I have an update on how my challenge of using up what’s left in my cupboards is panning out.  I’m also joined by expert in IBS and acid reflux nutritional therapist Jackie Morrell to chat about IBS, low carb diets,  breakfast choices, the role of food diaries, and the balance of carbohydrates in a healthy diet. Jackie also shares why she loves her Thermomix and how its transformed her approach to meal preparation. 

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Not Pasta Again

06:02 Understanding Control in the Kitchen

12:04 Jackie's Journey with IBS and Nutrition

17:53 Making Dietary Changes: Overcoming Hurdles

23:51 Personalized Nutrition: Adapting to Individual Needs

30:00 Balancing Carbohydrates and Nutrition

35:31 The Thermomix Experience

42:50 Emotional Aspects of Cooking

49:36 The Thermomix: A Kitchen Revolution

Hey, it's Sam and this is Not Pasta again. If you're a new listener and you haven't actually listened to some of my earlier episodes, then welcome along. You've hopefully found a podcast which is all about building a community of like-minded, busy people, whether you're parenting or not, who basically face a constant daily battle of what to feed the family. So if your house is anything like mine, then pasta was a frequent request.

So Not Pasta Again is about uniting us from having to hear that phrase again and again in the kitchen. I like to think that the podcast will be an outlet for us to breathe and feel heard in all the emotions and overwhelm that comes along with this daily task. So in a recent episode, for those of you who have listened, I asked you to very much hold me accountable for using up some of the stuff that I've got in my cupboards.

I am an absolute nightmare when it comes to this kind of thing. I have a tendency to buy everything in bulk. It represents better value. However, it also means that my cupboards are absolutely bursting at the seams. So I did a little bit of an audit over the last couple of weeks and what I found I'm tending to keep are things like lentils. I've got puffed millet in there. God knows why I've got puffed millet in my cupboards. I even found a pack of unopened chickpea flour.

I don't even know when I bought that, to be honest. So what I've actually done is I've gone about making meals and snacks that actually incorporate those three ingredients. I absolutely loved the lentil and chorizo stew that I made with the green lentils. No sauteing, absolutely one pot wonder. Just chucked it into the jug of my Thermomix. It cooked and stirred it at the appropriate temperature for around 40 minutes. And there you went. I had four or five meals that I've actually got from that one pack.

of lentils. The puff miller, a little bit trickier, but I just looked at it as if it was puffed rice, so rice crispies. And I've basically made chocolate coated rice crispy cakes for the boys. Add infinitum. They're loving them. And then the chickpea flour.

probably a little bit more uncertain about what I needed to do with that. So I spend a little bit more time looking up and researching it. But basically just reading the back of the packet, which I hadn't actually done, showed me that it is also just a thickener as well as any other plain flour. So I used it in a chickpea curry a couple of nights ago and I'm going to add it to some bread recipes as well. So that's just going to get used more frequently.

possibly won't buy it again for a long time, but I am absolutely determined that I'm going to use it all up. So you know what? It's worth just getting into those cupboards, looking at what you've got, doing a little bit of research, spending 10 minutes to just make sure we're not doing that thing that we don't want to do, which is wasting food. So yeah, keep me accountable, keep asking me questions about it, and let me know if you've started on that same little adventure and tell me what you've been making. So also,

In the last episode, I think it was the last episode, we talked about control in the kitchen. And it's not necessarily a favorable word that people like to admit that they want around their life. For me, it's really important. But what I hope I communicated and shared with you is that control has lots of different things in terms of its meaning. It's not necessarily just about calorie counting, for example.

It's going to relate to things like personal preferences, specific dietary needs, maybe even medical reasons or allergies can come into it as well. So that word control is really broad. And with that in mind, I've actually got a guest that is going to join me today. She's a friend, Jackie Morell, and she's hopefully going to be able to offer us lots of advice around this subject.

So Jackie is a nutritional therapist and importantly, she's also a coach and I think that makes a massive difference. And I met her when I started networking a couple of years ago. Now Jackie specializes in IBS, acid reflux and weight management specifically, and is very much about creating personalized plans for every client that she works with. So whilst this is the case that she tailors everything to the individual,

Jackie often advocates though a low carb lifestyle due to its simplicity and the significant benefits that she herself has experienced, but that she also witnesses with her clients. I think it's the holistic approach combining diet, lifestyle and mindset that makes her very different and unique. So welcome Jackie. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

It's an absolute pleasure. So I think if we could, we'll start at the beginning. Why don't you tell us a little bit about why you are a nutritional therapist and why specifically you've chosen that low carb sort of focus? So I'll try and be quick. I have been an IBS sufferer since I was 25, which is a very, very long time ago. And there was no advice at all.

when I, you know, in the nineties, there was nothing. And so I suffered for 35 years really with IBS. And one day I had a very bad incident at work and I decided I'd better do something about this because I was getting sicker and sicker no matter what I tried. And I really did try a lot of things. Anyway, I came across a book that taught me about the microbiome. And once I'd learned about the microbiome and then learned about how to...

look after and tend your microbiome and that is actually through a low carb diet. Everything changed for me. Within six weeks, I'd lost weight, I'd stopped having daily headaches, the pain had gone. You know, it really was amazing in that first six weeks. And it was then that I decided I wanted to understand what had happened in my body because it wasn't good enough for me to have just made that change. So then I decided to study nutrition.

which ended up full time actually, they say it's a part-time course, but I kept going down rabbit holes. So it just took me a long time. So in the end, I studied nutrition for four years. And when I finished my nutrition qualification, I wanted to open up my own business. And, you know, I think IBS people just get pushed aside because it's not serious and it's, and lots of doctors think it's something in your head and, you know.

there's nothing you can do about it, all those kind of things. Yeah, I think I want to take a step back in that case, because it's really interesting that you suffered sort of not silently, I'm sure, but what was sort of the doctor's approach then? What were they recommending for you with the symptoms? So when I first went, they did do an H. pylori test and an H. pylori is a virus that can cause some symptoms. Burning and pain when you're hungry is one of the biggest symptoms.

I did the test and then they didn't contact me. And six months later, I went back and they said, you've got this infection. And then they give you three weeks of antibiotics and that's it, no advice. And at the time there was never any advice about antibiotics and probiotics. So that was the first thing. The other thing the doctors gave me was peppermint. And honestly, they did the test because they'll always do the test to make sure there's nothing serious. So you have a...

tube up one end and a camera down the other and I had this horrible barrier meal thing where you drink it and they tip you, ugh. But once they realize that it isn't something serious and they don't consider, and they still don't consider IBS serious, they kind of leave you to it. So in the 90s there was nothing because there was no internet. And then over the years I didn't really read books but I did look for supplements that would

because one of my big things was low energy. And then when I had my menopause on top of that, honestly, it was just, I was working in a trading room. I was running a big team, multimillion dollar projects, and I couldn't get through the day without feeling that my eyes were rolling in my head because, you know, when you've got IBS, you don't absorb nutrients properly. I didn't bother going back to the doctor's apart to get, get HRT.

but not for IBS, because they don't know anything about IBS. Yeah. So in the sense when you started that nutrition course, was that a specific low carb nutrition course?

No, no, no, no, no. Do you know low carb is a funny thing because when you're studying, particularly, because I'm BANT registered, BANT is the British Association of Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine. When you're BANT registered, they don't want you to specify any diet.

That's not what they want to do. you're not taught a low carb diet. It's just that the more I researched low carb, the more I researched the scientists, the doctors, the nutritionists that advocated low carb, the more sense it made to me. And one of the big positives, one of the huge positives was that as I was getting older, I was getting fatter.

And I didn't really understand why, because I'd never really dieted. And suddenly my bra was tight and my rings were tight and I was going into higher and higher clothes. The big thing for me was we go on safari every year and at 80 kilos, you have to buy, for a woman, you have to buy an extra seat. And I was 79 kilos. And I said to my husband, I've got to do something about this. The embarrassment of having to buy an extra seat. Anyway.

When I started looking after my microbiome, which is a low carb whey, I lost weight so easily and my husband initially was, not doing that. I said, oh rubbish. Two months, I'd lost, I don't know, six kilos and he was, oh, what are you doing? Why aren't I doing that? Okay. So I think we've got two questions that I'd like to ask in the sense that I want the listeners to understand everything. Cause you've used the phrase microbiome, but also

You know I've been an advocate for low carb, so I understand what that is. So shall we just very simply explain what a low carb diet is in the first instance and then what microbiome is in relation to that. Yes. Okay, so low carb, let's start with low carb. So your body likes to work on glucose, sugar. They're all the same thing. And carbohydrates, carbohydrates, sugar, glucose, all the same thing.

And when you eat carbohydrates, your body uses that as energy. Now the thing is, there are some carbohydrates that are beneficial to us and they are the vegetables. are primarily the over the ground vegetables. But the other carbohydrates that you eat are going to really spike your blood sugar and they're really going to upset your microbiome. And I will come back to what that is.

Anything that is grown under the ground is a starchy vegetable and that's going to spike your blood sugar. And then obviously the obvious things, you know, we all know if we're honest that cake, biscuits and pizza are not a diet food. But do you realize that potatoes, rice, bread and pasta, they are also carbohydrates and they are also totally unnecessary in our diet. We don't need to have those. And we kind of get into the habit of you must have

meat and potatoes, you must have a huge bowl of pasta with a dollop of sauce. Really easy, really convenient, but it's not good for your body. I think it's interesting because when I was following a low carb diet, which I have adjusted slightly, I still don't eat those refined carbohydrates. I think that's the way I'd describe them. I think one of the ways in which I understood how not to eat them was that they are fillers. They don't carry nutrients. So what I did was I sort of substituted

you know, the rice with a curry with a chopped salad to enable my body to get more nutrients. So I think it's things like that that people perhaps don't realize that, you know, it's easy to make adjustments, isn't it? Absolutely. So if I was going to ask someone to start doing low carb, I would explain to them that bread, rice, pasta and potatoes are the first things to remove because they're so easy. It's such an easy rule.

but then what do you have instead of those things? So if someone had to choose one thing, I would say choose potatoes because potatoes are a starchy vegetable and your microbiome loves them, but not mashed. So then we're kind of thinking about how do you eat the food you love in a way that isn't contributing to sugar spikes and upsetting your gut? So removing those

for those four foods, because you're right, they are absolutely just fillers. Bread again, if you are thinking, if you love, I'm a lover of bread, I can't have bread in the house because I'll eat it in one, you know, over a day, the whole thing will be gone. But I'm eating sourdough because at least it's fermented. We don't have rice because there's virtually no nutrients in rice. It's, I'm sorry to say, it's a poor man's food. You think about the people.

who historically would have eaten rice as a filler. Same with potatoes. Think about where that came from, that idea that we needed potatoes. And pasta, again, it's the same thing. Pasta in particular, I have a problem with because of the grain. And grains in the abundance that we now eat them aren't good for us. But all of these things are treat food, once a month food. But we eat them every day and that's where the problem comes.

Yeah, exactly. And I think let's just not forget microbiome. Let's just define what that is as well. So people can understand why that's so important. Yeah. So you have a gut, you have a microbiome is bacteria, beneficial, non beneficial, there's some yeast, there'd be some other microbes, but predominantly, your microbiome is 80 % bacteria. And you have a microbiome on your skin, on every orifice, but you have the biggest microbiome is in your gut.

and you need to tend it like a garden. And if you feed your microbiome sugar, then the non-beneficial bacteria explodes. It's kind of like if you were to leave a garden and never tend it, you would get weeds, not flowers. It's that kind of idea. I like that. And so we can't live without our microbiome. They, poor little mice, they bred...

mice without a microbiome and that none of them survived. We need our microbiome. We have evolved with bacteria. We are more bacteria than we are human. So, you know, I think of my microbiome as the, as the universe. Do remember in Men in Black, the cat had the universe around his neck. That's our universe. We have to tend to this universe. So simply, you know, that's your microbiome. Okay. So

I think whenever somebody is looking to potentially make a change, maybe they've identified they're not feeling great or they might have symptoms like you've described with your IBS. I think change is a difficult thing for people to do. So how do you deal with that? What would you say to people to sort of get them over that little hurdle?

You know, it's funny, isn't it? Because when I first started practicing, I would put these big protocols together with lots and lots of things on it. And then I started working with ADHD people. ADHD people want one thing because, you know, their brains are really whirring fast. And I've realized actually that's beneficial for everybody. One change. It doesn't suit everybody. Some people like to go absolutely...

100 % full on, know, change everything in one go, but that's small. So I would say for people, if you're looking to do a change, a change, a habit, they now know can take three months to become something you don't think about anymore. So make one change. And for me, always the place to start is breakfast because we are obsessed with this idea that we need cereal, porridge, toast, orange juice.

granola. It's a totally manufactured meal, right? It's a complete marketing success story. That's what it is. Yeah, 100%. And I think it's really interesting that you say that because my most cooked recipe on my Thermomix is a stir fry vegetable mix, which I have every morning with scrambled eggs because it is the day, it's the way I want to start my day knowing that I have fulfilled that microbiome. I've, you know, I've tended my garden. I wouldn't normally reference it like that.

And I just think people don't realize that that's what they need to be starting to think about. Absolutely. Think about, you know, think about having dinner for breakfast. That's the way I, that's the way I, you know, you can have anything you want for breakfast. But the breakfast that has been in the media that we grew up with is really more dessert than it is food. It's very, very sweet.

And so for most people, you have breakfast, it spikes your blood sugar and anything that goes up that sharply comes down sharply. And then by 11 o'clock, you're starving. And then you start picking, go to the machine and get a hot chocolate or go to the machine and get a bar of chocolate or whatever it is. And that is because you started your day with a lot of sugar. So when you start your day, you know, a stir-fry for breakfast, that's amazing. You know. love it.

I absolutely love it. And I've got my eldest son eating the eggs and he has smoked salmon. I haven't quite got him onto the vegetable mix. He sort of looks at it. He'll get there, I think. But again, I just want to go backwards. think there's three things. If I remember the three things, think simplifying things is something that you've referenced. I'm a massive advocate for less is more. I think if you do less, then you're going to achieve more out of it. And I've very much sort of been saying on this podcast that it's small steps.

So I love the fact that you sort of talk about that as well. I love the fact that you've been adaptable. Like obviously at the beginning you were, I said that you work individually with people. Could you give us some examples of how you've had to make differences for different people? Like you've referenced working with ADHD people, but what else? How do you make it different? you know, the biggest thing with IBS, I'm sorry to bring bowels into the conversation so early. Everyone is used to me talking about bowels.

With IBS, you are either a diarrhea person or a constipation person. And to be honest, you're having to think about those in slightly different ways. My biggest success, I have to say, is a young woman who came to me and she had put on three stone really quickly and she had lost her confidence, totally lost her confidence. And she'd been to see the gastroenterologist who'd said to her, you have a very slow moving bowel and you're never gonna be any different than you are now. And she would go once a week if she was lucky.

and it was painful, she was bloated, she had no energy, she was putting on weight. She was vegetarian. so low carb when you're vegetarian is a little bit more tricky, to be honest, because I would be advocating that you eat more animal proteins, because they're satisfying and they're so good for us, they're so good for our brains, they're so good for our gut. So with her, I had to think, how am I going to give her a low carb diet?

because that's what she needed to help her to lose weight without hunger. That's the biggest thing to think about. You can lose weight, if that's your aim, low fat, low carb, low calorie, dah-dee-dah-dee-dah. But you want to do it without starving, without feeling that you are restricting yourself, and low carb does it for you. Low carb means that you consistently lose weight for longer. You don't hit that wall.

where you can't lose weight anymore because you're accessing your fat reserves. So for her, we had to find a way of making it easy because she's working. We had to find it a way that she can socialize and we had to find a way for her to eat enough vegetables so that her body allowed her to do her pooping every day. And we got her within a month,

She, was within a month, she was going every day. And now what we needed to do was embed that habit. So she worked with me in the end for six months. She showed me her food diary every day. She was very committed. And every day I would look at her food diary and comment, you know, you might be better to do this rather than that. It's, it's really interesting because one, you've mentioned food diaries. Do you use those with everyone?

Yes, I tried to. are the people that are most successful use a food diary. Now I'm not, my mom, bless her, my mom was a yo-yo dieter and she dieted using calories her entire life. And she would go from eight stone to 12 stone, 12 stone to eight stone. She did it her entire life. And so she wrote down on a piece of paper, everything she ate and the calories up until a week before she died. So I am not saying.

that this is a long-term thing to do. But when you come to a professional for advice on diet, you need to tell me what you're eating. Otherwise, I can't really help you if I don't know what you're eating. And so I do ask my clients, I use WhatsApp. So I ask people, I ask people to take a photograph of their food because I can kind of work out. And someone did send me some brown looking...

Stuff. Stuff, yeah. It didn't look great. And I did have to say, what is that? So that didn't look great, but mostly I can tell. So with the food diaries, here's a question completely not off topic, but do you find that most of your clients are surprised by what's in their food diary? Yes, definitely. So talk to us about that. Do people, I guess I'm asking, do people think they're eating healthier than they actually are? Absolutely. Absolutely. The amount of times people say, I'm so good, I eat...

five portions of fruit every day. I don't know why I'm so bloated. And so then we have to explain to them how fruit, you know, have fruit ferments in your stomach, particularly if you are someone that eats on the run or someone who has acid reflux and is taking ameprazole or, you know, all of these things. You have to explain to people that bears eat fruit to get fat for the winter. So, you know, fruit is not our friend. Fruit is adult treat food.

So that comes always that comes as shock. And the other one that comes as a shock is porridge. Bless it. You know, I have got a client who is 75 and to be honest, the porridge has stayed in because it's so much better than shop bought granola and toast and orange juice. So again, good nutrition is about compromise. It's about working out what you know.

And what you can achieve and find in the mid ground for most people is maybe oats with berries, oats with flaxseed, oats with something else so that it's not so sugary, so it doesn't spike your blood sugar so much. And the other thing that people cannot get their head around is how, I'm not saying be vegan, but how much plant food you really need to eat. And the plant food, and this is where

I kind of experimented last year. We talked about this before, didn't we, Sam? That, you know, your gut microbiome loves the starchy carbs. It really does. And last year I was really experimenting with eating more starchy carbs because my gut liked it and I've been well for so long, but I'm very, very sugar sensitive. And I won't lie, I've put 10 pounds on in a year because I've been experimenting with the starchy carbs.

And that has, that's not good for me. I don't want to be 10 pounds heavier, but it's compromise. It's all compromise. It's, it's your gut needs to have a good amount of fruit and veg. And now I'm working with fruit and veg concentrates. It means that I'm really much happier because they are feeding my microbiome to take out the starchy carbs as well. And so since Christmas I've lost five pounds. Brilliant. It's,

It's amazing when you are low carb how quickly the weight starts to shift, but you have to be on it. You can't be having weekends off. Yeah, and I think that's where, again, some people can, you know, have come down, have a downfall in that level. And I think it's...

interesting and important for people to remember to listen to their body. You know, because that's, like I said, you know, I've eaten a low carb diet for a very long time and I have adjusted my diet because I just didn't feel that I was nourishing it in the right way. So I have introduced not those refined carbohydrates that we spoke about at the beginning, but I have definitely upped my carbohydrate intake. And for me, one of my major, major wins from that is I sleep better.

you know, there's, there's that there's a little bit of leeway isn't there in that low carb approach? I say to people, when I first meet people and they say that they would like to lose weight and they're happy to go down the low carb route. If someone wanted to do a low fat route, I would say, you know, maybe I'm not the nutritionist for you because we need fat in our diet. Fat is very important for our brain health and women, you need fat in your diet.

So I don't advocate a low fat diet for anybody. So again, sorry to jump in. One of the things that I was taught very early on was fat is your friend, sugar is your enemy. Yes. And it's very black and white. But if you can understand that basic premise for what you're putting into your body, you're going to be in a win in a winning mode. Absolutely. But I grew up in a low fat diet. And if you look at the statistics, when we swapped from a heart, when we swapped

from a high fat, low carb diet to a low fat, high carb diet, which is what some of the weekly weighing groups suggest, let's put it like that. We saw an increase in obesity. There is no doubt that the two correlate because our bodies need fat, that they absolutely need it. And we need carbs to get us through

winter when there is no food around because carbs make you fat. There is no denying that. Carbs increase your cholesterol because you need cholesterol to be fatter. You know it's like we've kind of forgotten all of this information. We have been so inundated with fabulous marketing. If only my marketing was that good. I know.

Well, you haven't got millions to spend though, I haven't got millions to spend. But you know, it's such a shame because the diet industry is there to make money. It's not there to make you thin. It's there to make money or healthy. Let's get healthy in there because some people don't need to lose weight. They need to be healthy. I mean, I am not the person who needs to lose weight in the slightest. It was a health reason that I went low carb and it has served me amazingly well. And I think, you know, that whole notion of

I have a phrase called, eat real food. You know, again, a very simple approach that people could perhaps take on board. I could absolutely talk to you for ages. I am conscious of time. So just to sum up for everyone, because it's not always medical reasons that people might come to you. What could you give some over sort of arching sort of reasons why somebody might want to talk to you about taking on a change? Yeah.

Firstly, it will be because they've gone down the NHS route for their symptoms and they've got no sympathy, no empathy, no time and nothing has changed. So when people come to work with me, the first thing I do is spend an hour and a half talking to them about them and their symptoms and how they want to manage their symptoms because not everybody is the same. Not everyone can make the changes. If you've got a family...

to consider, you don't want to be cooking three meals or two meals or whatever it is. So they're the first group of people and the second group of people, this is really beneficial to me, is the coaching that I've done last year, because a lot of people need someone to listen to them. Most of us have friends who just want to give us their opinions or partners that just want to tell us how they did it.

Where in an actual fact, the most important thing for clients, the most important thing for people is just to be listened to. And coaching has allowed me to listen and ask questions that are appropriate for that person. And that means people can work with me for longer. So my success rate of people sticking to the program has changed from 50 % to 80 % in less than a year, which is amazing. I think that's amazing. And that is because

Managing your diet is not about the food you eat. It's about how you think about it. And the biggest thing for people is when I go out and people say, go on, treat yourself, how do I deal with go on, treat yourself? That's what we spend a lot of time talking about. And I, you know, I think it's when people are successful, it's because they're able to put themselves in their clients shoes to see the world from their perspective.

not just overlay what they've been taught or what they've learned. And that's obviously what you've been doing to have that increased success rate, which is absolutely amazing. It is amazing. All right, I have to ask you about the Thermomix. Oh, I love my Thermomix. So tell me a little bit about the journey. What is it? Where did you find it? Oh, it's a funny story, to be honest, the first time I used it. But I was introduced to the Thermomix by you.

And I was instantly sold because you said to me that it will order the food from the supermarket and wash itself up. And I'm thinking, yeah, I'm in. I'm definitely in. You know, I want to cook from scratch all the time. I don't eat processed food. I can't stand the way it tastes. Kev by mistake bought me some baked beans that were no sugar.

no sweeteners, which is not true because there's stevia in them and they taste revolting. you know, for me, if I'm going to use sugar, I use sugar. think, can I, sorry to jump in, I think that's a really important point. If you're going to have sweetness to your food, use sugar, don't use a false sweetener. Yeah. Your body does not know what to do with sweeteners. It really doesn't. The only two I've recently been told about is stevia and xylitol.

are good for your gut, that your gut actually, they've done some research, but I don't like the taste of sweeteners. They have a weird aftertaste that I don't like. I wouldn't have xylitol in the house because of my dogs. It's toxic for dogs. But I do like to cook from scratch. I do like to cook from scratch. But I found that I was doing the same thing all the time and I hated chopping. What a waste of time shopping is. stand there for, anyway.

It is, thank you. It really is a waste of time. So you introduced me to Thermomix and I must admit I'd watched you do your video and when it came I was so excited because all I needed to do was chuck it in and go whew. And so I didn't. That's what you did. That's what I did and it came out as brown baby food, brown puffy baby food because it had had blended lamb curry and my husband said

God, what have you done? What have you done? Now, I will admit that because I'm low carb, there's too much sauce in a lot of the recipes. So it took me quite a long time to work out how to adjust the recipe. And I'm not fiddling around with that inbuilt thing where instead of four, you make it two, because, you know, I'm not very good at following rules like that. So I just kind of adjusted it for myself. But now I've figured it out.

I'm gonna say this quietly, my husband has stopped moaning about the recipes that are coming out of thermomix. He doesn't even know I'm doing it. He says, oh, that's delicious. He hasn't moaned about a recipe for a year, because he doesn't know I'm using it. I don't know how, because he must be hearing it going. He just likes it. He likes it. Just leave it. Don't make him admit that he likes it. You know, keep it on that even ground.

So tell me how the Thermomix fits into your world on a day-to-day basis. I have a protein smoothie for my breakfast. And I started doing that because I was supporting a client and giving her accountability. And so we started doing it together. And I realized actually that I like the freshness of a smoothie. So every morning we do a smoothie in it. Soups.

are so easy to do. Oh God, I tell you, when you forget, when you don't put the lid on the blender properly and it ends up on the ceiling, that quick soup takes hours because you know, it's so soups are amazing. Because that's not what you do with your thermomix though is it? It doesn't go all over the ceiling. It never goes over the ceiling. It's all done in one pot. You know, Teddy helps me.

Teddy is my grandson, he's three, and I'm trying to introduce him into fruit and veg. So he sits on the side, everything goes in his mouth, and then in a Thermomix, and we make soup together, or we make whatever it is we're making together. But you know, it's good because he sees real food and he knows what an onion is, and he knows what it tastes like. It might be a bit, well, I'm not sure, I like that taste, Nana, but it goes in a Thermomix and he pushes the button. So now we've got children.

involved in the cooking, which is really important if you want to teach your children not to eat McDonald's and JFK. No, that's not the right thing to don't even know. KFC, KFC. don't eat that stuff either. No, but you know, I'm not in charge of my grandson's food. So he said to me, look, Nana, there's McDonald's the other day, three. They all go there. my God. Yeah, that's not good. So, you know,

There's so many benefits. So soup, curries are the most simple thing to make. I love the slow cook. So I used to have a slow cooker and I did this, this huge recipe that went in the slow cooker or went in a pot in the oven as a slow cooker. And it said take four hours. I came back after four hours and it was burnt to a crisp. Obviously I've got the temperature wrong. You never get the temperature wrong in the thermomix. It kind of, you know, it...

It takes the worry out of cooking. If you pick, I've got in my cookadoo, I've got recipes for clients, I've got low carb recipes, I've got recipes for curries, recipes for treat food, you know, I've got, I do like the occasional alcoholic treat. So a margarita in a thermomix is about the easiest thing you can possibly do. Chuck it in, push the button and then you're away. It's not like blending when

Let's not go back to blending, but it just makes life easy. The cook-a-do, once you get used to it, but it's like any new thing, you have to get used to it and you have to learn. You wouldn't expect to know how to use your oven properly or your hob. You wouldn't expect how to use it. You wouldn't expect to use it the first time and get it perfect the first time. So if I was to ask you to put your coaching head on or hat on,

I think one of the things that I've, I enjoy the most about what I do with a thermomix and introducing it to people is the transformation. So the change in the emotional aspects of eating and food preparation. If I could ask you to sum up how that has changed from what it was like for you before to what it does now with the thermomix, what would you say has that shift or transformation been? It means that.

I cook from scratch every day and I batch cook a lot. And that has meant that I don't eat takeaways because, you know, quite a lot of the time you feel terrible the next day and you think it must have been the wine, but actually it's a food hangover that you're getting from your takeaway. We don't eat takeaways. We don't buy shop-bought convenience food because the Thermomix mix makes convenient food.

It's interesting because I thought about, you know, convenience food in the UK is huge. And I think that's one of the biggest barriers that we've got from a Thermomix perspective, because there is a pre-made this and a pre-made that. And I think that Thermomix redefines convenience. Yes, absolutely. You know, I do say to my clients, there's a difference between ultra processed food and convenience food. Convenience food is real food.

that has been cooked for you, but there's not many of those things and you have to know what you're looking for. So now it's more time consuming because you've got to go to the shop and you've got to really read ingredients and most people don't do that. The Thermomix opens up 80,000, I mean 80,000 recipes is so overwhelming, but you you can put in Indian recipes and my husband...

has said to me over Christmas, don't like takeaway Indians anymore. I prefer your Indian. He doesn't know I'm cooking it in the tournament. I like how you whisper that. I know, he can't hear me. He can't hear you anyway, probably well he might be able to. And I think, so for me, that's an authenticity, isn't it? That the flavor profile of the stuff you're making. Absolutely, absolutely. know, Teddy bless his heart.

He, because they're busy and I'm trying to persuade them to think about a Thermomix, but it's an investment that they need to put, you know, you need to prioritize your investments. Health is an investment. A Thermomix is investment. You need to prioritize those. What's most important to you? A night out in a restaurant or saving up for your health. What's important?

Well, and it's really interesting because my eldest can differentiate. He's really discerning now. So sometimes when he goes to his dad's and he's given food from a jar, he can't eat it as well or as easily. And yeah, I think it's, it's a really positive thing about the thermomix, the authenticity of everything that you're making. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So would there be any other

I don't know, emotional aspects. How does it make you feel to have a thermomix in your life? So I'll tell you what mine is in the sense that I am a control freak and just being able to take away a sense of, I guess, overwhelm. You know, I gave an example in a recent podcast where I couldn't eat something I bought from the butcher because I could taste the sweetness in it that just sent me spiraling in my head about, I know that that's artificial, therefore I shouldn't eat it.

So for me, that the thermomix and that control just means that I feel safe in my food choices. What about for you? What emotions do you align to it? me, it's all about being busy. I'm really busy. And I often get to the end of the day and I'm really tired. And the thought of cooking, the thought of working out what I'm going to eat would have driven me before to a packet.

The thermomix means that number one, I sit on a Sunday and I work out what I'm going to have. Six meals because I, as I say, I batch cook. So I've always got something in the fridge that I can just put on the hob for the really busy days or reheat in the thermomix. Let's not forget that that is a very, very good thing to do. And that means I've not burnt it. As you can see, you know, I get distracted and then I come down and the things anyway, the thermomix doesn't do that.

So I sit on a Sunday and I work out what I need. It makes me feel like I'm being a good person, that I've spent time working out what I'm gonna have in the week. And also it just relieves all of that pressure because I send my husband out for the ingredients, comes, bless him, I know, he comes back with the ingredients, so I know exactly what I'm gonna do, because I look and I say, oh yeah, I'm making that today. And as I am,

doing whatever I'm doing in the thermomix. I don't have to stop my life to think about it because it's prompting me all the time. I'm, the end of it is a fantastic tasting meal. It means that for me, it gives me that time. That's what it does. And you know, one of the things I absolutely love is that at the end of the cooking period, everything has been cleared away.

So all I have to do at the end of the cooking is wash up my Thermomix and it can wash up itself. But honestly, it's just a rinse under the tap in the dishwasher. And so I've cooked a meal. There's not stuff all over the place because I've got time to put things away and I know what I'm doing and I haven't forgotten an ingredient. That's brilliant. So final question with regards to the Thermomix.

If you had to describe it to an alien or somebody who didn't know what it was in the slightest, how would you describe it so that it was at least a little bit understandable? It is a kitchen gadget. That means that it's a tricky. It's tricky, isn't it? Because it's so much more than a It does everything apart from roasting.

It gives you access to thousands of recipes. It does the shopping for you and it cleans itself up. So if you are short of time and energy, then the Thermomix will do everything that having a chef in your kitchen will have done for you. The only thing you have to do is choose what you want to eat.

It is, it's true. And it even prompts you with some ideas on that anyway, doesn't it? It gets used to what you like. It does. It's intuitive. Okay. One more food question before we give everyone details about how they can contact you. If time, money, know, blue sky, was, you know, everything was possible, what would be the one meal that you would cook? My favorite meals is a curry. Yeah. That's what I love.

Where from? Indian? Are we talking Thai? No, I don't like Thai curries. I like a proper Indian curry. And I like the fact that as a menopausal woman, I can no longer eat a lot of chilli so that I can now adapt the curry. The curries, even the people in my family who think they like chilli never notice I haven't put chilli in my curries because there's so much flavour. And the fact that you grind your own spices at the beginning.

so that they are fresh. You know, you don't realize how horrible those dusty things are that you buy in the supermarket in comparison to fresh ground spices. I made my, I can't believe this, four and a half years with a thermomix. I made garam masala for the first time at the weekend. it's stunning. know, toast and roast those spices in the base, grind it up. Anyway, amazing. know it's one of my favorites. That's one of my favorites. We make a lot of curry.

Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for your time today. But before we go, we need to ensure that people can get in touch with you. So where can we find information? Where do we go? Where do we direct people? So go onto my website, which is www.foodforhealthyguts.com and the four is a number four. That's the best place to start on my website. There's loads and loads of recipes, loads of low carb recipes on there.

There's loads of blogs, loads of me just wittering on about things that I love. And there are click buttons all over the place. So everybody gets a 30 minute free discovery call with me. that is because you should try before you buy. You might not like me. know, why? It's not going to happen. Well, you know, so, so you absolutely need to have a conversation with me because, you know, food is emotional.

And you need to trust and like the person that you're going to spend a lot of time with over the next three months because all my clients say that they can hear me when they're not with me. I'm in their ear saying, you really want to make that decision? So you really do need to try before you buy. Yeah. And you've just, again, sorry, I am winding up, but you've just referenced three months. Is that the general timeframe that you work with people?

If someone is nervous, then we start with three months and then you can add on. But if you are someone who has IBS or acid reflux, or if you are someone that really wants to get to grips with your weight management, then I advocate working with me for six months, then you've got your accountability. That's really what this is all about. Working with me is accountability. Having to show up every two weeks and say, do you know what? It wasn't such a great couple of weeks.

Don't worry about it. exactly.

Sam

Jackie, it has been amazing. I really, really could speak to you for ages. There's so much more that I think we could cover. So I may ask you to come back. We may get questions. So I hope that it would be okay for me to forward those through to you if that's the case. And I would just encourage anyone who is listening to the podcast, if you want to know anything about how a low carb lifestyle could help you, then Jackie is definitely somebody to get in touch with.

Okay guys, so in the next episode, I'm going to be looking at and talking about cooking when it involves children. So actually what we want to cook for them and also maybe looking at getting them involved with the process as well. Please do keep the emails and messages coming in. It really helps me determine what we are gonna talk about, but also it does keep me accountable.

I'll keep you posted with all the things that I'm making, with the things that I've got in my cupboard. And please do share any new recipes that you might have tried because you never know, it might be very relevant for all of us. Don't forget my Facebook group. We'll put all the details of that into the show notes along with Jackie's, as I said earlier. And I look forward to hearing from lots of you in the future. So till next time, remember it's all about flourishing rather than floundering with food