Bare Root Girl

Tfw is finallllly LIVE 💥

Many hours and much love has gone into this magical collaboration with my bestie .nurture. And I’m so excited to share it with the world. Read more and listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Links are over in the TMF insta.

Let’s talk about stress support today (wohoo!) with my favorite nano particle thyroid supplement by .

✨ If you don’t read any further, I hope you’ll take away from this post that >>> our bodies are designed to deal well with stress ✨

Stress is an important part of our biology. Without it, we grow weaker and cells will atrophy rather than become robust. Healthy stressors like exercise, occasional fasting, and even eating plant foods are all forms of stress called “eustress;” they promote resilience is us when applied with balance 💪🏼

But the word stress gets a bad rap these days since the demands of our modern lives have taken us far beyond eustress and into a place where our bodies are triaging problems on a daily basis.

We badly need regular practices for stress management (my faves: restorative walks, healthy & connected conversation, hot baths in a quiet bathroom). And a fairly large percentage of us can also benefit from minerals to support the cascade of stress hormones overreacting in our bodies.

If you:

✔︎ Are unable to get at least 7 hrs sleep nightly 💤
✔︎ Have emotional or relationship struggles
✔︎ Are overweight
✔︎ Have a physically taxing lifestyle, both at work or at home
✔︎ Have financial concerns
✔︎ Have children 😅

What am I forgetting? Bc the true list is very longgg.

Enter: thyroid support with nano sized particles for better absorption.

This one, in particular, has a combo of selenium, copper, zinc, and iodine. Which, when taken together, help to support healthy thyroid function in the face of disregulated cortisol (the first big hormone impacted as a stress response). When cortisol is dumped regularly to help us manage stress, insulin is impacted, weight management becomes difficult, and even immune function will then suffer bc your thyroid will begin to underperform.

Disclaimer: please always consider having testing done before starting any supplementation regimen. That said, I’ve used this on myself and clients with great success.

If you’re curious about how whether you could benefit from this type of stress support, definitely DM me and we can chat more about whether it’s a fit for you!

In continuing the conversation of discipline as a form of self-care from a reel I shared a few days ago >> I love the concept of setting a minimum baseline.

Chances are you are already implementing this principle in certain areas and it’s just second nature:

Alcohol or coffee, yes ☕️🍷
Hard drugs, no 💊

All are mind-altering substances but we recognize there should be limits and we each choose where to draw that line.

For some reason, we often fail to apply this same principle to other aspects of our lives.

If I asked you if you were willing to get just 2 hours of sleep in an evening, you’d probably give me a hard ‘no’ (unless you’re one of my EDM friends out there 🥳). But are you ok with getting 5 hrs on a consistent basis even though you regularly feel exhausted?

Where is that minimum baseline set for you and what is the reason it’s there? Was it made consciously and deliberately?

❓Are you happy with where you’ve drawn it?

So while I’m not advocating for a perfectionist mindset all around, I think we could stand to reevaluate where these lines are drawn. What types of foods we’re consuming, the level of movement and activity we expect of our bodies each week, and even the quality of people we spend our time with.

I look at my minimum baselines as a standard to live by, a part of my personalized code of honor. I expect more of myself so that I can better support you in expecting more of yourself 💥

Swipe for this delicious springy side dish that could also be a main dish of you really wanted 😁🥕🥓

There is no slower path to where you want to get than to adopt an extremist mindset 😅

I used to reside there mentally. Not as a result of actually believing it worked, but more as a byproduct of being so terribly desperate to get better and lose the weight.

I see threads of this belief system woven throughout the teachings of very well-meaning educators and it hurts my heart 💔

An extremist mindset will most often make your relationship with food more difficult and disempowered. And I want nothing more for my clients than to reclaim their power, strengthen their inner knowing, and align more closely with who they truly are.

All-or-nothing thinking strips us of our individuality. So whether we’re talking wellness or some hot button topic, the idea that we should all be the same, eat the same, do the same, is only going to dull your inner light.

🔆 The fastest way to get where you want to go is to turn that inner light up to full brightness 🔆

I began to take back my power over food when I adopted the belief that only I could know what foods my body did best with. I set the rules. And I feel no shame over what others may think of what I am doing.

Like many things, the answers are not found in the extremes. They are more often found in the middle, and only you can find that middle for yourself.

I am an anti-diet wellness coach 🙋🏻‍♀️

Kicking off a new series here at BRG where I expand on some of the terms I’ll utilize if you work with me. There will be components relating to the traditional Webster-style definition but mixed together with my own personal approach, developed from many hours of study and 1:1 experience with clients.

First up: taking a look at the term “anti-diet” and what that approach means for our sessions together.

🙅🏻‍♀️ Diet culture says we should label foods for their health, therefore foods are “good” or “bad” for you. Certain diets seem to perform better and get *super fast* results (when really they just appear to based on fads/trends). Extremes, restriction, and deprivation mindsets foster an unhealthy relationship to food and in many cases, to our bodies, as well.

✨Anti-diet coaching pulls the focus away from traditional dieting mentality by:

• Avoiding labels, both of the way of eating and the foods themselves
• Practicing food neutrality
• Not dealing in extremes or deprivation
• Encouraging a strengthening of our inner knowing to develop a personalized way of eating

💭 Curious to hear from you: if you’ve lived in the diet culture world like I used to, what does the term “anti-diet” mean to you??

Do you miss your 20-something body?

I used to keep a pic of the stick thin 22 yo Angela in my desk drawer as a “goal body.” Back before I got really sick, before I gave into so much emotional, erratic eating. Before life had a chance to hit me hard.

🔸 But also before I had really even LIVED.

The pictured progression of our bodies tells the story of our lives.

Often times we want to bury pics from past — or current — stages, reject the experiences that changed what we see in the mirror. (for me: gaining and losing 100 lbs comes with a fair amount of stretched out skin and stretch marks 🥴)

But periodically looking at that pic had me in constant rejection of my current body.

The antidote >>>

No, I’m not going to tell you to suddenly love your body and/or all the hard experiences that brought you to where you are now (although there’s massive power to be found in doing that work).

🔸 What I do recommend is envisioning a new body that’s more powerful and resilient than the one you miss. Change what you see now by changing what you want for your physique.

Look forward rather than backward.

I put consistent effort into my new and better body. I get regular joy from my present 40 yo efforts and seeing what she can do, both in the gym and out of it, that my 22 yo self could not.

This post could alternatively be an encouragement to all women to *lift more.* Because all day long 💪🏼

Issuing a challenge to anyone who has enjoyed even one of my recipes to make this Grilled Potato Salad this summer. You’ll never go back to not grilling the potatoes first 🥔🥔🥔🥔 Recipe is linked in my profile!

No foundation, no SPFs, and no cleansers on this nearly 40 year old skin 😌

Sharing about my oil cleansing formula over in stories today. Always taking the unpopular path when it comes to my skin (and most other things too 🙃).

What have to done outside the norm for your skin that’s worked well??

New easy one for you! Creamy Avocado Ranch 🥑

Swipe for the recipe and hit the flag to save!

This is delicious as a dip or can be thinned out to make a creamy dressing.

Both traditional ranch and Mexican variations 🇲🇽

I make as-is for my one person household but it can easily be doubled or tripled.

When I first learned about neural pathways and how the brain learns *and unlearns* habits, my whole world was rocked 🤯

I had no idea that I had been working so hard to set myself back on a daily basis.

It’s a fairly complex topic relating to neurons in the brain and how they are built. But setting aside the complexity of biology: what’s important to know is that every action has a neural pathway in your brain. And related habits — those that have associations, like grabbing a snack + sitting down + turning on the TV — will tie neural pathways to form a thicker circuit. Add in a bad mood and you have 3 components (tv, food, mood) that wire a thick ropey🧬daily habit.

This framework explains both how the brain maintains efficiency (IE not having to think hard about *how* to sit on a couch every time) & also the strength of those patterns due to repetition.

Habits are, in fact, hard to break. And new habits are hard to build. But despite being hard, the methodology is quite simple.

🔸What you do regularly is what your brain will get better at.

Some of the ways I’ve built new neural pathways:

1️⃣ More healthy fats: nerves are lined with a fatty coating called myelin. The thicker this coating is, the more efficiently the nerves will wire & fire.

2️⃣ Minimizing old associations: the ex of eating while watching TV > an old habit that was not easy to break but instrumental in helping me to be more conscious when eating

3️⃣ Food swaps: I used to crave very specific things related to mood. Switching what I reach for or just abstaining and sitting with hunger cravings is one of the best practices I still use

4️⃣ Try new things: one of the easiest ways to break old patterns is to replace them, rather than trying to fight to stop them. Hate the gym? Come with me to a yoga class :D Climb a mountain. Try a dance class.

5️⃣ Access a new mood: a slightly more advanced approach, but one that is worth the effort. I spend time regularly deciding what mood I will be in. I get music on, I write, I drop into the space of the emotion I want to create. THEN I act. And those actions come from an entirely different place than if I hadn’t decided my mood beforehand.

On weight fluctuations & moving through disordered eating >>

Tbh this is not an easy post to write.

My journey with disordered eating has been a long and winding one. And I wanted to open up about what it’s looked like the last few years👇🏼

These photos were shot a year apart in 2022, 2021, and 2020. Exact same tank & jeans for reference’ sake.

A refresher for anyone new: I spent a lot of my adult life in a very emotional space when it came to my eating habits. Sometimes binging (when happy), sometimes starving (when sad), sometimes balanced (when I would feel ever-so-briefly in my power). Habits that begin in my 20s came to a head in my 30s due to how unhappy I was.

And while a combo of taking control of both 1️⃣my mind & 2️⃣my habits got me out of the destructive patterns I was in, these things do not disappear overnight.

2021 was a hard year. Possibly more difficult for me than 2020.

I’ve stuck with most of the good habits I had built. But the difficulty of life caused me to want to disconnect with my body.

It felt like too much to feel everything constantly.

So when an injury during a workout last year forced me to take months off, a combo of lower activity and trying to dull my senses led to more weight fluctuation than I had experienced in some time.

My ability to sit with unpleasant emotion weakened.

The drive to buffer grew again.

Being able to work out again certainly helped break this cycle. But movement is never enough on its own.

I’ve never had to dig myself out like I have this past year. To create the desire (again) to FULLY feel my life. Not shying away from any experience. Not wishing it away with food or drink.

Loving all of it.

🔸 Recommitting to the decision to love all that comes my way (the meaning behind a tattoo etched on my arm: “Amor Fate”) was what took that weight back off.

Not the gym.

Or counting calories.

✨ I lost the weight with my mind✨

If we are willing to fully feel our life experiences, we gain power over them. Food loses it’s grasp. And the weight can’t cling to the body any longer.

(And if it sounds like I’m encouraging you to be a Jedi — yes, this is very much what it must feel like to be one 😃)

One of my favorites from the archives: Blackened Salmon w Strawberry Mango Salsa 🍓🥭

Recipe is linked in my profile!

Supa easy & quick Strawberry Mango Ice Cream 🍨

Swipe for the recipe & hit the flag to save for later.

Fruity ice cream can be a pain since fruit contains so much water. Generally roasting is the best way to remove the water and concentrate the flavor but! I gave freeze dried fruit 🍓🥭 a try and it was a major success.

Simply blend the ingredients together while cold and churn right away. You’ll get a soft serve texture or you can move it to the freezer for a firm ice cream.

If you haven’t made my ice cream recipes before, you may be surprised by the raw eggs. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to warm and creature a custard base for it to work. This is the creamiest & dreamiest texture ice cream that holds well against iciness after frozen.

If you have concerns about salmonella, just give your eggs a wash with soap and water since salmonella lives on the outside of the egg. If you’re concerned about taste, don’t be! You won’t be able to tell at allll that there are raw eggs 😊

Finding some play this beautiful 4th of July 🏖

Pool party szn I’m full effect. Seeing with the besties this weekend and adding some new ones 📸 to the collection.

Happy 4th everyone!

A little Friday love to all my fellow friends who:

Are recovering perfectionists

Weren’t given love freely as a child

Haven’t been given love freely as an adult

Second guess even your best intentions

Wonder if everyone is as weird as you are inside

And are afraid to show up fully as yourself

But have a whole lot of love and kindness to give to the world 👭🏻

💪🏼 DESIGN THE BODY YOU WANT

Swipe for the before 👉🏼👉🏼

I lost control of my body for quite some time. I allowed my mood and cravings to take over and hold me hostage.

It stole my power away and before I knew it, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.

I took that power back when I started to make better food choices 🥦🥑🥩🥓 And the key being >> holding consistent over a long period, no longer allowing daily decisions to be stolen from me by compulsive, long-wired habits.

🔹 What started in the kitchen was able to be leveraged outside the kitchen 👊🏼🏃🏻‍♀️

More control translated to more energy, more strength, and more deliberate usage of the growing amount of energy that was building inside of me.

Regaining that power has opened doors I had thought were long closed. It’s a strong source that I can choose to channel into whatever activity, person, or pastime that calls to me most.

One of the ways I’ve chosen to utilize this energy is to transform my body into something stronger and truly unlike anything I’ve seen before in myself.

I’m so blessed to have found activities that bring me joy and combine those with some that push my limits so I can deliberately face discomfort.

🧘🏻‍♀️ Yoga has gotten me to my most flexible point ever and I surprise myself regularly in class with how my body can perform.

🧗🏻‍♀️ Hiking has built my heart endurance & recovery up to a point where I can sustain difficult activity and also maintain a low resting heart rate (a great data point for heart health🫀)

🏋🏻‍♀️ Lifting has built my gluts up quite a bit, which is fun since I come from a pretty flat-butted family 😁🍑

And most recently, I’ve been testing myself by hiring an x trainer to strengthen my knees (shoutout , my vivo twinner). My knees have limited my activity since I spent a good 10 years distance running and probably with subpar form 🥴 But it’s been yet a new experiment to explore utilizing different muscles and doing quite a few exercises that I do not love lbh.

Stay tuned cause I’m just getting started 💃🏻

How I’ve Used the Power of Constraint to Find More Food Freedom >>>

There’s a lot of controversy in the health & weight loss world about restrictive diets.Too much restriction can, in fact, drive unhealthy behavioral patterns and cause a more toxic relationship with food 🙅🏻‍♀️ (I’ve been there)

I believe that this happens most often when the decisions are not in our hands. When we blindly follow a recommend way of eating that we may not fully align with.

🔸Where the power can be found is in making active decisions about what restrictions you *want* to follow.

Take into consideration two scenarios:

1️⃣ You allow all foods with a hope for “moderation” (a restrictive diet “remedy” that I see touted a lot). You try to eat intuitively but since all foods are allowed, you likely gravitate towards those that are both habitual and also most addictive (processed/sugary/engineered-to-hook-you type foods). You struggle to listen to your body. Foods you know are best for your body never sound that appealing.

2️⃣ You put effort into learning the restrictions that work best for you & your lifestyle. You eliminate the foods that dull your senses and keep you detached from your own body’s needs. You begin to build your own way of eating that is tailored and honed because you can actually hear your body speaking to you.

You make the decisions ahead of time.

You are informed & in charge.

Crucial to this process is cutting out the foods that keep you in FOOD JAIL. You gradually move the slider to start incorporating more foods that *do* make you feel great, and in turn break those jail cell walls.

It can seem counter intuitive, yes.

These days, there is a very long list of foods I simply never eat. And to some, that constraint does not look like freedom. But I have genuinely never felt more free when it comes to my daily food choices. I am not eating on a whim, or driven by cravings, or as a reaction to my feelings.

👉🏼 My very deliberately curated “allowed” list of foods is also very long. And it’s delicious 😋

If you are curious about how to build your own flexible framework, don’t hesitate to DM me and we can chat.

A tough love post for anyone who complains about how healthier food isn’t as exciting or tells me that they can’t make this or that recipe due to some ingredient they don’t love the taste of 😒

Like my Grandma Castillo always scolded me: “eat to live, don’t live to eat.”

Don’t get me wrong, as a serious lover of quality food and artful cooking, I struggled with this concept for a veryyyyy long time.

I put so much pressure on most every meal to bring me joy and happiness.

>>> If this is where you are, I get it. Since at the time, my life was too stressful and sad to have my food disappoint me, too.

But I got to a point where I could no longer hang out in the cycle of indecision, copious web searching at meal times, and errors/disppointment with ordering choices.

The pressure I was putting on my meals made the stakes so effing high.

My meals were always letting me down.

🔑 It’s an interesting paradox that when we stop putting so much pressure on meals to be our primary source of pleasure in life, they begin to be all that much more enjoyable.

Couple that with removing the addictive, highly palatable foods and you will watch your pleasure sensors change entirely.

It’s important to note that I have made it one of my life missions to make nourishing food as enjoyable as possible. I don’t see anything wrong with this and food still brings me joy on a daily basis. But the key and *crucial first step* is to begin to separate the level of pleasure in your life with the pleasure you find in your meals.

When I began this journey, I set up a strict regimen that I followed almost perfectly for months. I decided to view food as fuel and while it was realllllly hard at first, it quickly got easier and even felt empowering.

🔹When you stop putting so much pressure on each bite, you take the power food held back into your hands. And that feeling trumps the most delicious meal I’ve ever had by 1000%.

The simplest water filtration tool💡💦

Every six months or so, I grab two new binchotan charcoal sticks to plop into individual gallons of water I keep on hand in the kitchen.

Binchotan a type of Japanese activated charcoal that’s extremely porous and binds to chlorine, fluoride, and heavy metals, while leaving behind important minerals.

The effectiveness decreases with use and volume of water being filtered regularly but the sticks can be boiled to refresh after about 3 months.

There are definitely other (possibly superior) filtration options. But for somewhere around $10 a piece, it’s the most sensible solution to keeping a majority of pollutants out of my water for the time being.

I generally buy bc I have used them for a long time and trust them. But they’re not difficult to find from many companies with a simple online search. Just look for larger sticks so the surface area is greater and can handle the vessel you’ll be keeping them in.

What’s your go-to water filtration solution? Curious to hear what you all prefer!

🍲 New green curry for you w full write up over on BRG!

Forget the disappointing store bought curry pastes. Food process a moderate length 😅 of ingredients for a super fresh and flavorful homemade paste that can be bulk prepped and frozen for later use.

Link to this Summer Veggies Green Curry recipe is in my profile.

I’m sharing a facial expression that’s a relatively new one for me in recent years. This is my “I like you” face 🥰

>>> Otherwise titled: “My Guard is Down”

We weren’t born with our defenses up. But many of us were conditioned throughout childhood (or for some of us: adulthood, as well) that it wasn’t safe to be vulnerable.

I was a sensitive child.

From a very young age, I knew I felt the full breadth of emotions and I felt them deeply. But punishments and yelling at home, combined with social awkwardness at school, made it so I began to shut this emotional range down 💔

I tried to conform to fit in (and hopefully be loved more)

What was buried in my emotional expression was forced to be channeled elsewhere. This mostly looked like widely varied emotional eating habits, over cardio-ing, and a drive to be thin so I could fit what I thought others expected of me.

I’m still sensitive. And I love it now 💓

Sensitivity is aliveness. Feeling a full range of emotion is what it is to be human. No fear of negative emotion, no clinging to “positivity only.” Take the bad and the good gets even better.

When I stopped burying my emotional depth in unhealthy habits, those emotions had no choice but to bob up. Like a beach ball trying to be forced under water, you can only hold it down for so long.

Some of it was ugly as it emerged.

But a lot of it was poignant and beautiful.

I started dropping walls.

I chose forgiveness > holding grudges.

I chose softness > spite

So here’s my soft face. I love this look on me. It feels like a version of me that had been hiding in there for years that was so happy to finally be let free.

(And summer freckles look so much better on a happy face than an angry one☺️)

On deck this week from the archives: Creamy Chicken & Artichoke Squash Bake 😋

One my my fave one-pan meals that feels perfect for summertime. If you haven’t made it, recipe is linked in my profile.

As a desert dweller, hydration can be a struggle at times.

I do quite a few helpful things like morning salty water and hydrogen tablets to boost the utilization of the water I do consume. But there are definitely some days where I live off Bubly seltzers cause I just can’t stand plain water most of the time 🥴

So it was the most wonderful discovery to come upon 8 years ago when I began eliminating grains that my body *no longer needed* the same quantities of water that it had previously.

🔹 I just stopped feeling thirsty very often at all.

Grains are very porous and will therefore pull water into the digestive track as they’re being digested. The process is not only a bit more taxing on the body when compared to protein and veggies, but it also asks that you hydrate more as a result.

Idk about you but there are days when I get a little worn out from all the components of self-care that I maintain.

Neverrrr would I go back to my old life where I did not take good care of myself but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

🔹 So eating in a way that keeps my body’s hydration needs lower is the absolute best hack I’ve found to have one less thing to worry as much about each day.

Are you well-hydrated?

👉🏼 You can gauge this by checking many external physical signs:

• Dry & brittle nails
• Dry or thin hair that splits easily
• Dry and/or imbalanced skin sebum (your body can overproduce oils in order to try and compensate for dry skin)

Naturally dewy skin was something I had previously thought was a pipe dream prior to finding more balance with my body’s hydration needs. Staying hydrated has been a key component in healing years of adult acne 😌

Note: for the post, I did set aside the other negative impacts of grains and nutrient/hormonal factors that can impact our hair, skin, and nails. But hydration is still a main variable in the equation. Aaaand while we’re at it >>> hydration should always be approached by “drink when you’re thirsty” rather than the 8 glasses of water per day bs 😠 Limiting grains makes listening to the body’s signaling all that much easier.

Why I use my infrared sauna 5-6 days a week >>>

Yes, I love the physical impact of lymphatic detoxification, improved cardiovascular health, the mimicking of low level movement/exercise and all those accompanying benefits. We should be sweating regularly!

Feeling achey? 🤕
Angry? 😡
Need a good cry? 😢
Drank too much? 🍷
Sauna solves all 😌

>> BUT! The main reason I regularly sauna is for the ***mental benefits***

The sauna is one of the most easily accessible ways to put yourself up against the elements and test your limits, a concept so foreign in our extremely comfortable modern lifestyles.

Being in an environment where we no longer have perfect, thermostat-regulated temperature control is a challenge most can’t handle.

When in these types of situations, the mind will almost certainly revolt. And what comes up for you is the junk you have most likely been avoiding dealing with 😅

I’ve had sooo many sessions where I cried, breathed through it, or grabbed my laptop so I could flesh it out with some writing.

I’ve become besties with both the hot 🔥 and the cold ❄️ (A super helpful thing for the extreme temps I face each Phx summer.) And have grown both my mind & body in the process.

If you wanna start👇🏼

You don’t have to spend thousands and take up a good chunk of space in your home. There are quite a few options popping up for around $200 on Amazon. You tuck into a little box and get the added benefit of some Slughorn vibes. I had one and it served me well for a few years. Or if you have a bit more to spend, companies like and are making powerful infrared sauna blankets you can roll out onto your bed and get cozy with (I have a MiHigh). Make sure you get an infrared, they heat from within and give the most benefits. Start slow but always crank it up to as much as you can handle within an hours’ time.