Why Project Vibrancy Meals?

It happens to ALL of us.

Stymied by AIP/Whole30/Paleo Meal Planning? Not sure how to amp up the yum and tone down the dinner-time stress?

Listen, I feel your frustration. I started out overwhelmed and confused myself...Whether you are diagnosed with autoimmune disease (like I am) or you’re just trying to eat healthier, whole, real foods, figuring out what’s for dinner can feel like quantum physics.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. You can have fast, healthy dinners. You can work ahead and eliminate “what’s for dinner” pondering.

It IS possible! You just need a plan!

Perhaps you’re like me and you have no choice but to change the way you eat. When I was diagnosed in 2010, I stopped eating gluten and grains. It made a HUGE difference in my life, health, energy, appearance...basically in all of the ways.

But due to an intensely stressful series of events in 2013 (divorce while writing a cookbook, good times), I turned to the autoimmune protocol (AIP) to help me overcome a relapse and get my health back on track. I followed AIP strictly for a year, then slowly reintroduced many foods.

Thanks in large part to deeply nutritious, anti-inflammatory food, I’m currently in remission and enjoying a bountiful diet (minus chiles, coconut, and gluten). But the unexpected gift of my (otherwise stingy) autoimmune disease is that food has LITERALLY become my medicine, and that’s the most powerful, life-changing thing imaginable.

I’ll be honest and tell you, when I first gave up some of my favorite foods, I grieved. Real, ugly, crying grief. It felt unfair and like too much extra work.

And then I did what we all do when life gets real: I figured it out.

I’d been developing and writing recipes professionally for four years before I gave up gluten and grains and seven years before I embarked on AIP.

In other words, I knew my way around a kitchen.

I decided to make a healing diet fun and delicious for myself and that’s exactly what happened. You know what else happened? I got better and faster at meal prep, I met a million new friends, and in the end, it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. In fact, it led to creating Project Vibrancy Meals.

I’m not saying that changing the way you eat is going to remake your life the way it did for me. My health demanded that I changed the way I ate, and you might “just” be wanting to eat more real food, or deeply nourish your children, or decrease your stress at meal times, or eat really delicious food on your own and/or with your loved ones.

But I can say this: like all important things – and I’m pretty sure that providing ourselves with delicious nutrients is one of the very most important things we do for our families or ourselves – it takes a PLAN to get where we want to go, especially when time is limited.

Look, we have ALL made a box dinner or picked up the phone and ordered takeout, even with good intentions and a fridge full of healthy ingredients. Regularly. Don’t beat yourself up for that: it takes brain power at the end of a day to plan a meal on the fly and who has brainpower at 5:30 pm? No one!

But with a plan, you already know what you’re going to have for dinner before you even get there. In fact, while sitting in traffic, you look forward to it! (Plantain tortillas tacos with braised beef, avocado, and salsa verde....yay!)

The truth is that it’s OK to ask for help. Why do we not ask for help? I resist asking too and then when I finally do, I wonder what took me so long. Project Vibrancy Meals meal plans are the help you’ve hesitated to ask for.