Living Ancestral Health: Diet, Cohousing and Unschooling

Nourish Balance Thrive

One of the best things about doing this podcast for the past seven years has been how our guests have shaped nearly every aspect of my life and the lives of my family. Over the years my wife Julie and I have built an ancestral lifestyle we believe to be most conducive to health, connection, and longevity, largely influenced by the brilliant guests we’ve interviewed right here. The process has been nothing short of an adventure, and it continues to unfold.

On this podcast, I’m joined by my wife, food scientist Julie Kelly to talk about how we’ve taken everything we’ve learned about health, wellness, and ancestral living to create a home life that truly supports and sustains our family. We talk about how we eat, prepare meals, and educate our kids and changes we’ve made over the years. Julie shares the immense value she’s derived from a very specific type of psychotherapy, and we discuss how our practice of managing stress has evolved. We also give an update on our adventures in cohousing, and the number one factor that we’ve learned will make or break cohousing relationships.

Here’s the outline of this interview with Julie Kelly:

​​[00:00:17] Ayla is 6 months old; the birth experience.

[00:02:21] Podcasts with Lily Nichols, RDN: How to Optimise Nutrition for Pregnancy and Real Food for Gestational Diabetes with Lily Nichols.

[00:03:13] How our eating has evolved over time.

[00:04:04] Podcast: How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy, with Herman Pontzer, PhD.

[00:04:22] Meal prep and shopping. Our eBook: What We Eat.

[00:07:14] Justin Sonnenberg.

[00:07:37] Lucy Mailing, PhD; Podcasts: 1. How to Optimise Your Gut Microbiome, 2. Microbiome Myths and Misconceptions, 3. Rewilding the Gut: Restoring Ancestral Diversity to the Microbiome.

[00:09:17] Simon Marshall's Stress Audit; Podcast: How to Manage Stress.

[00:11:31] Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP); Podcast: Healing and Transformation with Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), with Jason Connell. Learn more about working with Jason.

[00:16:27] Book: It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self, by Hilary Jacobs Hendel.

[00:18:33] Forest School.

[00:21:58] Book: Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, by Peter Gray; Podcast: Free to Learn: Unleashing the Instinct to Play, with Peter Gray, PhD.

[00:22:36] Books: The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, and The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn, by Alison Gopnik, PhD.

[00:24:54] Book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein.

[00:25:00] Cohousing; Podcast: Contemplating Cohousing: A Paradigm for Modern Day Tribal Living.

[00:25:07] Book: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

[00:26:13] Article: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake, by David Brooks.

[00:26:25] Podcast: The Postmenopausal Longevity Paradox and the Evolutionary Advantage of Our Grandmothering Life History, with Kristin Hawkes, PhD.

[00:29:54] Our experience with Workaway.info.

[00:38:38] Our Workaway profile.