What is an Ancestral Diet?
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As I started learning more about health and decided to start taking mine more seriously, I immediately assumed that the best way to care for myself was by the narrative I had heard my whole life - low fat, low calorie, lots of salads, lean meats, almond milk, sugar-free, etc., you name it.
We’ve all heard it. Often times we still hear it. I spent so much time chasing skinny, that I honestly couldn’t have told you what it meant to be nourished.
I’m so grateful for a random Instagram post I ran across one day. I followed an account that talked about the importance of being nourished. Thus began a slow but very eye-opening process. I started to heal my body. I started prioritizing feeling good over fitting into a certain size of jeans and a six-pack. It was incredible to watch the transformation. My body started to open up, I started to feel more confident and more alive, and my anxiety and depression started to melt away. I started to care for my body from a place of self-love rather than self-hate. I started prioritizing real, nourishing foods, as God intended them to be. I started prioritizing an ancestral diet and lifestyle.
What is an ancestral diet?
I like to think of an ancestral diet as foods in their simplest form - things our ancestors were eating hundreds of years ago. This doesn’t mean we don’t cook, or that we don’t ever eat processed foods. We love things like beef jerky sticks and a good chocolate bar. It just means that the ingredients contain only whole food sources. I like to try to find foods that are local, in season, and grown/raised in a healthy, nourishing, sustainable way. Whenever possible, we buy organic, local, pasture-raised, or grass-fed.
Some of our favorite ancestral foods:
Pastured eggs
Grass-fed beef, pastured pork, pastured chicken
Bone broth
Collagen and gelatin-rich foods
Raw or vat-pasteurized dairy
In season produce
Properly prepared grains
What we avoid in an ancestral diet
I try not to be too strict with food, especially after a history of struggling with an eating disorder. I love the idea of “intuitive eating,” but sometimes that can be a bit of a free-for-all. So I like to combine intuitive eating with the principles of ancestral eating, and I find that is where I’m healthiest and happiest - both physically and mentally. While I try not to strictly consider foods off limits, there are certain things we avoid for the sake of our health because they don’t meet our quality standards for food.
Foods we avoid:
Seed oils: things like canola, soybean, sunflower, vegetable, grapeseed… you get the idea
Processed foods in bright colored packaging. Like I said, sometimes we love a good beef stick, chocolate bar, or popped corn, but I always make sure to read the label and check ingredients.
Refined sugars: any type of sugar that isn’t organic, high fructose corn syrup, or anything where sugar is one of the first ingredients
Conventional dairy
What we eat in a day
Every day varies, depending on which season we’re in, schedules, and whatever is sounding good. But here’s a general breakdown of what a day of eating in our house typically looks like:
Breakfast:
3-4 pasture-raised eggs
Sauteed seasonal squash
Ground pork sausage from a local farm
Raw milk latte with collagen and cinnamon
Lunch: We typically eat leftovers from dinner the night before, but when we don’t…
Sliced organic turkey
Raw carrot salad
Cottage cheese
A slice of long-fermented sourdough
Dinner:
Organic chicken or grass-fed beef
In-season vegetables
Snacks:
Gut-healing gummies
Chomps beef sticks
A2 yogurt with homemade granola
Bone broth with coconut aminos and seasonings
Ancestral lifestyle habits
Beyond just prioritizing an ancestral diet with the foods we eat, we also make sure to implement ancestral practices into our day-to-day. Here are some habits we’ve been incorporating that have helped improve our quality of life:
Time in nature: the average American spends 90% of their time inside. This is damaging to our moods, circadian rhythm, and our overall health. We make sure to prioritize getting outside - yes, even when it’s cold - getting sunshine in our eyes, breathing in fresh air, and walking around barefoot in nature.
Sleep routine: I used to stay up to the wee hours of the night, and then wake up early, work out, go to work, come home, and do it all over again. I was living in a constant state of fight or flight. In the last couple of years, I've learned how important it is to have a consistent bedtime routine. It can look different for everyone, but for me, I like to sip some good tea, put my phone down, lay on my acupressure night, and unplug our wifi. This helps me to wind down and sleep better every night.
Community: I think we as a society vastly underestimate the power of community. It has become all too easy to let relationships be surface-level as we have become so engrossed in our phones, but it is so important to find a good community of friends that have similar beliefs and interests as you that you can spend quality, face-to-face time with.
A non-toxic home: This was not an overnight change. I’m a big believer in habit stacking, meaning that I make a habit out of one small practice and then build on top of it, rather than trying to overhaul my life. The same was true for our home as we switched out toxic products for non-toxic products. As one item ran out, I replaced it with something less toxic. And our house still isn’t 100% non-toxic, but I’m slowly working our way up to it!
These things might seem a little complicated as you first implement them, but even with busy schedules, it’s become just a regular part of our day-to-day. We are in no way perfect, but we know that every deposit we make into our slower, ancestral, lifestyles will all add up. In the same way, any deposit we make into a toxic bucket will later to our overall toxic load and long-term sickness. What are your thoughts on an ancestral lifestyle? Let me know!
