What We Consume Matters

August 12, 2026

I've been trying to figure out where this rabbit hole actually started.

And I don't have to think very hard about it anymore.

It started with Crohn's disease.

In 2012, my health started changing.

What followed was a season of appointments, testing, hospital visits and extended stays, unanswered questions, and trying to figure out what the hell was happening to my body.

By the middle of 2013, I had been diagnosed with Crohn's disease.

During that same period of testing and uncertainty, I also had my gallbladder removed “just in case” gallstones were causing some of what I was experiencing.

There weren't any gallstones.

And suddenly I found myself taking 13 prescription pills every day.

Thirteen.

There were plenty of practical reasons that wasn't going to work particularly well for me.

I'm entirely too forgetful to remember a collection of pills that need to be taken at different times throughout the day.

And I sure wasn't taking all 13 at once.

But underneath the logistics was something much bigger.

I didn't want to take 13 pills every day for the rest of my life.

I didn't know then what I know now.

I wasn't standing in grocery-store aisles reading every ingredient label.

I wasn't examining everything in my cleaning cabinet.

I wasn't making fire cider.

I wasn't baking sourdough.

I wasn't questioning half the products I had spent my life buying without a second thought.

All of that came much later.

But I had learned something that would fundamentally change the way I approached my own health:

Doctors don't know everything.

They don't.

That isn't an insult to doctors. It's reality.

There is a reason it's called the practice of medicine.

Doctors are human beings studying an enormously complicated human body with information that continues to change. They work with symptoms, tests, research, experience, probabilities, and the information available to them at the time.

Sometimes they know exactly what's happening.

Sometimes they have a very good idea.

And sometimes they don't know.

I've watched doctors consult other doctors because they didn't know.

I've lived through appointments where nobody seemed to know.

I've undergone a surgery looking for an answer that wasn't there.

And there are people who spend years—even decades—undiagnosed or misdiagnosed before somebody finally puts the pieces together.

That doesn't make medicine useless.

It makes medicine human.

And my experience taught me that a medical degree does not remove my responsibility to participate in decisions about my own body.

I can listen to a doctor.

I can value expertise.

I can ask for testing.

I can consider a recommendation.

And I can still ask:

Why?

What else could this be?

What are the alternatives?

What happens if we don't do this?

What evidence are we working from?

What can I do differently?

Is this the only option—or simply the option we're discussing right now?

Those questions started changing everything.

I began learning.

I began paying attention to my body.

I stopped assuming that someone else would always have the answer simply because they had credentials after their name.

And I became a much more active participant in the decisions being made about my health.

Within about two years, I had stopped taking those prescribed medications, and I haven't taken one of those Crohn's prescriptions since.

I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but looking back now, that's where the rabbit hole began.

Not with sourdough.

Not with ingredient labels.

Not with natural remedies.

With the realization that I wanted to understand more.

And for a long time, it moved slowly.

One question here.

One change there.

One thing learned that made me look at something else a little differently.

But over the last four years or so, that slow curiosity has snowballed into just about every area of my life.

Eventually, it reached our medicine cabinet again.

We stopped automatically reaching for over-the-counter medications for every minor ache, cough, or cold.

Headache? Did Advil or Tylenol automatically have to be my first move?

Cough? Did I immediately need cough syrup?

Were there other ways I could support my body through some of the ordinary things that happen in a home?

So I learned.

Herbs.

Honey.

Fire cider.

Simple things people had been making and using long before they became trendy little bottles sitting on health-food-store shelves.

And something kept happening:

The more I learned, the more questions I had.

That rabbit hole opened another.

Then another.

I started paying closer attention to household products.

Personal-care products.

Ingredients.

Food.

The things we were buying.

The things we were putting on our bodies.

The things we had used for years without ever stopping to ask why.

Not because I decided everything conventional was bad and everything natural was automatically good.

That's not discernment either.

I simply started realizing how many choices I had been making without ever realizing I was making a choice at all.

And once I started paying attention, it became pretty difficult to stop.

Eventually, that rabbit hole followed me straight into the Publix bakery.

I went in to buy a loaf of sourdough, picked one up, flipped it over to read the label, and saw that it contained bioengineered food ingredients.

I put it back.

There was no dramatic protest in the bread aisle.

I simply thought:

If I want sourdough, I can learn how to make sourdough.

So I did.

And if you've ever learned sourdough, you already know that was basically me voluntarily opening another rabbit hole and diving in headfirst.

I learned about starters and fermentation and flour and hydration and all the things that make absolutely no sense until eventually, somehow, they do.

My starter got stronger.

My bread got better.

And eventually I could consistently pull a beautiful loaf out of the oven knowing exactly what had gone into it.

Somewhere in that process, I started imagining Nourish Her Wild.

At first, I thought it would be a cookbook.

Recipes made with real ingredients.

Food made intentionally.

A place to share some of what I was learning and making in my own kitchen.

But the longer that idea sat with me, the more I realized a cookbook couldn't hold it.

Because nourishment is so much bigger than food.

And while this years-long rabbit hole was changing the way I thought about what I put into my body and brought into my home, another journey was changing the way I thought about everything.

My faith.

The deeper I've gone in my relationship with God and the more time I've spent in Scripture, the more I keep finding myself returning to two things:

Discernment and stewardship.

Discernment has taught me to ask questions.

What am I listening to?

What am I believing?

What am I allowing to influence me?

Is it true?

Is it good?

Does it deserve the access I've given it?

And stewardship has made me think much more deeply about what God has actually entrusted to me.

Not just money.

My body.

My mind.

My time.

My home.

My relationships.

My gifts.

My attention.

My faith.

This ordinary, beautiful, sometimes messy life sitting right in front of me.

All of it is something I have a responsibility to steward.

And suddenly nourishment meant something much bigger than what was on my plate.

Because we're consuming things constantly.

Food and drinks, yes.

But also information.

Entertainment.

Conversations.

Opinions.

Social media.

Products.

Marketing.

The voices we repeatedly allow access to us.

The thoughts we entertain long enough that they begin to feel like truth.

And spiritually, we're consuming too.

All of it feeds something.

All of it has the potential to shape us.

Which means what I'm consuming isn't just a conversation about physical health.

It's a conversation about stewardship.

It's a conversation about discernment.

And ultimately, for me, it's a conversation about faith.

That doesn't mean becoming afraid of everything around us.

Fear isn't the goal.

Discernment is.

I want to learn.

I want to ask questions.

I want to understand what I'm consuming instead of blindly accepting something simply because it's familiar, convenient, popular, recommended, or because it's what I've always done.

And then I want to make the best choice I can with what I know.

Sometimes learning something means I change what I buy.

Sometimes it means I start making something myself.

Sometimes I research further and decide I'm perfectly comfortable continuing exactly as I was.

And sometimes I learn something six months later that makes me reconsider the decision all over again.

That's okay.

Because this isn't a race toward some imaginary perfectly natural life.

There isn't a finish line where I finally know everything, make every choice perfectly, and receive my organic cotton sash declaring me officially enlightened.

It's a journey.

Mine started more than a decade ago.

It moved slowly for a long time.

Then somewhere along the way, especially over these last few years, it started snowballing.

And I don't think it will ever quite stop.

That's ultimately why Nourish Her Wild couldn't stay a cookbook.

Because nourish isn't synonymous with eat.

We nourish whatever we continually feed.

Our bodies.

Our minds.

Our relationships.

Our fears.