Digging Deeper Into Food-Combining Rules [Episode #426]

This week’s topic is: Digging Deeper Into Food-Combining Rules

This topic is something that we get asked about all the time. I like to think of food-combining as just another tool, another strategy that we can use, once we have more knowledge about it, to give ourselves more energy to elevate our wellness, our skin, just to feel good in our bodies. So we’ll get into it today.

Have you been wondering about this very topic? If you want to know the answer to this question and 3 more sent in by Beauties just like you, listen now to find out!

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Questions Answered]

Connie – NY, NY

Where in food-combining do protein bars and protein drinks fit in? Also when is the best time to drink coffee to optimize my day if I still want to drink it?

Kelsie – Bozeman, Montana

I know fruit is supposed to be eaten alone but is there a world where it can happen? How do you feel about combining watermelon in The Glowing Green Smoothie? I love watermelon in smoothies but do you think it really causes bloating or messes with digestion?

Patty – Boston, MA

Could you please talk about food-combining rules and the risk of digestion issues? I still follow the rules most of the time, I saw some videos of women who have had terrible bloating and digestion from it and just wonder what is really true? Help!

Greta – Lithuania

I love having the Protein Powder Smoothie in the late afternoon when I get home from work around 4-5pm. And then my dinner at 7-8, which usually is a large green salad followed by cooked veggies and grains such as quinoa or buckwheat. Is it ok to have starches after my protein shake?

Inspirational Thought Of The Week

Simplicity is the path to true beauty.

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[RESOURCES]

• Can Protein Bars Replace My Protein Smoothie?
• Power Protein Smoothie Recipe
• Tips On Swapping Out Ingredients For The GGS!
• Lifestyle Changes with Joe Cross & The Do’s and Don’ts of The GGS
• Easy Tips To Enhance Your Digestion!
• 5 Ways You Are Ruining Your Digestive Health in the Hour After You Eat
• 7 Excellent Sources of Plant Based Protein
• Green Power Protein Smoothie
• Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Four Cornerstones FREE PDF: Text the word: feelgood (833) 744-0079

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• How Much Beauty Fat Can I Have On A Daily Basis?
• How To Transition From Coffee To Tea!
• Lifestyle Changes with Joe Cross & The Do’s and Don’ts of The GGS
• Common Food Combining Misunderstandings Explained!

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly Snyder: Okay. Hi, beauties. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you’re having an amazing day so far or you had a great Thanksgiving if you’re listening to this a little bit after Thanksgiving. Wishing you so much love. So grateful for you and our community. And in the spirit of gratitude, we still wanted to, of course, put out a show today. Our topic is something that we get asked about all the time. It is digging deeper into food-combining principles. I like to think of food combining as just another tool, another strategy that we can use, once we have more knowledge about it, to give ourselves more energy to elevate our wellness, our skin, just to feel good in our bodies. So we’ll get into it today.

Kimberly Snyder: I will share that when I started food combining and understanding it more, I saw a big increase in not only energy but a reduction of bloating. It just became easier for me to maintain my weight. I, by no means, am perfect. Even though I know what to combine, sometimes I love rice and tofu, starch and protein, and things that are not necessarily what the principles are. But I know when I’m doing it. I do it specifically. I always take an extra digestive enzyme, so I’ll take three or sometimes even four. And a lot of the time, I do properly food combine. So just like everything else we talk about, it’s not all or nothing. But the goal of our show today specifically is just to give you some information that will help streamline your diet so that you can go about your day, again have a bit more energy, get more nutrition from your food, and feel and look great. We have our amazing Katelyn with us on the line today, our general manager of Solluna. Hi, K.

Katelyn Hughes: Hey, beauties. Happy Thanksgiving. I’m so happy to be with you guys. I’m very grateful for this time we get every week together to drum up the community questions and have these conversations. So I’m glad we’re doing it today, and I’m especially grateful for you, K, and your time and just being together, even though we’re not physically together today.

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Kimberly Snyder: So grateful for you, K. We’ve been together now for quite a while. We’ve built this podcast together, and we built Solluna together. So it’s really, really exciting. I am grateful for the podcast. I think it’s great. We get to talk with amazing experts. We get to hear from the community. We get to have this amazing community show every week. So beauties, thank you for you. We love you. We are grateful for you. There’s so much love bursting from my heart. We do start every show by giving you a quick reminder to make sure you subscribe in the spirit of love and gratitude. It’s a great act of self-love just to stay motivated and inspired to make sure you’re getting the podcast every week and you don’t miss out on any information. And secondly, just a little request to please make sure you leave us a review on iTunes, which is super easy and fast, and it’s just a great way to support the show back.

Kimberly Snyder: So thank you so much in advance, beauties. All that being said, K, let us hear what the beauties are saying, thinking, wondering about with food combining. Oh, but let me just do a quick intro. If you’re listening to this and you’ve never read the Beauty Detox Solution, which is my first book that covers food combining, I’ll just give an intro. Food combining is basically not just paying attention to what we’re eating, but the order and the combination to help food digest a bit easier in our body. The biggest, overarching principle of food combining is simplifying your meals. So if you simplify, if you pare down the amount of actual groups of food and eat more of fewer groups, it’s just going to be easier for your body because your body has to break down and digest every specific food. So just like our ancestors didn’t have access to salad bars with 80 different things that could end up on your plate, it’s better for us to simplify, simplify, simplify.

Kimberly Snyder: So that’s the main sort of, again, through-line in food combining. Food combining is something that’s been discussed in a lot of specificity actually in Ayurvedic medicine, which is the oldest medical system on the planet. It’s over 5,000 years old. I am a student of Aryuveda. I’m a student of teachers like Dr. Ann Wigmore and Herbert Shelton and Dr. Norman Walker and many other proponents of food combining from the past. It’s very individual. There isn’t as much clinical research, I would say, on food combining, just because of the nature of it. Just like in Aryuveda, for instance, there’s clinical research on turmeric and curcumin, but there isn’t clinical research on most of the herbs and most of the plants. So just because there isn’t funded clinical research doesn’t make something non-viable necessarily.

Kimberly Snyder: I always say experience is our greatest teacher. So if you apply it in your body and you start to feel lighter and you start to feel less bloated and you start to feel better, then we know it’s useful, and we know it’s beneficial. So why not use anything that’s beneficial, right? So that’s the overall intro, K, before we dive into the first question.

Katelyn Hughes: Yeah. Thank you so much for giving that, just in case anybody wasn’t aware of what we were talking about. We know a lot of members that are already in the community talk about this a lot. So if it’s new to you guys, be sure to pick up the Beauty Detox Solution for a deeper dive into it. So we’ll jump right in.

Kimberly Snyder: Perfect.

Question 1: Where in food combining do protein bars and protein drinks fit in? Also, when is the best time to drink coffee to optimize my day if I still want to drink it?

Katelyn Hughes: We have a bunch of questions today that have come up around this in the community. We have Connie living in New York, New York, and she asks, “Where in food combining do protein bars and protein drinks fit in? Also, when is the best time to drink coffee to optimize my day if I still want to drink it?”

Kimberly Snyder: So Connie, great questions. Both questions are fantastic. I’ll address them both. Lots of love to you out in New York City, my old home. I always have a soft spot in my heart for New York. Food combining wise, protein bars and protein drinks are, of course, proteins. So when we’re looking for our protein bar, it’s a great idea to look at the ingredients to try to get obviously a cleaner bar and to try to get one with seeds and nuts. Some of them have a lot of granola and oats and seeds and nuts and a lot of grains and nuts and everything like the kitchen sink all mixed in. I try to get the more simple ones myself, or we have a couple of recipes, very simple recipes for making your own protein bars from seeds and nuts. And if you want to boost the protein even more, you could actually add in protein powder. So that’s something to consider.

Kimberly Snyder: Because they’re protein, you want to have them in between meals a couple hours, if you are eating starch or fruit. You don’t want to throw everything in together at the same time. For instance, I do have a Power Protein Smoothie in the afternoon. It gives me a boost. It’s just a really great way to give yourself more energy. Mine has… You can check out the Power Protein Smoothie recipe. We’ll link to it in the show notes, but it has chia seeds and acai usually and protein powder and hemp milk and banana. So let’s talk about the banana for a moment. You can’t juice a banana. Technically, with food combining, we say try to avoid concentrated starch and concentrated protein at the same meal. It’s just a little bit lighter on your body. And again, for more detail, please read the Beauty Detox Solution. It goes way into that.

Kimberly Snyder: For instance, if you’re going to eat a bunch of nuts, it’s better to eat them with veggies versus a bunch of nuts with rice. Or if you do eat some animal protein, it’s easier to eat fish or chicken with broccoli or kale or asparagus than with a huge pile of bread or starch or rice, any sort of concentrated carb. Bananas are fruit, but they are starchy fruit. But moreover, they contain less water. Like I said, you can’t juice a banana, so they tend to digest more slowly, much more slowly than other high-water-content fruit. So we say it’s okay to have banana in your protein smoothie. I add banana or acai, which is also a bit of a fatty fruit. It’s the only fruit right now, as far as I know, discovered by man that doesn’t have any sugar, so it’s naturally sugar free.

Kimberly Snyder: I do not put blueberries or apples or high-water-content fruit in my protein shakes because fruit digests so quickly. So if you add a bunch of water fruit in your protein shakes, there’s the potential to cause bloating. Let me break that down. Basically, if you think of a traffic jam, you put the fastest cars in front. You put the Ferrari, the race cars, the Porsches. And in the back, you want to put the big Mack trucks. So imagine that the fruit, which breaks down very quickly and is able to exit your stomach and get into the rest of your GI tract, your duodenum, the top of your small intestines, quite quickly, that’s like the race cars, the Ferraris. You want to put them out in front or on their own. You don’t want to necessarily stick them combined with all the denser Mack-truck foods, like the protein, because it could start to mix in there and slow down.

Kimberly Snyder: And when starches prematurely digest, they release gases. They ferment prematurely, and that is a contributor to bloating. So a lot of people say to me, “Oh, I can’t eat fruit. It makes me super bloated.” And I say, “Hey, just try this experiment. Anecdotally, try it in your own body. Just see if you feel better having fruit on its own or separated away from heavy protein. And just notice if you feel better.” And for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that I have, thousands at this point, done this experiment or had them do this experiment within their own body, they will feel lighter and less bloated and better. So there is something to simplicity. That’s one of the principles of how all our ancestors ate, what they had access to in the jungle and the wild, simple meals. Simplify your meals. Don’t combine everything at once, and it will be easier to digest.

Kimberly Snyder: Now, the second part of your question, Connie, was about coffee. And I will just say coffee is acidic, so I suggest having it at least 20 minutes on either side of your Glowing Green Smoothie. I don’t necessarily think it’s the best thing to have it with salad and fruit and nutrient-dense foods. I’m more in the camp where coffee should be drank on its own. Just wait sometime or mid-morning, mid-aft… Not mid-afternoon because that’s kind of close to bedtime. But after you have your GGS, I think, is great. I still would love everybody to start their day with hot water with lemon if possible, so you’re starting on a high, but then you could certainly enjoy some coffee. Please make sure it’s organic, and please avoid the dairy and all the sugar that goes in it. And you could add some plant-based milks, delicious coconut creamer. But yeah, try not to have it with your Glowing Green Smoothie or with lots of food because then it just acidifies your food.

Question 2: I know fruit is supposed to be eaten alone, but is there a world where it can happen? How do you feel about combining watermelon in the Glowing Green Smoothie? I love watermelon smoothies, but do you really think it’s causing bloating or messes with my digestion?

Katelyn Hughes: Awesome. And you kind of started to answer a little bit of Kelsey’s question, who’s living in Bozeman, Montana, so we can just kind of pick up from some of the things you mentioned there. Her question is, “I know fruit is supposed to be eaten alone, but is there a world where it can happen? How do you feel about combining watermelon in the Glowing Green Smoothie? I love watermelon smoothies, but do you really think it’s causing bloating or messes with my digestion?”

Kimberly Snyder: Kelsey, thank you so much for your question, my love. I love hearing from you out in Montana, a state I have never been to, but I’ve always wanted to go to. I heard it’s beautiful. Fruit can be eaten alone, as you said, Kelsey, but also with greens as in the Glowing Green Smoothie. You pointed out another really specific rule, which is try to eat watermelon alone. Food-combining experts from the past, like the Herbert Sheltons and the Dr. Ann Wigmores, have said that melon tends to digest better on its own. Now, that being said, I will say if you’re doing your best, in general, to eat fruit on its own already, if you… because then it gets really specific. You could do the watermelon on its own. There’s something about sub-acid fruit with acid fruit, which I do not follow because it just gets too crazy. It gets too specific for me.

Kimberly Snyder: So if you feel okay combining it sometimes in smoothies, Kelsey, if you are a huge watermelon lover, I think it’s fine. You could take a digestive enzyme before if you’re concerned. I don’t think that’s the thing to hyper-focus on. I think there is a lot of other things. There’s a lot going on day to day decision-wise that we’re making with our diets. So I don’t think it’s the biggest problem to put watermelon in, even though ideally if we’re going to eat a big pile of watermelon, we would eat the melon on its own. But you know what? Again, it’s progress, not perfection. And the fact that you’re even separating out fruit and understanding this principle means you’re doing pretty well, I think. So again, we aim for 80% here at Solluna. We don’t try to be perfect perfect, which creates stress and anxiety and is no way our goal. So do your best, but sometimes if you put the watermelon in, I don’t think it’s the end of the world, is my answer.

Katelyn Hughes: No, it’s perfect to talk about because we do get a lot of very specific questions in the groups, and people are really concerned at times about what to put and really want advice around these areas. And I think it’s great that you bring up that this is only a part of the philosophies that are a very, very small part of everything we do here at Solluna, and we have our four cornerstones. So today, we’re focusing more on the food side of things, but it is expansive in your body, your emotional well-being, in your spiritual growth, that there’s other elements that contribute to your health and your well-being. So not necessarily having to stress so much about the details if it’s really causing anxiety and things like that.

Kimberly Snyder: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Exactly. Exactly.

Break

Katelyn Hughes: All right, beauties, so with that, we will let Kimberly take a short break, and then she’ll be back to answer the last two questions.

Kimberly Snyder: All right, beauties, we’re back from our break, and we have two more questions for you guys on digging a bit deeper into food-combining principles. I think that it’s important that we treat them as principles rather than rules. Rules is just a word that I don’t resonate with, K. I feel like it feels so rigid. Principles is, hey, here are some ideas and concepts which could help you. Try them out for yourself, which is really what food combining is about. It’s not about being perfect all the time, every meal. But it’s having a general understanding about digestion to a deeper level than perhaps you did in the past and applying that to feel better in your own body. So this whole idea is we want to feel light. We want to feel energized. We want to feel our vitality. We don’t want to feel bloated and heavy and weighed down. So this may potentially be a really great tool that you could utilize, that you could layer on top of what you’re already doing that could give you a lot of benefit.

Question 3: Could you please talk about the food-combining principles and the risk of possible digestion issues? I still follow the principles most of the time, but I saw some videos of women talking about having terrible bloating and digestion from it, and I was wondering if this could actually be true. Help.

Katelyn Hughes: 100%. It’s always good to try things and see. I know, for me, when I eat heavier, I definitely feel it. I don’t eat perfectly all the time, but I definitely notice when I make certain shifts in my diet I don’t feel as energized. So you guys can try it for yourselves and see. So we’ll see what Patty is thinking, living in Boston, Massachusetts. And she’s asking, “Could you please talk about the food-combining principles and the risk of possible digestion issues? I still follow the principles most of the time, but I saw some videos of women talking about having terrible bloating and digestion from it, and I was wondering if this could actually be true. Help.” Help.

Kimberly Snyder: I’m here to help, Patty. I send you lots of love in Boston. Thank you so much for your question. Thank you for bringing this up because let’s face it, beauties, we live in a fear-based world and anything you can think of right now, eating an orange, the most innocuous thing, eating almonds, if you look around, you will find somebody or something out there that will refute it and have fear around it. Like, “Oh my gosh, I heard it’s really dangerous to be vegan. You’re not going to get nutrients. I found, oh my gosh, you can’t eat that banana. There’s all the sugar.” So there is a lot of stuff out there, and it’s really important that we are discriminating and understand the truth, as much as we can, behind it because otherwise we can feel like we’re getting thrown about in the ocean. Like, what’s this? What’s that? So try this. It’s confusing. It’s frustrating. It’s crazy how much is out there.

Kimberly Snyder: We just had Dr. Joel Warsh on our podcast, and he’s like a holistic pediatrician. Wellness warrior, I think, is what he calls himself. And he was talking about sometimes he tries to go the natural route with clients. So for some children, he’ll say, “Hey, for immunity defense, here’s some elderberry,” instead of going right to meds. And some people will be like, “Oh my gosh, well, I saw a video on elderberry, and this one person had this one berry and da, da, da.” And it’s like, yeah, you could find evidence for probably everything, but he’s like, “I would rather still go with the natural fruit, the natural berry, versus going to a med, which could screw up your liver and have a ton of side effects that are like three pages long.”

Kimberly Snyder: So I’ll say in this case, Patty, that food combining is about simplifying your meals. It’s pretty innocuous. You’re not going to have terrible issues if you eat a bunch of cherries, versus cherries and pecans and coconut, and you simply separate out foods. Like, I don’t really understand how someone could say that food combining gave them issues because what we’re doing is we’re just literally making it easier on your body. So to me, it can only help. We’re not adding in weird combinations. We’re not creating, again, hard-and-fast rules that are difficult to throw together this with this. We’re just saying, “Hey, pair veggies with protein. Pair more veggies, both cooked and raw, with starch. Don’t eat too many concentrated foods together, fruit on an empty stomach. Try to drink more liquid in between meals, so you dilute your digestive enzymes less.”

Kimberly Snyder: I mean, if you look at the principles, again, it’s about simplicity. It’s about making it easier on your body, and it should make it easier. Maybe you think at first, “I don’t really notice a big difference, or maybe I have to try this longer.” I think it’s especially powerful when we combine it with digestive enzymes. But it’s a hard stretch for me to imagine it makes somebody really bloated, because again, at the end of the day, we’re making it easier on your body. We’re not adding some weird, specific, fad-diet combination or something like that.

Katelyn Hughes: Yeah, thank you for addressing that because a lot of times there is so much fear around certain things. And again, we live in an age with social media and information at the tips of our fingers, some credible, some not credible, and you can find it in a quick Google. So I think it’s always great to do your own research and feel it out in your body, as you mentioned, K, with this stuff. And we can’t always believe everything we see.

Kimberly Snyder: Exactly. Exactly. Thank you.

Question 4: I love having the Power Protein Smoothie in the late afternoon when I get home from work around 5:00. And then my dinner is usually 7:00 or 8:00, a green salad with cooked veggies and grain, such as quinoa or buckwheat. Is it okay to have starches after my protein shake?

Katelyn Hughes: Yes. All right, we have one more question here to round out the show from Greta from Lithuania, and she’s asking, “I love having the Power Protein Smoothie in the late afternoon when I get home from work around 5:00. And then my dinner is usually 7:00 or 8:00, a green salad with cooked veggies and grain, such as quinoa or buckwheat. Is it okay to have starches after my protein shake?”

Kimberly Snyder: Greta, thank you so much for your question. And first of all, I love Eastern Europe. I have backpacked through that area and Slovenia and Slovakia and Romania. And I just think it’s beautiful where you live, and many countries around there actually, K.

Katelyn Hughes: Wow!

Kimberly Snyder: And I love it. So sending you a big hug out there. I love that you’re part of our community in an amazing, beautiful part of the world. And I also want to congratulate you on having such a wonderful routine going on there for yourself. Having the Power Protein Smoothie in the afternoon, spot on. You’re going to get a ton of protein, omega-3 fats, minerals, nutrition to really fortify your body. And then I love your dinner: a salad, cooked veggies, quinoa, buckwheat, gluten-free high-protein grains. I mean, these are incredible meals you’re creating for yourself. It’s absolutely fine as you laid it out.

Kimberly Snyder: Protein, the Power Protein Smoothie, when you look at the sprout, especially the sprouted organic vegan proteins, they’re basically free-form amino acids. They’re not dense proteins. They absorb and assimilate pretty easily. So just having a little bit of time, a few hours is plenty. It’s going to be wonderful for you digestion-wise. So I really don’t think you need to modify anything with your program. I think it’s great hearing what you eat in the afternoon. I’m really curious to hear what your lunch is like and your breakfast. Maybe you could write that back in, and I’d love to take a look because it sounds like you’re really on point. I’m glad you can source everything. Sometimes in different parts of the world, we’ve heard, “Oh, I can’t find chia seeds, or I can’t find protein powder.” But it sounds like you’re really on point. So congrats, sister, you’re doing amazing.

Katelyn Hughes: Awesome. It’s good to be on a program and feel good, especially during this time of the year in the States, where we’re celebrating Thanksgiving today. And, of course, beauties, don’t be hard on yourself if you have some improper combinations today, as we all may. Just be mindful of what you’re eating. I know K often mentions on our holidays to try to keep your routine, right, K, today. So maybe still have your Glowing Green Smoothie, your hot water with lemon in the morning. That’s what I’m doing before I dive in with my family today.

Kimberly Snyder: Yeah, exactly. Thank you, K, for bringing it back to Thanksgiving. I get so excited about food combining, I forgot it’s a big holiday. Yeah. So first of all, yeah, don’t worry about being perfect. Of all holidays, we know this is such a big national food holiday that you’re probably not going to be perfect. Back to progress, not perfection. Definitely, keep your Feel Good digestive enzymes on hand. Take them before lunch. Some people eat like a later lunch. Some people just have dinner. What time is it in your family that you usually eat, K? Because I used to do it at 2:00, but then I know a lot of families eat at like 5:00 and 6:00.

Katelyn Hughes: Yeah, I’m splitting between my fiance’s aunt and my mom and dad’s house, so we’re eating around 5:00.

Kimberly Snyder: Okay. Okay. Yeah. So I will just say, keep the morning light and do your best and go for a walk. Get some exercise in today. Do some yoga, so you feel good in your body. Hydrate. Have some hot tea, and go into the meal already hydrated, so you don’t pig out because you’re thirsty. Pick and choose. Do your best, but again, this is… Of all holidays, there’s no shame in indulging today, for sure. I will say tonight is a really great time to have some strong ginger tea to help with digestion. Have that, chill out.

Kimberly Snyder: And tomorrow, try not to get sucked into a cycle of eating the leftovers for the next week at every meal. I think that’s where we start to feel heavy. It’s one thing to have our day, but I always like to give away a lot of food when I have these big events and parties and things at my house because, first of all, you don’t want to eat stagnant food that’s just been sitting there for days and days and days. And second of all, you don’t want to… It’s one thing to indulge, but when you do it for many days at a time, that’s when you start to get into that cycle. That’s when weight gain does potentially creep in because we’re just kind of not getting… We’re off our schedule. We’re not getting back on track. So I think my policy is enjoy today. We don’t have to be perfect. Do your best. But tomorrow try to be more on track than today. Don’t eat Thanksgiving leftovers all day long tomorrow and the next day.

Katelyn Hughes: Definitely good tips, for sure, because otherwise you do start… I’ve definitely done that where you start to feel worse and worse as the day goes on. One day is different than like two or three.

Kimberly Snyder: Oh, 100%. It’s like if you get off on the wrong track now especially, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to keep eating this all week,” and then it drags over into being more susceptible as stress comes up, leading up to Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, whatever you celebrate, and it just makes it harder to come back on track. Like, our show last week was about sticking to a schedule more. And I think, again, when we fall off or when we indulge, which is totally cool, we want to get back on. We don’t want to let it go three, four, five days and then just start to feel like crap.

Katelyn Hughes: 100%. Nobody wants to feel bad, for sure. So if you’re listening to this and it’s a couple of days after Thanksgiving and you already feel bad, you can still reset. But with that, as always, we like to round out the show with your thought of the week. What are you thinking today, K?

Thought of the Week

Kimberly Snyder: So my thought of the week is related to this concept and also relating it to our overall philosophy of true beauty that we talk about here at Solluna, which is a lifestyle. It’s about… Our cornerstones are food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth. So to us, beauty is more than physical. It encompasses physical, but it goes beyond to our confidence and our power and being in touch with our true selves. But it also applies to the physical, as you’ll see. So it’s one of those sayings that could have many, many levels. It is simplicity is the path to true beauty. What I mean by that is we talk about simplifying, simplifying your life, simplifying your food, simplifying each meal. It goes down to, let’s say for instance, something as specific as a smoothie. The Glowing Green Smoothie has held up for years and years because it’s basically mostly greens, made with water, high-fiber fruit, and lemon juice. It’s super, super simple, and the power is in the simplicity because we let the ingredients do their magic. We let nature do its magic.

Kimberly Snyder: So in life, I feel that… It was Patty’s question. When we get into, “Oh my gosh, I’m watching this and the media, and I heard this and this and this,” when things become complicated, we feel more thrown off. We feel more anxiety. And if you look at most of these diets that come out, and it’s like, “Okay, you eat three peanuts at this meal and then two tablespoons of this and this,” super-complex, they’re not really sustainable. And they don’t create that true beauty, which, again, isn’t just food, but it’s how you feel emotionally. It’s how you feel spiritually. It’s your day-to-day experience. Simplicity. When we have less crap in our house and less clutter, we feel lighter. And when we simplify our day and our to-do list isn’t like three miles long and we don’t try to jam so many things in, we feel better.

Kimberly Snyder: And with meals, as we were speaking about today, when we simplify them, it’s easier on our digestion. It’s easier on our organs. It’s easier on our stomach. And when we complicate things, we weigh our bodies down, we tend to age faster, and we have more toxicity build up. So across all the cornerstones and all the different facets of life, I really believe that simplicity is a huge component of true beauty. So that’s something to maybe reflect on today, beauties. How can you simplify your life a little bit more? Maybe look at each cornerstone. Food-wise, can you make each meal more simple? Smoothies, make them more simple. You don’t have to throw eight… My biggest… Well, not my biggest, but one of my pet peeves, K, is if I go to another juice bar and there’s 15 ingredients in a smoothie, they’re such micro quantities that there’s not really a therapeutic level of any of these ingredients. It’s just kind of putting it in for the marketing idea of putting it in, right?

Kimberly Snyder: So we can look at our meals and our food. I like to subtract things. Like, okay, I’m going to make this kale salad. It’s going to be delicious, but I don’t need 20 vegetables. I’m just going to put the red cabbage and the tomatoes and make an amazing dressing that we do with nutritional yeast and lemon and avocado. So think about how you can simplify your meals. Think about how you can simplify your practices or your workout or whatever related to your body, your skincare routine. Our Feel Good skincare line is powerful. There’s four skincare products. Sometimes people… I meet people that have like 25 steps.

Kimberly Snyder: So simplify. Simplify emotionally. Where can you let go of excess baggage and playing things over in your mind over and over again and beating yourself up? And then spiritually simplifying your life, finding gratitude, and not worrying and over-complicating things, and finding time to breathe and meditate. It’s very simple the practices we teach, and that’s their power and consistency. So that’s my thought for you, beauties, today on this beautiful holiday. Pare back. In the season where there’s excess and consumerism and materialism and adding and piling more, how can we actually simplify and just spend time with ourselves, spend time with our loved ones, enjoy our lives?

Kimberly Snyder: And again, I’m hugely grateful to you, K, for gathering all the questions and just for being such an amazing, stable, Earth mama, real… I’m trying to find the right word. I keep thinking pole, pole star at our community, just a huge foundational part of our community. And beauties, I’m so grateful for you. I know we’re here together, sharing. The journey continues. We’re here to support you. Have the most amazing Thanksgiving ever.

Katelyn Hughes: Yes. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. If you have time today, maybe you’re off or spending time at home, head over to mysolluna.com/ask Kimberly. Submit your question there, so I could check it out for the upcoming shows.

Kimberly Snyder: Awesome, K. Thank you so much. Thank you, beauties. Sending you all the love in the world. Enjoy the rest of your time off this weekend. This is a great time to do some self-care, whether it’s getting more into journaling, making sure you’re making a batch of Glowing Green Smoothie, going for a beautiful walk outside, having some extra time to meditate. Do whatever makes you feel good. Get on a nice rhythm for yourself as we get more and more into this season, and we will see you back here on Monday for our next interview podcast. Till then, take care, and so much love.