MAY
02

Meet Team Puremamas!

I’ve been crushing on the ladies of Puremamas for some time now. I love-love-love the recipes, the photos, the style – it’s a beautiful space full of healthy inspiration. After reading the blog I want to run to the farmers market and fill my kitchen with veggies and fruits and spend the entire day making healthy meals for loved ones! Puremamas founder and entrepreneurial mama Juli Novotny (pictured below) is truly a gem. If you haven’t checked out the site yet, I implore of you to do so… after you read the interview with she and her two contributors, Meredith Baird and Christine Dionese, of course! 

the puremamas story

PUREMAMAS is my new, consistent outlet for sharing recipes, health and a clean food lifestyle with people. That’s my passion in life and it’s a blessing that I know my purpose and passion at this point in my life. So, I just go with it and share info. I love it. It keeps me happy, sane and feeling good about life and myself {even though I don’t make a living doing it}. My goals is to simply share recipes and tips that have helped me stay on my healthy path. The rest is up to parents and up to us. I don’t force or coerce or challenge. It’s not my style. And nobody will change their habits because you told them to. People find a healthy path when they are ready and when they want to. There is no reason to be pushy or a know-it-all. I don’t like that approach.

how did you + Meredith + christine happen?

OK, this question is SUPER difficult. I don’t remember at all. I do know I met both these lovely ladies through the World Wide Web. I think they were both readers and wrote me telling me something about my blog that they either liked or enjoyed?

And then we got talking…Meredith and I just started blabbing via facebook messaging. We couldn’t stop talking. We felt like friends from day 1. And would just talk about life, etc. We are weirdly similar on way too many levels. I’m a bit older than her but I don’t feel like it at all. We just have so much to talk about all the time {food mainly, spirituality, love and life}. Minus the kid thing {maybe someday – ha}.

And Christine just amazed me because she is a health professional yet loves the kind of recipes I shared on my blog. She is a well-rounded professional that focuses on alternative things which is RIGHT up my alley. She reached out to me at the perfect time. I was wanting to talk more about health but didn’t feel qualified to say the things I wanted to say. So Christine offered to take on these posts and share her wealth of food therapy knowledge with us. I was just so happy to have her as part of the team. I’m so lucky!

goals + vision for Puremamas this year:

There are so many goals. Too many! I can’t live up to all of them. One for ME, Juli, is the photography. I want to kick it up a notch. I also want to do more posts and include more interviews {like this one} in order to share cool people and experiences with my audience. My blog is NOT about ME as a person or my diet or my food, it’s about health and eating better; It’s about motivation and inspiration to feed the whole family right. So, I get tired of seeing my own recipes and photos and hearing my own dialogue. I want to share other people’s stories and ignite conversation. It’s really important to me.

any advice for aspiring food photographers?

Just try and try and keep trying. You need light. Somebody once told me that and it has changed everything for me. Your food must be in indirect light. A lot of it.

the best part of my day is: 

Ha. I think around 4pm. My kids and I all come home from long days together. I give them a shower and we all get into comfy clothes. It’s our time to unwind. I usually leave the house with my boys at 9am and don’t come home until 4p {they are pooped and ready for home by this time}. I make them healthy food and they usually watch some kind of show or they play LEGOS separately. I often play with them or watch TV with them. Sometimes I pour a glass of wine. It’s a really nice bonding time for me and my boys plus it’s finally calm and full of super healthy food. I can’t tell you how happy I am about how clean my children eat. We recently went 100% gluten-free and it’s been so wonderful to watch them crave healthy foods and try new things and even their behavior has changed for the better!!!

when do you feel oh-so-you?

When I’m in the kitchen making food. I never make the same meal. EVER {unless it’s for my kids} and I never follow recipes. I get creative. I zone out and try fun experiments. Also, when I follow this daily routine I feel most me! Also, when I do my 100% raw food cleanses I feel SO me. It brings me back to my 20s and my super happy independent {not mommy} days ;) Ask me this question in a few years and I’m sure I will say something about being a MOM is when I feel most me. But my kids are so young that it hasn’t quite hit me like that yet ;)

your family’s current favorite foods:

My fav food – spiralized zucchini. I am obsessed. Also homemade fresh nut milk. It’s my dream food. I drink way too much of it. My sons? Hmmm, good question, I’d say watermelon, frozen bananas, kefir and poached eggs.

meet Meredith Baird

Raw foods chef, instructor, author (*giving away a copy of her hot-off-the-presses book next week!!!) and the creative director at Matthew Kenney. Find her full bio here; leave love notes on her Tumblr here; and see her creative mind in action via her Instagram feed.

impeccable style inspires wellness by:

Design inspires wellness because good design gives order and peace to your state of mind- whether or not you realize it or not. Good design is calming because it is functional and brings structure to the chaos that we live in. I think about this a lot. It is very hard for people who have chaotic lives, or don’t have the means to bring order to their world – poverty… how can you focus on wellness when you are just struggling to survive? We are so fortunate (probably anyone reading this). The tools that we have to wake up – buy fresh produce, use the juicer, get on your MAC, drink your filtered water, go to the well designed yoga studio etc. – all the little items that we use on a daily basis to design our lives the way we want are SUCH A LUXURY. In saying this, I do think that there are a lot of people out there who DO have the means to live a life designed with purpose and organization who choose to ignore the details. I believe that diseases breeds in chaos and disorder.

if you could prepare a meal for anyone:

Hmmm… this is a tough one. There are a lot of people that are alive that I would love to make meals for on the business end of things- ha! ;-) But, probably my dad- he passed away from cancer when I was 12. No one enjoyed food more than he did. He ate so slowly and purposefully – never snacked- savoured every bite- and was always so grateful for any meal put in front of him. I also wish that I knew what I know now so that I could have fed him healthy food when he was sick. We always had nurses feeding him “good southern meals” that were SO far from healthy…

staying healthy on the road

When on a plane or in transit- I eat less and drink a lot of water. My go to snacks are apples, almonds and dark chocolate. I think not over eating is key when you are on the move. People love to “indulge” when they are on vacation- or use traveling as an excuse to cheat- I feel the opposite. Give your body a break, and just get in a lot of good liquid.

If I am in another culture where food is the main event- I will try things that aren’t in my normal repertoire- but I never over do it. Just because I’m in Paris doesn’t mean I’m going to wake up and eat 2 croissants, but I’ll probably have a few bites!

the best way to spend a Sunday is:

My ideal Sunday is – exercise in the morning, a great cup of coffee or tea, a refrigerator full of fresh produce to make juice and an amazing salad for lunch, and lying out in the sun (with my face covered) surrounded by books and magazines.

meet Christine Dionese

When I think of the kind of doctor I want on my health & wellness team, I think of Christine. She’s SO SMART!! Up on all the latest & greatest in the medical field paired with integrative, holistic and traditional forms of medicine. She also has a great site called Garden Eats shared with her mama that’s all about creating an organic kitchen gardening.

mainstream medicine goes holistic

My ultimate vision for the medical field is that integrative, environmental medicine will drive the creation of all future care systems and technologies. Some skeptics call my vision for the field an unreachable utopia rather than an attainable force of change (as I call it!). The way I see it, the field will become a place where science and discovery unite with human intuition and wellness… Medical schools will teach their students how to evolve as compassionate healers rather than standardized technicians… That primary care providers will develop the foresight (quickly) if they are to survive, (to remain useful to patients), that they must evolve into integrative health specialists who offer a myriad of services aimed at the discovery of their patient’s underlying health concerns.

what do you eat when you’re super-busy?

Super busy equals me having the right balance of immuno-endocrine supporting foods with comfort food snacks. I love fresh juices that combine seasonal greens, coconut water and adrenal herbs such as sea buckthorn, maca and ginger. Snacks, let’s see, Juli’s Kookie Karma Kookies! (wink). My fave go-to meals are homemade power “sauce and spreads”- I love to blend seasonal greens with herbs, nuts and sheep cheese. I can literally spread this on everything in sight when I need a flavor-packed, nutrient dense meal. I also love chopped up coconut flesh sprinkled with pine nuts, cinnamon and blood orange slices. With these foods I’m feeding my brain while sucking up good muscle energy!

I am inspired by:

Risk takers, thought leaders, lifestyle designers and philosophers who are more concerned with sharing mind-blowing, ideas and tools for society rather than “fitting in” or being “PC”… TED talks, human rights advocates like Ken Cook of The Environmental Working Group, Jeffery Bland, co-founder of the functional medicine movement, the modern day, organic and local food movement as a means to raise sociocultural, collective consciousness, author and teacher, Jack Kornfield.

a quote to live by

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual. -Hemingway