Mission Statement:
“Helping moms have more energy and confidence to chase after their dreams.”
Where Grassfed Mama all Started
I got this crazy idea to start blogging in 2012. At the time, I had a spunky 15 month old daughter and lived in Lake Charles Louisiana. I was also still working as a speech pathologist – mostly part time in nursing homes.
I titled the blog “Grassfed Mama” because of my foundation in nutrition. I had sort of a crazy health journey that led to eating whole foods and discovering the world of natural living. The thought that everything we eat basically comes from grass (an idea from Michael Pollen.)
Two books that really shaped that journey from the beginning was “The Maker’s Diet” and “Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon.”
After reading these books, we completely changed what we ate, and threw out 80% of our pantry to start over from scratch.
When I was looking at some of my oldest blog posts, I thought that I really should have titled this blog “What I fed my toddler” because most of my posts were just the recipes that I was making when Aidalyn was younger, ha! But now we have expanded to lots of low carb and keto friendly recipes for the whole family!
My Story of Gender Swaying
Some health history that really shapes who I am: My family has a very rare genetic disease that haunts me. I am a carrier, so that means I have the genetic defect without any symptoms. But I have 50% chance of passing it on at each of my pregnancies. It is x-linked – meaning that it is passed by the mother, but would be expressed only in males because it is recessive and isn’t matched on the “Y” chromosome. This disease, Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (namely PMD), has been in my family generation after generation. My uncle had it, my first cousin had it, two of my nephews have it as well. You can look it up to learn more about the disease itself – there is no cure and it is all encompassing since it is neurological in nature.
Since PMD only affects boys, when I was ready to get pregnant I did some research into swaying for the gender you want… Sounds very silly when you think about it – but we did a few things to sway for a girl, and ended up with a very cute and spunky little girl.
A few years later, we gender swayed again – and it was successful! I learned a lot more about gender swaying through this process and put together an How to Sway for a Girl E-book for anything else embarking on that journey.
My Story of Gestational Diabetes
When I was pregnant with my first baby, around 27 weeks I was tested for gestational diabetes and failed! It honestly changed me for good. It was such a difficult process to go through alone and without a plan. I developed gestational diabetes with all three of my pregnancies, but it got easier to manage with the right plan in place and knowing what I could eat that wouldn’t spike my blood sugar. This is one of the main reasons I continue to eat low carb to this day.
Eating Low Carb and Keto
Since I struggled with gestational diabetes, that indicates that I do have underlying blood sugar regulation issues… and honestly I can feel it when I eat too much sugar. When I was pregnant, it was very apparent because if I ate too many carbs, I would have a serious sugar crash where I would almost pass out (yeah, not healthy!). So I had to vigilant and track my blood sugar 4x a day.
Now, I don’t have to be that strict, but I do need to eat low carb or at least carb conscious or my body really doesn’t respond well. I have eaten low carb and keto… and gluten free and dairy free – so I have a lot of experience with low carb substitutions and dairy alternatives (more about that here).
My Homebirth Stories
I had all three of my babies at home – in a water! You can read my 3 successful birth stories below. Each was a good experience – and all different experiences.
My birth stories:
Autism Family Story
When my son was 2, he had regressed and lost some of his basic skills like hand waving, eye contact, pointing to books. These were skills that he had, but seemed like all of the sudden – they disappeared. Believe me, this was a very scary and frightening time for us as a family.
We were referred to get him tested for autism, and the wait list was long. By the time he was evaluated for autism, we already knew what the diagnosis was going to be.
Autism is diagnosed based on outward signs, so everything is behavioral based. There are no blood tests or GI test used in common medical practices.
Coming from a natural health background, I knew that autistic behaviors could be a symptom of underlying health issues. Did you know that it is common to have GI symptoms in autism?
While we were waiting on Anderson’s autism diagnosis, we got him into speech and occupational therapies. Honestly, during this time, he only regressed even more.
I didn’t want to guess at what was going on, so I reached out to Greer at Biomedical Healing for Kids and she put a plan to help Anderson based on his test results. I’m not going to go into specifics here, but I would highly encourage anyone who wants to understand more about the “why” behind different behavior symptoms to reach out to her (you can tell her that I sent you!)
Service Dog Story
With Anderson’s autism diagnosis came some very scary behaviors like “eloping.” This is basically just when a person runs away and doesn’t understand the dangers. Anderson also wasn’t responding to his name, so he would run away and just wouldn’t stop.
When I searched for different ways to keep him safe, I saw story after story about families who had service dogs who were trained to stay with their child and block them so they could stay safe. I knew that long-term, this was exactly what Anderson needed! As he was getting older, he was getting faster, but a trained dog could get to him before me to block him from running in the street.
We reached out to Saber Life Foundation and found a community of other families just like us! They helped us raise money so we could start the training process with our service dog “Millie.”
Service dogs provide so much support for autistic people and their families. I know just in the past year, Millie has been such a blessing to us and the relationship she had with Anderson just keeps growing.
Angela of Grassfed Mama – Health Coach
Over the past 2 years, honestly since Anderson’s autism diagnosis, I have felt lost. I was doing so much research in how to support Anderson, I was losing focus on myself (which honestly happens often when you are a special needs mom.) I started working with a health coach, and the process that we worked together was exactly what I needed.
She helped me get a clearer picture of who I wanted to be in a year, what I wanted to work on, how did I want to live… and my life at the time wasn’t close to where I wanted to be.
I was overwhelmed with making diet changes for Anderson and getting him into all the therapies I could. She helped me break down my goals into week by week steps to it could be accomplished. But because I was focusing so much on him… I did let some of my own passions fall to the side.
After life settled down a bit, I started thinking back to that “dream” I had about myself when I first started working with my health coach and it involved blogging again.
I felt like to really step back into the blogger I wanted to be in my “dream life”… I wanted more education and training. So after much thought, I decided to become a certified integrative nutrition health coach. I am just loving all the information I’m learning about inside this program. I’m glad I took the leap and started the process this year!
Feel free to ask me anything about:
- kicking sugar to the curb
- eating low carb (or even keto)
- natural birth
- natural detoxing
- simple healthy swaps for families
