The Exchanges

Q flare up. Again, you got really, really sick. And I mean, I think to the point where you were, you're almost close to dying. Um, and you had to be like flown back to the US from Uganda. Um, what, can you just talk about a little bit what, what happened? I mean, you were following your doctor's instructions, you were taking medication, but, but, but it wasn't working, right?

A Yeah, yeah, you know, I was, I would not say I was in full remission before we went, but I did check with my doctor, and he was like, you're gonna be fine, but yeah, by the time, actually, we, we'd stopped in Dubai to get over there from San Francisco. It's definitely a long journey. By the time we were in Dubai, I felt like the world was spinning, and then I just was like, okay, I just need to get, you know, get to Kampala. We were going to spend a few days in a hotel there before we headed up to the northern Sudan border to do some humanitarian work, and I thought, I just need to rest, I just need to, you know, get used to the time change, and it, I just declined very, very, very quickly, and ended up in a little two, two-room hospital in Kampala, Uganda, actually, so not, we didn't, we did not get too remote at that point, thankfully, um, and had, had really good care there, but yes, after about eight days in the hospital there, the doctor just said, you have to get back to the United States for blood transfusion.

AI assessment note: “I just declined very, very, very quickly, and ended up in a little two, two-room hospital”

Q All right, so that was the first thought, but did that happen? Did you put out the e-book, or, or did you, because I know you, you published your first book in 2013, was that, is that what actually happened?

A No, yeah, so no, I had just started working on the ebook, and then I got this email that I, I thought must be a joke from a publisher offering me a cookbook deal, uh, and she was so kind, she went into kind of the reason why she found my blog. She had a child with an autoimmune disease and a chronic illness, and had the child eating grain-free and dairy-free to help the symptoms, but, uh, they had a weekly cereal day at school, and, uh, I It was, I think it was her son, uh, just felt left out every single week, you know, on that cereal day because he couldn't partake, and I had a grain-free granola recipe on the blog that she had stumbled on just searching for something to make her child feel, you know, less, less left out and more involved, and so she would send my granola and a little thermos of almond milk to school every week, and that's how she found it, and she said, I showed your blog and your photos and your recipes to the publisher, and, you He wants to offer you a cookbook deal, and, uh, I remember calling Ryan and being like, you're, you're never gonna guess what just happened.

AI assessment note: “so no, I had just started working on the ebook, and then I got this email”

Q Alright, you get back to the U.S. And you, clearly, this, the medication isn't working. Something's wrong. I mean, now, of course, you know, talking about it today, now it seems painfully obvious, but, but in 2007, it wasn't necessarily obvious. How did you start to think about food? And maybe, maybe there was a food connection with what, what was going on?

A Honestly, the first little hint of anything food related did not come from any of my doctors in San Francisco. It came from the doctor who treated me in Kampala. Uh, he was a British doctor that had been living there for about, I think, 13 or 14 years, and had been just working in the community and running this hospital for a really long time, and he was the first one that told me that my disease was an autoimmune condition, which I had not heard, uh, thus far, and, you know, he talked to me a lot about the gut bacteria and about how we over-sterilize in, you know, the Western cultures and, and, um, that we do Antibiotics, and he's like, you probably packed four things of, you know, hand sanitizer in your bag to come here, and, uh, he just talked to me a lot about how we kind of kill off anything that could be vital and healthy for our guts, and that the bad bacteria just thrives because we eat a lot of sugar and a lot of, you know, carbohydrates. It didn't go too, too into depth, and mostly probably because I was very close to death, as you mentioned, um, but it did spark kind of something in me that I went back to later once I recovered.

AI assessment note: “the first little hint of anything food related... came from the doctor who treated me in Kampala.”

Q few tens of people and maybe a few hundred people, but three million people in the United States alone have, you know, some of these symptoms. And you find a blog that's writing about it. Probably a lot of people like, this is me. This is my story. And, and is that, did it kind of just grow organically? Did people just kind of discover it through word of mouth?

A Yeah, yeah, so I started a Facebook page in 2009, I believe, too, after I'd had the blog up for a bit, and I remember publishing a cookie recipe, a chocolate chip cookie recipe. It used almond flour and coconut flour, and, you know, it went from the normal five to 10 comments from my sister and my mom and my grandma, Grandma Marge, who always signed off, you know, under her Facebook comment, Grandma, love Grandma Marge, and I started seeing names that I didn't recognize, and then I started seeing that You know, the share button that it was just ticking upwards, and I'm like, well, who are all these people? And so I think it might have started, you know, with my mom or my sister sharing it on their Facebook page, and then somebody they knew shared it, and yeah, it just was this crazy organic growth that I saw that I just remember being so excited. I still remember, you know, when the Facebook page hit a thousand people, and I just, I just thought that was it for me. I was like, we've, we've done it. We've got a thousand people, but then I started getting all of these emails and comments on these posts, From people that had other autoimmune diseases, not the one that I had, and ones that weren't actually even digestive related. And I quickly started to think, like, why is what I'm doing and the food that I'm making working for other people that have other diseases that, you know,…

AI assessment note: “it just was this crazy organic growth that I saw”

Q had to become the person on stage, and, you know, I know that Probably some of that was hard for you because maybe you felt it was self-promotional or too self-referential. How did you kind of get over that, you know, obstacle that maybe you place in front of yourself or that mental block that enabled you to say, you know what, I do need to put myself out there?

A That's a great question. I, yes, I am a bit of introvert, uh, and, you know, just by the nature of the things that I was sharing, it was a lot easier to write, uh, Behind a laptop and put them on a blog. I mean, you know, ulcerative colitis is a pretty intimate disease to be sharing with people, but it, I realized pretty quickly that people needed somebody that they could trust, and so when I first started blogging, yeah, it was just photos of the food. It was just, you know, a name behind kind of a blog. My, my, people would, if they ever met me, they'd be like, oh, you're the against all grain girl. They didn't even know my name, and so I realized that they needed a face. They needed somebody that looked, you know, like a friendly person that they could trust, That, that might look like them kind of staring back at them. Uh, and so it was, it was pretty, uh, we did plan. I put myself on the first book for that reason. I hadn't really been out there much, and they wanted to put food on the cover, and I remember telling the publisher, I need my face on this because I need other women who are suffering with this disease to see that, that somebody like them understands it. So yeah, it was a strategic move. I, I fought back against it. Actually, I think it was Ryan's idea to put myself on the cover at first.

AI assessment note: “I realized pretty quickly that people needed somebody that they could trust”

Q a, a venture fund manager. Um, but, 2009, you start to blog about what's going on in your life, and, and you just, it's like a WordPress blog, I think, that you start, uh, and you called it Against All Grain, and what, you did this just for fun, like, just to kind of, like, as a public diary of what you were eating and what you were going through?

A Yeah, yeah, I was still working, ah, for that venture capital firm, and I was just kind of getting by, but I was starting to think, gosh, this food is pretty bland, it's really boring, I don't know that this is going to be a sustainable thing that I can do forever, you know, if this disease is incurable, but this way of eating helps manage the symptoms, and that's not something I could turn back from. So I was starting to, to kind of tinker with and tweak the recipes that were found in that book. And I was starting to just kind of play with them a little bit, or I was taking recipes. My grandma, you know, again, we were newlyweds, and she had given us this whole book of just like handwritten, you know, three by five cards of some of her recipes. And so I started to look at some of them and think, okay, well, I can't have, you know, the pasta, for instance, or I can't put flour in this to make a roux. What ingredients am I allowed to have, you know, coconut flour, almond flour, things like that. So I just started doing it more as a personal experiment so that I could enjoy food. And our neighbors or our family, they would ask for the recipe. So he, my husband, Ryan, suggested that I start a blog. Uh, and I didn't know what it was at first. So yeah, we started, we called it Against All Grain, and it still had the .wordpress. We didn't, you know, didn't want to invest in, in ownin…

AI assessment note: “it was just an opportunity for me to be able to point my friends and family”

Q I mean, what, what explained it? I mean, was it just like the whole CrossFit paleo world was really starting to take off, and what do you think happened?

A Yeah, I think, I think it was a combination of things. I do, CrossFit had, had recently kind of acquired a paleo diet. I think they were zoned diet before, and, and it was, it was absolutely having its kind of heyday at that time. Um, there were a lot of people coming to eat that way for various reasons, but I think, you know, for mine particularly, um, not only did I put a 165 recipes in it, uh, it was one of the first cookbooks in the The category that had a photo for every recipe, which I think is, is a, is a big selling point for it. And then I think my story just resonated, you know, with people. There were some other bloggers and authors at the time, but most of them weren't eating this way out of, you know, a hundred percent kind of live or die necessity like I was. Uh, and, and then the recipes, you know, I, I tested and tested and tested until those things were perfect. And then I also had my audience test them, which I had never heard of an author doing before. Uh, it was kind of a new concept, and for me it was just, you know, especially when you run a blog, you kind of get immediate feedback, right? You, you put something out there if there's a typo, or if, you know, you forget to put a temperature for the oven, people will tell you right away. And I'm sitting here writing a 165 recipes over a year or so, and photographing them all myself, and I, I did the Layout of…

AI assessment note: “I think it was a combination of things. I do, CrossFit had, had recently”

Q What do you remember? Because you, I mean, you've talked about this on your blog and in your books. You were, like, 22, and you started to experience severe pain, um, and, and you didn't know what it was.

A Yeah, yeah, it started just a couple of months before graduation from college, and it started, I think I just had some sort of a stomach virus, because I remember going to the ER one night and just having a ton of pain, and then that kind of subsided, but I got married in September of 2007, and, you know, I remember now looking back at photos and just seeing that my stomach was kind of distended, and, you know, I was Very young. I was 22 years old, so that wasn't a normal symptom for me, and I chalked it up to stress at the time because I had just planned a wedding, moved, graduated college, and gotten married, and that's a whole lot, you know, of life changes. I just figured everything would kind of get back to normal after the wedding, but it really just ended up getting worse.

AI assessment note: “I remember going to the ER one night and just having a ton of pain”

Q Like, you probably don't need to go to culinary school. Of course, I'm exaggerating, but that's essentially what he said, because so many resources are out there, including things that you do. If somebody wanted to kind of get into this space, right, somebody listening, how would you recommend they, they go about it to kind of, I don't know, differentiate themselves or do something that, that could stand out?

A Yeah, I think, you know, I think you need to find your passion, clearly, uh, and you do need to figure out what makes you different from, from the next person, because yes, there are so many now, you know, grain-free or paleo or vegan or, or whatnot. There's, there's something for everybody out there. Uh, and I think you need to find your voice, too. You know, I, I will say, you know, just don't do something just because it's trendy, you know, whether it's, it's TikTok or YouTube shorts. I know, For me, I know I like to teach in long format. I know that my current audience likes to learn in more of a long format, you know, where they get to really see the steps, and so I could go and I could make a ton of short TikTok videos, but it's not really true to me and what my mission and what my message is, and so I think that's really figuring out what, what, even if you don't have a full company built, you know, finding out what your mission statement is and really keeping that as your true north and everything that you're creating around that is there to service the customer that you're looking to

AI assessment note: “you do need to figure out what makes you different from, from the next person”

Q and what you've built. I mean, there's a lot, I mean, just a lot of different kind of revenue streams coming in, and I wonder how do you think about, when you think about sort of building it out, and what you want it to be, where do you, sort of, where do you imagine this This becoming, you know, is it, is it television shows? Is it live tours?

A Yeah, you know, it's funny because I call myself an accidental entrepreneur as well. However, if you were to look back into my childhood, I was constantly creating new businesses to make money. Always. I was always selling things. I was always creating things. I always had big dreams. And so, yeah, you know, while this started as not something that I planned on ever monetizing or even knew that I could, Once I realized there was a market for it, I will say my kind of marketing and business brain did go, go into work, and it still comes from what can I give, what can I give people, what can I do to make this easier for them and more accessible, and so yes, I mean, a TV show is something that we've been working on for a long time, and hopefully at some point those doors will open sooner than later, and the reason why I went ahead and did the cooking courses digitally in 2020 was because people need to see This food made. They need to see that it can actually look and taste amazing. They need to see that it's really not as difficult as it might look on the page, and when, you know, when they see it made, they're much more willing to try it, and we notice that even with Instagram and YouTube. When I make something on camera, the amount of people that then the next day make what I made and start tagging me and showing it, you know, it just gives them this confidence of, oh, it didn'…

AI assessment note: “a TV show is something that we've been working on for a long time”

Q So you presumably, I know, you started to go to doctor's, And initially, I mean, how long did it take before they were able to actually diagnose something?

A Yeah, I think I saw three different specialists and a trip to the ER. Uh, they did a, a test, a CT scan, I think, in the ER and saw that my entire colon was impacted. So I think that was, you know, it was like, oh, you're just stressed. You probably just are stopped up. So just Throw a cup of fiber into your smoothies for a few days, or take some Metamucil, and you'll be fine. Uh, and so, ultimately, when I walked into this, this specialist's office, when I finally got the appointment at that point, I had been in so much pain, um, was losing some blood, and just was in really bad shape, and, and he kind of saw me immediately. I was pretty, pretty pale at that point, and he said, we need to get you in and do a colonoscopy right away, and nobody had performed any tests, really, besides that Kind of CT scan in the ER at that point, so I didn't know what a colonoscopy was, but quite honestly, I was just glad somebody was performing some sort of a test to try to figure out what was going on.

AI assessment note: “I think I saw three different specialists and a trip to the ER.”

Q walk into Trader Joe's, right, and a lot of grocery stores, Target, you know, Walmart grocery stores, and you can find coconut aminos and almond flour and coconut flour and the kinds of things that are standard in a, in a paleo grain-free diet, but it wasn't that easy in I did paleo for a couple years. I mean, how are you even discovering what to substitute, what to use?

A Yeah. Gosh, I lived in the Bay Area, so we probably had things in our grocery stores long before some other places in the country, but even still, there were days I'd have to drive to, you know, three or four grocery stores to find what we needed, because I loved to shop at Trader Joe's, because it was more affordable as newlyweds, you know, with a husband in law school, but they didn't have coconut flour and things like they do now, so then I would go to, you know, go to Whole Foods to get a few things, but that was so expensive, and then I would go on Amazon and see if I could get a bulk of, you know, something. Uh, and, and so I was piecing it together.

AI assessment note: “days I'd have to drive to, you know, three or four grocery stores”