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Gluten Free Cake Round Up

Gluten Free Cake Round Up

This past year, my husband and I discovered that we both were reacting to gluten in our food. Not so much of an allergy, but definitely an intolerance. Did you know that up to 6-10% estimated people are celiacs or have a gluten allergy? Wheat products are not easy for human to digest even for the person without celiacs disease.

Phytates in the grains bind to other minerals like magnesium and are hard to digest. These phytates can make your digestive system inflamed overtime. They can also cause deficiencies, a leaky gut or just impair your immune system.  Because of these factors, it is becoming more and more common for people to go Grain Free (Read our story here and here) read more

8 Top Sugar Free Pancake Recipes

ditch your sugar cravings
ditch your sugar cravings

Starting your day the right way is the key to feeling your best all day long! With these sugar free pancake recipes you can enjoy your favorite comforting breakfast food without the sugar or guilt!

 

 

 

8 Sugar Free & Healthy Pancake recipes

 

Pancakes bring up so many warm and fuzzy feelings inside me. They just scream Saturday mornings with the family. Traditional pancake recipes are full of carbs and sugar (with fat too!). All these together do not help a mama stay healthy. 

 

These Sugar Free Pancakes are the perfect solution for you and your family. Keep the traditions going with slow Saturday mornings and gather around the kitchen table with some yummy pancake goodness without the guilt or blood sugar swings. These will leave you satisfied and not crashing in an hour. read more

Trim and Healthy Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

 

 

Biscuits and Sausage Gravy are one mine and my husband’s favorite weekend treat.

 

These are not traditionally a healthy meal. Traditional biscuits are full of processed carbs and hydrogenated fats. These processed carbs are likely to send your blood sugar soaring. Sausage gravy is usually thickened with processed flour, mixing carbs and fats.

 

We learned in Trim Healthy Mama  that when you mix carbs and fats together, you are going to store excess carbs and fats in your cells as more fat.  read more

7 Ways to Use Cranberry Sauce

cranberriesCranberries are in season! I love cranberries for many reasons.

They are tart and add a nice flavor to turkey and dressing on Thanksgiving. They are great paired with pumpkin in muffins and breads. And they make a great No Sugar Added Cranberry Sauce!

They are also very healthy for you! read more

Baking With Coconut flour

low carb, low sugar, stevia

Baking with Coconut Flour 

Baking with coconut flour can be a great way to eat low carb, grain free and keep all your favorite breads and cakes in your diet. 

We’ve already talked about how great coconut oil is:

increasing metabolism, supporting immune system, promoting the absorption of vitamins, detoxing the body, promoting healthy cholesterol and heart health. Now we are going to talk about all those great benefits in a flour: Coconut flour.

 

Our bodies don’t tolerate grains very well (wheat, barley, oats…). They are filled with phytates that bind to minerals in our bodies like magnesium. This overtime can leave us deficient in vitamins and minerals. You can soak your grains to help reduce the phytates, but it may be easier to incorporate more grain free foods into your diet.

 Does that mean you can never eat a piece of bread again? What about cake?

There are two main flours that people who are eating grain free are using: almond flour and coconut flour. Those certainly aren’t the only ones, but they are definitely the popular ones.

You can read here about some benefits of coconut flour to other flours. I haven’t bought Dr. Mercola‘s coconut flour – we just bought Bob’s Red Mill brand on Amazon.com.

There are a ton of recipes using coconut flour that you can make and not even realize you are missing the wheat. I found several grain free recipes by searching on Pinterest.

 

Check out my King Cake in a Mug that Uses Coconut flour

coconut flour, louisiana, cake in a mug, minute cake

 

This is just one I found recently: original post here

Gluten Free Carrot-Poppy Seed Loaf

3 eggs
1/4  cup applesauce (add more if you need more wet ingredients after you have mixed dry and wet together)
3 Tbsp honey or one teaspoon of liquid stevia extract 
3 Tbsp melted coconut oil or butter
1 cup grated carrot
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup sifted coconut flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)                                                                                              1.5 tablespoons of poppy seeds  read more

Why Grain Free? Part 1

Adapted from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frederikvanroest/3842334310/

Adapted from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frederikvanroest/3842334310/

Why You Should Go Grain Free

Grain Free? Wait – haven’t you looked at the food pyramid??? Aren’t we supposed to get 9-11 servings of breads, cereals, grains each day? No bread, no pasta? Are you crazy?!?

This was my exact internal conversation when I started reading about giving up grains.

I am by no means an expert on this – I do have personal experience and I think that matters. I know most of what I know about grains and what they do to us from reading Mark’s blog at Mark’s Daily Apple and Kate at Modern Alternative Mama.

I read the Maker’s Diet by Jordan Rubin 7 years ago or so that drastically changed my eating habits. It is a 40 day challenge to basically purge your body from all the junk you have been eating your whole life on the Standard American Diet and jump start it with whole foods.

Before the diet, I was eating the standard “healthy” diet – low fat, low meat. The Maker’s diet recommends a diet full of nutrient rich foods: vegetables, fruit, protein, healthy fats, soaked grains. It confronts nutrition (and the national health crisis) from a biblical standpoint. For about a year, we did very very well on this diet. Adam and I both felt great, we were both working out, able to wake up in the morning easily… it was a success. But I didn’t understand at the time why I wasn’t eating grains – or why I was supposed to be soaking them, and it just didn’t stick.

Then life happened. We got lazy – I wanted pasta, bread, cereal… the cravings came back. We still ate whole foods, we just continued to substitute more carbs in place of vegetables and fruit – we always grabbed the whole wheat bread (Nature’s Own), the whole wheat pasta, the stone ground whole wheat flour… We thought we were eating healthy.

Our diet consisted of whole grain carbs, fruit, vegetables, and just a little protein and fat. But we weren’t healthy any more. We had sugar cravings, we were tired, I was having blood sugar problems – getting shaking between meals, getting light-headed… It was my “normal.”

Then I got pregnant. Pregnancy did my diet in… It was not sustainable. I was miserable with morning sickness, weakness, dizziness, passing out at time. This diet was not nourishing for me or my growing baby. Thankfully, I was getting care from a midwife at the time who does a more “whole body” approach. She asked me to send her a 3 day food diary.

I just knew that I had the perfect diet, why should I be worried? Then she knocked me across the face, “your baby needs protein and fat” – and very little empty carbs. Of course, this was going to have to change every single meal I was eating at the time. I was more miserable for the next 2 weeks when trying to change my diet then I was before – was this even worth it? I would sit at the dinner table and cry because I didn’t know what to eat and I had so many food aversions from pregnancy… I just felt so limited! 

I was eating more protein and fat with my meals then I had ever eaten before – I’m going to be huge! But I wasn’t getting bigger (other than my growing belly) and after I got down the “acceptable” meals down – I was feeling great.

So, fast forward a few weeks to December 2, 2010. I had an amazingly easy homebirth of a 9 pound healthy baby girl. I thought “I can eat whatever I want now!” Bring on the carbs! And my diet went right back to what I was eating before I was pregnant – whole foods, but a whole lot of carbs. In one week I had dropped all the baby weight, I was in my prepregnancy clothes again – I felt amazing!

But that feeling didn’t last… I was breastfeeding, so I was hungry – but I grabbed carbs – crackers and cheese, breads… I even started gaining weight around 5-6 months post partum… This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was breastfeeding and working out!

I got to thinking, if I was able to eat all the fat and protein while I was pregnant and my body functioned like it needed to – giving it to the baby and not my thighs, maybe there was something there. So, I started doing some research… and research…

It took months before I convinced myself that I needed to go grain-free. Aidalyn was probably around 10 months, when I just started reducing grains. Then Adam and I committed for the whole month of January we would be 100% grain-free, after that we would be 80-20. I did a lot of “pinning” on Pintrest to get ready. We started using more coconut and almond flour for baking and cooking.

***Update: Trim Healthy Mama does a great job of balancing the carbs, fats, and protein in their book. You can soak oatmeal to reduce any phytates, if you want to eat that for an energizing breakfast. Grain free breads are perfect for satisfying meals and snacks. 

Check out Part 2 of Why Grain-Free here

Grain free Biscuits and Sausage Gravy 

grain free coconut almond flour

 

What are your thoughts on going grain free? Have your tried adding more grain free flours into your diet?  read more