The Bossticks - How To Heal Through Food, Raise Strong & Capable Children, & Think Outside The Box Ft. Serenity Kids Founders Joe & Serenity Carr

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

#492: On today's episode we are joined by the founders of Serenity Kids, Joe & Serenity Carr. The duo join the show to discuss how to heal and grow through food, how to raise strong and capable children, and what it takes to think outside the box. The duo also discuss their journey as brand founders and what it's taken to grow and scale a highly successful business in an established yet outdated category.  Use code SKINNY for 15% of your first order of Serenity Kids at https://glnk.io/40px/laurynbosstick To connect with Serenity Kids click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential This episode is brought to you by Just Thrive Just Thrive products have more clinical research than just about anyone else in the industry. Enter Just Calm–The breakthrough new stress and mood support formula from Just Thrive. Get 15% off at Justthrivehealth.com with code SKINNY. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront Wealthfront is a financial services company that makes building long-term wealth delightfully easy. Open an account today at www.wealthfront.com/skinny to get a $50 bonus when you invest $500 or more. This episode is brought to you by Pique Tea Pique is your source of beauty from within. Their cutting-edge tea and supplement formulations are crafted from nature, refined by artisans, and perfected with science. Got to www.piquetea.com/skinny to receive 5% off your first order. This episode is brought to you by OSEA It's important to prep your skin to stay hydrated and smooth with safe, clean products. OSEA skincare products help nourish, soften, and smooth your skin to keep you glowing from head to toe. Go to https://oseamalibu.com/ to get 10% off your first order with code PINKSEAWEED. This episode is brought to you by Everlywell  The Everlywell Women's Health Test measures eleven biomarkers known to play a role in your overall health and wellness, and checks for any abnormal levels that may be keeping you from feeling your best. Go to Everlywell.com/skinny to get 20% off an at home test. Produced by Dear Media

The following podcast is a dear media production. All right. So I recommended this the first time I had a baby. And I still recommend this the second time after I had a baby. And that is testing your hormones. That has changed the game for me. I remember the first time I tested my hormones and the doctor told me, even if I ate perfect quote unquote and worked out every day,

I still wouldn't lose weight. because there were issues with my hormones and my thyroid. And so I was so relieved to have that test. And the second time being postpartum, I took a test at home. And the test that I used is ever really well. So they have at-home lab test that can help you get the knowledge and support you need so you can become healthier. The one that I would recommend is the at-home women's test. And basically it's a comprehensive hormone panel for women at all stages.

So you can test and measure your hormones, your antibody levels, and you can just check for any abnormal levels that may be keeping you from feeling your best. So what you do is it's like a little finger prick sample collection and then you do a saliva sample collection and you send it in. It's literally so easy, okay? They also have like a food sensitivity test. You can go on their site and check it out. I'm a huge fan of the site and I feel like everyone who's listening to this podcast will be too. So you can just measure all your 11 biomarkers. And I think it's so smart to just know where you're at with your hormones and your food sensitivity. You can collect your sample, use the prepaid shipping label, you mail the test back to a certified lab,

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Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. We essentially mapped the nutritionals of all organic baby food pouches on the market and just looked at how much fat, how much protein, how much sugar.

and like created these averages. And the stats were terrifying. I mean, the average organic baby food pouch, nine grams of sugar. Nine might not sound like a lot. I was wondering, I'm like, from a baby's body to a grown-up body, does that exactly translate? So I called a couple of my doctor friends. And they're like, yeah, add a zero to that.

All right, all right. Welcome back to the skinny confidential him and her podcast. Today we're talking kids. We're talking toddlers. We're talking parenting. And we're talking all those things. with the founders of Serenity Kids. You can expect Serenity Car and Joe Carr. They're married to give us all the details when it comes to babies, toddlers, parenting tips, tricks,

how to keep your kids healthy and eating optimal. I think this episode is not just for parents. I think you could totally listen if you don't have kids. We talk about sort of what to expect to. I wish I had heard this episode before I had kids. This is one of those episodes that you're going to want to take notes. I'm just saying, I also just think they get it when it comes to children. They really are practitioners. Not only are they parents, they have a daughter named Serenity, they're also the founders of this incredible baby food company called Serenity Kids. I personally feed Zaza, their broccoli puffs every single day. It's legit, like, her favorite thing ever. They're these broccoli puffs and they're tiny, and I bring them, like in my stroller. I'll bring them in my

purse in the car. She loves them. She screams puffs like every single day. Anyways, let's get to this episode. But first, let me tell you about Serenity and Joe. They are both the co-founders and CEOs of Serenity Kids Baby Food and they're on a mission to promote wellness starting with the first bite. And their story is absolutely incredible about how they're transforming the baby food industry by developing innovative nutrient dense products because every bite counts. On that, note, let's hear all things kids, parenting toddlers with Serenity and Joe. This is the skinny confidential, him and her. We're having this thing.

I've talked about it before on the podcast where we put our daughter to bed. She's like winding down. Michael just gives her like a nice warm bath. I'm reading her book. She had a nice good dinner, but sometimes she eats it, sometimes she doesn't. Right. And so like the frequency music is on. The dogs are in the bed.

The blankets are down. Everything's ready. And all of a sudden she goes, Toast. Toast. Toast. And I'm like, I literally just fucking offered you 800 things downstairs. How can you be asking me for toast?

Puffs, toast. Puffs, toast. And then it's juice. And then she'll go to sleep. Usually we'll try to give her a little piece of something. And then at three in the morning, rice. Oh, no. So I'm so happy to have you guys on here because you just said a lot of mothers and

fathers of toddlers don't think their kids are eating enough. And it's really hard to gauge someone that can't communicate. So I think we'll just hop right into this episode. And maybe you can share some tangible tips and tricks for parents out there who are struggling. Yeah. So we really like big little feelings on Instagram. I don't know if you guys have seen them yet, but they're awesome. And I took their toddler feeding class and my mind was blown. So we took, get to heart and we started doing that with our kid. She was maybe right around early two. She's three and a half now. And I didn't realize that the lack of power those kids feel with not being able to make their own food is a big deal. So they want choices, right? So her plate, instead of having three big servings of three different things, it's seven options like a bite or two. And then if she eats all of the strawberries and once more, I refill the strawberries. Yes, it's kind of a a pain. But the other liberating part is you set it down and you stop paying attention to her.

So you're not like, eat one more bite, eat your protein first. You kind of give her the freedom to choose. We say, mommy and daddy get to choose what goes on the plate. You get to choose what goes in your body, right? So she gets to have the power that she needs to feel, you know, like she's making her own decisions and no one's trying to make her eat a bunch of broccoli that day if she doesn't feel like broccoli that day. And you're right, because they can't communicate. They can't say, I don't really feel like eating broccoli today. The only way you know is when it gets thrown at the wall, right? So we also really like the no thank you bowl concept. So we give her an empty bowl when we give her her plate. And if she doesn't want the blueberries that day, you don't have to have stained

carpet. She'll just put it in the no thank you bowl, please. It's our job to put it on your plate. It's your job to take it off. So you actually give just an empty bowl and you say, hey, it's something you don't want you, just put it here. Don't just throw it at Daddy's face. That's right. So no thank you bowl. I've had the no thank you face for a while. It doesn't always work. If you were to break down tiny little tips, like you said you, I use you guys as puffs all the time and you brought me the pouches today. And one of the pouches is turkey bullenies. And you said take this pouch and put it on top of like lentil pasta or something. Can you give us a little bit of those like super micro tips? Even I loved the mushroom tip, maybe you could share that one too.

Yeah. Not mushrooms like psychedelics guys. They're trippy enough. You know, toddlers like, like Della, sometimes I'll put seven things on her plate and she'll only eat cashews. That's it. Cachews for dinner. And so later, away from dinner, because the dinner process is the dinner process, will maybe give her a pouch, right? Like I know she didn't get a ton of nutrition.

But the other thing to know is toddlers don't need to eat three full meals every day, right? They can be omad and be totally fine. They, they, she, for example, eats a lot when she's at school during the noon hour. Sometimes she doesn't eat very much dinner and that's okay. Yeah, I think people forget that, right? Because we've conditioned ourselves like, hey, three meals a day. And obviously that's now people are approaching that diet in a different kind of way. But we assume because that's what's been projected on us that the tallest breakfast, lunch, dinner.

Maybe they're full. Maybe they don't need the nourishment. And there's whole days where, you know, you can almost measure their, calories in weeks rather than days because they'll have days where they just eat a ton and then they go a couple days where they don't eat much. So it's very easy to stress out about it. I think the best work I ever did to help my daughter with food was do my own somatic healing work around food and feeding. I was very anxious about what she eats, how much she eats, probably passed to me from my parents. I see my mom with her. She's very anxious about

what she eats. We think it's our job to feed them as if they're plants or animals or something. It's like, eat more, eat more. when really it's natural to eat. You know, toddlers will eat on their own if you let them. But if they also feel anxiety, they feel tension. And if they can get your attention in some way, they're going to do it. So I basically created this dynamic where if she didn't eat, she'd get more of daddy's attention, you know, not in the most pleasant way. Because it's like, hey, eat more.

Why aren't you eating that? You know, but it was psychologically what she did. So as soon as I did that, like, work where I just like, oh, it doesn't even matter to me if she eats or not. I just give her the food and don't care. suddenly she was eating so much more, like instantly. We can take, you said, I have symbiotica here. You can take these organic longevity mushrooms that taste like chocolate, and you guys said put it on ice cream. So yeah, you can put it on ice cream.

We put it on berries a lot. You know, we'll get raspberries with some almonds. And I like to put a little nut pot on it. She calls it berries and cream. She calls it berries and cream. And we make a little swirl with the symbiotica mushrooms. And it feels kind of like a little tree. but it's really healthy and she's getting a ton of nutrition.

That is so smart because in this that they're talking about you guys, it has almond butter, almond oil, cacao powder and vitamin E and cacao extract. That's so smart because Zaza keeps saying chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. And I give her the enjoy life as healthy as I can find chocolate chips. But I feel like this is even cooler because it's almost like an activity to drizzle the syrup. It's fun. Yeah. And it looks fun.

Like toddlers, they want fun things, fun shapes with their pancakes, their names cut out and things, right? You know, it makes it a fun experience. I want to go back a little bit with both of you. Obviously, we were introduced to the brand. We partnered with the brand. And now, you know, obviously over the years, Zazas had the pouches. She's had the pups.

You know, now you guys have the formula. But for both of you, obviously, you've learned a lot in the space. Before this existed, what led to your, you know, realization that's something like Serenity Kids needed to exist. I know that that's a full story in itself, but just to give some context and how you guys came to this realization for this brand. It was five, no, six years ago now.

And we were at a paleo conference here in Austin. And I just love it. It's paleo effects. It's coming up again. I can't wait. And I started getting fuzzy and maternal. And we were like, let's go find the baby stuff. So we look and look and we don't see anything.

We see a chiropractor who does prenatal chiropractic, which is pretty exciting. but we didn't see anything. And I thought, oh, I guess we'll just have to make all of our own baby food. But Joe had just read Tim Ferriss's book, The Four Hour Work Week, and was on the hunt to change career paths from selling services by the hour as a coach to making a product to have a bigger reach. And I wasn't really on board.

But that summer, I was like, well, what will I feed my kids someday? So I call it my summer of nerddom because I spent the entire summer with my nose in a book or with podcasts or reading blogs. And conveniently, a lot of my health heroes, kind of in the paleo-anestral health space, had just had kids and were just feeding two-year-olds and three-year-olds. And every single one of them is making sacrifices for convenience. And it took me about a month.

And what were those sacrifices? They were eating packaged foods that didn't have as much nutrition as they had hoped. They were eating a lot of pouches that were all fruit with not a lot of protein or fat. And I, at the time, I knew what worked for my body was a lot of plants, clean meats, healthy fats, but I didn't know if babies were supposed to eat that. And it took me about a month to realize, wait a second, there's a perfect baby food out there already. It's mother's milk. So I dragged Joe to the milk bank here in Austin. It's the biggest milk bank in the country.

Donate your milk if you have extra. We learned a lot about mother's milk and how the calories from mother's milk were about half fat and half carbs with not so much protein, which I was kind of surprised by. And then we hired an EA from Indonesia or something to pull, to make a huge spreadsheet of all the organic baby food pouches on the market. It was 470 of them. Joe always remembered these numbers better than I do. We essentially mapped the nutritionals of all organic baby food pouches that were out there already. I think the organic ones is like 256 different baby food pouches on the market and just looked at the average, you know, looked at how much fat, how much protein, how much sugar. and like created these averages.

And the stats were terrifying. I mean, the average organic baby food pouch had nine, it was an average of nine grams of sugar per pouch. That was the average. There was some that had 15 to 20 grams. This is one little pouch. And nine might not sound like a lot. I was wondering, I'm like, from a baby's body to a grown-up body,

does that exactly translate? So I called a couple of my doctor friends. And they're like, yeah, add a zero to that for converting 150-pound person into, you know, a 15-pound baby. So if you're adding a zero, you're adding a zero to that nine and it becomes 90 grams. Oh my gosh. That's like three Snickers bars. And people think that, and here's the problem is, people think that this is organic and good. They think they're doing right by feeding this to their children.

Obviously, everyone's intention is the right place. It's very frustrating as a consumer that these companies try to pull a fast food. Well, you wonder why, you know, at least in this country, so many people are set up for failure when it comes to diet, right? And mental health, right? Think about mental health. If I ate 90 grams of sugar for breakfast, I'd be a disaster all day. It'd be horrible. So we did this study and found out that there just, there wasn't much fat. There was not much protein. What was on the aisle was not ethically sourced and regenerative. You know, it wasn't like super high quality proteins. Less than 4% had meat at all. So almost no meat on the aisle. And that, those 4% rarely were distributed in grocery stores because they

didn't quote, didn't sell well. Yeah, they didn't sell well. So, because they were gross. They tasted really bad and they were mixed with rice or blueberries or beans or fruit. It was just weird combinations. Stuff as an adult you would never. Exactly. It was just totally crazy. So they had this belief that you couldn't sell meat for babies because they made only gross products. They wanted to charge the same as they're charging for the fruit pouches so they couldn't make the same money. They weren't willing to charge more. And then the sourcing was bad. Like they didn't actually get good meat. They just used whatever, you know, factory farm meat. So, you know, The fat was the most disturbing because breast milk, being nature's perfect baby food,

tell them about macros of breast milk, Granny. Oh, you said already said that. I told them the macros. So it was all fat, like breast milk, 60% fat. And you had no fat on the aisle. Literally less than 0.1% had any significant. So they're getting less of what they would naturally get if they were taking breast milk on the supplemental products that you'd be using if you're not breastfeed out.

It's 100% carbs. The baby aisle was 100% carbs. And then I got pissed. I was infuriated. I was so mad. Those babies don't get to pick what goes in their body. And their parents, as I would have, if I hadn't been on this long health journey for myself figuring stuff out, I would as a trusting person go to the baby food aisle, see what's on there and think, oh, this is probably what my baby should eat. These people care about my baby and my baby's health.

And the food companies and the government surely would take care of us. totally wrong. So then I got mad and I was like, okay, let's do it. Let's start the company. You did it. We weren't even engaged at the time. Like, we were just kind of dating. We weren't pregnant yet. We weren't engaged, but we were like, let's start a company together. Taking a couple additional steps before. We did. We did. It's kind of crazy. We wrote a contract with ourselves on like, with, you know, pencil and paper. And it's really worked out. You know, this is a tangent. But I do think something you touched on is important here. it's like this and what we were talking about is some of the stuff that we're feeding our kids is

stuff that as adults you would never put in your own mouth. Yeah. You're like, oh, it's gross. And I will say and this, people might be like, what you try the way. I've tried each of these. Anytime I give it to Zaza, I try, I put a little on a spoon and I try it. I'm like if I, because if I won't eat it. Hold on. What? Yeah. I've never seen you do that. Yeah, I have on. You try the baby food. Yeah, because it's editable for adults too. I mean, like this, it's, it's edible. You can have this food. I mean, I mean, you did suck on my breast milk. So that doesn't surprise me. That was under a different circumstances. But I think

I've had some in his coffee when he wasn't looking. Again, I think we think we're doing right by our kids and oh, they're babies and they don't know and they may not have the developed palate,

they may not have the developed palate, they may none of the taste. You know, why would you put it in your child's body? That was actually one of the biggest aha moments that summer, I'm talking about, the summer of 2016.

We couldn't, so we got only these results. No one was doing what we sort of thought we should be doing. And I thought, No, no, Joe. Maybe no one makes it because babies won't eat it. I'm like, we got to make some. We got to make it and get it to babies. So we had a very difficult day measuring tiny amounts of purees, figuring out how to make baby food. We were living in this like community house with 15 people. We had to take over the whole kitchen. It was a disaster. We were arguing. It was stressful. We had to drive these baby foods around town because we didn't. What were these other people saying? I mean, listen, I've lived, I've had some roommate situations. If I saw them making a bunch of period baby foods, I'd be like, we have to have to. have a house meeting. Right. We had booked the kitchen and one of them tasted, in fact, he's one of our investors. He tasted the first batch around and he was into it. So he's supportive. And I'll never

forget, we filled our little pouches with those homemade pouch fillers you can get on Amazon. And my friend Camille texted me a picture of her son, Orion, sucking on the pouch that we had made. It was the original, it was chicken pea and carrot. And she said, he sucked it all down. He wouldn't let me have it. And now he's been playing with it the rest of the day. And, like, tears came out. And I thought, these babies know what's up. They know that fat and protein are really good for them.

They don't want just sugar. But it's really, we learned why. It's easy to produce. And it's cheap. So companies thought that that's what they should be doing. And, you know, there was the low fat trend for a while. It hit the baby aisle. So there's the anti-meat trend, a natural food space.

So basically the low fat plus the, you know, the fear of meat and the natural food industry filtered down to baby and we end up with no meat, no fat on the aisle. Now the rest of the stores fix that. We've got high fat stuff. We've got ethically sourced meat, but nobody was doing it in baby. I also think, too, that I notice a lot of my friends' kids getting rashes. And I think a lot of that contributes to diet and even also the beauty products that they're putting in the bubble bath or the lotions that they're putting.

putting on, I mean, you really have to be your own advocate or guru as a parent to read the labels. It's crazy. It's a total pain. Yeah. I mean, it is so stressful for moms and maybe dads too, but I'm the researcher of the two of us. And oh my God, everything that comes into the house, clothes, shoes, you know, everything. It's like, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I need to check it out. What are the clothes and shoes brands that you guys reach for? Are there any things that you can recommend to our audience? I sure can. I really like primary. com. They're clean

O-Tic. I don't remember the exact words, but they're clean fabrics and they don't use the flame retardants on jammies and things. They're gender neutral

so you don't have to pick stuff. It's like solid colors, not white. Why would you ever put a baby in white? Oh, shit,

I put babies in white. What's wrong with white? No, just stained. Just stained. Oh, oh, oh. He also did all white and beige

furniture in our house. We have two small dogs and a tall. Hold on. I need the baby to match my aesthetic. If maybe it gets something on it, we can just change it into another one. She goes, oh my God, there's a smudge on the couch.

I'm like, we are completely screwed. I want you to go on with the clothes. I just really quickly would like, because you guys are experts on this, to talk about the flame retardant. How do you say it? Flame retardant. Okay. So, you know, decades ago, it became a law that you needed to put flame retardant chemicals

in the fabric that go on to baby's pajamas. And that they can't be baggy because flames will catch easier with baggy clothes. And so it has got to be really tough to be in that industry and making something that's actually chemical-free for kids. They have to put warnings on the clothes on the pajamas. Like, warning, this does not contain terrible chemicals for your baby. Might burn your baby alive. No, it doesn't say that. I really like that brand.

And it's easy and you can order online. and they have a really mobile-friendly website, you know, for your phone. So you can do it while you're nursing or, you know, one-handed, right? For shoes, we really like 10 little. They're not completely barefoot in terms of flexible soul, but they've got a very wide toe box, and they're pretty easy to put on and take off. They're coming out with some new products here and there. That's the one that doesn't compress the toes in the foot.

Yes, that's right. So their foot can just take the natural form. I'm big about the shoes. I'm very passionate about foot health. always preferred barefoot, and I've had all kinds of body issues that started with foot binding, basically. We're all ruining our feet from birth onward with these shoes that squeeze our toes and these heels that mess up our hips. And so we're really important to me for our daughter to not put her in anything that binds her foot in any way. So finding these shoe brands. Tendal is the best

American brand. What's the German brand? Wildling. Wildling out of Germany have really cool fabric-based shoes. With flexible so... That are super flexible. For sneakers. They're a little warm, so... They make a cotton one for some. So the crocs, aren't it?

The crocs might work. They've got a wide toebox, right? Yeah, they won't squeeze the toes. They have a little bit of a heel. Don't they have a tiny drop? Yeah, I don't think they're zero drop. I'm going to get new shoes for her. Yeah.

Daddy's taking her to the wrong shoe place. But it's all things of moderation, too. You know what, though? It's so funny because, like, I... They're hard to find. Yeah. They're hard to find. Well, and I, you know, I've observed...

It's interesting for me. Like, you see a little kid, like, they don't really want to be in the shoes. I mean, nope. They want to run around barefoot most of the time. I think, you know, it's a thing you learn. Obviously, as you go through life, you need shoes. But the types of shoes, I think are important. Okay.

This is something every single person on the planet is using, I think, diapers and wipes. I bet you guys know the diapers and wipes to use. What are they? Well, we used cloth diapers for a long time. Oh, my God. I know, but no, only a year. We only handle the whole thing. We made it to the first year and now we don't use cloth diapers anymore.

That is a commitment. Especially with running a business like this, that's a commitment. It sure was. Joe handled it all. I said, if we're going to do it, I can't do one more thing. Are you okay? Joe, are you okay? Blink twice.

I'm such a big environmentalist, you know. No, I think it's amazing. It was like important to me to the waist and also the comfort and to be totally honest. It was like an image thing. We were taking all these pictures for the baby food brand and we had to be. be like the crunchy parents that we were marketing to. But after that got over, I was like, I wrote this blog called The Death of the Crunchy Dad where I was like, I had all these visions of things I was going to do.

And then I had a baby. You do have visions, don't you? You have grand visions. All this stuff. I was going to cloth diapers. It was after the clothed diapers where I was like, I just got to let it go. I just got to accept that her being an awesome, well-adjusted human is the most important thing. That's going to make the most impact on the world.

And diapers don't really matter. I mean, think about the way, and I think I can make this blankantly probably for all this. Think about the way our parents raised. I mean... Well, your parents were like, hey, honey, let me clean your entire high chair with Windex. And on top of that Windex,

I'm going to give you a plastic bowl with a lot of crap mac and cheese. I don't think I'm unique there. Let's hope as long as not listening. And then while you're eating the Kraft mac and cheese, I'm going to clean with Fibrize around you. Listen, this body was built on Fabriz, Windex, and Mac and cheese from crap.

No, I'm just kidding. I've been saying this a lot on the show. We are a generation that comes from a generation of mass marketing and mass production. And I think we're the first kind of generation to really exhibit that from childhood onward, right? Like my dad's in his 70s now. He was, he was born in a time when we didn't have that kind of mass production. It was just getting going. I don't know how old your parents are. But for all of us at this table, like we came up in that kind of craft, you know, Kellogg's like, you know, that's, you know, brand world, right? Like I think you think

back as a kid. Think of all the things that were on TV, all the like serial commercials. and all of the Mr. Clean and like all of that stuff. It's nostalgic kind of, but probably wasn't the best for overall health. And I think there's now a massive pushback of people trying to get back to more natural ways of living. It's brilliant. I love online marketing and the internet for that reason because it's allowing entrepreneurs to recognize a huge problem, kind of like we did, right? There's so many of us. Recognize a huge problem.

Use the internet to test it out, to start selling, prove the concept online and then go to retailers and say you guys are really missing the boat. If you don't jump on this train, you're going to be left behind. And some of them are. Well, and I think for the longest time, it was about margins. And some of this stuff may be more expensive to produce and more expensive to buy. But I think everybody would say, okay, I got to pay a dollar or two more, but it's, I'm going to feel better, live longer, be healthier. My kid's going to feel like that's a pretty easy decision to make for most people. That was our goal. We wanted to demonstrate that you can do this right and make money at it. We wanted to show the big food.

companies that it doesn't have to be, you know, as little nutrition and as cheap as possible. There are customers out there willing to pay for it. Yeah, not to mention you always pay the Piper, right? If you become sick and unhealthy, maybe you save two or three dollars on something on the grocery store, but now you have thousands and thousands of dollars in hospital expenses or medical expenses or whatever. So it all evens out. And it's better to be proactive and feel better, in my opinion.

Those first years of life, I mean, their spine is doubling. their brain is doubling, and the nutrition during that period is so critical. Okay, I have a couple of audience questions. You have to tell me the brand of diapers that you use now. So we use whole 365 or whatever is it, Whole Foods. We do. We also have been talking to Hello Bello a lot. We really like Hello Bellow's mission and products.

They have cleaning products that are super safe for babies. They have diapers. And for wipes, we really like, I mean, I still use water wipes. So do either the best. They work the best because they don't fall apart. All those biodegradable ones, they get poop on my hands. I'm not okay with that. I know.

That's water wipes, I think, do work the best. They do. Okay. You mentioned cleaning supplies. I'm, for some reason, I don't know if this happens during pregnancy. Everything smells bad. What are the cleaning supplies that you guys use? I bet you guys have the healthiest brand.

French basics. Okay, good. I'm on to that with that. And I do in the bathroom one, I don't know if you have the whole set, the like window washing, the all purpose, the bath. In the bathroom one, I put thieves oil. So it's a little bit more, you know, you do get a little bit of that antibacterial kind of concept. All right. Recently, I was packing for my trip to San Diego and you know what was in my luggage.

I also got this really cute vitamin holder that does like a weekday situation and it has morning. and night and I put the probiotics in the morning. I like to take them with my food. I was taking them a lot before my food, but I found I like taking them with food better. So obviously I pack those probiotics. I want to make sure my gut is thriving during postpartum. I also have their Just Calm. This is actually a psychobiotic. I learned all about them on the episode with the microbiologist. He basically broke down how they work in tandem. Just Calm is going to help reduce your stress, improve your memory and diminish fatigue. So those two together are awesome. And I like to take the just calm at night. So in my vitamin packet in the morning, I have my two probiotics. And then I have one

just calm. I packed them in my suitcase. I'm really loving both of them. I personally love this company because it is one of the only probiotics that actually survives the trip to your gut. There's so many companies out there that you take a probiotic and it doesn't even survive to the gut, which is like devastating. Anyways, right now you get 15% off this dynamic. duo when you go to just thrivehealth.com and use code skinny at checkout. You're going to go to just thrive health.com and use code skinny at checkout, grab the probiotic and the giscom. You're going to go to just thrive health.com and use code skinny at checkout. Grab the probiotic and the gistcom. Enjoy. If you just listen to our episode with Nicole Lappin, you will understand

how passionate I am personally about personal finances and saving for your future. I keep saying this over and over on the show, especially to young people. It's one of my biggest regrets in life that I didn't learn about investing and saving earlier. Nobody taught me only myself to blame, but I really didn't figure this stuff out until I was about 30. You don't know how much of a difference it makes if you can start saving in your 20s, but don't worry, even if you're out of your 20s and your 30s, 40s or 50s, it's always a good idea to save money, which is why I love our partner Wealthfront. There is so much going on with the economy right now. Are we in a recession? Is it a bare market? Is it a market going up? Is it going down?

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account today, you'll get an extra $50 bonus with a deposit of $500 or more. There are already nearly half a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. So why wait? Earn 2% on your cash today. Visit Wealthfront.com slash skinny to get started. That's Wealthfront.com slash skinny. This high interest, good news, has been a paid endorsement from Wellfront. Once you cut certain fragrances and chemicals out of your house, you become so sensitive. Like even if there's a candle that smells weird in my house now, I'm so sensitive to it. Do you find that? I had a lot of smell issues when I was pregnant, like him.

Wait, ours is the opposite. Michael has smell issues with me. Did you have that with me? He doesn't. I don't think he can smell very well, actually. I don't care. Actually. I wish you couldn't smell.

Just cut your nose off. Yeah, I'm like a hound dog in the air. I'm like, what the hell's that? Yeah. Whatever you put on your face at night, I don't like that stuff. He doesn't like my peel at night that I use. Okay. Well, what do you guys use for baby products when it comes to the bathroom?

Are there any? We basically use Purity for everything. So, Purity is a local Austin company. And they have a great baby shampoo that Della had Credo Cap for a while. and it really works well. It doesn't. You know, there's no garbage in it. They actually also make a laundry detergent that we use for a little while and really liked. We also just avoid, I don't say we avoid bathing, but we bathe very rarely. Oh my God, I'm so happy that you're talking about this. She didn't have a bath for like

five months of her life. Yeah, like we didn't bathe her for the first whole part of her childhood. And like, now we basically bathe her as she asks for it because it's fun or she's exceptionally dirty. Hold on, hold on. Wait, we have to go back to this. You didn't. bathe her for five months. Is that because you wanted the microbiome from the vagina to stay on her? Well, I had to see a section because she was breech and no one in Austin would deliver a breech baby vaginally, which was really sad. So I have a tip for that. Oh, what is it? I did Riki or Riki on my stomach because Zaza was breach and she created so much space in my stomach to relax that Zaza flipped. Wow. So if you're listening, don't. It was weird. It was weird. It was weird. It was so cool. It was

really weird. And then I told him I just said the baby just flipped and he was like, well, because we just had seen like that it was breach, right? That we just got out of that thing. Yeah. So but all these people think you have to. She's like, oh, she flipped. And she like, felt it. Wow. So instead of doing that flipping thing that they do, I tried that. We did that citizen to labor. What I think, this is a little tangent, but if you can create space in your womb, the baby does it itself. So that's why I think the Reiki worked. Anyways. Good to know. Go on. Go on. So cool. So not bathing. Why do it would be? Oh, yeah, not bathing. Yeah, so it was, it was a microbiome thing. I was pretty nervous about, first of all, I was a little bit nervous about giving her a bath, you know, water and babies. I don't know, drowning, you know. I had major postpartum anxiety, like, really bad at one point. And so I was really nervous about actually putting her in the bath. But we were, I was looking at her. She didn't seem dirty. She didn't smell dirty. She was just drinking milk. I mean, you know, I would wipe her down in her neck, but we really wanted to keep her skin.

microbiome as healthy and intact, even the water, right? Even if it's just rinsing with water, our water has chlorine in it and all kinds of other preservatives and different chemicals that I just didn't want to expose her to. Joe has some skin issues. I wasn't sure if she was going to kind of pick up on some of that. It's just a pain. So why do anything you don't have to do? Like it was, we were clear that there was no medical or hygienic necessity to bat the baby, possibly benefits not to, if anything. And there's so many hard things about having a newborn. It's like just take anything you can take away, take away.

So if you don't have to bathe, like, okay, great, one less thing we have to try to do. Yeah. So even today, we don't have bath time as a part of the bedtime ritual. Occasionally we do, but is this one more way to make parenting a slightly easier. This show and being married to my wife has opened me up, this is a compliment, It's opened me up to so many more thought processes like this. Because I think, you know, again, grew up in a very like commercial environment. You know, you think three meals a day, bathe every, all these things, two showers, all these things. I think so many of us are conditioned.

But if you really strip it down and think about how we evolved as humans, you probably weren't in a scenario where you had a newborn child and you were bathing them once or twice a day every day. Like you were probably in an environment where you had to survive and be careful and you're not dumping a new baby in a river. So obviously we live. lived this way naturally for a very long time. I think like, you, you know, you put up the commercial city constraints and people change your behaviors. It's like coming back to a more primal way of life. I also think, you know, my gut told me and I knew nothing about babies when I had a baby, don't bathe her right away. And you know how they, they like take the baby and then they're like

putting it in the bath and you're like, no, no, no, no, no. This is all these amazing good bacteria that she had just gotten, like, I'm not going to strip it off. And so even looking back, I remember the first time we bathed her was like, it was probably like four days after she was born. I still was kind of like,

does she really need a bath? Now that you guys are saying this, that makes a lot of sense to just like let it be. And I feel like as a mother, too, you have intuition to know when they need a bath. I mean, we put it on our birth plan. So I had one plan written down

for the home birth that we, We had hoped to have. And then I had another plan written down for hospital. And I remember being in the operating room and hearing them say, is this a no bath? Yes, this is a no bath. And they're like, they asked me three times, are you sure you don't want to give your baby a bath? I'm like, in the middle of labor. And I was like, contracting, like, real labor.

And I'm like, no, I really don't. I'm like, Joe, talk to these people. Like, you're my, you're my mouth right now. And he's like, no, we really don't want a bath. And what I'd love to know what they're bathing. baby with. Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, I'm sure. Oh, my God. You have to micromanage everything. It's so wild. They get it for free. So now that your daughter is three and a half, you still don't bathe her every single day because, because why? Because it's too much, it's like too much time. A couple of reasons.

One, she's a fairly clean kid. Even when she was eating our salmon pouch, she was never the kid to rub it all in her hair. You know, she just, if she had been, we would have given her a lot more bets, right? But she wasn't. For a long time, she didn't really like them very much. And so, like, giving them to her was screaming matches and I didn't want to do that. And then it's just, I want to spend quality time with her when I get home. I work full time. And I work a, you know, nine to five-ish work week. So we get home and I want to have snuggles and play fairies and really enjoy her. So the short and bedtime. sucks. It's terrible. It is the worst part about parenting. So if you can make bedtime shorter, right? Anything that can make bedtime go shorter and better like, yes. So that's why we did it. What is you guys's plan with bedtime? How do you want to know our bedtime ritual? Yeah. So we're in the, we're at the tail end of nighttime potty training. It has been hell, frankly, hell. I mean, awful like I awful so we're at the very end so but but we hired this amazing potty training coach and it has been really helpful it's it's gonna sound a little nuts but what we do is her dinner

time is 430 to 530 kitchen closes at 530 no more water no more food bedtime starts at 630 for the potty training for the potty training bed time starts at 630 she is asleep by 7 we take her to pee when we go to bed at 9 third or 10 and then she's dry. Oh, you wake her up. Yeah, we put a little potty right beside her bed. And so it's just like pick her up and kind of sit her. And she sleeps naked because she hates clothes.

So we pick her up and set her on the potty. And I say, it's time to go peepee. Sometimes I have to wake her up a little bit, but most of the time she'll go. She stays asleep. Yes, she stays asleep. So I lay her back down, give her her fuzzy pillow. She rolls over. then knock on wood.

She's been dry the last few nights. Oh my God. I forgot about potty training. You have to worry about them sleeping. Of course. It's awful. It's awful. Yeah.

But so is the idea you do this at night because it just gets them in the habit of getting up going to the bathroom? Or then they extrapolate that to the day? Or is why nighttime training? We decided. So you, so we followed the oh crap method. And she said you can either do it all at once, which is better. but it was at the beginning of COVID for us and we just couldn't handle both at the same time.

So we decided to do daytime potty training first and then start nighttime later. Okay, so the day she knows. That's right. It's been daytime. She's been daytime potty train for over, I mean, really almost two years. How old did you start potty training? 20 months.

Oh my God, I got to get to it. There's a window. She said that's the magic month, but you know, I mean, there's lots of different magic months, I'm sure. Oh, great. I barely get dinner on the table. Now I got a body drink. She actually said for new mamas, so after the baby comes, she said it's a really, because you're up in the night anyway, it can be an easy time to night train your toddler.

Whether you want extra stuff in the middle of the night, you know, that's for each mom's to decide. But if you're up nursing, you could easily, you know, spend two minutes taking the toddler to pee. I mean, it's, I can't imagine that being awesome, but that's what she says. that would go over. I feel like that waking her up, she's like me. It would, I mean, there would be a night here. I'm one of those people. It's like, if you snap your finger, I'm up like this. Me too. Right? Like it's like ready to go. Lauren is, I've learned. And the baby. Lauren explains like this. She says, you have to wake me up like a cat. And in the beginning, I really had a rough time trying to figure out what that meant. I couldn't do. I couldn't understand the concept because the way I get up is like go. And so I was like, how the fuck do you wake up a cat? I'd never had to do that. He knows how to wake up a whole herd of cats now. Now I do, but it took me 13. years or so to figure it out. It's one of the harder things I've had to figure out, honestly. And fortunately, and unfortunately, my daughter's taken on many traits that my wife has, namely, she needs to be waking up like a cat. So now at least I learn this way with her, but now I'm trying to figure out. So I don't know how it would go waking her up.

Yeah, I don't know how that would go either. It's good. She doesn't actually wake up. She's literally just peas in her sleep. Okay. And then it's really good because then she just goes right back to sleep. She doesn't wake up. I'd be real. I'm always, I'm always afraid she would like wake up. and then I have to put her back down. Because in the beginning, you take her at your bedtime, and then you also take her at like 2 a.m. And you do that. Because she just can't hold it that long.

And then you're pushing her to hold it. To 2.30 to 3 to 3.30 to 4. And then once it's like up to 2 hours before she wakes up, then she can hold it. But that's why it's hell because you're getting up so much. But there's an important window that that muscle gets built before, what, three and a half. Otherwise, it takes many, much longer.

There are seven-year-olds and pull-ups at night. Because they don't, didn't build that muscle early. It's really sad. One pull-ups, Michael? No, I was ready to go. Okay. Yeah, you're probably a quick learner. My mom wasn't having that.

She's like, figured out, but you're laying in the piss. That's right. Okay, so you mentioned work-life balance. I would love to know I also work a lot. I think we're both fortunate, though, that I can also work at home too, so that's nice, but still at home you're working. How do you guys manage that? We calendar everything.

Everything goes in our calendar. We have an amazing assistant. We got COVID back in August. And I had a very bad case in September. And I was off work for a month. And Joe said something that was so beautiful. It changed my life. He said, you know, instead of coming back to your really big, busy schedule, why don't you build your self-care into your calendar first and then fit your work in around that?

And it blew my mind. I was like, I couldn't do that. I have the power to, like, control my own life and take care of myself. Was Joe listening to the skinny confidential him and her? Maybe. Probably. So my assistant in the middle of the month, she plans out all my self-care for my next month. She books our dates. She books my dates with my daughter, which I have now, which are amazing. She books a massage I get every month. She books my workouts. She books my acupuncture. She books. Hyropactic. Yeah.

She books. We have like three different acupunctures for different modalities, all in different intervals. and it works. In fact, my goal for 2022, friends. So I'm going to start having her book things with my friends, I think. I'm trying to figure out how to make this happen because I had a friend. Let me know when you figure it out. Right. I'm going to try. We'll see. Between potty training at 9.30 and 2 a.m. I don't know. I don't know how much time I'm now. Well, we're almost done with that, right? So I'm like, okay, okay. We're almost done. I get a reward for two years of hell with body training. Yeah, but this is the problem. is now I'm having another one. So like how many years of hell into the potty training do we have to go through? Just don't think about it like that. Okay.

The second one's easier, but having two is harder. We don't have two kids. You don't know that. We don't have two kids. You're right. We have one. That's true. Oh, look at that.

You're right. Oh, I don't know. But he was right about the self-care on your calendar. He's right about many, many things. Okay. So I also would like to talk a little bit about this coach. If someone wants to book a potty training coach, What does this entail?

So let's see. How did we do it? They do have little online classes, which I took. You know, their little five-minute videos, little three-minute videos, mom-sized, you know, parent-sized videos. Oh, crap.com or something like that. Oh, crap, potty training method. Jamie Glowcicki, something, I'm sorry, Jamie, if you're listening. It's a great book and then a lot of classes online that are easy.

Mm-hmm. And for potty training issues, you can just contact me to schedule a potty training. So, Jin, Letalien. has been our potty training consultant. We email her with, this is a problem. Della won't, she won't pee before bed. That was our biggest problem.

And she's like, you gotta use your magic parenting skills and try these things. And she was the one who was instrumental. And we were putting her to bed maybe around 830 or 9. And she's like, oh, that's way too late for a kid her age. I'm like, oh shit, I didn't know. I didn't know.

She was still napping. And she's like, actually after three, they don't need to nap. they should really be getting 12 hours 11 to 12 hours at night and that will solve a lot of the potty training. And it did. When did she say to stop letting the kids nap?

Three? Ish. Ish. And we don't forbid her from napping. We just don't intentionally nap her. Like she'll fall asleep in the car occasionally. You know, like there's times where she has a little nap. But we just don't have a nap time where we put her down anymore.

And then she goes to sleep a lot easier. Bedtime's way easier. It's so easy. She's exhausted. Yeah. It's great. Yeah, that's actually really smart. What do you guys do about screen monitoring?

It's a tough one. It's been on our shit list for two weeks now. We have a list of, we have a relationship coach that we've had for years that really helped us start the business. I mean, helped us get married and like happy and all the things we really wanted to achieve. And we have a list that we of things we keep on there. And Della's phone has been on there for a couple weeks because I don't know, talking about it. Just me and him, we don't agree. And so we keep things on the shit list for Ken, our coach to totally.

But we just, but the short answer is we. you know, use it as rarely as possible, you know, like we don't just let her watch TV every day for the sake of it. We save it for, oh, I'm, you're home sick and I need to work and I have an important call. You get to watch Encanto for the 10th, 27th time, you know, or like it's been a really busy day. It's a weekend. We've been outside. We're all kind of tired. Like maybe it's a movie day, but it's not every day. You know, I did some research on it and they said, you know, two hours, The studies that they've done, say, two hours, anything after two hours a day is problematic. Like, that's where a brain starts to get messed up.

So anything less than that, they say, is no noticeable effect. But we try to keep it to, you know, less than 30 minutes a day and not every day. But I will say, the girl has long hair and hates getting her hair brushed. Absolutely just wouldn't let me. She was dreading out this long, nasty hair. So I'm like, okay, let's watch TV. You can watch five minutes of TV while I brush her hair. And do you have a wet brush?

I got a wet brush and she, it wasn't as bad, but then my brother-in-law has an autistic daughter who could only stand the Mason Pearson sensitive brush. Oh, I heard that one's good. So we've got that now. Has she seen you brush your hair? Oh, that's a good question. I don't think I brushed my hair around her when I had long hair. I do like really manipulative things in front of Zaza.

You don't even know this. It's genius. I put on my skin care. It's like we brushed together. Oh, smart. I'll put on skincare and go, ah, all down my neck,

taking it to the tits. Oh, oh my gosh, look at this. It makes me feel so good. And then I'll wear iPads in front of her and she's like, what is that? And so now she, like, tries to dip her finger in my organic, clean, like lotion and we'll put it on her face.

So I don't know about hair brushing, but I feel like if you brushed your hair, all right, we've got to start. We're going to brush hair. A little manipulation, never heard of plate. She would not brush her teeth as many of like two-year-olds, right? And so I was like, hey, I'm going to do this. And I started doing it.

And then she, now she gets her brush. And now she asked me to do it. She comes and says, brush, brush. By the way, this tip also works on men if you want them to do something. You can do it and make it super loud noises. I have another tip for the screen time. One of the biggest problems with screens is when you need to turn it off. And it's like automatic meltdown that you're turning it off.

And my sister said, what you do is you say, we're going to turn it off in five minutes. and you set the timer four or five minutes so they know it's coming. And I actually make an agreement with her. Like, we can turn this off in five minutes, right? And she's like, yes, or sometimes she'll negotiate with me. No, six minutes or for a while. She'd say, no, three minutes. Not a very good negotiator, but she loves the negotiation, gives her a little more power.

I'm like, okay, six minutes, fine. We set the timer. And then it goes off and she turns it off. She likes to push the button. So we give her the power to turn it off. Do you want to push the button or do you want me to? Right. So there's the false choice model of parenting, right?

You give two choices, both of which are okay for you. And then she agrees to it and turns it off. And we very rarely avoid meltdowns. If we forget and turn it off and she gets mad, we say, hey, do you want five more minutes? Should that guess? And then she's happy to turn off at her five. They just need a little bit of the control, the illusion of control, I guess. And to me, five minutes of more screen time is better than meltdown that lasts, God

knows how long. Not that meltdowns are a problem because they're inevitable. One, I think that's incredible advice. Two, as you were talking, I think that, false choice thing my wife has been doing to me for the last 13 years. I do that too all the time. It just hit my brain. I do this with every single guy I've ever dated. You only, you give them two choices and it's both choices that work in your favor. I feel a very taking advantage of right now. I just was listening to you talking like, holy shit, that's just what's been going on. You did go to

Montessori. That's why I'm leaning into your Montessori stuff. Wow. Mind blown. There you go. works on men. I got to get a therapist right now. The other day I was like, hey, like every time you give Zaza something, let her choose it. So like two books. Do you want this juice or this juice? Like let her pick because I think, and this is maybe crazy, that it builds an independent person to feel like they have some kind of choice. Now the choices are definitely the choices that I want.

I'm like, do you want bubblegum pink or do you want light pink? In the living room, for example, do you like this couch or this couch? And my brain said, I don't like either couch. But somehow I chose this other couch. I still don't like the couch, but I chose the couch. I love a little manipulation. It is. It's powerful. Okay. I like the couch now. How can a mother or a father who is trying to clean up their kids diet implement your products into their daily routine? Like I'm talking gets so granular like snack time, lunch, dinner. Tell us some tips. Well, one of the things we've learned is starting kids with savory purees early if you can, right? If your kid is just starting. out in the six, seven, eight month age range and they're just starting out eating puries,

make sure to integrate some of the savory ones and not just the sweet ones. Otherwise, they'll look at the pouch format and they'll think, oh, this should be sweet. And then if you give them a savory one, they'll think it's gross. So start early with the savory. And actually, we deliberately created our line of pouches to have a wide variety of flavors. So we have herbs in some of them. We have a lot of different kind of veggies. We put parsnets. we put red peppers, we put all kinds of fragrant and really tasty kinds of veggies and herbs in there so that they can start getting used to those flavors early. And then once you put them on their plate, it will seem familiar. And I want to read to the audience of why I use Serenity Kids. I'm going to

read to you the ingredients, okay, because there's no added natural flavors or weird acids or anything. This one has green pea, free-range turkey bone broth, and has turkey bones, carrot, parsley, turkey, celery, tomato paste, olive oil, garlic, Himalayan sea salt, basil, and oregano. And that's it. Yeah, and if you want to go the vitamin route, or not the vitamin, the vegetable route, organic carrot, organic, sweet potato, water, organic beet, organic olive oil. So, very clean ingredients. No preservatives.

Sherveen was recently in town, the owner of Symbiotica. We went out, we had some fun. we had a lot of oysters. We got our zinc in with those oysters. And we had a martini. And he was telling us whenever he has a martini, he always has the glutathione packets by symbiotica. So this is Michael's favorite thing ever.

He has been a huge advocate of glutathione. And I'm just starting to like play with it. I did try the packet recently when we went out for oysters and martinis. And I noticed that my hangover was not that bad. People sleep on glutathione. They don't have enough antioxidants. They're completely out to lunch. they're just not anti-oxidized. So I think that if you're not supplementing with glutathione,

you're at a huge disadvantage for a number of reasons. Also, it has PQQ in it. So in addition to all the other things that we've talked about for months now about symbiotic of the vitamin C, the magnesium, the magnesium spray, the zinc, the omega's. Also now they have these packets of glutothion, which is a game changer and many people are not supplementing well with it at all. So definitely check it out. It's kind of a one-stop shop for incredible supplements. I really like how supplements are liposomal. Is that how you say it, Michael? Yes, that's how you say it, Lord. Okay. And also it comes in little packets. I like the packets. They taste good. They're easy to squeeze in my mouth. It's food. My daughter likes them. It's easy to

squeeze in my mouth, I just said, Michael. Anyways, let's keep a professional way. Okay. Anyway, you get your vitamins in, you get your glute thion in with symbiotica. You can get your magnesium spray. All the things, Shrveen is coming on the podcast to break more stuff down for you. In the meantime, you can use Code Skinny. check out for 15% off your first purchase. This is in addition to custom bundle discounts so people can get 45% off. Create your custom bundle at symbiotica.com and get 30% off. Enjoy. My entire pregnancy, I switched to clean beauty and one of the brands that is always on my shelf is OSIA. Okay, so here's the move. They have this mist. It's like an algae mist. And what I like to do with

this mist is I spray it on my face the second I wake up. It hydrates my self. It hydrates my skin, it tightens it, it makes it feel supple, but also it wakes me up. I'm obsessed with it. I've turned all my friends and family onto this algae mist. I talk about it all the time. I literally brought it to San Diego. I travel with it. I even had an extra bottle sent here because I like it so much. So you got to go on their site and you've got to get this mist. It is so, so beautiful. And it just keeps your skin healthy, hydrated, but also is such a great way to wake up. All of their products, too, are really designed to help nourish and soften and smooth your skin. So you're just glowing when you put them on. If you have to pick up another product from them, I would highly recommend their algae body

oil. So what I'll do with that is I'll dry brush, get in the shower, take like a freezing cold three minute shower, get out and just put the body oil all over my body. It's absolutely amazing. I'm super picky to what I put on my body and like underneath my arms and all my boobs. And this is it. Like this is the oil that you want to check out. It's algae body oil. So go on their site, okay? Get the algae mist and the body oil. You cannot go wrong.

I love their products. I just feel like they're all clean, safe. They're vegan. They're cruelty free. They're powered by the sea. So you could honestly add anything on their site and you won't be disappointed. Anyway, those are the two that I recommend. Like I said, the algae mist and the algae body oil and you get 10% off.

Find your new skincare and body care favorites at Ocea Malibut. com and get a special discount just for our listeners. You get 10% off your first order sitewide with promo code pink seaweed. You get free samples with every order and orders over $50 get free shipping. You're going to want it all. I'm telling you. Go to O-S-E-A-Malibu.com and use promo code pink seaweed. So purees are a good way to start, you know, with little six to eight month babies. Once your baby needs to start eating some solid foods, right, practicing that pincers grass, really getting that jaw development, the tongue development, once they kind of get some teeth, starting with a puff concept, right? Because the thing about the puffs that I wasn't even sure

if we could successfully do in the manufacturing space is it needs to dissolve in your mouth without actually having to chew it very much. Because some babies don't get teeth till like 12 months old. I only had two teeth when I was 12 months old. Joe had a full mouthful and so did our kid. So having them dissolve really easily, this can be added in to the snack. So when I was When I was giving Della, you know, her little plates, right? I'd put maybe a little pouch on it, a couple of puffs, maybe some red. She used to love red peppers when she was a baby. So we'd give her, you know, little pieces of red pepper strips and things like that.

Because I really do think that there's a place for purees. Even in the kind of baby-led weaning space, I also really agree with that philosophy. We would give her a whole piece of asparagus when she was six months old. And she would just like munch on it and lick it and chew it and play with it and smell it and experiment. I mean, she could gnaw on that for 10 minutes. Or a big piece of steak, like a piece of steak that's bigger than she could put in her mouth, but like she just kind of suck on or chew on. And she was a big meat baby.

She loved meats. And meats are really important first food for babies. It's actually the easiest thing for them to digest. It's the most similar to breast milk of really any other food because it's an animal product. It's the similar kind of protein fat mixture. And it's easier for them to digest meat than vegetables, especially than grain. You know, grains very hard to digest for anybody, but especially a new, you know, very first food. So starting off with meat, and that's why our initial core line is the meat, fat veggie combos of very simple ingredients, you know, like our, you know, this one's probably the simplest.

It's grass-fed beef, organic sweet potato, and a little bit of organic kale. So it's got that green flavor and nutrients, but the base is that vegetable carb mixed with the grass-fed beef. And it's a very fatty cut of beef. So we've got a lot of beef fat in addition to beef protein in there. And I think it's worth mentioning like when you say it's grass fed and I was even looking at your salmon. It's wild caught. Like all the stuff that we talk about that we put on our own bodies, especially on this show,

are in this baby formula. I mean, it's obviously incredible stuff. I mean, there's been a long time coming having you guys on here. We've been using it for years. I would love if you could leave our audience. You mentioned it in the beginning to round this out. You said you give her seven choices. What do those seven choices look like on a breakfast plate?

That's a good question. There's so many, you know, so they recommend you have at least one or two, quote, hero foods that are foods she loves, that she'll always want to eat. One or two new things that are fairly new, and then a lot of stuff in between that maybe she eats one day or not. For breakfast, the Applegate sausages, she really likes those. She loves bacon. So we get, you know, Applegates bacon. You know, Teton Ranch actually just came out with some grass-fed beef breakfast sausages, which are awesome. Who's such eggs are amazing.

She gets to choose which kind of eggs she wants. Do you want to scramble egg or do you want to, she calls it a round egg, which is like a fried egg. So we use eggs. Sometimes we put some berries. She likes strawberries, but we might also use raspberries or blueberries. She loves carrot sticks. So that's a common thing to sneak in there. Her favorite food, though, is olives.

She loves olives. She will eat olives. She will eat olives. Really? It's bizarre. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she was manta. Mama, and she has them all on her fingers.

Next time, I am I going to catch her. it on her big toe. She loves olives. That's so weird. Is that a baby thing? I don't know. I think it's kind of weird. It's great. It's great. I'm like, oh my God, my daughter has an acquired taste. It's good for your skin. It is, right? I think it came from my Bloody Mary obsession. I would get a bloody Mary and I would give her the olives and she was little. And it would be like a special thing at a restaurant. Throw a little vodka in the hole. There might be a little left on there. Map time. Yep. And then now she associates that with fun. So she loves olives. You know what else you were talking about breakfast meets force of nature?

Are you guys? Oh, yeah. They're the supplier for our bison. Oh, yeah. That is so cool. They're like the best, the best of the best meet in Austin, right? They are. Mm-hmm.

Before we go, you guys are launching a grass-fed whole milk toddler formula. The formulas in the United States, I'm going to say it fucking suck. They're terrible. Why is this one different? Yeah. So the formulas in the United States are all made according to the Infant Formula Act of 1980. so old. And we really wanted to be able to produce something that was with more modern science, better ingredients that were maybe not available in the 70s, right? And so we decided to create this

toddler formula, which is not technically infant. We cannot recommend this for infants, but it is made in an infant formula facility. It has the 29 nutrients. The FDA requires being an infant formula. and we've heard lots of pediatricians recommending this for their little patients. So if you talk to your health care provider, it could be a good fit. But basically, you're right, all the infant formulas in this country are garbage. They all have industrial seed oils. They have skim milk from not super healthy cows. They have a lot of super synthetic vitamins that maybe are or maybe are not digestible and absorbed and bioavailable.

Corn syrup. They have corn syrup. Their fats are like canola oil. and a lot of industrial seed oils. So we made this one. So I, you know, I didn't mean, I didn't want to give my kid formula necessarily, but she weaned at nine months. I had terrible anxiety, low milk supply.

She had a lip tie that we didn't get revised until she was six months old. So nursing was so painful for me, which made, which gave me really low supply, which it was a vicious cycle. So she weaned at nine months. And I had to feed her formula. And I ended up with something from Europe. But now the FDA is cracked down on all those imports. and now those parents can't buy that anymore.

I want to ask a question that I know the audience is going to ask. How does your formula compare to Hawley and HIPAA, which I know are very popular in Europe? We have a graphic for that. And that's actually what I ended up using. I ended up using the Hala formula for my kid, the goat. And it's better than that because we don't use any industrial seed oil and they still do. They also have crappy sources of carbs. They have like maltodextrin, which is, you know, corn starch that they're using for carbs.

And this is lactose. So yours, explain the ingredients. Like you just have a lot of vitamins and minerals in there? We have whole food ingredients. Okay. Our goal was to put as much whole food ingredients in here as possible. We do have some synthetic vitamins in it, right, to meet these FDA targets. But our first ingredient is organic lactose.

And then we use organic A2 whole milk powder from an amazing regenerative farm out in California called Alexander Family Farm. We went to visit those cows. They're awesome. Grass-fed, regenerative, like, magical place out there. Their land to market. Their milk was so good. We had it nutritionally tested. We didn't have to add as much vitamins because it was already so rich in nutrition.

And we were the first ones to use the actual whole milk to keep all the fat in. And then we use galactylologosaccharides, which are medium chain, I think medium chain, carbohydrate that is very prevalent in breast milk. Like 20% of breast milk is galactylaccharides. And we use weight protein content. for some of the protein. We use olive oil, which you can't use in infant formulas yet, because it just wasn't approved in 1970s, right? Coconut oil. We use palm oil, which can be a controversial topic from a sustainability perspective,

but palmitic acid is very prevalent. One of the main fatty acids in mother's milk, and we have a sustainably sourced palm oil source. And there are some studies that say that palm oil is not great for the gut, but we use it in such small amounts that it's not one of the huge sources of fat in this product. So it's, you know, minimal. We use cocoa butter, which was a really awesome bind. Tastes really great. Adds a lot of the saturated fats that we needed. And then one of my other favorite ingredients and why it's actually not certified organic, because we use wild algal oil, which provides the DHA and the EPA for brain development. And, you know, we could have gotten fish oil, but it kind of smelled a little funky. You can't,

You can't get organic, wild, anything. So it's just wild alcohol. What do you think about a lot of parents that are feeding their kids plant-based formula? I don't really agree that it's healthier unless your kid has a huge issue with cows milk. Okay. If that's the case, do what you got to do, right? I mean, I would love a goat in my backyard and I would love Michael to milk the goat every day and bring it in with like the butter churner. So one of the reasons go milk.

I want to give you a choice, Lauren. Yeah. Choice A is I don't do that. And choice B is you do the goat milk. I want to see that on Instagram. I actually drove an hour after Delawined and I was using the Hala formula. There's a farm just east of Austin that does raw goat milk. And I would drive an hour each way and get a whole cooler full of raw goat milk that had been tested.

It's a really nice dairy. And so she would drink a couple bottles of that a day too. Does the goat want to come live in our backyard? No, this formula looks really amazing. We're not in the formula stage right now, but soon it looks like we will be or hopefully no. Well, who knows? You know what, though? My opinion with all this is like fed is best.

I agree. You do what you can do. I think that there's been so much pressure put on women to breastfeed. And like there's a lot of reasons why you can't breastfeed and that's okay. I feel like when you start becoming obsessed with it and giving it so much energy, it almost overtakes you and dries your milk up. That's exactly what happens. I'm going to go into it like. Whatever happens happens and like I'm not doing this for anyone but my baby and me.

Okay. Code Skinny for 15% off. Mm-hmm. You guys can use it on my serenitykids.com. I personally would recommend starting with the broccoli puffs. It is something that Zaza asked for every single day. You've seen it all over my Instagram. One of the reasons why I wanted to interview you guys, she loves them.

I now am also going to recommend the turkey bolognais 100% pasture raised turkey. you can put on pasta. I'm going to put that on lentil pasta for her. And the formula is on there too. So go crazy skinny on my serenityKids.com. Where can everyone find you guys pimp yourself out? So we have an awesome website, my serenitykids.com. You get subscription on there. So it just shows up at your house. We have, we're on Amazon as well. We're in a lot of retail stores. We're in basically every natural food store. We just launched nationally at Walmart. So you can get us at all the Walnuts, yep. So a lot of conventional regions were in most Kroger's, a lot of targets as well. So really everywhere baby food is sold, we will eventually be. But, you know, we have a store locator on our website

to find us in retail. Of course, you go online to our website and use the skinny code. And Instagram at My Serenity Kids. Yep. Can we do a giveaway? Sure. Yes. Okay, let's give away my favorite products to one lucky audience member. All you have to do is tell us your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram at Bostick and make sure you're following at my Serenity Kids. Serenity, Joe, thank you so much for coming on. I took a page of notes. Yay. Thank you both. And honestly, congratulations for all the success. I also, like, you know, think you guys are making a huge impact on the world. So thank you. you. Congratulations. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Parents, do you want to win a big sparkly new package of

Serenity kids for your kids or you could gift it to someone else's kids? All the healthy foods. All you have to do is tell us to your favorite part of this episode on my latest post at Lauren Bostick. and make sure you're following at my Serenity Kids. Thank you guys for listening and we'll see you next time. All right, so I recommended this the first time I had a baby and I still recommend this the second time after I had a baby. And that is testing your hormones. That has changed the game for me.

I remember the first time I tested my hormones and the doctor told me, even if I ate perfect quote unquote, and worked out every day, I still wouldn't lose weight because there were issues with my hormones and my thyroid. And so I was so relieved to have that test. And the second time being postpartum, I took a test at home. And the test that I used is ever really well. So they have at home lab test that can help you get the knowledge and support you need so you can become healthier. The one that I would recommend is the at-home women's test. And basically, it's a comprehensive hormone panel

for women at all stages. So you can test and measure your hormones, your antibody levels, and you can just check for any abnormal levels that may be keeping you from feeling your best. So what you do is it's like a little finger prick sample collection and then you do a saliva sample collection and you send it in. It's literally so easy, okay? They also have like a food sensitivity test. You can go on their site and check it out. I'm a huge. I'm a huge. huge fan of the site and I feel like everyone who's listening to this podcast will be too. So you can just measure all your 11 biomarkers and I think it's so smart to just know where you're at with your hormones and your food sensitivity.

You can collect your sample, use the prepaid shipping label, you mail the test back to a certified lab and then you get physician reviewed results sent straight to your phone in a few days. It's so easy. And our listeners get a code. Everly Well is offering a special discount of 20% off an at home lab test at every everlywell.com slash skinny. That's everlywell.com slash skinny for 20% off your next at-home lab test, everlywell.com slash skinny. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or

indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.