Clean Eating Summary – Mason and Jess discuss prior episodes from the Clean Eating Series and share their personal journeys with food and path to a clean eating lifestyle. They also share their vices, morning routines, and their good and not-so-good habits.
Show Notes:
George Milton and Erin Link of Yellowbird Hot Sauce
Marissa Epstein of Springdale Ventures
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Pretty ok (not great) transcript:
[00:00:00] Jess:
This is Jess and Mason with a mostly green life. The podcast that’s making sustainability and our connection to the environment. More fun and approachable for the eco cure. Today, we’re reviewing our first clean eating track. Each episode in January and February were all around clean eating, covering different topics.
And today we’re going to talk through the highlights of each of
[00:00:18] Mason: those. Yeah. Yeah. I think we found some really great guests for a solid foundation in clean eating, but it’s amazing how little. Of the topic as a whole, we actually
[00:00:28] Jess: got to, I could go deep into each individual topic from each.
[00:00:34] Mason: We had so much to talk about with them
[00:00:37] Jess: let’s do another track. Yeah,
[00:00:39] Mason: we will do another one soon. So a quick review of the episodes that we thought were in this track, we started with Marissa Epstein and we really wanted to start with her because her of her research around why we eat the way that we eat.
[00:00:54] Jess: Yeah. Especially with all of the emotion that can go into it. And I liked her perspective. You know, allowing yourself to eat that extra piece of cake, if you’re at the birthday party or, you know, divulge into all the food at Christmas or Thanksgiving or wherever you’re at.
[00:01:08] Mason: Yeah. Give yourself permission.
Just make sure you counteract it later on with some exercise, but the importance of recognizing the emotion that does go into eating and allowing your motion to guide your eating sometimes, uh, we’ll probably end up with a more, a healthier relationship to food.
So then we talked to Joe Dixon who helped us figure out how to choose what to eat.
[00:01:30] Jess: Yeah. I love his app Maryfield and helping us find more brands that we’re unaware of, but you know, we’re, we know how to shop for the most part. When we go to the grocery store, we know what brands are good, what brands are putting the right ingredients and the right packaging and
and all this other criteria that goes into the food. But I feel like for a lot of shoppers, they don’t quite know where to start. And there’s so many options in the grocery
[00:01:53] Mason: stores too. I would say, even though we know what we’re looking for, there’s so many new brands coming out all the time. I still get confused in.
[00:02:03] Jess: Yeah. And what I like most too, is that every brand that they put on their app, he says, you know, they look at their. Their whole product portfolio. Like it’s not just that they have one product that really meets the mark and is doing good things and is made from good ingredients. They make sure that the entire brand, you know, has products that all fit within,
[00:02:24] Mason: right?
Cause like if ExxonMobil started to make solar panels, you still probably wouldn’t want to support ExxonMobil because of everything else they’re doing.
[00:02:34] Jess: So, you can trust each brand. Yep. Yep. Yep.
[00:02:37] Mason: That’s great. And then next was our friends and Yellowbird, we dug into an actual category condiments and we mostly just laughed in that episode, but we just fun for sure.
Yeah. But we did learn some things and we talked about, uh, how, the difference between what people want and what people say they want and packaging and such when it comes to a better for you.
[00:03:02] Jess: I think for the most part, I mean, we try to avoid, or when I’m grocery shopping, I try to avoid plastic and condiments, but that’s kind of just been like a new phenomenon that I’ve been doing.
And it’s hard a lot of the time, especially with use cases like their hot sauce.
[00:03:13] Mason: So after Yellowbird we dug into a pretty, I would say it’s an extensive and sometimes controversial topic around what type of diet you should follow. And first guests we had was rip Esselstyn, who is a, what I call a level five vegan.
[00:03:31] Jess: Is that an actual term or is that what you call it?
[00:03:33] Mason: I looked it up one time and it was coined in a TV show somewhere.
And I’ve just used it ever since then, but it wasn’t a TV show that I watched. So someone said it and then it caught on for me. But to me, level five is extreme where there’s no oils and it’s just really, really intense, uh, restrictive diet. And it is, I mean, there’s massive data behind it for. Reversing heart disease and avoiding heart disease, which is a number one killer in America.
And so there’s a, a whole bunch of positive attributes behind it. To me. It doesn’t mean that’s what we all have to eat though.
[00:04:11] Jess: I liked all of his tips on, just trying to eat more plants or just try and trying to eliminate some meat. If you do have a heavy meat diet, You know, you’re a big carnivore and you barbecue all the time or take out and finding foods that you like, like breakfast, something that, you know, can get you through the day that doesn’t incorporate eggs or breakfast, sausage and stuff like that.
And he actually has a new podcast that he recorded a few weeks ago with Dean Ornish, which he is also, I mean, do you notice. He’s a doctor, he’s a cardiologist, but he is the one that’s really created this map or plan for people to reverse diseases. And they had a conversation recently.
I haven’t listened to it yet, but
[00:04:51] Mason: And it’s worth mentioning. I was hoping to find there’s a carnivore MD, a guy out there who thinks that we should all just be eating animals and no plants at all, and tried to get him on to be a counterpoint, to rips information, but he ended up just kind of going radio silent on us and didn’t come on the shows.
So, yeah, that was a bummer. Yeah. So we didn’t get an alternate. Viewpoint. So maybe later in the year, we’ll be able to get them on and, and hear about what he has to say.
[00:05:21] Jess: Yep. That would be very cool. And then lastly, we had Todd white, which I think was an exciting guest for both of us, just because we’re obsessed with wine, I guess you could say.
And it was great to learn the right way to enjoy wine
[00:05:33] Mason: daily. Yeah. I’ve really settled in, on wine as being the right alcohol for me to be able to pace myself and enjoy my evening. And I’ve gotten to the point where I love that one or two glasses of wine with dinner. sometimes we mix tequila shots in there and that can lead to quite a hangover.
[00:05:52] Jess: That’s usually my fault. I mean, We could find wine that you don’t like. And then that also makes you only have one glass. Remember we had the white wine the other night and you were like, wow, I paced myself even more with
[00:06:03] Mason: this, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. I want to enjoy drinking and still be able to be functional the next day.
Every time we go out, we need to carry around a list of wines or something. Because when we go out and order wine, it always makes me feel bad. And I don’t know, I don’t notice. Bad. It’s going to make me feel because I’ve been drinking such quality wine at home, and then I get home and I’m like, what happened?
I’m like, oh, it’s literally just not the wine in my house.
[00:06:34] Jess: We just need to bring them a bottle or understand who their distributor is. And I don’t know, I guess they probably don’t let just Brandon people do that, but the place is
[00:06:43] Mason: worth a try.
[00:06:44] Jess: Just the places we go to often enough, you know, they may consider. If we promise we’ll buy like two bottles a week or something. Well,
[00:06:53] Mason: and dry farm is a collection of different wines. You know, they don’t tell you which ones they send you at any given week, but as you get the deliveries, we can write them down and look for those in restaurants.
Cause it’s not like they’re only going through dry farm.
[00:07:10] Jess: Top takeaway that I got from that podcast was when we go out to dinner and we are choosing wine, I try to make sure that it’s from Europe, you know, so that we know that it’s not irrigated, not irrigated California. Nope, California. Nope. And I would know better, I would have some of those wines that are grown here, but I just don’t know from the wine list
[00:07:27] Mason: at a restaurant.
Yeah. And I think it was in. Joe Dixon’s podcast talked about how in Europe, the burden of proof is on the manufacturer to say, this is safe for people. Whereas in America, it’s the opposite. The burden of proof is for watchdog groups to prove that something is harmful. And so that is in wine as well. And that’s why there’s more FDA.
Approved additives and wine, and why us wine in general is inferior. I think we can say from a natural and health perspective
[00:08:02] Jess: and going back to Joe Dixon’s as well, learning about how the coloration or color dyes in foods also leads to hyperactivity in children. It’s funny. Cause when we have the kids, you know, we like to have them have a low sugar diet with us But I’ve never related, like, not like we give them Cheetos or anything all the time or like Gogurt, but there’s certainly foods with dyes in it. So now it’s like, okay, none of those two, cause that just leads to hyper activity as well.
[00:08:25] Mason: And typically they go together the dyes and the sugar,
so what we’d also like to do during this is kind of go through. Our story arc and just like we did with our guests, because we both have, you know, journeys with food and we went down a path to a clean eating lifestyle. And so let’s, uh, talk about it. I think an interesting thing that I think a lot of people who have.
Tried to adhere to a clean eating lifestyle have tried at some point is going vegan. Have you, you know, of course you have tried to go vegan. I believe what’s the longest you ever. Going vegan. And also what was the first time you tried to go vegan? And what was that like? Yeah. I don’t know if you
[00:09:08] Jess: know, my first story, the first time I tried to go vegan.
Um, it was actually in high school. I think I was a sophomore and this is going to sound disgusting, but I think I only went vegan for maybe 48 hours at that point. And I really want it, the meat balls in my SpaghettiOs that I had made. And I was just like, fuck it. I’m going to have the meatballs. So that was the first time that I tried to go vegan.
Second time, I guess wasn’t until like two years. No, it was probably more like three years ago or so after watching forks over knives. And I think that was like 30 days. Like it was a month, it was a good stint, but that was while you were doing keto. And so I don’t, I think it just, I easily fell off or cooking for a family and cooking for multiple people.
Like if you’re cooking for yourself, Those types of diets are easier to stick to. Yeah.
[00:09:52] Mason: I mean a vegan and, and in the same household, it’s just a recipe for trouble. Yeah. So many temptations on both sides. Yeah. I wonder if any of our listeners out there have a vegan and a keto in the same house and how
[00:10:06] Jess: they do it, how they do it.
Have you ever tried to go. Yeah.
[00:10:09] Mason: So when I had my company green lane and was learning all about health and had first discovered rip and all of his information, I was like, this is really interesting. I’m going to try it. And so the first time I did it, I lasted about two weeks, but I was also really stressed out at work and was just working all the time.
And there were fewer options back then for. Vegan alternatives to things that we normally eat. And so I lasted about two weeks, you know, just eating salads and beans essentially. And I just, it consumed my day. Like I had to spend too much time thinking about what I was going to eat because I had to eat more volume overalls used to get in denser calories from, you know, meat.
And I think at that time, It’s still eating dairy in fact. And so it was just, I didn’t want to think about food that much, Mike and I was busy enough. I think I needed to not think about food that much. And you know, some of rips things has been bowl cereal and stuff is probably packed with enough calories.
I could have figured it out, but I don’t even think they were quite out yet at that time.
[00:11:18] Jess: So yeah. Preparation is key. It seems, but it kind of goes back to Marissa’s podcast too, where she says it’s easy to choose. Not like you choosing bad food, but in that example, you were trying to avoid meat, but you could say that meat is so prevalent and so frequent around us, whether it’s like fast food chains or quick snacks, like she mentioned as well, that it’s hard to.
Right or nutritious and healthy because there’s so many bad options around
[00:11:43] Mason: us. Yeah. He didn’t know. He didn’t, that was the hardest because lots of places, the salads aren’t very good. Oh, but in those two weeks that I went vegan, I felt amazing. Yeah. So I really felt like my body jived with it. And then I tried it again at some point and maybe lasted a month, a few years later. And. After a month, some of the things started to either build up or finally get deficient where it wasn’t the same thing.
I had to think about it too much. I wouldn’t need it in the right varieties of things. And there are certain vegetables, like I think the whole brassica family, uh, broccoli and cauliflower and such, I have to take in small doses.
[00:12:23] Jess: And I think that’s true for a lot of people for that family of vegetables, right?
[00:12:27] Mason: Yeah. It can be rough on digestive systems. And so going back to our journey with food, I think a lot of people. Learning about food through necessity. They have some, either it’s heart disease or they have some kind of health challenge.
Mine was a parasite. I actually contracted a parasite in Spain when I lived over there for a year. I think it was. The little meat bodega. I went to had rats in it. I went in there one day and all the pepperoni hanging out on the counter. I noticed it had little bite marks out of it. This is not good. I think I
[00:13:03] Jess: forget about that.
[00:13:06] Mason: It was pretty gross taken out of it. And I’d been going there for like six or nine months at that point. And I was just. Uh, it makes me want to puke. And then it was only a few months later that I got sick. And so that really sent me on a really deep journey with health had destroyed my GI system. I finally got rid of the parasite, but I couldn’t.
Digests potatoes. When I was done with it, there were so many things that my body couldn’t handle. And so I had to really dig into what I needed and, and nutrition that I had. But all along the way. For me, even before I knew a lot about food and health, I knew organics was important.
My first company was actually a landscaping company and we would go in and not known to us. Pesticide trucks would have come through before and treated their lawn for, uh, bugs and ants and such. And they would spray chemicals down or even the chemical fertilizers. And when I would come through with my crew, we’d be kicking all that up with, with the grass.
And I started to have reactions that were so bad where I had to stop working for a couple of days. I, my face was swollen, lethargic. I had just sleep. And so I was really. I’m one of the people that can have a very quick and acute reaction to pesticides, but it got me thinking, like there’s no way that these chemicals that are meant to kill organisms can be good for us at all.
And so, as I dug into organics and learned like, what is really going on and how many health issues are linked to the chemicals in our food. That ever since then I’ve considered organic. So the most important label that’s out there and Joe Dixon verified that for us, as one of the champions of better quality food, we asked him what was the most important label in the grocery store.
And he said, organics.
[00:15:01] Jess: So this is going to be probably a dumb question. So, you know, when you’re a kid and you’re hanging out in the grass, it’s always so itchy. Is that truly from the grass? Have you think many lawns have it’s from pesticides?
[00:15:14] Mason: I think most that itches from grasp there as kids, lots of kids are actually allergic to grass in particular.
And so when I go lay out, even in our grass, which is completely organic, I’ll get itchy too. I think there’s a little bugs in there that, that make you. My reaction was more in my face and my sinuses. And then it would, I would have a, it, a neurotoxic reaction to it where it would affect. Although sometimes it, it was a crazy itching where.
Part of my body would itch and all I would have to do is I learned, I didn’t even have to scratch it. I would just touch it and it stopped pitching there and then I’d itch somewhere else and I would just touch it. And so I just spent hours like touching different parts of my body as they started to itch to show my body that it wasn’t real, but it was just some neurotoxin that got in so interesting.
That’s pretty
[00:16:04] Jess: crazy. Yeah. I guess my food journey started in a negative way. I struggled with bulemia through high school and I kind of went into college a little bit, but not for too long. And I think through that, Once I got past that stage, then when I was on my own diet, that was when everybody was big into just counting calories.
Nobody really looked at any of the other nutritional components. It was just like calories in calories out type of thing. And so I would eat healthy on the weekdays and we’d be counting calories, but then I would eat like shit on the weekend. So then I was doing like the yo-yo diets, you know, like up and down, up and down.
And so for women, I feel like a lot of time. It’s focused on aesthetic and the way that your body looks versus. Really digging into understanding what’s good for your body and what’s best for you like how Merissa went into it a different way and didn’t have a mirror and was just learning about nutrition
[00:16:54] Mason: We were so surprised how well she handled that, or she’s like, I got fat, I need to learn about nutrition. And she went and found a nutritionist and. Learned about it. And we’re like, whoa,
[00:17:06] Jess: wow. People do it like that.
[00:17:09] Mason: And she’s like, I’m surprised that y’all didn’t have access to that, or didn’t know that there was literally a whole profession that could help you eat out here.
Right. That was
[00:17:18] Jess: a funny moment. And so that was, I guess my early journey, but then just getting into the food space and into the CPG world and then truly being introduced to different ingredients in different products. had such a highly packed nutritional content and then understanding, what’s actually good for your body.
And then through that is when I learned about organics. Cause that wasn’t something I grew up with, or we had talked about as a family or knew that there was even like different options. I don’t even, it probably wasn’t until like late high school, I even knew there was like a difference between organic and conventional.
[00:17:50] Mason: I wonder if he had started at ConAgra, if you had. I believe in organics today,
[00:17:55] Jess: right? I’m so happy that this path led me, you know, to the organic space versus. I don’t know, going to work for a huge CPG company that is
[00:18:04] Mason: focused on and so slightly disappointing, but understandable that rip is less concerned with organics and the way he put it was like, look, if your doctor was like, it has to be vegetables and they have to be organic and come from local like that, it would turn
[00:18:19] Jess: people away barrier or too many barriers, you know, not only do you have to change how you eat, but you have to change.
What you purchase in terms of the type of vegetable and other type of whether it’s organic or not. And it’s more expensive. There’s a lot that, yeah.
[00:18:35] Mason: Well, I hope that as he grows his company plant strong that till continue to move towards that, I know he looks for clean. I mean, they’re all clean label products and such, but the more he can make it organic and more will buy it.
True. And then Joe took us through some other labels, some of them, I wasn’t sure. You know how much we could trust them. And so it was good for him to go down that list around fair trade and non GMO project. And these things that to a lot of people just look like an extra label on an extra little bug on the label, but they are important.
And as we learn about food, I think we should try to consider more and more of these labels. And I think Joe. Articulated perfectly non-GMO it is very controversial. And there is a lot of GMO foods that the genetic modification does not make them worse for you. But the genetic modification, 95% of the time is so they can dump toxic chemicals all over the land, around the food and the chemicals get on the food.
[00:19:41] Jess: That was something that I, not that I learned that during his podcast, but, I thought GMO was bad cause it was, created in the lab and it was altered and it wasn’t natural. And I didn’t quite understand until a few years ago that it really meant that it was because there’s a lot of chemicals being poured on the crops to
[00:19:56] Mason: right.
Like he said, early on, it was bad. They were taking fish genes and genes from different organisms and putting them into the plants. And so that is cause for a lot of concern, but more recently they’ve gotten better at it, but you’re still, it’s still supporting chemical agriculture.
That’s creating health issues all over the country and all over the world. And so you talked about being in the food scene. You were with a baby food company for awhile, and then you joined CCS vet Chico, where we spent a lot of time together trying to get people to eat healthier and making it easy and convenient for them to eat healthier.
What kind of lessons did you learn from
[00:20:35] Jess: CCS? I think the transition from the baby food company, the baby food company opened me up to the world of better for you products and organics, but I didn’t really. It was baby food. So it wasn’t like I was eating it all the time. It wasn’t like shouting this better for you diet for the general population.
So I think it was because of that leap to CCS, veggie co, where the marketing and the messaging was all around, eating more vegetables and how it’s better for you and making sure it’s organic and introducing more veggies into your diet and making it the center of the plate.
That’s what it was speaking to me more because at the baby food company, we were speaking to babies or when we were speaking to parents, but feeding babies, parents feeding babies. Yeah. So I think CCS, veggie, co that, that just pushed my food journey even further to dig into, especially going into.
Farm tourist. I got to go to during different trade shows and things that was super cool to be able to see it firsthand as well. So I think there’s just so many cool, aspects and moments and memories from,
[00:21:35] Mason: yeah, it was a lot of fun and I struggled sometimes because we were using single use plastic and there was a film on top that was non-recyclable.
And so there were challenges from a sustainability standpoint. I was always trying to solve, but still kind of weighed heavy on me and the transportation of making it in one place and sending it all over the country. And, but every now and then people would remind me, like you are helping people eat more vegetables and pasta is such a huge category.
And to help people replace wheat pasta, and grain-based pasta with vegetables, w you know, it was a noble effort that we were doing. And so for everyone out there, cc’s veggie co is still on the shelf out there. Jess and I are no longer involved in the company, but we’re still, you know, the company’s biggest fans and, and we think vegetable and we still buy them on a regular basis.
Cause vegetable noodles are a great alternative to. The grain-based noodles. Yeah.
[00:22:31] Jess: Early on when I was checking the info at emails and doing all of that customer service level stuff, it was really cool to see the feedback that we’d get from customers and how, they were going through this.
health concern or health issue, and they didn’t know how to eat. And CCS was helping them eat better, eat healthier, and they were feeling better. And so I think hearing and reading different people’s journeys and the role that CCS had, or that the noodles had, um, on it was really exciting to
[00:22:56] Mason: see.
Very cool. So that’s been our. Journey. And now with, you know, mostly grain we’ve continued to learn and it’s great to have all these guests on and really deepen our knowledge about food and our relationship with food. So let’s talk about what are good and bad clean eating habits are
[00:23:18] Jess: what ours are.
Yes.
[00:23:19] Mason: Okay. So people know whether we’re practicing what we preach. We are mostly green. We’re not all green, but we’re also not kind of. Right.
[00:23:31] Jess: All right. So where we shop, you want to start there? Yeah, I mean, I guess we shop mostly at whole foods. But also it should be because it’s very convenient
[00:23:39] Mason: to us. Yeah.
AGB is right next to where the kids go to school. And so we sometimes stop there. Although I generally get frustrated every time I go into HEB, because I can’t find the things that I want.
[00:23:53] Jess: I mean, I get frustrated too, but you get frustrated
[00:23:55] Mason: for sure. And I think the worst part about the HEB that’s bias. I mean, AGB is a wonderful grocer and they sell a ton of organics and they were great partners for CCS.
And so love HEB in general, but I think everyone gets used to their own grocery store. But the way AGB I struggle with is that as I am exiting, the organic section of produce is the gluten-free dessert section. And so every time I go to AGB, I end up with some gluten-free Oreos or cookies or something. Cause it’s just right there,
[00:24:29] Jess: right there. Yeah. It’s pretty easy. Every time you come home from HEB, when you go by yourself.
Uh, do a little game. I’m like, is he going to come home with 1, 2, 3, or four things that are totally random and not on the list? And sometimes you come home with 10 things and like, not the things on the list, but you come home so excited.
[00:24:49] Mason: That’s what I shop hungry. I’m too hungry to remember what I needed to buy, but then I buy all the things I want to eat right then.
And usually. Oh, something just on the way home,
[00:25:01] Jess: like open packages.
[00:25:04] Mason: And then what about when we eat out? Unfortunately, I think we are not so green eating out.
[00:25:11] Jess: This is the question, like where do we
[00:25:13] Mason: eat out? Do we eat healthy meals down?
[00:25:17] Jess: I mean, we go to Marty’s 50% of the time when we eat out. So I would say, no, it’s so
[00:25:21] Mason: close. It’s three minutes away. We love to sit at their bar.
The staff there is amazing. Salsa
[00:25:27] Jess: is phenomenal. Chips and salsa is delicious. Um, baskets. Baskets. Yeah.
[00:25:34] Mason: Horrible wine. Huge.
[00:25:36] Jess: Horrible. Yeah.
[00:25:37] Mason: Well, it’s not natural wine, natural wine. So I get a hang over from the wine. You had to stop drinking. The margarita margarita is, were making me fat and full of
[00:25:46] Jess: sugar. I was talking about cause they were full of
[00:25:48] Mason: sugar.
That also though there was, we started going to Marty’s a lot. Remember. And after a couple of months, I’m like, man, why I’m getting a fat tire here? Why am I getting fat? I couldn’t
[00:26:00] Jess: do. Yeah, you couldn’t figure it out. Then we sat down next to this lady and the lady told us, she was like, man, I come here all the time and I had to stop having the margaritas.
Cause I started getting fat and Mason like lit up like a light bulb. He was like, that’s the only difference in my diet recently. It’s margarita. I never drank those Margarita’s yeah. You were never into the Fresno. Yeah. I don’t like the frozen. They give me a brain freeze way too quickly. It’s just not
[00:26:24] Mason: enjoyable.
You don’t like being cold right aspect. And so there just aren’t any high quality restaurants. Yeah, no, to go to like a, a picnic, which has some really high quality stuff. Um, every like everything’s 20 to 30 minutes away. So we just, we don’t do as well. So our grade for eating out is probably B minus.
[00:26:46] Jess: Yeah, probably C plus
[00:26:48] Mason: C plus.
All right. So shopping a plus, right. Or a mostly whole foods shopping,
[00:26:54] Jess: eating out C plus C
[00:26:56] Mason: plus. And then how about our vices? What are the things. That we’re doing that are unhealthy voice drugs is one.
[00:27:09] Jess: That’s probably one. Yes. I, I would have to go back to eating out. Like anytime we eat here, I don’t feel unhealthy.
And like almost any of the decisions I make. We have healthy food here. Yeah, it’s really eating out. I feel.
[00:27:23] Mason: Yeah. And it creates a spiral. Cause then we ended up drinking tequila or cocktails when we eat out. Then we come back and drink more tequila. And so we’d foods with sugar, weed, bad foods, processed foods.
And then we drank a lot when I go out. So what would you say? Yeah, that’s I, I think eating out, I mean, for me, I’ve got a sugar tooth, you know, I tried the Atkins diet one time, which is Quito, but really high protein. Keto is mostly high fat Atkins is high protein, and it really messed me up. I lasted about two weeks on it.
And then I was just like, I wasn’t feeling good. I, my body did not handle the high protein. And when I stopped it, I had a sugar teeth and ever since then I’ve craved sugar just on a fairly regular basis. And I feel the best when I go completely sugar-free and I think I did it.
[00:28:20] Jess: January of last year, we all did it.
Yeah.
[00:28:23] Mason: Even just recently I think it was the entire month of November. I went no sugar and then holidays fell off that wagon, but yeah, it was November. Yeah. It really felt great.
[00:28:33] Jess: Yeah. So your advice is sugar mind’s tequila. And then we influenced. Like when you’re making cookies, I’m going to eat the cookies and I’m taking the tequila shots. You’re going to take the tequila shot.
[00:28:46] Mason: What is your daily routine for food and drink
[00:28:50] Jess: for food and drink? Um, for, for food, it used to be eggs all the time, but then I took that food sensitivity test and it said that I was sensitive to egg whites and egg yolks, or I stopped doing that.
Um, and just retook the test. So we’ll see if it comes. Or what it comes back at. But otherwise it’s just been oatmeal and bananas probably for the most part for food and then for drink. I don’t have caffeine in the morning. I feel like I get way too jittery too quickly. Um, and so I don’t have my caffeine till later in the day, like around noon or so.
And that’s like, if I, if I need caffeine for whatever reason, but morning beverage would be violet fog, they have a mushroom powder blend. Um, Tell you all of the ingredients in it right now, off the top of my head, but a really amazing company here in Austin. And the co-founders are a couple they’re married and we’ve had happy hours with them and they’re super great do out.
So yeah, I love supporting local and I liked the product, of course. So it’s that mixed with the plant-based college in which I’m doing aura right now. Um, and then mixed with some MCT. And then in addition to that, I’ve been doing mantra SuperGreens as well in the morning. Not at the same time. I’m not double fisting.
[00:30:04] Mason: Yeah. I found a really good. Routine. I’ve always struggled with what to do in the morning. I felt like I’ve never found anything where I don’t either have a crash in the morning or am just emaciated by lunchtime and then overeat at lunch. But what I do a French press. Coffee with the filter in it.
Apparently filtered coffee is good for your heart. Unfiltered coffee is bad for your heart. And so in my coffee, I do MCT oil and I also do this. It’s a thing it’s Quito, nootropic blend. Like I’m not keto. I had plenty of carbs, but. Eating actual having ketones in the morning with my MCT oil seems to just really fuel my brain and my body.
And I’m able to get to usually 1:00 PM before I get hungry. And so I attempt intermittent fasting. Uh, during the week and then I usually drop it on the weekend and go ahead and have breakfast and such, and just try to eat a little bit less, but I love the coffee with MCT oil and some ketones and nootropics in it as really as my breakfast.
And that’s all I do.
[00:31:11] Jess: You’ve been doing that for
[00:31:12] Mason: awhile and it works well.
And then the only other, I think, you know, we have our vitamins, which we’ll cover. I think we’ll do a supplement track at some point, because there’s so much to kind of go into when it comes to supplementation and what we take
[00:31:25] Jess: and why.
Yeah. And I think the majority of our supplementation is like longevity reasons and things that can be its own separate.
[00:31:34] Mason: And so the only other I’d say daily thing we’ve gotten into is a mantra around.
And that since I’ve been taking that my, or a ring, which tracks my sleep, I get crowns almost every single, you know, gray day sleep almost every
[00:31:47] Jess: night. Right. I didn’t think about that. Cause when I think about daily ritual, I think about morning time, but I mean, that’s truly something that we have every single night in the
[00:31:56] Mason: yeah.
Cause if we don’t, we don’t sleep as well and we immediately regret it. Yeah. And then, you know, of course alcohol, I think hard liquor disrupts my sleep. And so I think that’s one of the biggest drawbacks to that. Whereas wine doesn’t seem to disrupt my sleep and it’s one of the reasons why I like
wine
[00:32:16] Jess: so much more and it’s different for everybody.
If I don’t stop drinking like two hours before bed, at least adult a hundred percent disrupt. And I sleep, no matter if I’m drinking natural wine, I feel makes sense.
[00:32:28] Mason: I used to not drink closer to bedtime either. And I had this one ex-girlfriend who always wanted, would bring a drink to bed and then she wouldn’t even drink it, but then got me in the habit of it too, except she would fall asleep before me.
So then I would drink, I ended up drinking right before bed and, uh, not a, not a great habit. I don’t like it. And I’ve been trying to kick it some. But maybe you can help me out. Yeah. So you,
[00:32:56] Jess: I just have to do it like in a nice way. I’m bad at trying to help you out with things. I’m like, Hey, are you sure you want to be doing that right now?
You’re like, you don’t have to be rude.
[00:33:04] Mason: I’m like, yeah. Sometimes you can sound a little naggy,
but I’m also not the most receptive to constructive criticism when I’m drunk either.
[00:33:18] Jess: I’m glad you
[00:33:18] Mason: acknowledged that thing. So generally I think for us, we have found alcohol that works for us and the pros outweigh the cons. And, you know, I, I think we’re just, yeah, at times, and we’re generally lucky, you know, a lot of people do struggle with alcohol and weed, you know, always want to be sensitive to that.
If people are struggling with alcohol, then they shouldn’t drink. And Todd white said that too, that there’s millions of people that should not be drinking at all. And you know, some of us are able to handle it. All right. So closing thoughts, what did you think of the clean eating track and what should we take away from
[00:33:59] Jess: it?
I enjoyed it a lot. I do like that. We covered a variety of topics and they were all so different from one another. I guess I really enjoy learning about wine. I feel like we’ve been talking about alcohol a lot, but it’s nice to know that there’s something
[00:34:13] Mason: it’s just, it’s such a, it’s a big part of our lives and there’s so little information available, right? Like you can’t go read
[00:34:20] Jess: labels. Have such an emphasis and focus so much on what we put in our body with, through what we eat. And so, you know, you should pay that much attention to what you drink too.
And it’s hard because it’s like you were mentioning, there’s no labels, they don’t have to put the ingredient list. They don’t have to do any of that. So it’s, so it’s great to be able to have alternatives or have companies like dry farm wines or like our friends at red thumb wine where we know what’s in it so that we can, you know, feel better.
Mentally for choosing it, but like really feel better physically.
[00:34:51] Mason: Yeah. And you know, I honestly feel like before this track and learning about alcohol, I probably knew more about the powders I was snorting than the wine I was drinking and
[00:35:03] Jess: shifted a
[00:35:03] Mason: bit. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. So I think next clean eating is a big part.
Health and wellness, but there’s a lot of other stuff that goes into health and wellness and longevity. And so I think I want to dig into that next and kind of, you know, bring it up a little bit. It’s like, all right, the food and the beverages we put in our body, but then what are the practices we can do?
And what are the things that we are doing already? And what are some other things that we can do to improve our health and improve our longevity? We think that. I
[00:35:37] Jess: like it. I mean, I definitely would love to dig into all of those topics even more so, but I think also what’s important is our listeners. And we want to know what you guys want to hear because we did at the beginning was all about sustainability and that’s, you know, that’s like the core and we moved into health and wellness because it is our background and we’re so interested in it.
[00:35:58] Mason: Yeah. You know, I had this idea actually to get a little bit more feedback from our listeners. I should have mentioned this at the beginning.
Well, I’ll mention that at the beginning of the next one as well, but let’s put up a survey on our site and it’ll just be mostly green.life/podcasts survey. And at that page, we’ll ask you to go and give us a little information about what you think of the podcast and what you want to hear and in return, which I haven’t discussed with you yet.
So we’re kind of discussing live, uh, on the air. But we’ll send them some swag, maybe a t-shirt and coupon to some of the things we love. Yeah. And so you could earn some really cool stuff by, uh, taking a survey and telling us what you think.
And, you know, while we will be doing a health and wellness track, one of the things we’ve wanted to do with most of the green life is use it as a platform to launch better for you companies and sustainability oriented companies. We’re already working on one. And so in the coming weeks, you’re going to hear some podcasts directly related to this stealth project we’ve been working on.
So we’re really excited to share. Thanks for listening!
Check out our other clean eating podcasts – https://mostlygreenlif.wpengine.com/podcasts
