In this episode, I sit down with Katie Kimball, founder of KitchenStewardship.com.
Katie has shared her journey to real food and natural living for over 7 years at Kitchen Stewardship, a blog that encourages other moms to take baby steps to better nutrition for their families while balancing their limited time and budget.
Along with her 4 children, she has created the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse to help other parents teach their kids to cook, so that they too can get a little break (and raise healthy children who know how to cut, cook AND eat their vegetables). She has also written 8 eBooks to date, including the popular Healthy Snacks to Go.
Baby Steps to Switching to Real Food
Katie Kimball offers this advice for fellow moms seeking a healthier kitchen:
1. Give Yourself Some Grace
Creating a healthy lifestyle is a journey, and it’s not easy to do all at once. Rest assured that nobody is perfect, and making the switch to real food takes time.
2. Look for Something that Takes Minimal Effort & Make a Big Impact
Rather than trying to overhaul everything at once, Katie recommends focusing on something small that affects your family’s diet on a regular basis. Start with something small like replacing cereal for breakfast a couple times a week or replacing packaged potato chips with nuts and dried fruit.
3. Basic Food Staples to Keep on Hand
When time is running short to make a wholesome meal for your family, it’s hard to turn to healthy options. It’s for that reason that Katie Kimball keeps these healthy staples on hand in her kitchen:
1. Homemade yogurt
2. Chicken Stock (for soups)
3. Frozen fruit and healthy smoothie ingredients
4. Nuts and dried fruit
5. Cheese
6. Snackable veggies like celery
Katie Kimball’s Experience with Whole 30
The Whole 30 is a 30-day diet is intended to remove food groups that can promote inflammation, and in the process, kill your cravings for artificial sweeteners and processed food. Katie Kimball and her husband have each tried this method of eating with great success. The benefits they have experienced include:

weight loss (without feeling hungry)
resetting their palette to curb negative cravings
gut health reset

Better Than a Box
Katie Kimball has written an excellent book about replacing processed food with real food alternatives. In it, she has reverse engineered many common store-bought favorites like casseroles, soups, and desserts—even Velveeta cheese!
The result of her process is a book of excellent, healthy recipes that can replace your traditional meal-in-a-box choices from the store. Not only that, in the first 80 pages of the book, she explains how to reverse engineer your own recipes, a skill that goes beyond the recipes in the book.