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This week’s Gluten Free School Podcast tackles the question “Is a Gluten Free Diet more expensive?” For many, the answer is yes, but it doesn’t have to be.
What if I told you that you could save up to 50% on your grocery bill every week? Would that make you happy? It certainly has for my clients.
This week we welcome back Kevin Geary from RebootedBody.com to talk about his new book all about cracking the code to finally sleep better (and lord knows we all need that!).
And Kevin interviews me about my new book, The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper: How to Eat Healthy without Breaking the Bank.
The following points were discussed:
01:25 — Introducing Kevin Geary, founder of RebootedBody.com and author, his most recent book is REM Rehab: Reboot Your Sleep, Feel Amazing and Light Your Productivity on Fire.
02:09 — The important discovery that lead him to formulate a comprehensive sleep guide.
03:29 — The #1 reason most people are not getting enough sleep.
04:56 — A simple analogy illustrating the importance of sleep.
05:59 — “Medicating” with caffeine may cause worsening side effects of poor sleep habits.
07:19 — THE “worst side effect” of poor sleep and how it effects your weight-loss goals.
08:48 — This second “worst side effect” messes with your hormones, your will power and even triggers disordered eating habits.
11:01 — How the third “worst side effect” of poor sleep is linked to depression and anxiety.
12:17 — One big factor causing sleep issues and how it changes your brain.
15:40 — Two simple things to get better sleep (and no, it doesn’t involve moving into a cave or throwing away your electronics!)
17:16 — Mitigate a bad night’s sleep with these simple hacks.
20:29 — Take actionable steps to better sleep, without reading through science jargon.
20:50 — Switching gears: What prompted Jennifer to write her book, The Savvy Gluten-free Shopper and how her strategies can cut your grocery bill in HALF!
23:12 — Jennifer’s mission to actively advocate and educate in a way that sparks meaningful change and get people back in control.
25:32 — How Jennifer’s real food philosophy helps keep things simple in the kitchen, even if only one person in a household has to eat gluten-free.
27:10 — Who this book is for, and how it’s even helping those who are NOT gluten-free.
28:02 — The difference eating gluten-free on a shoestring and being a savvy gluten-free shopper.
30:16 — One simple strategy to saving money in the meat aisle and time spent grocery shopping.
31:54 — The hidden BONUS page in the book to access the additional meal planning guide.
33:27 — What Jennifer is up to next (and check out the Events page).
35:10 — Final thoughts and sign-off.
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Transcription
Jennifer: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. Today, we’ve got a very special episode. It’s a little bit different because I have invited back my co-host if you remember him, Kevin Geary. He co-hosted a couple of podcast back in the fall. He has a really great new book out and I want to talk to him about his book all about sleep because Lord knows, we all need sleep.
And then, Kevin’s going to talk about me about my book, The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper and what drove me to get this enormous – oh, my goodness! It’s like giving birth almost getting this book out. And I wanted to share those reasons why with you because I’ve gotten a lot of questions and advocacy has become more important to me this year. So I’d really like to share that with you and I hope you’ll hang around with both of us and listen in because man! You’re going to learn how to totally fine-tune your sleep because I know I need a little bit of help with that right now.
So Kevin, welcome to the show!
Kevin: I am glad to be back. Thank you, Jennifer.
Jennifer: So I just want to give you a little bit of an intro so everyone knows your background if they haven’t gone back and listened to those two podcasts. For everybody, Kevin is the founder of RebootedBody.com. He’s the host of the Rebooted Body Podcast, helping men and women reprogram their body and mind for sustainable fat loss, vibrant health and peak performance using a unique blend of ancestral science and modern psychology.
So Kevin, I’m so excited for you about this guide. Why don’t you tell us what made you decide to write a guide about sleep. I mean, you already have a popular action guide about unhealthy eating triggers. Why did you make the transition to this one?
Kevin: So basically, nutrition and exercise seem to get all of the attention when it comes to health and fat loss, but I have a bunch of clients who in the past have made amazing changes to their eating and their activity and their mindset, but they came back to me telling me that they were still struggling and they were looking for answers. You know what I found? I found that sleep was the culprit. It continued to be the culprit in a lot of these people who are making awesome changes, but still struggling.
I talked to Evan Brand who is a good friend of mine who also does notjustpaleo.com and the Not Just Paleo Podcast and he mentioned the same thing. It was the same stuff we were running into. We looked around and we said to ourselves, “You know what? Nobody is really talking about this and it is so absolutely critical.”
So we kind of formulated a plan and he is my co-author for REM Rehab and we launched a sleep guide because everybody is struggling with it, they don’t really know they’re struggling with it or they don’t know how to fix it, so here it is.
Jennifer: Now, I have to tell you, I will admit this publicly, I have not been sleeping well. It’s been several months. It’s stress. I’m sure everybody can relate to this. You’ve got stress at work. You’ve got big projects going on. Maybe you have kids. I mean, my sister had a baby seven months ago and she’s still struggling with getting a full-night sleep if that.
This is a big problem not just for women. I mean, this is a big issue for women, but I know that it’s not just women. It’s men too. I even suspect that these problems probably start somewhere even maybe in the teenage years where our sleep patterns get off and we don’t know how – there’s no textbook or guidebook about how to sleep.
Kevin: No, there isn’t.
Jennifer: Nobody teaches you this. So what is the biggest issue in our society around sleep?
Kevin: Well, you hit the nail on the head talking about stress. I mean, we’re a super-stressed society. I think most people would agree with that. We value productivity very highly. So I think the biggest issue is that people don’t place a high value on sleep.
This is contributing greatly to the health care crisis, preventable disease, outcomes. Everybody is trying to cram in as much productivity as possible. And when they’re not being productive, they’re worried about being entertained. It seems like sleep is just constantly put off and put off and put off.
Going back to the importance of it and people not understanding the importance of it, in order to get people to understand the importance of it, I use the analogy of the sun.
If you think about the temperature of the earth, what factor has the most influence over the earth’s temperature? It was 40° this morning in Atlanta. It’s going to be 75° today. Nothing else has that level of influence.
Well, the impact of sleep on the body is very similar. On a day-to-day basis, nothing has the level of importance on us and our performance and our health that sleep has.
And back to society being so stressed, that’s what drives up cortisol levels and chronically-elevated makes sleep even worse. And of course bad sleep drives even more stress. So it’s just a vicious, vicious cycle that people are attempting to sidestep and medicate away with things like caffeine and alcohol and sleep drugs. It’s all deranged and we need to get it all sorted out again.
Jennifer: It’s great. You kind of mentioned some of the problems with poor sleep because when I find when I wake up and I have not slept well, I am just in a fog. Now I don’t do any caffeine, so I recognize I’m different than a lot of people out there. I just function better without it, but there’s a lot of people as you said who are chronically addicted. They can’t start their day. It’s not going to be pretty if they don’t have the cup of Jo in the morning.
Is some of that a big mistake that people are making or is that somehow indicative of something, a bigger problem that people have with sleep?
Kevin: Yeah. I mean, definitely. We’re always – or I guess our society focuses on trying to be the society that medicates things instead of dealing with the underlying problem. As far as sleep is concerned, I think people do that because they just don’t understand a lot of the worst side effects of sleep. And if they did understand them and they understood how much they could fix these things just by making small, simple adjustments to their routine and their daily life, that they would start taking this more seriously and they wouldn’t be medicating so much and they would get better outcomes as a result.
Jennifer: So wait, you mentioned the ‘worst’ side effects because maybe I’m not even touching on those. What are a few of these ‘worst’ side effects that you are referencing if you’re experiencing poor sleep.
Kevin: I will give you three of them. I really want people to understand that we’re not just talking about stress and disease here. I mention clients who are doing everything right and are just kind of running in place in a treadmill. If you have fat loss goals, sleep is absolutely critical. This is the first worst side effect and that is, blood sugar regulation.
So a study from the University of Chicago Medical Center tracked healthy young men over 16 nights. These are people with presumably functional metabolisms. When their sleep was decreased, which is I’m saying less than six hours of quality sleep (not time in the bed, but six hours of quality sleep), the changes in glucose metabolism were crazy.
They took 40% longer than normal to regulate blood sugar after a high carbohydrate meal. Both the secretion of insulin and the body’s response to insulin decreased by 30%.
I’ll put that in laymen’s term for people. Poor sleep makes you metabolically similar to a type II diabetic. And to make it even more clear for people, poor sleep makes you fat.
So if you have a fat loss goal, that is like one of the worst side effects of poor sleep.
Jennifer: Cool! Well, not cool. That’s really not cool at all.
Kevin: Not cool. Not cool.
Jennifer: Oh, but I love your explanation. Cool for the explanation. I like the explanation, but what’s the next one?
Kevin: Alright! So the second one is that poor sleep makes you crave high glycemic and hyper palatable foods. So we have a lot of people running around with intense cravings that they can’t seem to get rid off or heal. Of course, I wrote a book on eight unhealthy eating triggers. But sleep is a huge contributor to this. The mechanism behind this, again, is hormones.
So without getting into too much science, there’s two main satiety hormones. We have leptin and ghrelin. Leptin signals that you are full. Ghrelin signals that you are hungry. So when the International Journal of Endocrinology looked at poor sleep and these hormone levels, they found that leptin decreases by 19% (so you’re having less satiety) and it increases ghrelin by 28%, which means increased hunger. So you have less satiety and you are far more hungry. And that is even after subjects in the study were given a compensation of ten hours of extra sleep for the two days following their nights of bad sleep.
You are basically walking around craving all sugar, all carbohydrates after a few nights of poor sleep. People say that this is due to their lack of motivation like, “My motivation is going away” or, “I don’t have will power” and really, it’s a physical response to poor sleep.
Jennifer: So you could actually be craving junk food because you are not sleeping well?
Kevin: You absolutely do. I mean, they polled the participants in the study after it was done and they basically said that their cravings for high glycemic, carbohydrate-based foods and salty foods increased by 45%.
Jennifer: That’s really interesting. And that, in essence – because I know you also talk a lot about disordered eating, that would play in to people who struggle with disordered eating as well, right?
Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. There’s no way you’re going to be able to address unhealthy eating triggers if your sleep is not accounted for. It’s just impossible.
I guess that’s a good segue into the third thing I was going to tell you about, which is mood disorders. Of course, we already talked about medication. One in five Americans is on prescription drugs for anxiety or depression. I’ll tell you how sleep ties into this just really quickly. People with sleep disorders are five times as likely to develop clinical depression and 20 times more likely to develop anxiety disorders.
Going back to the vicious cycles we talked about earlier, once you have a mood disorder or clinical depression, it becomes harder and harder to get better sleep. So one thing continues to make the other thing worse. They just work with each other and your life gets worse and worse.
Jennifer: Oh, my gosh. It sounds so awful.
Kevin: It is awful. It’s very awful.
Jennifer: It really does. It’s such a shame too because we don’t realize how valuable sleep is. And I know for myself, I’m very busy and I guess I figured, “If I’ve got to chip away at something, I’ll chip away at sleep.” I rationalize to myself that I’m not doing anything, but really, you are doing something and it is a really important time. I always think of it as like a computer, rebooting the computer in a sense.
So what do you guys suggest as far as beginning to solve this issue of poor sleep?
Kevin: Yeah. Well, first of all, we have this chapter in the book where we follow a fictional guy named Dave. He’s actually an archetype for a lot of people who we surveyed and talked to about their day-to-day activities. We just kind of go through the dozens of mistakes that Dave makes all throughout his day that impact his sleep quality. But there’s one big factor I think that people don’t realize that it is a big factor and that is artificial light after dark, especially blue spectrum light.
So if you think about way back in the day – way, way, way back – what light would you be subject to after dark? I mean, really all we had was campfires and candles…
Jennifer: Yeah, I was going to say candles. You see that in movies or old movies all the time. Everybody has those candles in beautiful, old, little lanterns and things.
Kevin: Yeah. And that’s very normal. That’s perfectly normal. But here’s the problem. All this stuff is based on a rhythm. It’s based on the chemicals and the changes in the chemicals and electrical reaction in your brain that gear you toward sleep or toward being awake.
We talked about cortisol earlier. That’s a rhythmic hormone. A lot of people don’t understand that. It is naturally high in the morning to wake you up and it tapers off throughout the day, meaning it’s low at night and that allows you to go to sleep.
Well, your eyes play a big role in this too. So as the sun sets, the color spectrum shifts. The blue light is basically filtered out and the sky becomes orange. That’s called a sunset. That signals your brain to start preparing for sleep.
Now if you bring in all the computers and the televisions and the iPads and the artificial light after the sun sets, well what happens? Your eyes and your brain are soaking up all of that light, much of it is blue spectrum light, which is not supposed to exist after the sun sets. So what does that tell your brain? Cortisol begins to ramp back up. The brain starts to function as if it needs to be awake. All of that stuff is sabotaging your body’s rhythm.
Jennifer: And actually, I’d like to share a little bit of my own experience around this because what you’re saying is right on. I had worked with a practitioner several years ago. I was a night person. I was a total night owl. I would get so much done at night especially like around 11, 12, 1 a.m. I was in this sweet spot of being so productive on the computer and reading and everything except I didn’t feel well. I was exhausted all the time during the day.
She had told me “You need to turn the computers and the TV’s. Stop looking at your phone at probably like 8:30 at night. You have to just stop because your body thinks it’s supposed to be awake when it needs to be winding down for bed.”
She didn’t explain it from the color of light as you are, but she was right. And now, I wake up without an alarm at 5:45, sometimes 5:15 every day, and I am more productive in the morning now than I am at night. I notice around 8 o’clock, I’m just exhausted. I’m done for the day. I’m winding down.
So it is really true, those rhythms. You’re right on with that. It is so important to get out of that space of being addicted to the screens.
Kevin: Yeah, definitely.
Jennifer: So as far as sleep and some changes because you’ve talked about some things that we can do, is there a way to stop or mitigate some of the damage that we’re doing without going to live in a cave or taking the lights and throwing the TV out the window?
Kevin: Yeah, going back to the artificial light things. I do want people to understand that you don’t have to move into a cave, that you can use electronics after the sun goes down. You don’t have to totally throw away all productivity. So just really quickly, there are two things people can do.
There’s a program called f.lux, which is a free a computer program. You can just Google it, f.lux and install it on your computers. I don’t think you can do it on devices yet unless they’re jailbroken, but definitely install it on your computer.
What it does is it basically follows your computer’s clock. At certain times at night and early, early in the morning, it takes the blue light out of your computer screens. So you’re basically looking at an orange-ish screen. That removes the blue light spectrum that we talked about that causes so many problems.
And then for everything else in your life that’s emitting blue light, you can wear UVEX glasses, which are basically like $7 in Amazon. We link to them in the guide. You put those on when the sun goes down. Those filter out blue light from everything.
So if you’re watching television or you have artificial lights in your house that have any blue spectrum in them, that takes care of everything.
So that’s number one, to solve the light problem, alright?
Now you said, basically, if you have poor sleep, is there a way to mitigate the damage. Of course, we can do everything right, but sometimes there are circumstances that are beyond in our control and we just end up with a bad night of sleep. So here are some things that people can do to just mitigate the damage.
Now remember, we said you’re effectively walking around like a type II diabetic, so you must eat very low carb to mitigate the metabolic damage the day after your poor sleep. So if you get six hours or less, that’s not time in the bed, that’s quality sleep. So you can be in the bed for eight hours, but if you just had a horrible night of sleep, you got less than six hours of quality sleep, you need to be low carb to mitigate metabolic damage the next day.
The next thing you need to do, the next three things you need to do – and this is basically for immune support because poor sleep destroys the immune system. So you take an extra 5000 IU of vitamin D because vitamin D is an immune modulator – very important, very strong effect. Then you take 800 mg of vitamin C and then you take an extra dose of whatever probiotics that you typically take.
And then I want you to take a 20-minute nap, but not more. That’s really important. A lot of people take naps and they will take a 30-minute nap or an hour nap, sometimes even longer. If you go longer than 30 minutes, something called sleep inertia begins. You will actually wake up groggier when you went to sleep.
Jennifer: You know why? You know why? Because the bed sucks you in. That totally happens to me. I get stuck in bed, so I just don’t take naps, but I’ll try it. I’ll set my alarm for 20 minutes and I will just make myself get out of bed.
Kevin: Yeah, if you can feel asleep for 20 minutes and pop back up, you will feel very refreshed. If you go beyond the 30-minute mark, you’re not going to feel good when you wake up.
And then of course, don’t use any additional caffeine. Don’t drink any alcohol. We have to also remember that alcohol, not only does it interfere with sleep, but it’s basically like liquid sugar. So again, back to the metabolic issue, you don’t want any of that.
And don’t abuse this hack. This will help you mitigate the damage, but that doesn’t mean you should live life like that just so you can sleep poorly and “get better productivity” and so on and so forth.
Jennifer: Yeah, I think these are all really great tips. They’re very practical. I could try the glasses. I’m willing to give it a try at night. You know, when you’re very stressed out, I noticed it’s harder to sleep because my mind is racing. And then I don’t sleep well. I keep waking up. And then I wake up in the morning and I’m still worried about whatever it was that was going on the day before, so I wake up stressed and you’re in a chronic state of stress.
So that’s why I just love your book. I was reading it and I thought to myself, “Okay, it’s time to make some changes. I have a lot of these things down, but there are some key pieces like the light piece, changing certain other thing.” And oh, my gosh! The supplement suggestions are awesome. So I will definitely be giving that a try very soon.
Kevin: Yeah. And just to be clear, this book is so broken down into laymen’s terms and actionable advice that it’s not even funny. It’s not a sleep science book. I hope I’m not scaring people with science. It is a sleep action book. We wrote every page with the word ‘actionable’ in mind so people know exactly what steps to take.
Now I don’t want to take up all the time because I’m watching the clock here. So I want to transition over to talking about your book. I think I’ve talked about mine enough.
Tell us why you wrote the book first of all. I mean, you have an awesome platform at Gluten Free School. You’ve done the Gluten Free Sugar Cleanse. Why was this the next step for you?
To be honest with you, the reason that I wanted to write this book is because people are out of control when they find out that they have food sensitivities. We are just beat up left and right. Your body is beat up, your wallet is beat up, your emotional state and a lot of times, your mental state really takes a beating because you may lose friends, family, you might not go along with things. You’ve got to change your entire diet.
You’re stressed out and anxious about what you’re going to eat all the time. To just give people back some ounce of control in their lives, especially around food and around the money that they can spend, I think for me when I was able to experience that, it was really helpful.
And I know for my clients who I had been transmitting a lot of this information to, but just through our sessions, they said to me, “Can you compile this into one resource because there’s so many things that you’re giving me that are awesome and incredible and helpful, but I’m totally overwhelmed.”
And so as I started to write things down and put them into little systems and strategies that made sense, I was finding that clients were saving up to 50% on their grocery bill. And they’re not eating junkie food. They’re eating food that is healthy, that tastes awesome that no one ever goes, “Is this gluten-free?” Everyone’s like, “Oh, my gosh. Can I have the recipe?”
It’s simple and it makes their lives better. So really, for me, that was behind this, to help empower people to feel better about the food that they were eating and the money that they are spending.
Kevin: Well, one of the best thing I like about your platform and new book is that people writing on the subject of gluten-free could easily be advocating for processed, gluten-free food products and things like that. And of course, I’m a real food advocate, so it’s really important to me when I look at the work that other people are doing, that they are also aligned with real foods.
So that’s something that I really love about your platform and about this book as well.
Jennifer: And I think too, one of the things about advocacy that’s become so important to me is that advocacy is – and I think this is one of the things that’s confused out there — it’s not just about talking and sharing with people what is gluten-free or what is gluten-sensitivity or what is Celiac Disease. Those are great and they’re really important and I certainly don’t mean to take anything away from any person who is working to educate the masses out there about these things, these various things, situations and conditions that we’re all in the same boat, but the problem that I have found is that a lot of advocacy that’s out there lacks the ability to spark change in people’s lives.
I wrote an article about this at the end of 2013 because I had spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to really be in advocate as well as a leader. Keeping people stuck – I mean, we can argue about our battle wounds and our shared frustrations all we want, but at the end of the day, if we don’t ever move beyond that, if we don’t find ways to function and live productive, happy, vibrant, thriving lives outside of all the crap that happens, then we literally are not any better off.
That is my concern and I want to fill the void that I see is being because I think education is really important, but we have to be able to spark change and help people make changes that are meaningful for them and get back in control.
So to me, that is part of the reason why I decided to put this book out because it puts, again, people back in control.
Kevin: Yeah, it’s a very actionable book. I’m glad to see that there’s, I believe, some strategy behind this. I easily see you releasing more books down the road because it’s not like you tried to write the ultimate guide to eating gluten-free. You took one section of eating gluten-free and you mastered it with a book. That leaves open to going to different areas of eating gluten-free and writing more books and more guides and helping people in different ways. You’re kind of moving them into that lifestyle change step-by-step.
Jennifer: Right! And that goes along with my philosophy to eat healthy food that in a way that happens to be gluten-free. When the focus is on gluten-free, the blinders are put on and you can’t see anything outside of gluten-free. So you’re just looking for gluten-free pasta, gluten-free bread, gluten-free cookies, gluten-free cake. You forget that there is so much natural food out there that happens to be gluten-free.
And especially if you are the only person in your home that has to be gluten-free – and I get a lot of complaints from people on Twitter and on Facebook, “I don’t know what to do, I’m the only person that’s gluten-free and we have to make two different meals in our house. It’s expensive and frustrating.” Well, stop making two different meals. Make one meal that happens to be gluten-free that it makes everybody happy. That way, everybody is loving what’s there and they’re not missing what’s not missing because it was never meant to be there in the first place.
Kevin: That’s an awesome point. So who is going to benefit most from this book?
Jennifer: Well, I know for sure women are going to benefit. I did specifically write this book with the woman that’s gluten-free in mind. So she may have Celiac disease or she could be gluten-sensitive or have some sort of autoimmune condition that would benefit from a gluten-free diet.
But I will say this, I’ve had a lot of people who have brought the book who are not gluten-free. They said to me, “You know, even though you talk about gluten-free, this is completely applicable to my life. This is just about healthy eating in general and then you have the tidbits about avoiding certain things because they could be contaminated with gluten.” This is really a lifestyle book as well as a food book – and also, recipes as well.
A mom. This is great for a mom. It’s definitely family-friendly. I believe that because the grocery store is totally working us over, we should learn how to work the grocery store back and know where to find deals, where to save money and not necessarily to look again for that junk food or eating on a shoestring, but to really be savvy.
That’s the word. That’s why I called the book “The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper” because oh, my gosh! I’ve saved so much money over the past few years by shopping the way that I do. I’m eating grass-fed beef. I’m eating organic vegetables. When I was eating whole grains, we were eating whole grains and legumes and all sorts of things.
My diet has slightly shifted and I have learned how to adapt our foods so that my husband can eat his way and I eat my way, but we’re still technically eating one meal. We saved so much money that some weeks, for the two of us – I think two or three weeks ago, I spend $40 at the grocery store for our weekly groceries. I only go shopping once. And this past week, I spent $52.
So I really know how to find what is most beneficial. And it is kind of using some coupons and things, but you really have to know how to work the grocery store. It’s not complex. It’s not any of these like DIY tactics that take all day. It’s really about understanding how to prepare food and being focused on the food that’s going to be the most nutrient-dense that will help you feel better.
Kevin: Well, I’m glad you threw out some numbers like $40 because there’s a lot of people out there (including me as I sit here and listen) where I go to the store, I put a few things in my cart and that’s $40 right there. You can trip and fall and $40 is in your cart.
So the fact that you can get so much food and you’re eating for two different people – I could spend $40 just to eat for myself, by the way – that’s really inspiring for people to hear, to know that you can implement these strategies and get costs down that low.
Jennifer: Yeah, and part of the thing that I found is that there are going to be some times where I am going to spend more money than that. One tip that I gave away in the book, like I said, I eat grass-fed meat, I look for when these items like beef and chicken (not fish so much, you’re not really going to get deals on fish as much, maybe if they’re fresh frozen, you might find them on sale), but usually fresh items like the chicken and the meat and other actual land animals, you can look for the ‘sell by’ day. This is one of the best tips. The reason that I only spend $40 at the grocery store is because I have a freezer packed with chicken, beef cubes, ground beef…
Kevin: Yeah, you’re buying a lot in bulk.
Jennifer: I buy it in bulk when it’s 50% off because grocery stores have to get rid of it when it’s like a day before their ‘sell by’ date. it’s not bad. Everyone thinks it’s bad, so they don’t want to buy it. You buy it at 50% off and pack your freezer with it and then just pull it out and defrost it and cook it.
There are months like the winter where I’m only spending $40 a week on food because I already have the expensive nutrient-dense food available to me. I’m not going to the supermarket every week and I’m at the mercy of what they decide to put on sale.
Kevin: Yeah, and by the way, that’s not just money savings, that’s time savings because when you’re only spending $40 at the grocery store in a week, you’re not spending a lot of time there. You’re getting in. You’re getting a few things. You’re getting right out rather than week after week trying to do all of these grocery shopping all over again, the same stuff that you did last week. So that’s really powerful too.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Kevin: What bonus materials are in the book because it’s not just the book, right?
Jennifer: No. So for anybody that buys the book, there’s a hidden page. I’m not going to tell anybody what page it’s on, but you can’t miss it when you read the book. So anybody that buys the book has access to a bonus companion guide that I put together. It’s like 20 pages or something like that. It utilizes all the recipes.
There’s – oh, boy! There’s a lot of recipes. The number of recipes in the book is eluding me at the moment. I feel like it’s 27 recipes. I combined many of the recipes into a meal plan, which I’m giving to you in addition to the book.
But I don’t want to just give it to you because I’m a big fan. Maybe, Kevin, you’ve heard this phrase, “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime.”
Kevin: Yes.
Jennifer: And so I really believe that meal planning is a skill. It is a life skill that’s no longer taught. People are going to the grocery store with no plan and so they end up spending a lot more money on food that they never will eat because food waste is really high in the United States. There’s various studies that show that it’s anywhere from 25% – 40% of food in this country is thrown out and that’s money, literally, thrown in the trash.
So I use that bonus guide to teach you how I teach clients to meal plan. It’s really simple and it involves having to cook only 2-3 days a week. So it’s really simple. That’s my gift to everybody that buys the book.
Kevin: Awesome! So you’ve gotten all these stuff out of the way. You’ve got so much – we talk all the time. You’ve got so much stuff going on. I’ve got so much stuff going on. What’s next for you? What’s the next thing?
Jennifer: Oh, my! I have a lot of speaking opportunities. I am traveling all over the Eastern half of the US. I have so many as-is, but I’m actually in the process of booking more. I’ve had a lot of event promoters approach me because they’ve heard me on different podcasts and they’ve been following me on my website and on Facebook and seeing me also speaking in other events and realize that – my mission is really to help educate people and teach people. So I’m going to be speaking a lot. Please go check out my events page.
And I have a lot of other really cool things happening. I’m actually relaunching Gluten-Free 101. It teaches people how to go gluten-free. It’s a very comprehensive course that will be happening this spring, later this spring. And then in the fall, I’ve got a huge online event planned, but I’m not giving away any information right now. Keep your eyes peeled.
Kevin: I know what it is.
Jennifer: I know you know what it is! But for everybody, if you’re not on my list, make sure you get on my newsletter list. You’ll be the first to find out.
And definitely, obviously, if you’re on Kevin’s list, you’ll also be one of the first people to find out what it is. It is a really cool learning opportunity and it’s again part of my gift because I love this so much, to be able to give back what I learned to everybody else so we can all be in the know.
Kevin: Excellent! Well, I kind of took over the second half of your podcast here, so I’ll give it back to you now.
Jennifer: Well, thank you very much for being a really great co-host again. I appreciate it.
Kevin: Yeah, no problem.
Jennifer: I appreciate you coming on. And you know what, everybody? Please go over and check out Kevin’s awesome REM Rehab book. You won’t be sorry. I mean, I was just blown away when I read it.
I’ll also have the link to my book “The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper: How to Eat Healthy without Breaking the Bank” as well if you’re interested in checking it out. I believe there’s a preview on Amazon, so if you’re curious to peruse through it, you can also do that as well.
And if you have any questions for either of us because both of these topics are really important, just leave a comment below on the blog and we will definitely get back to you.
Please go visit Kevin on rebootedbody.com. Go listen to his podcast. It is awesome. And I’d really appreciate it if you guys would subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Head over, let us know your thoughts and we’ll see you the next time.
Thanks, Kevin. I really appreciate having you.
Kevin: Thank you.
Jennifer: Alright, everybody. Take care! Bye bye.
The links referred to in this episode are:
Kevin Geary – www.rebootedbody.com
Click Here to get The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper: How to Eat Healthy without Breaking the Bank!!