Happy Thanksgiving!

I am so thankful for YOU!

I know I’ve shared this with you all, but my current book I’m working on is called The Feel Good Kitchen. While it’s all still my same food and wellness philosophy, it goes deeper into cultivating the sensation of feeling good. Not just feeling good about how we look, but truly feeling good; to the core, on a cellular level. This is our approach to everyday life and it certainly includes special occasions as well. If you’ve been following CCN long enough you know that a few choices that don’t make us feel well can sort of feel like waking up on a Sunday during college… Do you get what I’m saying? 

I’m going to try and keep this short, but I have a good “feel good” story that is very near and dear to my heart. My sister and brother-in-law came in on Sunday to visit for Thanksgiving week. We are incredibly close. I talk about my sister in our calls because she’s much smarter than me and a truly incredible researcher. She always knows and understands cutting-edge science because she’s been a clinical researcher at some of the most well-known hospitals in the world and she now works for a start-up company that creates medical devices. She has also suffered from auto-immune disease from time to time. Mostly, we’ve been able to keep her from flare-ups with the traditional CCN way of life, but twice we’ve had to get her on our autoimmune protocol. 

My sister is the 5th of eight children in my family. I’m the oldest girl in the family, so my siblings have leaned on me a lot. They’ve almost all lived with me and my family at some point in their adult life. I’m very, very close to them, but I talk to my sister at least once a day. Recently, after the birth of her 2nd child, she had a terrible flare-up. So bad that she was almost unable to get out of bed. I’m much closer since moving from SoCal, but I’m still almost 8 hours away, so it’s not always possible to go pop in and take over for a couple of days.

She called me in tears one day and my heart sank because she hadn’t been telling me how bad she was feeling. She works and has two babies and while her hubby helps a ton, he’s a dean of charter schools in inner-city Cleveland, so his job requires him on the campus. The day she called me, I looked to book a quick flight back to support them and cook for them. She said to let her try it for a week because sometimes it’s harder after I leave than when I came in the first place. We got her on a foundational supplement protocol and expedited the orders. 

I wrote her a healing protocol that included one daily smoothie and three large AIP-type meals. She’s a nursing mom too, so she needs the calories and energy. After just a few days, she was feeling like her body was releasing tension, still in pain, but less and less. Throughout this process, we realized her husband needed this as badly as she did. He spent 10 years of his childhood in foster care and hasn’t felt good most of his life, even though he’s now an adult at 42 years old. A couple weeks after they started, he sent me the sweetest text saying he had never felt this good in his entire life and that I saved them. Cue the tears!

Fast forward two months and they’re visiting for Thanksgiving week, thank goodness because two days with them is never enough. I told them I was happy to be compliant with their successful approach to AIP! But they wanted to start shifting out of it and back to traditional CCN, while still filling their plates with healthy fat, lean protein, and tons of colors. They both have said several times that they don’t ever want to feel that bad again and now they feel more equipped than ever to make the best food choices for themselves and their family! They now look for similar inflammatory signs in their friends and loved ones and have mentioned more than once how frustrating it is when someone doesn’t want to change. We’ve all been there before and can only really worry about making the best decisions for ourselves.

They’re also loving being here and therapy stacking with all my goods: red light, sauna blanket, etc. Now that they’re feeling better, they will start adding resistance training back into their lives as well as these lifestyle practices. 

If it’s truly about feeling good, then the holidays don’t have anything on us! Thanksgiving is a time to share meaningful moments and carefree timelessness with those we love. The only reason to even look at a clock is to make sure the turkey hasn’t been in too long.

How can you build that carefree moment into your week and your day? Gratitude! Sincere gratitude is more than just a thought, it’s a feeling that impacts our nervous system, it’s physics. Every time you feel caught up, anxious, or out of sorts, think of something you are incredibly grateful for and feel what happens to your body and mind. This week isn’t about Black Friday sales, it’s about nourishing our spirits with the people in our lives who mean the most to us. 

Our mantra in our membership this week is: At this moment, I am grateful. I’d love to have you fill in the last part of the sentence with what you’re grateful for. I would bet at the top of the list are the people in your lives. 

Enjoy the day. Enjoy the food and make choices that support your feeling good! Move your body with an outside walk, if possible in the morning and after your big meal. If you’re on dish duty and it seems like a lot, remember how blessed you are to have all that food and those dishes to wash and the people to serve. Because you feel good, you can take on a little more than those that don’t. Let’s celebrate the Feel Good approach on Thanksgiving! 

Oh and in case you’re wondering, I have a few bites of everything pretty much, including both the pumpkin and apple pies that I’m making from scratch! Love you all! Happy Thanksgiving! 

Like I said before, it isn’t about the sales and what we can buy. But if you are looking for some great deals this year, I encourage you to follow me in stories on Instagram tomorrow – I will be sharing some deals from some of my favorite brands!