061. How to Eat Well Even When You're Busy and Overwhelmed With Heather Carey

In this episode of Organizing for Beautiful Living, I’m joined by culinary nutritionist and founder of the Green Palette Kitchen, Heather Carey. Heather shares practical, science-backed advice on how to make healthy eating easier, especially during life transitions like perimenopause and raising a family.

We talk about how to:

• Approach meal planning realistically (even with a full schedule)
• Make peace with food and ditch the diet cycle
• Eat well without making separate meals for your kids
• Stock your pantry with healthy staples
• Create a kitchen setup that supports healthy choices

Heather’s mindset around food is compassionate, practical, and sustainable—something every busy mom needs to hear.

Download Heather’s Essential Healthy Kitchen Guide at https://greenpalettekitchen.com/ (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page)

Listen to the Real Food Stories podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/real-food-stories/id1621737718

Heather’s website: https://www.greenpalettekitchen.com
Her Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greenpalettekitchen/

Get on the wait list for my FREE class: 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter your Kitchen in just a Weekend! This is how you get no-cry mornings and calm evenings in your kitchen. And I'll show you how you can do it in just a weekend without overwhelm and without getting stuck. And, of course, you'll learn how to make sure the clutter doesn't come back with minimal effort. Go to https://fireflybridge.com/update and get on the wait list!

Connect with me:

You can find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
Here's my website: https://fireflybridge.com

Call or text me: 305-563-2292

Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Heather Carey is a culinary nutritionist, and she's the founder of green palette kitchen. And she also has a great podcast called Real Food stories, where she calls out our relationships with food so we, as she puts it, can make peace with what we eat and get on with the real food and lives we deserve. When I met Heather, I was drawn to her deep experience, and also the fact that she goes to science to back up how she works with clients. And as an engineer, I respect that a lot of my work revolves around my clients, life transitions, and the conversation that you'll hear today is partly related to that, and also partly related to how to ease our meal times, regardless of what phase of life that we're in, she gives me some tips about what to stock in our pantries, and also about how she approaches meal planning. I think you'll find her ideas to be unfussy and realistic, much like I like to be in my own home. Enjoy the episode.
Hey, welcome to organizing for beautiful living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life. I'm Zee Sim man, professional organizer and productivity consultant, and I'm here to share simple ideas that don't take a lot of time, so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. Ready to get beautifully organized. Let's make it happen. 
So Heather, the source of our food, has become a topic that incites, at the best, confusion and at worst, fear and anger in people. Are you worried about things like pesticides, GMOs, microplastics, nutrient declines in our produce and things like that? And should we be looking at the source of our food at the grocery store before we buy it?
Yeah, that's a great question, because it, when you put it that way, it seems like there's so much to worry about. And where are we getting real good food? And like, what's safe to eat anymore and what's not what should we stay away from? You know, you I think the first thing you want to try to just stay off of the internet and, like, look at those wellness influencers who are just saying that, you know, seed oils are bad, or microplastics in our food, and because there is a lot of alarmism in Our food culture, and you really want to stick with well studied, scientific information. So seed oils, like I just said, are a great example. I mean that seed oils right now, everyone is in fear of anything with a seed. And the reality, and from how they have been well studied, is that seed oils are perfectly safe and actually really beneficial for heart health, so we don't have to fear seed oils. I mean things like, then, you know, things like microplastics. How I see it is that there's not a ton you can do. I mean, let's maybe go back to basics. And if we could all grow our own food a little bit, even if it's a little garden in our backyard, even some herbs, and that would be the ideal, right? Then you're not using pesticides. Nothing's wrapped up in a package and plastic, and you're picking it right out of your garden. I mean, I love that. I love I have a big garden myself. I'm in Connecticut, so I don't have the opportunity to garden all year round, but that would be the ideal. But there's just a lot that we can't I mean, microplastics are in everything, everything there's, it's only it's impossible to avoid them. So I think we just have to do our best, really, but stick with science. I mean, stick with trusted websites and and trusted people who have really good, credible information, I think is your best first step.
Well, the other thing that is in the news a lot right now is perimenopause and menopause and getting a lot of attention, especially because there is it feels like shamefully little research that's been done on essentially a natural life transition for every woman on the planet. But as women become more aware, they may want to adjust how they eat, and at the same time, when they also have kids to feed. A family to feed meals can become a little difficult. Do we now have to plan different meals for ourselves versus our children? How do we make this shift in how we eat in our households and not make it complicated and super time consuming? So,
yeah, so great. Questions. I mean, let's start with perimenopause and menopause. Because if there's any subject that I see as so incredibly confusing right now, it is the menopause space. There really is no specific menopause diet, you know, because, you know, for I think, a lot of women the fear of gaining weight, because we all think like we're going into menopause, and so that means an automatic 10 pounds that we're going to gain around our belly and and how are we going to, you know, deal with that. And I just, I mean, I hear so much from women, you know, I just look at food and I gain weight. I get it. I mean, I am in menopause right now, and I can feel my my body shifting, and I know a lot about food, so it gets really confusing. But I think the bottom line is that, you know, we can't go into like desperation mode at this time. We still have to really focus on eating the very best that we can menopause itself brings up a lot of you know, like when you have a dip in estrogen like this, and you're not on hormone therapy, which is a personal choice, your bones get affected. So it's not just hot flashes and night sweats, it's your bones, your heart, your brain. I mean, you know that that dip in estrogen affects so much so we want to just really double down at this time of our lives and make sure that we're eating as well as possible. So, you know, you said, like, do I have to go on a special diet now? And, like, I have kids at home and and do they have to eat differently than me? I mean, not really. You know, should all be eating, you know, like a mostly plant based diet, full of whole grains and healthy proteins, plant based proteins, tons of fruits and vegetables, healthy fats. I mean, that's really what we need to be focusing on. Now, women, though, it's not so much the menopause that that contributes to this, like redistribution in your weight or worse and weight gain. It's really just the fact that we are getting older and when. So this applies to men too. So when, when we get older, we have a dip in our metabolism. We are starting to lose some muscle, you know, and so we want to focus, as women in midlife, like women in menopause and midlife, on really maintaining our muscle, and because muscle then raises your metabolism. So strength training is one of the number one best ways to help maintain your weight. So if you haven't been lifting weights yet, this is a great time to start, to start. So I mean, and you know, still, you know, be doing cardio and everything, but this is not the time that we can because we're getting older, we like exercise less. You
know, that's a great way of putting it. And again, you mentioned it when we're talking about food sources. It's not to be alarmist about these things. It's a natural aging. I like looking at it that way, that if we're eating well and we're continuing to eat well throughout our lives, diet and menopause or perimenopause doesn't have to change, but your habits probably have to change a little bit around movement, around exercise. If that's not a habitual thing that you're doing, is that what you're what you're saying in
essence, yes, I mean, we, we might right. I think the one thing you want to definitely concentrate on adding in is strength training. That's, that's number one. And then, if you have spent the last couple decades having happy hour every weekend, you know, like, your weekends are full, like, with alcohol and like and, you know, partying, these are habits we might want to start really taking a hard look at, because it's empty calories. It's the connection between health related issues and and lifestyle are are just big, and they just become more magnified when we are in, like, this perimenopause menopause stage. So your so your kids don't have to necessarily eat, you know, like, they get to eat, like, this kind of certain way, and you have to eat like, you know, diet food. It doesn't have to be that way, right? I mean, that you can all be eating the same thing, the same things. Yes, maybe they
have have a dessert that I don't necessarily have. That's okay too,
right? Yeah, yes,
you've had your own struggles with weight loss. Yeah, would you, would you share what you went through?
Yeah, I'm a clinical nutritionist and a health supportive, you know, food chef, and I definitely struggled with my weight, really, my whole life. I mean, in my, you know, my teens, and then, you know, two. 20s. I grew up in a household where going on a diet by the time you were about, like 1112, years old, was totally standard. And, you know, all the women were on diets then, and so that's how I you know, that's how I was just programmed, like you were on a diet, you were off the diet, you were losing weight, you were gaining weight, you are hating yourself, liking yourself. I mean, it was just so I went through just, you know, years and years of that. And I think by the time I had, I had my kids, I had twins. I gained a lot of weight with my twins, you know, I lost it. I had it. I had another one, like, pretty close behind. And then, you know, after after that, I couldn't really blame it on, like, the baby weight anymore and but I think you know what was going on. And what I think the difference is, is that I spent decades beating myself up for my body, you know, like, just right? Like hating my body, kind of, even though I knew I knew how to lose weight, I knew it because I have a master's degree in clinical nutrition. I know how to allow the fat grams and everything, like, you know, do all that. But I think I finally came around and realized that the key to losing weight is to not so much have that, like strict diet, where, like, you know, tracking food, counting calories, is all useful information, but the key to losing weight and keeping it off is to have a whole lot of kindness and self compassion for yourself. You have to be your biggest cheerleader when you are deciding to do something as difficult as losing weight, because it's not easy. It's not easy. It takes a lot of mindset, right? It takes like, a lot of like, you have to stay consistent with it, and you have to create a goal, and you have to figure out, why do you really want this? Because for me, at that point in, you know, like, my early 40s, getting into a bathing suit was, like a fun goal to have, but not like a long term reason for wanting to lose weight. Because once I did this, I wanted to do it, and I don't. I did not want to have to gain the weight back. You know, having a why behind your your reason for losing weight is is key to everything, and then having a lot of kindness, patience and compassion for yourself while you're doing it. So I mean, for example, my, why was, you know, my, my father died really young. He was in his 40s when he passed away. And here I was approaching that that age, and now that I had kids, I felt so strongly that I didn't want to be responsible for a health issue that I might cause myself, diabetes, heart disease, you know, all those lifestyle diseases that come from what you eat and your weight and and that was my why that kind of gave me like the the motivation, even when like things felt kind of harder. But then also, I think that that kindness and compassion and really just being your own cheerleader is is the key to everything. When you want to lose weight.
You've mentioned that you have some what's the word you use some odd or unexpected tools and habits for weight loss, and is that one of them having kindness for yourself?
Well, I don't think it's a it's a talked about tool for weight loss, right? When you when you, like, go on the internet, or like, go look up whatever latest diet is, or the keto diet, or the carnivore diet, or whatever diet is. Of the moment, I'm not. I am no fan of of diets because, because they don't have that. I mean, they tell you what to do, they tell you how to do it, and then they leave you on your own. I mean, anyone, you can go on any diet and lose weight. You're going to lose weight if you follow the diet. And then what I mean, are you going to stay on keto for the rest of your life? I mean, seriously, it's like such a difficult diet to try to maintain, and you've lost the weight, and then you can't maintain the diet, because it's impossible. And so then you start slowly gaining the weight back, and you can't figure out why, and then you are now beating yourself up again, and you're like, why I don't have the discipline, the motivation? And that's not it at all. It's hard to be in menopause. It's hard to be you know, especially, and if you've been dieting your whole life and maintaining a certain like weight and and then you start your body starts shifting. It can, it's, it's, it can be a difficult change, yeah, for a lot of women. So
what are some of the habits that you recommend to people who are trying to not only lose weight but then keep it off? What would you recommend?
I think probably the number one habit is to just be very mindful, mindfulness. We're mindless eaters. We're eating. We're sitting in one on Facebook and we're eating. We're watching TV with our computer open at the same time, and we're grabbing a snack, and we're not even aware that we've walked into the kitchen and we had, like, you know, come back and we're what, you know what I'm saying, right? Like, right? A lot of things happening in our and swirling around us at all the time. So mindfulness, staying mindful, staying very aware of what you're eating and paying attention to your food is, is definitely, you know, after kindness, compassion, mindfulness is right there is that you have to, you have to stay mindful. You have to, you have to realize when you are hungry, physically hungry, and realize when you are physically full enough. That's like the very short version, but that's how you do it. Without staying on a diet. You have to be really tuned in to your body, and a lot of us aren't tuned into our bodies. We're just eating on autopilot, or we're eating for a lot of emotional reasons, or we're bored, or we're having a bad day, or we if we're tired or right, those are not good reasons to open up a pint of ice cream or make a very mindful decision to do it. I'm gonna, I want the ice cream. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna have it. That's fine. There's no nothing wrong. And enjoy it. And enjoy it fully.
Writing ice cream, yeah, yeah.
Rather than I'm eating a pint of ice cream, I just ate a pint of ice cream. And what just happened? Some of that, I have to believe and tell me if you don't, if you don't feel that's the case, we've evolved into a society in the US, especially where we're doing a lot of our work, sitting stationary, and our neighborhoods aren't always set up for us. Needing to walk someplace to get our daily stuff done. Walking for exercise is something else, but having to walk to the store, to our jobs, to pick up our kids, we're not always living close enough to those places to be able to do that. Is that some of the reasons maybe that we were in this position now, and also, I have to believe, at least in my case, meals have become a lot more accessible in a more convenient way, so much so that cooking myself from scratch is less necessary because stuff is available. So I can literally assemble a meal without having to cook something from scratch and taking out that necessity of picking the vegetables, washing them, you know, filtering them for pieces. I need to throw away that kind of thing, those manual things that we have to do that make us more conscious about what we're cooking, what we're eating. We don't need to do that as much anymore. Do you think that's also contributed to the way that we eat? Without a doubt? I mean, that's all such good points. I mean we could, we don't need to be doing it for convenience, but we need to be doing it. I mean, we we do for our health. And you could call Uber Eats now. And I mean, I've always, I've always said to, like my clients, and like, if you want, if you want something sweet, like cookies, ice cream, get in your car and go make it like an outing, you know, go to the ice cream store, get your scoop of ice cream outing. Yeah, and make it and make it like a thing, you know, like, make it a little hard to get to it, right. And now you all you have to do is call Uber Eats. You can have a pint of ice cream sent to you. I mean, yeah, I mean, I mean anything could get delivered to your door in two seconds, and that, yeah, and so that makes it all very convenient and good, but that definitely takes out the mindful component of eating, cooking, getting in your kitchen, chopping the carrots. I mean, it all. It's all those sensory things that I think really count towards being a more mindful eater. And then that's connected to our weight and our you know, our bodies and our health for sure. 
Okay, so just so we're gonna talk a little bit about organizing our kitchens, being organized in our kitchens, then for eating better. So take us on a trip to the grocery store with you. We want to cook. We want to prepare meals ourselves, but we also are mindful of the time that we don't have because we have children and we have activities and things like that, so we need to be able to make some quick meals, but good meals that we feel good about. So we're going to the grocery store with you. Where do you start? Take us through that that store with you.
Well, before I even walk into the store, I want to step back like two steps. Because before you even walk into the store, never go into a grocery store without a list in your hand, a plan and a list. Okay, so meal planning is one of the key skills, I think, after the mindfulness and everything, meal planning is a guarantee to eating healthier without a plan. You are, you are lost, right? And I know we've all been there before we walk into a grocery store. I'm just going to grab a few couple things. You walk it, you know, what am I? It's five o'clock. What am I making for dinner tonight? I find I'll grab, you know, like, some of the chicken, and I'll grab these vegetables. And then you have no plan you have no recipe, and you have no plan about how to make it, and half the stuff then sits in your refrigerator because you don't have the plan, and you end up throwing a lot of it out. Do not walk into the grocery store without that list in your hand. That will save you right there tons of time. I mean, I don't love being in the grocery store. I feel like it's sometimes it's my second home. I'm, you know, I'm in there, like often, because this is what I do for my job. So to to make it more streamlined and effective, I mean, you could literally get out of the grocery store in 30 minutes with your list, if you knew exactly what you were going to be shopping for. 
So give us a rundown of how you do your meal planning, assuming that you you're doing it for your own family and you have time limits around cooking. So if you're planning for the week, what are you trying to do? How many dinners are you planning? How many breakfasts are you planning? 
Well, so you know, I have been meal planning for years, especially when I when I first got very serious about losing weight and keeping it off and everything. Meal planning became even more important than so I've been going through years and years of doing this with my three kids living in the house. Now. My kids are flown and grown, and they're they live on their own, so now it's just my husband and myself. The meal plan is still the meal plan. Whether you have a whole house full of young kids or it's just you and your husband, or it's just you alone, what you want to do with planning meals is to have some kind of a goal, I mean, and so if it's you want your whole family to eat healthier, that just helps you again, like, be more mindful and aware. Does that mean you're going to make sure that every dinner has a vegetable, you know, on the plate? Does that mean that you're going to have three Meatless meals that week? And you know, so you you want to take some time and think about what your goals are for the meal plan. So for me, for example, like with with my husband and myself, I want to make sure that two times a week I am eating some kind of seafood, because seafood is really good for you and healthy. And so I definitely want to make sure I have, like, a salmon, and maybe we're having shrimp that goes into my meal plan. I want to make sure that at least two times a week I am eating something like plant based proteins like beans or tofu or or, you know, something similar. So that's part of my meal plan, and that's how I start to plan out my meals. Is by by the protein that I'm going to be putting on my plate. Now I'm at a point where I don't really plan out my breakfast and my lunches, because I'm usually and I want to just pause for a second too. This is not to complicate things or to or to make things right to waste your time this meal planning. It takes a little time at the beginning, and you will thank yourself all week long for having that plan in place, because it's going to be Wednesday night, and you're going to say what's for dinner. And like, you know what? I already know. What's for dinner already know, because I have it on my plan, right? I've already grocery shopped for it. The food's in my refrigerator, and I know exactly what we're having tonight, and it takes a lot of stress out of what am I having for dinner? My meal planning is not the same as your meal planning, right? I might not be. I mean, for example, I my dinners almost always become next day's lunch because I'm busy working and I do not want to take even a moment to have to get in my kitchen prepare as something. And we're fine with leftovers. Some people aren't fine with leftovers, and that's okay too, right? So whatever you know works for you and makes it easier, right? This is, this is about ease, but it also is about, you know, the more that you are planning, the more you have an opportunity to be healthier. You know, making healthier meals. Now also, if every Friday is like pizza night, you know, for you, that's okay too, put that in the meal plan, then, right? That's okay. That's a night that you're not. Cooking, and that's okay. What should we
How should we be maneuvering through a grocery store?
So, yeah, I mean, grocery stores are, you know, notorious for the middle aisles. Are the ones that are the worst. Are filled with with all the the junk and the highly processed foods and and, but that's that was used to be the the mantra, like a couple years ago, like, just shop the perimeter of the grocery store, because that's where all the best. And that still does apply. But grocery stores and food marketers have gotten very smart, and a lot of the junk can kind of sit around the perimeter too. So you just have to be very careful about what you're grabbing. There's a ton of marketing, food marketing words, like, all natural, 100% you know, like, when you see, when you see food labels that are screaming with bells and whistles and like, kind of like saying, like, buy me, you know, like, that's, that's a red flag. You go into the produce section. The oranges and apples aren't, like, waving their hands at you to like, that's right, yeah. I mean, right. They don't have any food marketing labels on them. They're just, like, right, you know, Hi, here we are. And so, so, you know, shop the perimeter. I mean, I think you get into those middle aisles and that's just full of, like, the convenience and the junk. But, you know, even you go into Whole Foods and stuff and, like, you know, more natural stores, and they can be filled with a lot of fat junky stuff too. So you have to just be just mindful anything that's, you know ingredients labels that have more ingredients than you can sit there and even read ingredients that you can't pronounce, that those are all red flags to what you should just stay away from.
 A lot of people want to take advantage of the big club stores to buy Food for the weeks. Maybe they only have to go shopping once a week. But what are, well, tell me what your what your feeling is about that is it doable to have produce for a week for a family of four sitting in your fridge?
I think, I think that it is, I mean, because, I mean, I had a family of five and, you know. And I could go visit the grocery store once, and then maybe walk into the grocery store again just to grab something that was more perishable, like fish, you know. And I could, you know, but that takes, that takes a decent amount of planning, right, of what exactly you're going to like, use the more perishable things at the beginning of the week. And, you know, there's that, there's certainly fruits and vegetables that can sit out on your counter for weeks, winter squashes, onions, garlic. I mean, those can, you know, those will last weeks. So you just have to be, I think that just takes it this, like, kind of next level planning. But, you know. So if, if you're up for that challenge, that's great. But I think, I think the thing to avoid is walking into the grocery store every single night at five o'clock, like, what am I making for dinner tonight? I mean, I don't, I can't think of anything more stressful than that. So I think, if so, if it happens to be, you go in twice a week, but, but again, you're going in with that list in your hand. You have a plan, right? You know exactly what you're just going in grabbing and you're walking out. And so it's that's, that's the key. 
And then in the kitchen, do you have recommendations about how we should be managing our kitchens, organizing our kitchens, to make it more conducive for us making these great meals.
I like to think of my kitchen as sort of like my personal assistant. I mean, it's like my right hand man. The very first thing I tell my clients is to go into your kitchens and I do something called a crowding out and adding in. I mean, like we want to crowd out any of the undesirable things. Like, I mean, in starting with equipment, I mean, get rid of stuff that you don't ever use. If you have an air fryer and you never use it, don't eat it, right? I mean, just give this stuff away. Like, don't let it clutter your your cabinet, your your your counter. And, on the other hand, if there's something like for me, for example, I have my VitaMix blender and my food processor get get front and center attention on my counter, because I use them a lot. I don't want to have to then dig them out of my closet, right? Yeah, right. So those things sit prominently on my counter, my container with all my mixing spoons and stuff that's right there anything that's just more convenient. So I would say, get rid of stuff that you don't use and then add in. I mean, another great example is I have probably 12 sets of measuring. Spoons, measuring cups, things like that, that mixing bowls. I have a lot of those sheet pans. I don't want to spend the time hand washing the measuring spoons every time I wanted, like, you know, if I'm using a couple of them or a couple of times in a recipe. So that you know. So why not have a lot of those things that you use frequently in your kitchen. So that’s, I think, 
And that’s the crux of that, yeah, I can buy five sets of measuring spoons if I have space to store them and if I’m actually using them frequently, then it makes sense to. And making a choice, right, I’m making a choice to find space to keep those. Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely, right. I mean, you know, pots and pans, a good set of pots and pans, a good kitchen, sharp kitchen knife, a cutting board. I mean, you want to be prepared, right? You wan to to be ready to to do your cooking, you know, and make it as easy as possible. 
Yeah to feel like a chef in my own kitchen.
Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. And so I mean, and then the same goes for the food you want to, you know, clean out all those expired spices, that like, you know, probably a food that maybe you bought for the last holidays that now will sit in your cabinet for a year, right? I mean, just I, you know, I’d say like once a season, I go through my cabinets and I just purge some lots of things get lost in the back of your pantry cabinets and I just did that the other day. I just went through yeah, the whole thing. Just to reorganize. And I think it kind of just gives you some peace of mind. And then you can see, 
Makes you feel good, yeah.
yes, yes, it does make you feel good. And it just makes you feel like you can maybe even generate ideas. I found a bag of farro in the back of my cabinet. I’m like, oh great, I will use that tonight for dinner. Just things like that. So I think like you crowding out, getting rid of a lot of stuff and then adding back in any pantry items that you use frequently. Extra virgin olive oil, sesame oil, vinegars. I mean, if you use those things frequently, definitely have them on hand.
I like that. Personal assistant. And as you planned for, and especially when your kids were at home, as you were planning for your family, not for your business, but for your family for the week, what things would you buy to keep as staples? Give me an example of some things that you guys would use often versus things that you would, other than produce, that you would buy weekly, for example.
I definitely in my pantry right now, I mean, I could tell you I always have a can or two of diced tomatoes, I have some tomato paste, I have canned beans because I have tortillas sitting in my freezer. I’m just thinking like off the top of my head I can make with the things just in my pantry and freezer. Like if I had just absolutely no plan for that night or like whatever my plan went or, you know, planning is not a perfect science. Like it can go awry sometimes, So every once in a while, like maybe I get home later than I thought, and I could probably go to my kitchen right now and make some kind of Mexican meal with a can of black beans, some diced tomatoes. I have cheddar cheese, tortillas in my freezer, frozen kale, frozen greens, you know, and I could create, you know, probably an okay quesadilla like with that. SO there are things yeah, I mean, always in my pantry are oils, extra virgin olive oil I cook with frequently. That’s the best oil. I have sesame seed oil for for Asian dishes. And then I’ll have like a neutral oil and canola oil. Those are my three oils. I have a variety of vinegars. I have some other condiments that I might use frequently like mustards or soy sauce or those are I always have those things on hand always because that just ensures that I can go into my kitchen and make and make a meal. May not be perfect, right? But it’s gonna but it’s gonna be healthy and fine.
Yeah, yeah. I love it. Wow. Thank you. And you said you had something you wanted to offer listeners.
I do. I’ve got a healthy kitchen guide, a setup guide, um, that I would live to give to my listeners. And I will send you the link to that. And then maybe you could put that in the show notes and  and they can grab that. That kind of covers a lot of what we were talking about today about like just getting into your kitchen and what to add in and to take out and to you know, what you want to stock your pantry with and a couple examples of quick meals that you could make with things in your pantry. So I will, yeah, I will send you that link. And that would be great if you could put it in the show notes.
Wow, thank you Heather. That’s fantastic. And than you for coming on the show today. This has been a lot of fun and really, really good information.
Great, no, I love talking about meal planning and cooking and getting your kitchen set up because it really is the key to healthy eating and just feeling that reduction in stress, right? We don’t want this to be a drag. We want it to be fun.
For sure.
So after we finished this recording, I went to my own cabinets and made a note of what staples I have there. And now, I always keep canned beans in my kitchen, and tortillas in the freezer! Really good ideas!
You’ll find the link to Heather’s guide in the show notes. Please go there to download that, and all her info is in the show notes too.
And do listen to an episode of Real Food Stories, OK?
I hope you enjoy your week! I’ll see you on the next episode.