Well by larissa

Just putting that out there

Shop local yall!

Traditional food was never dry. Not across any culture, not in any season, not at any meal. Every traditional food culture built moisture into the food itself and the body thrived because of it.

Here is what they did instead:
- Soup or broth before every meal to warm and prepare the stomach
- Stews and braises cooked in their own liquid until the sauce was as nourishing as the meat
- Grains cooked in broth not water
- Fermented foods at every meal adding moisture and digestive enzymes
- Sauces and pan drippings poured over everything, the cooking liquid was never thrown away
- Warm soft porridge in the morning not dry cereal
- Vegetables braised and simmered not raw and crunchy

Dry food makes your digestive system work twice as hard just to get started. Traditional food arrived already partially broken down and the gut barely had to work at all. And we wonder why bloating is so normal now!

Your great grandmother never ate a dry meal and never needed a digestive enzyme supplement. That is not a coincidence!

Add broth to your grains. Sauce your meat. Start every meal with something warm and liquid. It really is that simple.

Comment BROTH below and I’ll send you my warm recipes cookbook ❤️❤️

Some girls spend all their money at the mall. I spend mine at outdoor markets and farmers markets and I have zero regrets.

This is my version of retail therapy and honestly it hits different when you leave with something that is actually going to nourish you rather than just fill a bag.

Here is what I look for when I am at a market like this:
- Seasonal fruit and vegetables from farmers who actually know what they grew and how they grew it
- Eggs from hens that lived outside and ate real food, the yolk color tells you everything
- Raw honey from local beekeepers, the kind that still has enzyme activity and trace minerals rather than the bear shaped bottle that has been heated and filtered into syrup
- Fresh herbs that smell like something because they were cut this morning not shipped across the country a week ago
- Anything fermented, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, that came from someone’s actual kitchen rather than a commercial facility
- Bread made from real flour by real hands with ingredients you can count on one hand

The difference between food from a place like this and food from a conventional grocery store is not subtle. You can taste it, your digestion feels it, and your body knows the difference before your brain does.

This is not a health food store. This is just food the way food has always been sold, directly from the people who grew it to the people who eat it, without a supply chain, without a shelf life calculation, without a ingredient list that requires a chemistry degree to understand.

Some girls go to the mall. I go here. And my pantry has never looked better.

If that’s you, your body might be telling you something about your dosha, not just your personality.

In Ayurveda, Vata types tend to run cold. Light frame, quick moving energy, and a nervous system that reacts fast to a chilly room or a cold breeze. If you’re the one reaching for socks and a blanket the second it dips below 70, while everyone else is comfortable in a t-shirt, that’s not you being dramatic. That’s Vata asking to be warmed and grounded.

Pitta types run warm, sometimes hot, and actually crave the cold. If seventy degrees still has you fanning yourself, that’s Pitta doing what Pitta does.

Kapha types are steady and grounded, and cold doesn’t rattle them the way it does Vata. But dampness is Kapha’s real trigger. A cold, wet, gray day will slow a Kapha down more than a dry cold ever could. If you feel sluggish and heavy on rainy cold days specifically, that’s worth paying attention to.

Knowing your dosha changes how you think about temperature, food, and even your daily rhythm. It’s not about forcing yourself into what works for someone else’s body. It’s about understanding what yours is actually asking for.

Every ancestral kitchen understood this long before anyone called it Ayurveda. Warming broths for the ones who ran cold, cooling foods for the ones who ran hot. Food as medicine, made specific to the body eating it.
If you want my Ancestral Kitchen guide, comment KITCHEN and I’ll send it straight to your DMs.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​!

An egg yolk contains more choline than almost any other food on earth and this is why women need it.

Most women have never heard of choline and that is exactly the problem because what it does inside your body is quietly foundational to almost everything that matters for your hormones, your brain, your liver, and your cycle.

Here is what choline is actually doing:
- Your liver needs it to process and export fat properly, without adequate choline fat accumulates in the liver and liver function declines, which is one of the most common and most overlooked drivers of estrogen dominance and hormonal imbalance
- Your brain is approximately 30 percent choline by dry weight and it is the raw material for acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter responsible for memory, focus, mood, and cognitive clarity
- Every single cell membrane in your body is built from phosphatidylcholine which means choline is literally structural to the integrity of every cell you have
- It supports the methylation cycle which is how your body detoxifies, regulates gene expression, clears excess hormones, and recycles the nutrients your whole system depends on
- During pregnancy the demand for choline increases dramatically because it is essential for fetal brain development and most prenatal vitamins contain far less than the amount actually needed

The richest food sources are egg yolks, liver, and fish roe. Everything your great grandmother ate without thinking twice and everything the modern diet quietly removed from the daily plate.

Most women are cracking eggs, throwing away the yolk, and wondering why their hormones, their memory, and their liver are struggling. The answer has been sitting in the part of the egg they were told to avoid.

Eat the whole egg. The yolk is not the enemy. It never was.
Comment HORMONES below and I’ll send you my guide on ancestral nutrition straight to your DMs!

Your great grandmother’s multivitamin. The most nutrient dense food we stopped eating.

It was the whole animal, nose to tail, the feet, the bones, the liver, the giblets, the organs. Nothing wasted and nothing overlooked. Every part valued for exactly what it gave the body!

Here is what is on this plate:
Chicken feet → pure collagen and gelatin for your gut lining, skin, and joints
Bones → calcium, magnesium, and trace minerals that only release with long slow heat
Liver → vitamin A, B12, folate, heme iron, copper, CoQ10, zinc, and choline in concentrations no supplement can replicate
Organs → the heart for CoQ10, the spleen for heme iron, the kidney for B12 and selenium, every one doing something specific that muscle meat simply cannot
Steak tartare → raw grass fed beef with enzymes intact and iron in its most bioavailable form
Gravy with giblets → the heart, gizzard, and neck disappearing into the sauce the way they always did in a traditional kitchen

Nose to tail is not a trend. It is just what eating looked like before the food industry decided which parts were worth selling and which parts were waste!

Every deficiency sending modern women to the supplement aisle has a food answer your great grandmother already knew.

Comment KITCHEN below and I’ll send you my Ancestral Kitchen guide straight to your DMs.

Story time! My great great grandmother’s kitchen is still standing and honestly it might be the most grounding place on earth.

My family has been on this land for five generations. My grandmother’s great grandparents built everything here from the ground up, farmers with animals, a garden, and land that fed the whole family through every season without needing anything from the outside world. Every single one of the original homes is still standing and every time I walk through that gate I think about how genuinely amazing that is.

Coming back here does something to me every single time. This is where my love for the land, for farming, for real food and where it comes from, actually started. I just did not know it when I was seven years old running around with my sister and cousins playing badminton and chasing animals and helping with farm chores like it was the best day of my life because honestly it was.

Childhood me had no idea she was growing up inside something most people spend their whole adult lives trying to get back to. She was just having the time of her life and getting muddy and probably stealing fruit from the garden when nobody was looking.

Five generations. One piece of land. Still feeding us. Still the best place I know.❤️❤️

The only steak sauce you need is honey and I will not be taking questions.
Not A1. Not a marinade with seventeen ingredients. Not a reduction that takes forty five minutes. Just a thin drizzle of raw honey over a properly seared grass fed steak right when it comes off the heat and nothing has ever made more sense.

Here is why it works:
- The residual heat from the steak gently warms the honey which releases its floral compounds and thins it just enough to coat every cut without becoming sweet or overpowering
- Raw honey brings trace minerals, natural glucose, and enzyme activity that processed condiments simply do not have
- The contrast between the crust of the steak and the honey is the same principle behind every great sweet and savory pairing in culinary history, caramelized onions, honey glazed lamb, fig with prosciutto, your brain is wired to love this combination
- Honey has been used as a finishing ingredient on meat across Middle Eastern, North African, and European cooking traditions for centuries, this is not a food trend, it is just something that got lost somewhere between the invention of bottled sauce and now.

The only rules:
- Use raw honey, not the bear shaped bottle
- Add it after the steak comes off the heat, not during cooking
- Add flaky sea salt immediately after the honey, the salt and honey together over a rested steak is the whole thing
- Fresh thyme or rosemary pressed into the honey while it is still warm takes it somewhere extraordinary

That is it. That is the whole recipe!

Comment KITCHEN below and I’ll send you my Ancestral Kitchen guide straight to your DMs, it is full of exactly this kind of cooking, simple, intentional, and built around real ingredients that have always worked.

No, I don’t want a salad. And before you come for me let me explain because this is not about avoiding vegetables and it is not about not caring what I eat. It is actually the opposite.

Raw cold salads as a daily lunch staple is one of the most modern and least ancestral eating habits we have normalized and the bloating, heaviness, and afternoon energy crash that follows is not a coincidence.

Here is what is actually happening when you eat a cold raw salad for lunch:
- Raw vegetables require significantly more digestive effort than cooked ones because your body has to break down tough cellulose cell walls before it can extract any nutrition
- Cold food suppresses digestive fire at the exact moment it should be at its peak, midday is when your digestive capacity is strongest and cold food works directly against that
- Most of the nutrients in raw vegetables are locked inside the cell walls and cooking breaks those walls down and makes the nutrition significantly more bioavailable
- A cold raw lunch with no fat and no protein spikes and crashes blood sugar faster than almost anything else you can eat at midday

Every traditional food culture ate cooked warm food as the foundation of their diet. Raw food was seasonal, occasional, and eaten when the body could handle it, in summer, in small amounts, as an addition to a meal rather than the meal itself.

Ayurveda calls raw cold food tamasic, heavy and hard to transform. TCM warns that raw food extinguishes the digestive fire that the whole system depends on. European folk medicine never built a meal around a cold bowl of leaves.

So no, I do not want a salad. I want something warm, something cooked, something my digestion can actually work with.

Comment DIGESTION below and I’ll send you my Ancestral Apothecary guide straight to your DMs, it covers everything your gut needs to function the way it was always designed to.