Who am I?
Hello and welcome to Cinnamon Eats! I’m Naz and I live with my husband Joe in England. Before that we lived in Michigan, U.S.A for about 2 years but we’re originally from Australia! As you can see we’ve moved around a fair bit over the past few years and I know we will be moving again in future!
Before I share with you my personal story to health I want to take a moment to let you know WHAT Cinnamon Eats is all about and how it can help you!
What is Cinnamon Eats?
“Paleo Food Made Simple” is what Cinnamon Eats is about.
Not sure what Paleo is exactly? I won’t go into too much detail, there are others out there that have done an amazing job at this already like this person, this person and this person. To me personally, Paleo is about eating nutrient dense foods (e.g. bone broths, organ meats, grass-fed meats) and eliminating those foods which are problematic (e.g. gluten, refined sugars, vegetable oils). It is about sourcing local and organic produce where possible, but it is also about enjoying life and being able to eat a Paleo muffin, or have a Paleo cake for your birthday. Paleo is a lifestyle NOT a diet.
Whether you’ve been doing Paleo for a while or if you’ve just found it, you will eventually come to find out that knowing how to cook and having go to recipes on hand is extremely important to making this lifestyle work. This is where Cinnamon Eats can help you! Sure nowadays there are a lot of companies out there selling paleo friendly foods and snacks but learning to enjoy cooking and to have recipes that you can fall back on will give you the confidence and ability to make this a sustainable lifestyle.
How Can Cinnamon Eats Help You?
Cinnamon Eats aims to provide you with a variety of recipes, ranging from savoury to sweet, quick to make, to taking a bit more time, all of which will help you along your Paleo journey. I believe that eating this way should be enjoyable and the foods you eat should be YUM! Once you get over your fear of fats and the fact that pasta and bread are not your only options for lunch and dinner, your world will open up to a whole new way of eating.
Take a look at some of the delicious recipes I’ve created for you on this blog…
Butternut Squash Beef Chili Stew
Pomegranate & Mint Chicken Salad
Pumpkin Spiced Iced Chai Latte
Paleo Carrot Pancakes with Homemade Coconut Butter
In short Cinnamon Eats will help you:
- – Learn how to cook easy and tasty Paleo meals.
- – Provide you with go to recipes that are quick to make and which can be easily made in bulk and frozen.
- – Be more confident and adventurous in the kitchen.
- – WOW your family and friends with delicious meals and decadent desserts.
How to Connect with Me?
First up, you can sign up to my mailing list to make sure you keep up to date with all my latest recipes and posts. Just click here to subscribe.
You can also find me at the following places online:
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Want to know more about me and how I turned to Paleo? Then read on …
What’s My Story?
Growing up I was lucky to have a mum who loved to cook and who instilled this love in me and love for my cultural food (Persian). I ate organ meats, homemade broths and fermented vegetables and my sisters and I would fight over the bone marrow. But I also grew up eating fast food, soft drinks, sugary sweets, bread lathered in margarine and foods cooked in vegetable oils. Sure it may not have happened all the time but those things were also part of how I grew up.
It wasn’t until I started university that things really took a turn for the worse. I grew up loving food but I never cooked while I was living at home and then suddenly I was moving to a new city on my own with no skills in the kitchen! I mean ZERO! I survived on a diet of 2-minute noodles (think Ramen) and canned everything! I didn’t even know how to hard boil an egg! I ate food from the cafés at the university and had no problem eating fast food or take out. I also fell into the trap of the low-fat, whole-grain, skinny soy latte mindset that it seemed most people around me had fallen into.
Fast forward a few years to when I got married. I still really didn’t know how to cook the way I do now but at this point I wasn’t just dealing with the inability to cook but I was suffering from constant digestion issues and lack of energy throughout the day. I believe most of my digestive problems stem from the fact that I basically survived on meal replacement shakes for 3-4 months prior to my wedding, basically I was drinking my food for that period of time! I saw doctor, after doctor but no one could tell me what was wrong with me. I decided I had better learn how to cook properly, convinced that I needed to focus on my low-fat, healthy-whole grain diet, but of course there were days when I was too tired to cook so frozen meals became a staple in our house as did pasta and store bought pasta sauces. There was no butter or animal fats to be found in our house but rather margarine and vegetable oils. The only saving grace was the olive oil I used in salad dressings.
I continued to suffer but at this point this had become my “normal”. Everywhere I looked and every thing I read pointed to the fact that the way I ate was the right way. I was avoiding artery-clogging-saturated fats and eating low-fat everything! I was eating whole-grain cereal with soy milk for breakfast, whole-grain sandwiches with margarine, low-fat cheese and pre-packaged deli meat for lunch and pasta with store bought sauce for dinner.
In June 2011 everything I thought I knew about food and what we should be eating started to change. Here I was living in a new country (America), at this point I had become more adventurous in the kitchen and decided that I actually really did love to cook, Joe was working and I couldn’t due to visa restrictions so I decided to start a blog sharing about life in a new country and sharing my recipes. Of course I was still eating the same things I’d always had except that we were avoiding High Fructose Corn Syrup because it was the one thing nearly everyone had warned us against before we moved to the States!
I was still suffering from my digestion problems and sought out more testing, again nothing conclusive came out of those tests. At this point I was beyond frustrated at the lack of answers I was getting so I decided to finally seek out answers for myself, which is when I landed on a program called ‘I Quit Sugar’. It’s basically an 8 week program that helps you quit sugar and help you get over your sugar and carb cravings which I really needed! I proceeded to do the program and after 8 weeks I felt significantly better, not only did I feel better but I had made some BIG changes to the way I ate. For one thing I got rid of my vegetable/seed oils and margarine and replaced these with butter and olive oil to cook with (I still wasn’t using animals fats to cook with at this stage), I also swapped my low-fat dairy for the full-fat equivalent, all at the recommendation of the program.
I was feeling so much better than before but I wasn’t exactly sure why and wondered if I could feel even better than I was. Which is when I stumbled upon the Whole30 program. At first it seemed quiet daunting and I wasn’t sure If I could pull it off but I did and by the end of it I not only discovered that I was intolerant to certain things like gluten and refined sugars but that I also felt better when I cut out the dairy from my diet and those whole-grains and legumes! I was discovering Paleo and I was falling in love with it.
Of course over these past few years my Paleo has changed. I now include some dairy in small amounts in my diet (hard cheeses like REAL parmesan and feta) and I also eat white rice occasionally. I also firmly believe that this is a lifestyle and not a diet. I believe that everyone’s Paleo is different and that it’s up to the individual to find out what that is. I believe that other life style factors like sleep, stress and exercise are KEY factors to this lifestyle and when one area is neglected the other areas suffer.
So take a moment to look around and discover just how fun and delicious Paleo food can be! And make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any delicious upcoming recipes!
Thank you for stopping by! 🙂
DISCLAIMER: The information found on this site is purely for educational and informational purposes. It is intended as a guide to help you make your own decisions based on your health while doing your own research and working in conjunction with your health care provider. This site is not a substitute for medical treatment or diagnosis.
