Helllooo my angels! I am writing to you from the beautiful Malibu oceanside today and I hope you can feel those zen vibes radiating through the screen. I am so excited, happy and fired up to be black on my blogging roll. My god, how I have missed connecting with you guys in this way.
I am also sipping on my coffee from my NOT FROM HERE mug (!!!) & it is literally giving me life. Oh, and I am wearing my Celestial Club sweatshirt & have already had two of you come up to me this week saying you’re part of the tbb fam, recognizing the sweatshirt before even seeing that it was me hehe. 😉 I cannot tell you how much this fuels my soul & spirit — and how each and every order means SO MUCH & is SO FELT.
Keep sending me your screenshots & tagging me in your stories of you ordering/receiving your merch — it means more than you will ever !! know !! & the more we sell, the more we can do bigger collections (think SWEAT SETS) next year… so truly every single sale means the world & enhances the bigger vision for our community. 💕
So back to the blogging frequency thing. I am not sure why but my soul felt like it needed this blog revamp & switch-up with the site in order to really get back in the flow with my regular cadence of blog posts. It’s some kind of block I have had for the last few years, also mixed in with overall lack of energy & then wild life changes (becoming a mom being the main one! podcasting, writing books, etc!) – but I want you to know I am back in action. Blogging in this way is feeding my soul again, and that’s how I know I am back to stay.
So what will the new cadence be?! I am thinking it will be 1-2 blog posts per week, so please do send in your topics. We have also made COMMENTING on blog posts easier again by moving them back to the WordPress commenting style. Please do leave comments, they’re so fun and so OG blog life, & I promise to always write back. 🙂 🙂
🌱 My ! Current ! Diet ! 🌱
Ok so let’s get into the topic of this post. My current DIET!! Everyone wants to know, and it has been a hot topic of conversation everywhere from IG to the main question people ask me when I go on podcasts, etc. And I totally get why. It was less than two years ago that I released the Celestial Diet, and posted frequently about recipes, “what I eat in a day” videos, and even lots of YouTube recipe videos with Jonathan. Not to mention I used to be The Blonde Vegan!! & then talked a lot about intuitive plant-based eating for many years.
More recently I have felt less called to talk about my diet online, which has felt really good. As my soul continues to ascend in the spiritual realms and I continue to find a deeper rooted connection of who I am at my core, I have found it more exciting to talk about things beyond food. I have also been back and forth with how I define the way that I eat during this postpartum period of my life, which is only natural because postpartum shakes up so much.
I also don’t believe so much in blanket definitions for all people in general because they can be confining & stereotypical, but in some cases they make sense — and in my life they have often made a lot of sense & are more mentally freeing than confining. However, we are all different!
I will share all the deets with you guys, and it is kind of shocking to myself that I am even doing this today. But I want to dispel the myths and also continue talking about what I genuinely care about, and weave the plant-based recipe content back into this blog and my IG slowly but surely, because I know many of you guys ask for it. & I also deeply enjoy bringing it to you! Plant-based kids recipe ebook, anyone?! 🙂
Ok, so how am I eating now?
I was very vocal about having a plant-based pregnancy, and I absolutely loved it. My body thrived, my baby thrived, I felt really good and ALL of my cravings during my pregnancy were for fruit & veggies. The only thing I had during pregnancy that wasn’t vegan was my prenatal, which had fish oil in it. As I have always said, I resonate with all sides of veganism but I prefer to use the term “plant-based” because at the end of the day I do choose certain things to put my health first. For me, that is what I have found to be the most healthy & non-dogmatic way of going about it.
Then came postpartum. Wow, was that time of life a SHOCK to my system. I found the way that my body was dumping hormones wildly (think: night sweats, panic attacks, insomnia, raging hormonal stress, pp anxiety, cravings, rashes galore) in the weeks and months postpartum to be VERY jarring. Like I said, I had a healthy & balanced pregnancy — minus the debilitating sciatica. So hormonally this was extremely tough on my body.
Also, there was breastfeeding! I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to produce a whole lot of milk due to the fact that I have had various surgeries over the years and health issues that leave my body with minimal energy leftover. And lo and behold… I was right! So while I did breastfeed Atticus for 4.5 months, it was hard on my body to do so and didn’t come with a ton of ease. I loved the act of breastfeeding, but pumping became soul sucking and also sleep depriving and well, all the difficult things you would imagine it to be.
During postpartum I developed SEVERE food aversions. It’s kind of like what people talk about in pregnancy, but I had this way more intensely postpartum. The hormonal shifts taking place in my body felt more radical than actual pregnancy did to me. One of the things that started happening for me was a massive aversion to ALL fruit & 90% of veggies that were normally my staple diet. All I could eat was bland food… bread, kitchari (my saving grace), pasta, soup… kind of like food you eat when you’re sick. And that’s how I felt a lot of the time, very queasy and nauseous. For MONTHS. Like a chronic queasiness that I actually still feel even in this moment. & a MASSIVE lack of appetite. If it weren’t for breastfeeding, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself eat at all. My appetite still feels like this postpartum.
A few times in early postpartum I tried to eat fruit because I normally love it and it’s always such an easy snack, and I would just gag every time and it would come right back up. Not an exaggeration. Now, nearly 11 months postpartum, I am JUST starting to eat bananas again. If you’ve followed me from the beginning, you know that bananas (as snacks & in smoothies) have been my MAIN food group for basically my whole life. So yes, this threw me for a loop. And when you’re breastfeeding, you have to eat. & when you can’t eat your normal foods, you have to consider switching it up. It was hard, but I had to listen.
During this time I was craving some nutrients from foods I hadn’t been eating that were completely undeniable. To be honest, I was craving animal protein. At first I ignored and ignored this feeling. And after months of not having any animal products other than some ghee, the occasional egg dish, and a horrible bout with bone broth because I simply don’t enjoy bone broth… I decided to open up my mind and incorporate some wild caught fish.
Also, make no mistake because this is not a confessional. Thankfully, the world has changed a LOT since my first book came out 8 years ago. It’s not going to break the internet that I had a little bit of fish. This was healthy for me, and goes along with my non-dogmatic approach to my life. I think where we can get in trouble and get “stuck” in things that no longer resonate for us is when we hold so tightly to labels that we over-ride our intuition. And by the way, I did branch out from there and try a few other animal foods that my body guided me to trying.
This is how it went for a few months. I slowly pulled back from talking about being plant-based as much because I always want to be 100% truthful online. But keep in mind: I have a vegan husband, a vegetarian baby, and my SOUL vibrates with the frequency of plant-based life for mind, body, soul reasons. So I always knew and felt that I would make my way back to being plant-based when my body was ready. However, rather than FIGHT my body… I wanted to be at peace with my body. Give her what she was calling for. It wasn’t a “craving” so much as a NEED. Like my body needed something different and I opened to that.
Now, this brings us to present day. 🤍
Now let’s bring us to present day. I have NOT been feeling well. Many of you guys know that. I have full body hives and recently found out I have had a staph infection that my body has been fighting without medication for almost a year. I am finally on antibiotics for it and they seem to be helping. I am also in the middle of an epic series of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy sessions that are CHANGING my life. In fact, that is what my next blog post will be about!
Anyway, the ketamine sessions keep showing me something: I am vibrating out of alignment with my soul. Even down to the way I am eating (which has not been entirely plant-based) and I hit an earth shattering realization: it’s time to return to it. In a way that feels really good. And this is for me, not for anyone else. My body has finally told me it’s ready, and for this I am very happy and very grateful.
Something specific took place recently that really put this into perspective for me. My husband is vegan and we really enjoy being plant-based together. I have been known to say it is one of my favorite things about our relationship!! Because we have so much fun cooking, exploring plant-based restaurants, and traveling the world to healthy places because of it. We also have a passion for raising our kids plant-based (at least for the time being). And I have been totally deviated from that, and that has been hard for him. The thing that happened recently showed me just how hard… and that broke me.
Without my support and basically with me floundering in the wind, it has been harder for Jonathan because rather than us as a vegan couple or vegan family — it’s been him sticking to what we believe in but with me all over the place. And when I get “all over the place” I really don’t do well mentally. That’s a whole other thing that has come up in my ketamine journeys. Not to be morbid, but a part of me has been dead inside because of the lack of energy and health issues and autoimmune concerns and I have just been coasting along this year, not being entirely one with myself and who I really am.
So, my awakening to bring me back to plant-based has felt really good. And it has brought me to this place of being able to share this journey with you today. I didn’t want to share it in the middle when I was confused, because I FELT confused. I think there is a power and a freedom to listening to our bodies and testing the waters from time to time to make sure that how we are eating is really rooted in true intuition rather than pure dogma, pattern, or pressure.
And in certain times of life, i.e. postpartum times, all options for feeling better sometimes need to be tried out. I really needed to do this for myself because I was feeling so, so, so not well in the early postpartum days. & perhaps it helped and gave me what I needed. But now, it’s no longer helping and it’s also making me feel very out of alignment with myself.
I also share this post to share with you my journey and the inner workings of my own soul! We are all so different. I really don’t encourage people to take the plant-based path because they feel like they have to or they should, but only if they want to. If you want to, it is a beautiful door & gateway to many things. From health and joy and healing and spiritual vibration to a specific way of life and beyond. But I believe in bio-individuality and different seasons of life, I really do. The diehard vegan mentality is not at all my vibe — mostly because I have seen certain vegans be so damn MEAN to other people about their diet choices and that’s not EVER what I believe in.
I believe in intuition and following the intuitive pings that live within. I believe that we all know what feels best for us, our bodies, and our specific biochemistry. Not to mention… for our souls! It feels very good for my soul to be plant-based, and I feel the most ME when I eat this way. This is also related to my astrological birth chart and my Human Design! I am such an open channel as a Reflector, such an air sign with so much air & water in my chart, and I gravitate toward the ethereal parts of life. This is all very in alignment with a plant-based life. I also love inspiring others to be plant-based, and I do feel this is a soul calling that goes beyond just this one lifetime.
And when I say I wanted to dispel the myths with this post — I got the WEIRDEST & cruelest message on Instagram last night telling me that the reason I had a harder time breastfeeding was because I wasn’t eating animal protein. The funny thing was, I was eating animal protein at that time! And didn’t post about my diet at all during that time, so this message was such an assumption, such a projection, and I will pray for that person because there was a lot of nasty energy wrapped into it. But I do feel it’s time to share all the deets with you guys.
Another thing about all of this is, I used to be the kind of person who shared all the details of my life in the middle of the shit storm. Now, I am really resonating with sharing it once I have more resolve and resolution. Because I live my life for me and not for other people’s opinions. I never wanted or needed other opinions during this time, aside from my functional medicine doctor — who was showing me that my hormones and nutrient levels were so depleted that I did need animal protein during this time. Hence, the medicinal aspect I spoke of.
With all of these medicine journeys I am now doing, I see so deeply how we are all souls having human experiences. Soul experiences cannot always be defined in one way. And in most areas of my life I am trying to get away from labels and definitions. However in this one part of life, having boundaries feels good. I think of it as a boundary and a choice rather than a rule. Recently I have been bending my boundaries way too far, and I am grateful for it because what it tipped me into made me realize I want to have a strong boundary here. For myself, my husband, and my family — but mostly for me because it all starts there. It feels empowering, not limiting. I am starting to feel like me again. <3
Plus, thanks to these ketamine journeys I am finally thinking clearer again… so I can actually make legit decisions again. & this is one of them. But that is another story for another day. 🙂
So that’s the dealio and the scoop! I am thrilled to have made my way back home to my truest self, my essence, my inner plant-based hippie crunchy mama. That is who I am. I sobbed in ketamine about wanting to get back to her, because that’s the real me. And again, this post is not a confessional. I am not feeling like I need to prove myself to anyone. It’s just a story, my story, in hopes that it will shed light on where I have been and perhaps inspire you in some way. <3
Would love your thoughts below. Please share. & let’s get a comment train going about it all!
P.S. if you shop TBB Merch today and tomorrow, you will still receive your pieces by Thanksgiving!! And now is a great time to get ahead on holiday shopping. <3 Dive in and shop here, and tell me what you are loving from the collection! Yiipppeee!