clean eating with Lauren Brimley

Our real mom today is Lauren Brimley of Eating Whole! She is changing how the world eats with her instagram feed.  She promotes clean eating for you and your family. And guess what, carbs are included! Make sure and read our Q&A to see what inspired her to change her eating habits and focus on feeling great about herself. She is so inspiring and an incredible mom. Food really does matter. It’s a choice we make everyday. She is here to help us  live a happy life with food. To get started Lauren is sharing her top 5 kitchen necessities to make clean eating easier in your home. Make sure to print out her shopping list and keep it in your purse. It makes it easier to skip the candy aisle.

You don’t need these items to necessarily be successful in the kitchen, but these are 5 items I just can’t live without!

1. Kitchenaid Stand Mixer— I use this bad boy for making my homemade honey wheat bread on a weekly basis.

2. My Food Processor – I use my food processor to make sauces, pesto, cauliflower rice of cauliflower pizza crust, and my favorite healthy cookies.

3. Pretty, mismatched plates. I have been collecting vintage plates for years, and they have all been found at thrift stores! I love that our cupboards are full of mismatched dishes, but they all are cohesive in color. I like to stick to aqua blue and yellow when collecting plates. I find that sitting down for a meal with a beautiful dish makes everything feel a little more special. But, that’s just one of my quirks!

4. A well stocked pantry! This is key! Often people don’t want to invest in items that you might not use all the time, like rice vinegar, balsamic vinegar, herbs de provence, etc. But, I have found that when I have a wide variety of spices of vinegar, it allows me to expand the flavors of the meal and take it to the next level. I like to buy my spices from the mexican aisle of my grocery store, because they come in packets for around a dollar, and I can fill them in my own containers. It is much cheaper than buying from the regular spice aisle!

5. A FOOD SPIRAL tool!  These tools make it so easy to spiral veggies like zucchini or carrots into “noodles” for a healthy alternative to pasta. So handy!

1. Polar FT4 Heart Rate Monitor — I wrote a review on it here, comparing and contrasting to the FitBit (which I also love). This is my most used workout tool!

2.  I love to do yoga, and have recently joined MyYogaPro that has countless yoga routines that I can practice. When doing yoga I prefer an extra thick yoga mat, but that’s just preference. I also use my yoga mat for pilates. I love Blogilates!

3. A great running shoe is your best friend when running long distances. When I trained and ran my half marathon, these were amazing. I have been using ASICS since high school!

4.  I loved wearing this jacket while running in the cool temperatures of Monterey, CA. It was comfy, warm, but also was breathable.

5.  I love having a large water bottle to carry around everywhere. Carrying a water bottle with you promotes you to stay hydrated!

instagram – @eating_whole

My husband and I have been together since we were in high school, I waited for him as he served his 2 year mission to Madagascar for our church, we married in 2008, and had our first baby girl in 2012. We are a military family, and are now expecting our second baby girl later this year.

My eating style is very personal to me, and came about from years of counting calories and feeling terrible guilt towards food I ate. I hated my relationship with food and how it made me feel, so I decided to stop worrying about calories, and started focusing on the quality of food I ate. I now try to eat ingredients as whole as possible, and very clean. I try to make everything from scratch, and we have seen such positive changes in our health and outlook! I don’t follow any diets of guidelines; just what feels right.

 I was such a yo-yo dieter for years leading up to my positive change. I tried being vegan for a while, I tried eating raw, I tried counting calories. It was all so depressing and made me so miserable. Truly the best thing you can do for yourself is eat real food.

I was depressed for years. I had terrible self-esteem and a skewed view on my body image. I truly feel that my relationship with food was harming my overall well being and mental health. I used food as a punishment. It was so awful. After a lot of prayer and studying tons of books and articles online, I felt like I had a handle on what needed to change. And that change was the food I was eating, and how I was eating it. Food is meant to fuel our bodies and make us stronger. And it truly did that for me! I was able to run further than I had ever run. The frequent headaches that I had in the past were virtually gone. My skinned cleared up considerably. And my happiness was out the roof!

Yes, totally. For the most part, I live a sugar-free life, but sometimes you just have to have some dark chocolate. The best part about this lifestyle change is that it’s a LIFEstyle. I know that I won’t normally eat sugar, but if I really want to have a treat occasionally, that’s okay, and I will never beat myself up about it.

The most frequently asked question I get is how to get started. My answer, is just start! It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing, though. If you need to slowly wean out certain things from your family’s diet, that’s okay! Take small steps, but START! Maybe add in more vegetables to each meal. Maybe stop buying certain processed foods like corn dogs. Switch out your white bread for a whole grain bread. Small steps lead to big changes. You do not need to feel overwhelmed.  –Lauren Brimley

A huge thanks to Lauren for being our real mom today! Thank you so much for keeping us healthy.

Eating Whole –  instagram feed and her blog 

xx,

Jenna