into the intersection of nutrition and personal transformation, as Elizabeth shares her insights on how the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed her journey into homesteading. Faced with food shortages, she began growing her own food, which not only provided sustenance but also fostered a profound connection to her community and the earth. Elizabeth describes homesteading as an intentional way of living, one that aligns with sustainable eating practices and empowers individuals to take control of their food choices.

Throughout the conversation, listeners will glean valuable nutrition advice and practical tips on gardening, fermentation, and the everyday habits that lead to a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. Elizabeth emphasizes the importance of small, consistent actions that can lead to significant changes, encouraging everyone to embark on their own personal food journey. Whether you’re navigating midlife changes, exploring healthy eating options, or seeking to overcome food confusion, this episode is packed with insights that resonate on multiple levels.

As a culinary nutritionist, Heather brings her expertise to the table, guiding listeners through the nuances of nutrition and how it relates to women’s health, especially during menopause. Discover how to nourish your body with practical cooking techniques and learn about the seven pillars of abundance that can enhance your overall wellness. Elizabeth’s story is not just about food; it’s about healing, empowerment, and the joy of creating a lifestyle that reflects your values.

So, tune in to this episode of Real Food Stories and find out how you can embrace a homesteading mindset in your own life. Whether you’re interested in mindful eating, sustainable practices, or simply want to learn how to cook for health, this conversation will inspire you to take actionable steps toward a nourishing and fulfilling life. Let’s redefine our relationship with food together!

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hey everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. We are in spring right now, especially in the northeast, which is my all-time favorite season because it means that we finally get to start growing. And as you know, I have been gardening for decades and I have a very large vegetable garden, which is kind of my pride and joy. So when I talked to my guest today, Elizabeth Bruckner, I wanted to have her on. to share her story with growing and homesteading. So let me tell you a little bit about Elizabeth. Elizabeth Bruckner is the author of The Homesteader Mindset, a book that she claims will transform the way you view self-sufficiency. Her book gives you the tools and practical tips needed for a more meaningful life. It’s a must-read for every person who dreams of creating sustainable living through traditional skills and common sense. Through her research and experimentation, Elizabeth taught herself to compost kitchen scraps, ferment like an alchemist, cook traditional foods, and live a life that is more connected than she ever thought possible. Regarded as the fermentation maven, she speaks to enthusiastic crowds on topics such as healing herbs in the kitchen, the life-changing power of habit creation for homesteaders, and the art of lacto-fermentation. Now, Elizabeth, you were not always a homesteader. And in fact, you live in the suburbs of Los Angeles, right? So that’s not really an area that I would first think of when I think about living off the land and homesteading. But when we spoke a few weeks ago, you told me that you spent most of your 40s healing from a chronic illness that left you bedridden for weeks and homebound for months. And you were too sick. work for years. So I know that food, as we talked about, played a pivotal role in your healing. And then came the focus on homesteading and really paying attention to what you put into your body. So I would love to hear your story and how you got then to writing a whole book about homesteading.

Speaker #1
Well, thank you for having me today, Heather. I’m really grateful that we’re chatting about this. I love chatting about all things homesteading. I think the most important thing that I want to highlight for those that are listening is that you may be a homesteader already and not even know it. There are many spokes to the homesteading wheel. So let’s start firstly with how I got here. You mentioned my chronic illness and it was really debilitating and it was a wake-up call because I had to make a decision if I was going to slow down and appreciate my body and take care of it in a way that allowed it space. and energy to heal. So I feel like before my 40s, I was running on empty a great deal of the time. And in grad school, one of my teachers in traditional Chinese medicine, she had said, you know, vegetarianism is good for people that want to Buddha Buddha all day. But we’re not Buddha Buddha all day. We’re treating patients. And then I went on to run a successful high-volume, low-cost clinic where I was burning a lot of energy and continuing to do it on processed foods. They were good processed foods. They were expensive, healthy, organic, pretty pictures on the box processed foods. So I thought I was doing the right thing. I hadn’t had refined sugar for probably 15 years by the time I got sick, but I was sneaking in sugar with high carbs, like a lot of rice and brown rice. what’s wrong with brown rice? But I would do that. And then eventually it caught up with me. And so what happened was I developed a chronic cough and I also had my period for, I think it was nine to 11 weeks. It’s all foggy because I started having a lot of cognitive issues during this time, so much so that I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t remember what was being said at the doctor’s offices. My husband had to be my healthcare advocate after a time. And I was just spiraling and I didn’t understand why. And I was still working. I was working two days a week and then resting for five days. And what would happen is I’d work two days, my chronic cough would get worse or I’d get an infection. And then I would be down for five days until it was time to work again. And I did this for about seven months. And then one day I was no longer able to use my legs. I couldn’t stand up on my own. And it had been getting bad because I wasn’t able to stand for more than five minutes without being fatigued. But when my body stopped working in that way, I knew that I finally was able to go, I think I’m in trouble. I was experiencing a great deal of aphasia, which for those of you that don’t know what aphasia is, it’s when you can’t get grasp words. A lot of stroke victims get this. I had not had a stroke, but I couldn’t finish simple sentences like I’m finishing now. And it was really scary, but I was too tired to be scared. And so I went to seven different doctors, a neurologist, a gynecologist to make sure I didn’t have ovarian cancer from all the bleeding and someone to see my liver. And every single time I went to someone, they said that, well, this is your problem. And it was, I wanted… I wanted a Western diagnosis so that I could treat it with acupuncture and herbal medicine, but I wasn’t able to get the diagnosis. I just kept getting, we’ll come back and we’ll do more tests and more tests and more tests. Meanwhile, I was getting more and more ill. And so I finally went to one of my colleagues who is, he focuses on herbology, Chinese herbology, and he was feeling my pulse and he goes, oh, well, what you’re experiencing right now is yin separating from In Chinese medicine, That is bad news. That is when people are just about to go into a coma or just about to die. It’s the yin of your body separating from the yang of your body. And it’s for very, very sick patients. And I thought, oh my gosh, I got to do something because I don’t want my husband to have to bury a young wife. That was really my thought. I don’t want to leave my family with the burden of mourning me unnecessarily if my body can heal. And so I quit my job and slept and slept. and slept and slept. And at this point, I was still a vegetarian. And one of my holistic doctors, functional medicine doctors said, I just, I’m going to tell you, I don’t see vegetarians get better. And then I started doing some research on vegetarianism. And I had become a vegetarian at 16. So I’d been a vegetarian for 27 years. And I decided, well, you know, in a last ditch effort, maybe I can do this. And so I started finding regenerative farms and like… Getting away from the thing that I was protesting most, which was factory farms, big ag, you know, just packing all these animals into terribly cruel places. There were other options. I just hadn’t known about them. And so I started investigating that and slowly started incorporating meat into my diet as well as nutrient dense food. A few, I think about a year ago, I found the GAPS gut and physiology protocol, which involves. a lot of juicing and lots of animal fats and lots of very easy to digest foods on top of regular detoxes through baths and basic enemas and coffee enemas. And I noticed an immediate change because I was healing my gut. And so once I started healing my gut, my brain started to heal. The migraines started leaving. I had more energy. My ability to speak was coming back. It was all coming back quite quickly. So all of this to say that at the same time, that I was healing from this chronic illness, then the pandemic hit, right? And I remember thinking like, well, I’ve been, you know, isolated from all people for a couple of years now, I think it had been a few years. So I’ll be fine with this for two weeks. But then, you know, two weeks later, suddenly, people are panic buying food at the grocery store. And my biggest wake up call in terms of the fragility of our… food industrial system, it was when I went to the store, or maybe it was DoorDash. I don’t know if we were allowed to go to the store at that time. And I tried to get organic garlic and organic ginger, which are very important herbs in the Chinese medicine cabinet for traditional Chinese medicine. And they did not have it. They were sold out. And I thought, I’ve never experienced not having food on our shelves before. And I had seen it. I went… When I was 18 to the Soviet Union, the fall of the Iron Curtain had just fallen and they were allowing Americans to come in. And I was 18 and I saw all of these stores, these giant stores with like one piece of bread on an entire shelf. So I remembered in my mind. And then I come from a family of war refugees. So I’ve been told stories of communism and, you know, what happens. So I understand food shortages, but I’d never seen it in America. And I came home that day and I was very upset. And I told my husband, I’m really nervous about this. And he goes, well, why don’t we just grow some of our own food? And I paused. I blinked slowly. And then I said, do you know who I am? We’ve been married for like 20 years. I was notorious for going to the garden store, buying a plant and asking the gardener, please, can you give me something that won’t die? And then I would promptly kill it within a week. And then I’d go back in a month and buy another, you know. sad victim that would then be tortured by me. And I either watered too much, watered too little. I didn’t know anything about gardening. But I know that the prescription to anxiety is action. And so I was like, well, I mean, I don’t have anything else to do. So I went to the garden store and I started learning how to grow food. And I have grown garlic. It’s actually quite easy. And I’ve grown ginger. And there’s a sense of empowerment that comes with that. And it definitely cuts the ties that hopelessness can bind us to. So that’s when I started going, there’s something about this. So I started gardening, I started fermenting. I don’t remember which came first, but I fell in love with fermentation, mostly because even when I was chronically ill, I could still go and make some pickles and then let it sit on my shelf for a little bit. And so the two came hand in hand. And when I started reading about this stuff, I wanted to learn how to do gardening. If you have back… pain or, you know, and I noticed that there, people kept saying homesteading, homesteading, homesteading. I’m like, what is that? And it turns out that homesteading is just a sustainable, intentional way of living. It’s an intentional way of life. And it harkens back to some of our traditions, which we’re not that far from, at least I’m not that far from. And you, you get to do it in ways that delight you. You know, I don’t make sourdough bread because that’s not my homesteading, that’s not my homesteading passion. So that’s a little bit of my story of how I got to homesteading and being on this podcast with you.

Speaker #0
Okay, great. So, yeah, let’s recap for a second. Yeah. So you were suffering from this sounds like pretty mysterious chronic illness. And it also sounds like there was a link to your food. And I know that you said that you were a vegetarian. And… I think there’s a big misconception about being vegetarian or vegan that that necessarily equals healthier. And sometimes you can eat really poorly as a vegan.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
And it’s not necessarily healthier. And so you have to be really mindful of protein and certain nutrients. And so I don’t know if you ever got a definitive answer to your. what was ailing you, but it sounds like just changing your diet really had an enormous impact on your healing.

Speaker #1
Yes. Food, community, rest, and movement. So when I was so sick, I could walk only five minutes and I’d get nauseous and we’d have to come back to the house. And my husband had to come with me because my cognition was so clouded that I… couldn’t cross streets. There was too many decisions that had to be made in order to cross the street safely. And I had such brain fog that I couldn’t do those things. And I say community because we are social beings. So it’s not just I started juicing and suddenly my life was better. It was a number of things. And I knew as a practitioner, I kept going, what would I tell my patient? What would I tell my patient? And so just before I got sick, I had… I did something markedly different in my life. I did something purely for pleasure. And what that was is I decided to learn French. My husband and I visit France from time to time, but it’s not like there’s 1% of the population in the area that I live in speak French. It wasn’t like it was useful at all. It was just something I wanted to do because I liked the way it sounded. I’ve always wanted to learn a language. And so I had about six months of learning this language before I got sick, and I decided to keep it. And the people that I spoke with, like my teachers online, and I had a few language learning friends online, none of them knew I was ill. So I had to cancel a lot because I was ill, but I never told them why I was canceling. And so there was this one pocket of my world where people didn’t know I was sick. That wasn’t my story. And they now, a lot of them now know, but there was something about that because the people that I loved and cared for me, the, you know, they always had puppy dog eyes when they were like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Did you, you know, is it okay? I was like always talking to somebody that was at a funeral and I needed something outside of that. And so that was number one, having some sort of community and some sort of fulfillment. And so I talk a lot about that in the book, finding pleasure, because that will save, that will save your life in these difficult times. And it didn’t cost much money to just learn a language. And then secondly, food was such a big deal, but I initially, I didn’t know how big it was. Right. I just knew that something wasn’t working. And so I’m going to try homeopathy and acupuncture and herbs. And I just threw, I just, I was like throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what stuck. But what stuck really, what was the most magical was getting nutrient dense foods in my body. And the body knows how to heal. Like I was taught that in grad school. We were often taught trust the needles, which really means trust that patient’s body. Like I don’t have to be super creative or clever. I just need to do the pattern. the pattern diagnosis and then treat them according to that pattern. And the body does the rest. And it’s remarkable. So if I could do that in practice in the clinic, when I took off my work clothes and I was at home, could I do that at home? And I recognized that finally I could.

Speaker #0
Yeah. I want to pause for a second because I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but you are a trained acupuncturist, correct? So that’s why when you’re talking about needles and So you, yeah. That’s your whole business, right? And your whole career is acupuncture. So I want to just make sure that we were clear on that because I know that we hadn’t mentioned it before. So community was really important. Food. And then COVID happened.

Speaker #1
Yes.

Speaker #0
And that creates a lot of isolation. And you couldn’t get access to things that were very important to you. I totally get that. that. I remember that very clearly because food is very, very important to me as well as a nutritionist and a cooking instructor and chef. I’m cooking all the time. So to not be able to walk into a grocery store freely and go to a farmer’s market was extremely stressful. And so it sounds like that’s what really prompted you though, to then start growing your own food, which as Such a wonderful practice because you are then totally in control of your food. You want organic garlic, you’re going to grow it. You want organic ginger, you know, you can do that. It sounds like in Los Angeles, too. I don’t know if I could even grow ginger in Connecticut, but where you live, you could probably do that very easily. Well, and then that led into this. This homesteading lifestyle.

Speaker #1
That’s correct. Well, I will say you might want to experiment with garlic. You said ginger. You don’t know if you can grow ginger. Yeah,

Speaker #0
I can grow garlic, but I have never tried ginger. That might be tough. Yeah, if you walk into a garden store here, you would not find ginger.

Speaker #1
Yeah, I don’t think so. I mean, if you did a greenhouse, of course, yeah, but garlic for sure. Okay, yeah.

Speaker #0
So then you went from… Just realizing that you could start maybe growing food, even though you had never done it before.

Speaker #1
Yeah.

Speaker #0
And you kill all houseplants and everything. Although I see a couple of plants. Now. Behind you. On Zoom. But that this philosophy of homesteading then came to be. And you describe it as an intentional way of living or of life. Correct? That’s right. So let’s talk a little bit more. About homesteading and also because, like I said before, you live in Los Angeles. I think when people think or many people think of homesteading, they think of living someplace very rural.

Speaker #1
That’s right.

Speaker #0
You know, where you have no choice. Your closest grocery store is 50 miles away. And so you’re going to be raising chickens and goats and cows and growing all your own food so you can survive.

Speaker #1
Yes. On your property.

Speaker #0
So you don’t technically. need to survive in this way because I imagine that you have access to lots of food sources there. But it is a way of life.

Speaker #1
It’s a way of life. And I will say that the first thing that I thought of when I thought of homesteaders was someone like Little House on the Prairie. They live in the middle of nowhere. They’ve got some kids. They’ve got to fight off bears with a rifle. They’ve got homemade clothes. It’s probably made out of curtains. I don’t know. And What really the original homesteaders were that there was a series of homesteader acts starting in 1862 where the federal government gave federal land to private owners, about 270 million acres. A lot of that did not go to Little House on the Prairie. It went to big business, sadly. But there was quite a few homesteaders that had long beards and bonnets and all that stuff. Homesteading now. is more of an intentional way of living, as I’d mentioned before, and it’s a mindfulness practice. I think a lot of minimalism and homesteading can go hand in hand. I think there’s a lot of crossover into what’s trendy now, doing things that you love, like the woman that cleans closets, Marie Kondo, I think is her name. She was really big about tidying up. Well, homesteading can go into that because you can decide on things that you absolutely love. What homesteading looks like now, and again, it’s got many spokes to the wheel. So I’m going to name a few, but there’s a lot more. It’s reducing toxic load in your home, building your gut microbiomes with nutrient-dense food so that your terrain is really strong so that you’re not getting sick and you can close that loop. You’re not constantly going to the pharmacy or the hospital or urgent care. Growing edible landscaping is another spoke. And connecting more deeply with our innate resourcefulness. That’s… That’s the real key is I don’t have to do it all alone, but I also can do a lot of it. And so when we connect, we’re going to, you know, you’re going to meet other people in the community that have similar interests. And you kind of, you share tasks. For instance, at the farmer’s market, there’s this incredible baker that makes 48 hour fermented sourdough. My husband loves bread. And I was like, well, I think I should start making this bread. And he’s like, why? You don’t eat it. And we have a baker that makes it incredibly for 12 bucks. And I’m like, Well, I think I should continue to buy it from the baker. That’s a really good idea. And so because I have the ability to have convenience. Now, I will say that there is an urban farm. It’s a little postage stamp. There’s probably more than one, but one that I know of, a postage stamp house with a little, not even an acre of land, like tiny, tiny, like inner city land. And he grows enough food. I think it’s a quarter. No, it’s not a quarter. It’s like one fifth of an acre of land. He grows enough food for four people for the entire year, like enough produce in downtown Los Angeles. That’s remarkable. That’s incredible. It’s incredible. And so what I learned with homesteading, because I did a lot of permaculture, which permaculture is such an incredible education, kind of an education group. And what they’re teaching you is to mimic nature in your backyard. So, for example, I have things called gilds, which are really families. I’ll have a tree, a fruit tree. And then when the fruit tree’s a baby, I will have some cover crop around it that I can eat. So maybe, or not eat, maybe it’s pretty like snapdragons or I think there’s, I forget what the other, I’m not big on flowers. But there’s other flowers that will cover the ground and keep that ground because our ground gets really, really hot and really, really dry. So I need to keep it moist. So I don’t actually need to mulch. I can mulch with living. living beings. And then I’ll have another thing, like one of my favorite, what is the name of it? It starts with a C. Comfrey, that’s it. I love comfrey because it’s a nitrogen fixer. So it goes really deep down. It doesn’t affect any of the other roots, but it’s going to feed the tree. And then I can also use it medicinally for bruises and scrapes and all that stuff. It’s called knit bone in, you know, in familial herbal remedies. And so I’ve created this family and then I can walk away. And I do walk. I’m not like you. I’m not a proud gardener. I’m a really lazy gardener. And so I will walk away for a few months if stuff gets really busy and I’ll come back and everything’s still alive and thriving in Southern California in very, very hot area because it’s off of my cemented backyard. I have some planters that are, I mean, it’s hot and these things are doing just fine. I gave a tour yesterday and I was showing some taro, some yarrow, which is great for stopping bleeding for emergencies. And. And it was thriving. And I haven’t watered this thing in like a few months, honestly, because I’m a lazy gardener. And so homesteading doesn’t have to be perfect or beautiful. It can be very messy if that’s the type of person you are, which for me, that’s what my gardening looks like. But we can come back to finding what homesteading means to us. And I think that’s what I was most surprised about. I’m like, I’m not a homesteader. I don’t even cook. And as a nutritionist, I think we should talk about this a little bit because there’s lots of professional women, career women, and career men. think I’m too busy to cook. I’m just going to, I’m going to outsource it. And you can get into a lot of trouble outsourcing. So initially when I was outsourcing, I was getting rotisserie chicken at the organic grocery store that’s, you know, very close to my house. And that was all fine and good, except I didn’t know what oils they were using on that chicken. Like I didn’t, you know, they were using stuff that I probably wouldn’t use in my kitchen. So I, when I bake a chicken, I bake it with a little bit of chicken fat on top to give it a nice, you know, nice crispy feel. But I don’t know what they were using. And seed oils, I’m highly allergic to them. They really make me ill. But I didn’t know that they made me ill because I’d had them all the time because I was outsourcing all of my food. So what I would say to the professional that’s like, I’m just too busy. There are ways that you can create found time. And there’s ways that you can prioritize the things that are important to you in a way that’s. Um, that’s not painful for me, you know, cooking felt, felt painful. So I initially started with, I’m going to find a recipe that has no more than three steps. So chicken, you clean it, you put some grease on it, you stick it in the oven. That’s three, you know, less than three steps. And it’s, and it’s not three steps and it’s, um, it’s fast food, right? Now I have a chicken that I can pull out and make chicken salad or soup or sandwiches or just. that with a little side. And so I’d love to, for us to talk a little bit about that, this idea that cooking is just not that important because it is.

Speaker #0
Oh yeah. I could talk. I mean, I could do millions of podcasts on that because I mean, this is, this is the theme that I see with so many people is that they are just too busy to cook. And number one, I feel like when you are outsourcing, like you said, which I, I like that analogy. you are losing your connection to your food. I mean, you don’t know what the chicken that you buy for the rotisserie chicken, you don’t know what they’re making it with. When you go to a restaurant, it’s all fine to go out to a restaurant every once in a while, but you just lose the connection. You don’t know how they’re preparing things, and so you don’t know the ingredients, the sources, all of that. So I think the more that we can cook at home, the better, and be more just in charge of our food. Even just for the amount of calories and the fats and the salts and that, you know, just like that basic level. When people say that they’re too busy to cook, I have lots of tips for that. I mean, number one, you don’t need to be a five star gourmet chef. I mean, it does not have to look like something that came out of a food channel show. It can just be as simple as roasting a chicken once a week. And I mean, that’s such a great. example, as one roast chicken can make a couple of meals. You can put it into soup, you can make tacos, you can whatever, you know, you can make chicken salad, whatever, whatever. And so that’s a really good example. So I think we want to learn how to maximize food in that way, making double of something, freezing half of it, having, you know, things on hand. So meal prepping and meal planning, I think are… Very, very crucial steps in that. And you can’t just wander aimlessly through a grocery store five days a week just wondering, like, what am I having for dinner tonight? It really does take some kind of forethought and plan, and it lessens the stress of what am I going to eat every week.

Speaker #1
Yes, that’s exactly right. And I think even gardening, and I’m not suggesting that people garden if they feel that they can’t even, you know, roast a chicken. But gardening makes for this really, there’s less plan and less prep. So sometimes I’ll go out into my garden and go, oh, the cucumbers are up. I guess it’s time to make cucumber salad. Or, oh, the basil’s here. Let’s make a pasta salad with basil. And so, but I think if we circle back to, because sometimes for me, if I heard just bake a chicken, I’d be like, that’s insane. Like, what are you talking about? Like, I still have, I remember in grad school, I had bed sheets for curtains because I just didn’t have time. to go get bed sheets. So we just had bed sheets for curtains. So you’re going to tell the listener that has bed sheets for curtains to roast a chicken. And I will say that minute by minute, it’s easier and more effective to roast a chicken than it is to go out to a fast food joint, stand in line, get in your car, get in line, wait for the order, come back, feel like crap after you eat it.

Speaker #0
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker #1
So there’s just, there’s a few pieces. Once a week, we make a roast chicken. Do we get tired of chicken? No. Now that I’m getting better at cooking, we switch it up a little bit. But initially, it was like, we have cold chicken in the fridge. That’s a win. I can eat a leg of cold chicken with a piece of steamed broccoli, and I’m good. Before, I thought that it was easier to get in that fast food line because I was that. Yeah.

Speaker #0
No, I understand that, that there is a lot of mental block. to cooking a lot. I mean, that was something that I think when I first got into my business, I was not totally prepared for that, that there was going to be a lot of fear around cooking and just this mental block of like, I can’t cook.You want to tell me to cook roast. How do I even do that? I mean, what does that mean, roasted chicken? If you didn’t learn how to cook from your mom or your, you know, right. So then it’s difficult. But I think, right. So just taking these like small step by step. Right. So when I say you have to start meal planning and meal prepping, I totally get that you have to start where you’re at, where you’re comfortable. And same with gardening. I mean, same with gardening. I tell people like I have a very large vegetable garden. That was years, though, of me planning it, failing. I mean, I could tell you stories all day about like my first couple of gardens. It was just like such a fail. And now it’s a large vegetable garden that sometimes doesn’t do great. And that’s just how it goes. And I love how you talk just more about outsourcing some of the other. things that come in with your homesteading mindset, like buying the bread from a great baker who makes, I’m sure you know exactly where her ingredients come from. And that’s, and you feel good about buying her bread rather than you taking your time to make bread. You know that that’s just not in your wheelhouse that you want to even be baking bread. And that’s, that’s fine. And I’ve been there. I mean, we have, I have bees at my house or beekeepers. I’ve had chickens. I bake bread, the compost, you know, it’s like some things have worked. We don’t have chickens anymore just because of our lifestyle and traveling and everything. It’s hard to keep chickens when you’re not, you know, you have to be there all the time.

Speaker #1
So you can travel with bees? Like bees are pretty little.

Speaker #0
Bees you can leave alone for, yeah, a couple of weeks. You don’t have to be like attending, you know, attending to them every single day on their own. But chickens are different. Chickens need your attention. They’re like pets. Thank you, love. Yeah. So that that’s but I I have great egg sources around me, you know, so that’s so that’s super helpful. So I understand, you know, that this this outsourcing, but we don’t want to outsource too much. Right. We want it. We want to have some control over our food and our, you know, and our ability to to create our own health around that. you know, and it gives you, I think, a good sense of control.

Speaker #1
Yes. Yeah. It gives you a sense of hopefulness. If you can see, first of all, I didn’t even know, pardon me, what broccoli looked like coming out of the ground. Like that’s how divorced I was from my food. I was a latchkey kid to income home. Everybody was out of the house. So of course, they weren’t going to teach me how to cook. They weren’t there to cook. We lived on Pop-Tarts and microwave stuff growing up. And so I do agree with you that patient compliance is really tricky. And it’s always been an issue, this patient compliance. And so even when I’m treating patients in the clinic and they come for acupuncture, I’m often giving them homework and saying, try this one little thing. And a lot of times I hear those three big myths, which is I don’t have time, I don’t have enough money, and it’s too complicated. And I hope that the readers, the listener, reader, because I’m an author, I hope that the listener is taking this in. And especially that’s what I was looking for, for the reader as well, that it’s possible. It’s not that complicated, especially if you focus on what you love. For example, if gardening is not right now something that interests you, what does interest you? If cooking feels like too much, what does feel like something that you can… For me, it was fermentation. I loved the idea of increasing my vitamin count simply by putting a jar of some vegetables with salt and water on my counter. One of the fun facts that I learned, which made me so happy. told everyone at every cocktail party I went to, because I go to so many cocktail parties.

Speaker #0
There’s the cocktail parties, 1950s with my little martini.

Speaker #1
That’s where I am, usually on a Saturday. But I was constantly saying, do you know that in a table, a teaspoon of sauerkraut, there’s more probiotics than an entire bottle of probiotics? Like that to me blew my mind. So if someone is starting to get into homesteading or starting to create a more mindful, intentional way of life. And there’s one thing that they could talk ad infinitum about. Like you could talk about how to make cooking easy. Like your eyes lit up when you were talking about it. You’re a nutritionist. You’re doing the right thing. You’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. And so when we find something as a hobby that feels very full of passion and desire and motivation, that’s the corner that we can start on and we can grow out from there. You know, you may have been a good cook initially, and then you got into gardening because it was the next step in your passion journey. And now you have this incredible. And yes, there are. I think it’s really important to show our bumps and bruises. Like, I feel like I don’t have any social media. But if I ever do go back to social media, I’m going to take pictures of all the ugly patches of my garden. And I’m going to show people, like, this is what a real garden looks like if you’re not doing it. Yeah.

Speaker #0
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I know. And I don’t mean to sound like, well, I have a large vegetable garden. I mean, believe me, I have had years where things don’t grow. I actually just. This year, I got my soil tested for the first time in a good couple of years. And they told me that I had too much of everything in there, all the nutrients. It was like, because I compost so much and so regularly that I was overfeeding my garden. I had no idea in all of these years of gardening that you could actually overdo adding compost into your bed. So they said. leave your beds alone for a couple of years. And it’ll, you know, I know like last year, a lot of my vegetables, like didn’t, like they weren’t like vibrant, you know, so I’m just experimenting this year and seeing how that all comes out. So it’s all like a give and take. And I think the luxury that we have living in suburbs and stuff, and we don’t live out in the middle of Montana is that if all else fails and you’re gone. You can go outsource it, right? To like, you can go get to the grocery store and find food. It’s not like you’re going to starve. But it’s still, I think, extremely important to grow. And then there’s nothing better than growing tomatoes or herbs and picking them right out of your garden. Or like you said before, all of a sudden you have a bumper crop of cucumbers. And so then that’s what becomes part of your plan for the week is that you have… 20 cucumbers, what am I going to do with them? That’s fun for me. I know for some people this can be intimidating. And I tell people that if you’re just starting, get a container on your deck and grow some herbs. That’s a great start. Have some fresh herbs that you can put into your food and see how that feels.

Speaker #1
In my book, I mention that herbs are the gateway drug for gardeners. Because it’s hard to kill them and it gets you started. And I did a lot of, I do something called simpling, which is just taking an herb from your garden or going out into your garden and kind of figuring out what does my garden want to give me today for my water. And then I’ll take like some mint and maybe a little bit of rosemary and I’ll just throw those sprigs in some water, let it sit on my counter for a few hours. And then I have this spa-like deliciousness. Well, guess what? That easy, that easy step of walking out, clipping two little herbs, or even for those that aren’t growing food. going into the grocery store and sniffing or going to the farmer’s market and sniffing some herbs and just picking a satchel of them and deciding that you’re going to put some in your water and some in your food, it does give you that that is homesteading. That is getting more connected to your true essence, right? The fact that the natural world and humans are one. They’re not separate just because we have polyester clothing and drive-in metal boxes. That doesn’t make us any separate from that.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Now, I love your definition of homesteading and this concept of it doesn’t have to be this all or nothing. Right. I mean, I know you mentioned fermenting before. I have absolutely dabbled in a lot of I’ve made kombucha. I don’t think kombucha is really for me to make. I mean, I’ve done it. I could say I checked it off my list. And like, you know, I know really good places to get kombucha. So I don’t really feel the need to do that again. Yeah. But yeah, so things like that, I think maybe the important takeaway is just to try. Try some things and see what works. And I know earlier we were talking about using some kitchen scraps. I mean, the art of composting, I think, is really part of gardening. And it’s such an important part because you pick things out of your garden, you have all the scraps, the fruit scraps and vegetable scraps. You then compost. I know this is maybe very next level for some people, but the, you know, the compost, which then turns into dirt, then can go back and feed your garden. But you were talking about. way to also use kitchen scraps that I wanted to mention because I think this is a very easy way to maybe take one step into homesteading. So do you want to talk about your vinegar? I’ve never done this and I’m very excited to go home today and do this.

Speaker #1
Well, once you do it, I want to hear all about it. I really do. So there’s something called fruit. scrap vinegar vinegar it’s so easy to make you just take your fruit scraps so your apple cores and i did it with um recently i did it with grapefruit peels because grapefruits are in season and so i was getting a lot at the farmer’s market they were so good and i would just throw them into a jar so i have a half gallon jar mason jar and i fill it with water and then i put in a half cup of sugar so a half cup of sugar for a half gallon of water and fruit scraps And then I just shake it up and I put it on my counter with a canning lid. So I have plastic lids as well just because they don’t rust and stuff. But for the actual fermentation, I like to have a lid that will pop. And so every day…

Speaker #0
So just to get clear because if people are like just starting out, so a canning lid just has like a hole in the top, like a little stopper kind of. Yeah. That let a little air, like pressure out.

Speaker #1
Yeah, that’s a fancier version. You can get them at masontops.com, by the way, if people are questioning where to get them. This is just the metal lid that you have when you buy pickles at the store and you pop it open. It’s a lid and it’s a ring. It’s a metal lid and a metal ring. You can also get plastic rings, which they don’t rust as much. So it’s not the one with the hole. That’s really good for fermenting vegetables. With this one, you don’t need to pop it as much. so you don’t really you can you can do the whole for sure and mason Tops.com has those, the ones that you’re talking about are silicone and they let the air out. And they’re much more, they’re great because you can forget about it and not get fermented. In this case, it’s just the metal one that usually comes with the mason jar that you buy. Okay.

Speaker #0
So you let this sit on your counter.

Speaker #1
You let it sit on your counter. Every day you take a long fork or chopsticks or a butter knife and you mix it. And what you’re doing is you’re just trying to get the top layer. to go down under the water so that mold doesn’t form. You’re just gently mixing it, gently mixing it. And after about 30 days, it will start to change. Now, what I do, because I’m not a vinegar expert, and I still am a little Western-minded, so I’m like, oh, I don’t know if I, you know, modern-minded. I’m not used to just using vinegar. I go and get acid strips that you can tell what the acid is. They’re like $3. You know, you get them online. And you dip it in, and it’ll tell you. And when it gets to a… the acid that’s for cleaning vinegar. And I, I’m sorry, I don’t remember what it is. Remember, I told you if I don’t write it down. Yeah, that’s okay.

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
It’s just the one that’s, that’s, it could be edible, but it’s definitely going to clean your, your, your counters. Then I strain it through cheesecloth. So I get a second, this is at the end of 30 days, I get a second mason jar. I put cheesecloth over it, which could be a t-shirt. If you have a white t-shirt that’s, you know, clean, you could use that. But cheesecloth is something you can buy. It just means it’s like a tea towel. It’s very thin cotton. You strain it by, what that means is just pouring the vinegar through that cheesecloth into the mason jar. Sometimes I’ll let it sit a little longer if it hasn’t gotten acidic enough. And then I take that strained liquid and I put half of it in a spray bottle. I fill the other half up with water, so it’s half and half. And I put in my favorite essential oils. And I write on the bottle what the essential oils are so that when I refill it, I can do the same. So I like rosemary. It smells great for cleaning. lemon balm, definitely tea tree because it’s so antimicrobial. And so let’s just say I’ll do those three. You don’t need as much tea tree because it’s a very, it’s a bully scenting. It’s very strong. So you use a little bit of that, a lot of the rosemary, a lot of the lemon balm. And now you have this, you know, eight or $9 bottle of organic, of organic cleaning that you know where it’s come from. It’s saved you now eight to nine dollars and it costs you. relatively nothing, because if you’re not using the sugar for anything else in your house, then that sugar, that bag of sugar is going to go a long, long way.

Speaker #0
Well, great. I’m excited. I can’t believe that I have, I mean, I’ve heard of versions of this, and I cannot believe like in my homesteading journey that I have not done this yet, but I am definitely going to do this and I will keep you posted and let you know. And I will put that recipe in my show notes so people can get that. That would be, yeah, I think an easy way to ease into some homesteading habits. So tell me a little bit about your book and then how people can find you and what you’re doing now.

Speaker #1
Great. Well, I’m so happy to be chatting with you. And I love that. Would you have called yourself a homesteader before this conversation?

Speaker #0
No, I definitely would not have called myself a homesteader because honestly, when I say that I think of homesteading, I would never have identified myself as a homesteader. But while we’re talking and I’m like, oh, I do do a lot of those like homesteading habits.

Speaker #1
Yeah. You are a hardcore homesteader.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I’m more of a homesteader than I had imagined.

Speaker #1
Yes, you’ve had chickens. I mean, that’s fantastic. And bees. Oh my gosh, I could talk to you for hours about that.

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
My book, The Homesteader Mindset, helps busy people tackle the overwhelm of creating a sustainable, healthy lifestyle through the implementation of small daily habits. So we didn’t talk a lot about habit formation, but that really is the premise. What we did talk about, which is very important and key to The Homesteader Mindset, is we’re helping people get to the joy and the pleasure and finding ways to create these habits without pain, with joy. I really think that that’s like everything that you’ve talked about. I do have a free gift for your listeners. It’s a Homesteader Habit Tracker, and you can get that at my website, which is www.createwellnessproject.com forward slash gift. That’s G-I-F-T. And that will give you an idea of how to create these tiny little habits and also give you a tracker to start doing them. So if you want to do your vinegar, like that could be one of your first habits. You know, did I, did I… Did I shake it up? Did I stir it up every day? And then you can let us know because Heather and I are really excited to have you join us in the homesteading revolution.

Speaker #0
Yes. Yes. So that’s great. And I will put that in the show notes too, that link. And then they can get your book, right? Probably easily on your website. I’ll link that. I could talk all day with you about homesteading and gardening and growing food and food itself. And maybe I’ll have you back on. I would love to have you come back on and do a part two because I feel like we. are unfortunately out of time, but I have a million more questions. So let’s do that. You know what? I want to have you come back, I think in the 30 days after I’ve made my vinegar, my spray and let you know how it goes.

Speaker #1
I would love that. And baking soda, if you have a hard stain, you can add baking soda, sprinkle it on the area and then do the vinegar on top. It’s crazy. But yes, let’s do that. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Speaker #0
Okay. All right. Good. We will do that. Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming in today and talking. This has been super helpful and just meaningful.

Speaker #1
And you’re going to come back. So we’ll see you soon. Okay, we’ll see you soon. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker #0
And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating. our real bodies and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.