― Lord Byron
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
I started my food and recipe blog, Paleo Scaleo, in 2015. Our lives were in a full mixture of startings and endings - I had just left what I thought was my lifetime career and started a new job in a totally different field, my husband had just spent four months living 11 hours away for work, and then we suffered a pretty terrible house fire and had to move out of our home for a year while it was rebuilt.
Shortly before the fire, we had also started CrossFit. With CrossFit came changing the way we ate. We had seen pretty dramatic changes from working out this way, and we wanted to do everything we could to keep that momentum going. Enter paleo eating.
At the time, paleo was, dare I say…popular? Ok, maybe not popular. But it certainly was more popular than it is now. As CrossFit grew in popularity, so did paleo. Why? Because they’re a power couple. Because they are effective, and they’re more effective together. I saw it first hand, and so did many other people. So I stuck with it, and I shared everything I had done and was doing. The blog grew quickly. And then…it stopped.
It’s rare that people stick with a restrictive way of eating for the long term, unless it’s tied to their belief system or an allergy of some kind that prohibits them from it. Paleo had it’s day in the spotlight, and I feel that time to shine has kind of passed.
People see the next new shiny thing, the next new weight loss gimmick (I’m looking at you, Ozempic) and think they should ditch the current thing they’re trying and try the new one for faster results. (Spoiler alert - the only thing that works long term is eating the right things in the right amount and exercising. Natural food. Natural movement. Natural life.)
For me, and for small sample of the population that has adopted this way of eating for the long term, paleo isn’t restrictive. It’s just…the way I eat. I buy almond flour and coconut flour and tapioca flour and coconut milk and almond milk and I make or find recipes that work for my ingredients that I keep on hand. I don’t make Standard American Diet foods because I don’t have those ingredients in my house, so I can’t.
Trust me, when there’s a bag of pretzels that finds its way in the front door, its days are numbered. Bag of bagels shows up with the in-laws when they visit? Goners. But it’s not on a regular basis, and I don’t ever buy it myself. A lot of self-control just comes from what you have access to.
For years, we’ve been trying to be homesteady, while living on a postage stamp piece of land. When we lived in downtown Charleston,SC we had a vegetable garden and kept bees, and I wrote about both. When we moved to Summerville, SC we worked hard to plant fruit trees, only to be met with a ton of resistance from the neighborhood HOA.
Fast forward almost 9 (!) years. We’ve moved just outside of Beaufort, SC. We’re on the marsh. We have a dock, where we get crabs, and oysters, and hopefully this summer some really great shrimp. We’re getting a boat. We have three acres - not a huge piece of land, but enough. It came with four huge pecan trees, six mature blueberry bushes, a giant fig tree, a peach tree, an apple tree, 13 (!) newly planted but producing citrus trees to include lemon, lime, grapefruit, and orange.
We have nine chickens that are more fun than I ever thought imaginable. We homeschool our kid. He goes to an outdoor nature school twice a week. We have another four acre property in the mountains, which we rent out as a short term rental. (Find it on VRBO and Airbnb here!) We spend our time there hiking and being outdoors, and hope to plant a small orchard of apple trees in the future.
We still eat paleo, mostly. We do integrate some “off-list” things here and there - jasmine rice instead of cauliflower, or the sprinkle of parmesan cheese that topped the yellow squash from our neighbor’s garden at dinner last month. This is what the Scaleo part of the name meant in the first place - modifying it in a way that fits your lifestyle and allows you to maintain this way of eating for the most part, while not denying yourself everything you want all of the time.
Paleo is a very natural way of eating, if you do it the way we do - eating mostly plants and animals, as they existed in nature. But we’ve expanded into so much more than just a way of eating. We are, quite literally, Rooted in Nature. And while I still want to share healthy, clean eating, and mostly paleo recipes with you, there’s so much more I want to share.
I've spent years as a gym owner and personal trainer, coaching others on how to move more naturally. I want to share my experiences and advice on how natural movement in the gym can make your everyday life so much easier.
I want to share about the pollinator garden I’m building, to draw in bees and butterflies so they can pollinate our veggies and fruit trees. I want to share about the things we catch off our dock, and how we do it. I want to share tips and tricks on growing natural food, and what not to do.
I want to not only write about how to store blueberries, but also how to grow an abundance of them. I want to write about our chickens. I want to share how we’re involving our kid in all of this, so he grows up with an understanding of where his food comes from and how, in a world where we control so little, he can control what he puts into his body and why he should.
I want to share about our adventures in nature - like our recent hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up in a day for our anniversary celebration! And when I sat back and looked at all of this, I just didn't feel that Paleo Scaleo was the right name for it anymore. It's so much more than that. If Paleo Scaleo is the child, Rooted in Nature is the parent. The paleo recipes, the clean eating, the gluten free and dairy free will all still exist, just inside a bigger space. Our lives and experiences have expanded, and the blog needs to as well in order to make space for them.
I truly hope you’ll join me on this new chapter - where I include not just how to cook what you eat, but also how to take charge of where some of your food comes from, and why it matters. How nature can act as therapy for so many things, and how, no matter where you live, you can find small doses of it anywhere.
For me, it’s the simplicity. Bare feet on soft grass. A picnic blanket to lay on and watch the clouds roll by. Digging in the dirt with your bare hands. Walking outside to clip off some herbs that you grew to put on top of your dinner. A hike in the woods with just you and your thoughts. A deep breath of fresh air when it all seems too much. There are these tiny little pleasures that can be captured in the day to day that I think some of us completely miss. We’re too busy running from thing to thing and task to task that we don’t take the time to just be.
Come be with me, Rooted in Nature. I can’t wait for our journey together.
Leave a Reply