female podcasters

Real Food Dietitians

About Stacie and Jess

Protein Powder Post

This is Joy & Claire Episode 121: The Real Food Dietitians

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Transcription Completed: April 30, 2022

Audio Length: 42:00 minutes 

Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy.

Claire: And this is Claire.

Joy: Welcome back. Happy April. We’re here. It’s beautiful. I hope you’re having a beautiful day, a beautiful week. We have an awesome episode with The Real Food Dieticians. Welcome Jess and Stacie [00:00:43.24]. 

Claire: We are so excited to have you guys here. Jess is a registered dietician nutritionist living in Boulder, Colorado. Jess and I go way back to our CrossFit Roots buddy days. Also a lot of other hilarious moments in our lives like picking up a CSA from Jess’ porch during the height of the pandemic. I also remember running my sourdough starter out to your husband in the middle of a snowstorm. She lives with her husband and two daughters. She enjoys CrossFit, telemark skiing which we will have to talk about, mountain biking, camping out under the stars. She has an awesome adventure band as well. Stacie is a licensed registered dietician from rural southern Minnesota where she, her husband, and daughter reside with their two dogs. They are the co-founders of The Real Food Dieticians [00:01:29.09]. Stacie also loves all kinds of fitness and has a passion to inspire as many as she can to live a healthier and happier life, both in and out of the kitchen. We are so excited to have you guys here. We are so excited to chat about food, which is pretty much our favorite topic, and also to hear about your latest cookbook. Which I have cooked five recipes out of so far, and I really want to tell you about it. Actually we were originally supposed to have you guys on a couple weeks ago, right before your cookbook came out. I’m actually kind of glad that we got to have a little extra time because I got to dive into the cookbook and do a little homework. Welcome, Stacie and Jess.

Jess: Thanks, Claire. I still have your jar with the cute little lid from the sourdough starter.

Claire: Also, we want to mention that you guys have a third member of your Real Food Dietician team now who is not on the podcast, who is due with a baby minus one day ago, right?

Jess: Yeah, so Jessie Shaver [00:02:25.12] joined us in 2021 while we were in the height of writing the book. It’s been such a whirlwind that Stacie actually has two kids, she has a little boy, that we didn’t even update our bios after Jamison was born. That’s how crazy it’s been. But yes, Jessie joined us, and she is hopefully having a baby or will have had a baby by the time you listen to this.

Claire: I used to work with Jessie at my previous job [00:02:48.11].

Stacie: No way. That’s awesome.

Claire: There’s a lot of nepotism going on in this conversation.

Jess: We feel like Jessie knows everyone. She’s like, “Oh yeah, I know that person.”

Claire: You’re like, wow, I’m not surprised. So for those in our audience that are not familiar with you guys, tell us about how the Real Food Dietician team came to be.

Jess: Well Stacie and I met at a conference in New York City in 2014. We are both working in private practice. Stacie was also at the hospital. We met, and we did that whole, “Yeah, let’s keep in touch” accountability partners. Didn’t talk for about six months, and then one of us reached out to the other. I don’t remember who. And we were in this place where we were going to write a free eBook to put on our website to get people to sign up for our email list, and we decided to share the work. That turned into some really big projects like three 96-page real food reset books that we self-published over the course of eight months. We were going to do one for every season, and then we got to fall and were so burned out. Then we went to the conference that we had met at the next year. Stacie had an idea for a business where it was like an online meal plan delivery service, kind of like real plans or emails. She had that in the works, and then she asked me to be her partner. So I wrote her a check for like $400.

Stacie: It wasn’t a lot. 

Jess: For half of the business. And I’ll let Stacie finish.

Stacie: Yeah, and the reason that I came up with this idea for a meal plan membership program was the clients we were both seeing, I felt like the most thing they were interested in was the meal plan. So we’re like, great, let’s just put a meal plan membership program together. We can split the work. So I had already started this when Jess came in and she wrote that $400, half of the money I had already spent for this business. Not a lot. We launched that program I think in summer 2015. Again, every month we would put out new meal plans, new recipes. There were different kinds of meal plans. Gluten free, paleo, whatever. I think we had four different options. We realized that for the number of members that we had, which wasn’t very many, the amount of work that we were putting into that program really wasn’t paying off. So we decided this wasn’t for us after three months. Jess, how did we say that?

Joy: Yeah, we just reversed everyone’s PayPal. “Sorry, it’s just not working for us. It’s not you, it’s us.”

Stacie: And the thing was, we just didn’t have the amount of recipes at the time. Now we have like 600 recipes on our blog. If that was something we tried to pursue again, it might be a different experience because we have a much larger community and platform to promote that, but nothing that we plan to add to in our future. 

Jess: There are companies that are absolutely crushing it, so we don’t need to.

Stacie: So once we decided the meal plan membership program wasn’t for us, didn’t work out, we literally the next day started the blog. Jess was in Minnesota. She was planning a trip to Minnesota to work on the meal plan membership program. Instead we spent the entire two or three days creating a website, and that’s the blog. Obviously, it’s been updated and we’ve had someone come in and create our website. But in the beginning, we created it ourselves. Kind of just happened as a result of our first business “failing.”

Claire: That’s so funny. Like, “Um, here’s your money back. This isn’t actually going to work.”

Stacie: Yeah, exactly.

Claire: I kind of love that though.

Joy: I do too.

Claire: In the moment, you’re not married to this.

Joy: And also just knowing when it’s not working and it’s not working for the two of you as a business. You just have to pivot and move on. I think people probably appreciated the honesty.

Jess: And I think we were creating a business that we wanted to love. If we are creating our business, we are going to love it. That’s when we were like, this is not for us. We just don’t love it.

Claire: You guys really set out to say, this is going to be our full-time job, this is going to be our business.

Jess: With the blog? No. The blog was really just a place to house the recipes that we can then refer our clients to. It just took off. And 11 months later, we wrote ourselves our first paycheck, which is kind of unheard of in blogging. It was $126. But we were pretty proud of ourselves to have a paycheck at 11 months. We really did hustle though. We were blogging on our site, and we were guest blogging any opportunity that we had. We kind of fell in step with the Whole30, and that propelled us really quickly. They picked us up and were like, “You guys have great recipes.” We took over their Instagram feed. Yeah, we just grew from there. We never realized it would be our full-time jobs. I think by June 2015, I closed my private practice and worked on the blog full time. And then Stacie, I think it was October of 2015 or 2016.

Stacie: It took me a little bit to leave my job where I was working at a hospital. I really liked my job at the hospital. I really enjoyed it, so that was hard for me to choose to – I just didn’t know what to do. But obviously, when you grow something, you have a much stronger connection to it. I think it was 2017, Jess.

Jess: Was it? Okay.

Stacie: Because I went to contract, so very part time there.

Jess: Oh, that’s right.

Stacie: And then worked the blog.

Joy: I want to know a little about your personal philosophies of food because there is so much information out there. How are you similar and how do you differ? What do you both bring to the table?

Jess: We’re very similar. We both came to this having done a couple of Whole30’s ourself for health reasons. I have an autoimmune disease, and Stacie was doing it for some digestive issues. So we kind of fell into that Whole30, paleo, everything was gluten free, and those were the recipes we were writing. Of course, those were also the patients and clients that we were seeing. We’ve maintained that allergy-friendly bent since then. So all of our recipes are written to be gluten free. You can modify them to contain gluten, or you can modify them to be dairy-free or egg-free or nut-free. You have a lot of options. Our philosophy really is that we’re creating meals that anyone can enjoy, so we give lots of modifications, we test them with all different modifications. I mean, personally I don’t eat gluten free all of the time, but most of my meals don’t contain gluten. And when I have gluten, it’s sourdough or it’s a worthy splurgy or something I feel good eating and I’m really excited about. I’m not going to eat saltines because they’re not exciting. So our philosophy is that everyone has a place at our table because we create recipes that are very easy, simple, approachable, and can be modified for anyone. Anything to add Stacie?

Stacie: No, I think you got it.

Claire: What do you feel like has been the biggest difference between you guys? Does one of you really gravitate towards… I don’t know, taco recipes? Or when you sit down to start brainstorming, do you have any real preferences that show up? For example, Joy and I always joke – or not even joke – that Joy loves cereal and pancakes and carby snack foods. I’m over here like, give me a tin of sardines. Are there food preferences or food opinions that are really unique to each of you, or do you feel like you are similar in a lot of the things that you like?

Stacie: Definitely, we do have the recipes that we each gravitate towards. For me, of course, I take most of the egg recipes, because Jess has an egg allergy. And I really enjoy egg bakes and all the different egg dish. I really enjoy making different salads like chicken salads and veggie salads. I would also say baking the oatmeal bakes and all the different gluten-free baked goods. We also have Anna, our social media coordinator, who loves to bake, so she takes a lot of the baked goods as well. And then Jess, she likes – I’ll let you go, Jess.

Jess: Yeah, most of mine are like tacos, soups, grilling. I love vegetables too, but those are the things I gravitate towards. So Claire, I would be the one opting for canned fish.

Claire: Don’t knock it until you try it, guys.

Jess: So good. I had some yesterday on my salad and thought of you.

Claire: I love it. Jess, I didn’t realize you were allergic to eggs. Don’t you have like 40 chickens?

Jess: I have 32 chickens. But yes, I’m definitely allergic to eggs and it’s so unfair. Next time I come around in life, I’m going to eat all the eggs.

Claire: I’m putting that request in now for the next round. I would like to be able to eat eggs.

Jess: So unfair. 

Claire: I want to dive into your cookbook. I know we want to focus a little bit more on your overall story. But when it came time to start the cookbook, I remember chatting with Jess in the parking lot of CrossFit Roots within a couple of weeks of you finding out that you were going to do this. You were like, “Well, we have this really great project.” You were being very sort of vague about it. You were like, “I have to go home and write all these recipes.” I always am so curious where you start when it comes to coming up with brand new recipes. Having read through the cookbook, I know a lot of them are based in things you ate growing up or in family recipes. But where do you start when it’s time to come up with something brand new. And sorry if people can hear Evie chatting in the background. I don’t know what she’s doing. If you can hear small voices, that’s what’s happening.

Jess: You know, a lot of it is we got to include 20 recipes from the blog that we know people love. So we put those in the book, and that was kind of the ode to the greatest hits. Get our book, you’re going to get 20 of your favorites right there. And then for the others, we took recipes that do really, really well, both on social media and the blog and we – if it was a sheet pan with a protein, a couple of vegetables, a certain kind of sauce or a marinade or a rub, we just iterated on that. We would change up the flavors, change up the protein, change up the vegetables, keep the preparation the same. Same thing with soups, stews, that kind of stuff. And then like you said, we brought in things that we ate growing up and modified them to have a slightly healthier bent to them, maybe being more allergy friendly. Sometimes I think there were some stretch meals, maybe things we don’t normally make but we were like, “Let’s take a swing at it” because people love this. One of them might have been the Thai coconut soup. We don’t have it on the blog. I don’t serve it every day at the house. But it’s something that I really enjoy when we dine out, so we went ahead and modified it and that’s how it ended up in the book. Would you agree, Stacie, that was the method to our madness?

Stacie: Yeah. I think with having blogging for five years, we know what our community loves. When we put out a recipe, we kind of know how it’s going to do. We really stuck to those recipes that we knew people were going to love and they will cook. Knowing our community so well helped us determine the recipes that we put in the book. Jess, I don’t feel like it was that hard to come up with 100+ recipes. Yeah, I think we just spit them out. We had a couple of phone calls to brainstorm. It was pretty easy to come up with that list.

Jess: I think it was harder testing 7-8 recipes a day than it was coming up with the recipes. We could come up with recipes all day long, but actually executing them was the tough part.

Stacie: And I was just getting through my first trimester of pregnancy, so I was just coming off feeling nauseous. It took a while for me to start testing recipes. 

Claire: Were there any recipes that didn’t make it that you wish had made it into the book?

Jess: Probably. It all happened so fast. We signed the contract just before Christmas of 2020. Christmas Day 2020, we were on the phone coming up with recipes and testing recipes by the very next day. I honestly can’t remember. I’m sure there was many and some that just failed too that we were just like, no.

Claire: Right. There’s nothing that ended up on the cutting room floor that you are like, “If only we had gotten that muffin recipe in there.”

Jess: No. Did you have any, Stacie?

Stacie: No, I don’t think so. I do remember I had a bunch that I had tested but that didn’t make the book, so it was almost the opposite. But then we used them for the blog, so they were eventually shared somehow.

Claire: That’s right. It’s not like this is your only content opportunity. I want to talk to you guys about the sloppy Joe casserole [00:14:54.14] recipe. Because this is the most genius thing I’ve ever thought of. I’m going to give a little spoiler alert here, but it’s basically a sloppy Joe shepherds pie [00:15:05.01]. I can’t tell you how often my family eats shepherds pie [00:15:06.04]. We get a half cow every year. We have all this beef. And we’re always like, what the heck are we going to do with literally hundreds of pounds of ground beef. So I saw that recipe. We love sloppy Joe, we love shepherds pie. [00:15:18.03] It was one of those moments where you’re like, why didn’t I think of this? I’ve made it three or four times since then. I’ve only had the book for three weeks. So thank you. I just mostly want to say thank you for creating that recipe because it’s so genius. Who came up with that?

Jess: That was all Stacie.

Stacie: It was, but it was a combination of a couple of recipes on our blog. So we have this shepherd’s pie on our [00:15:39.23] blog that’s sweet potato topping, a meat base. So this recipe, and then we have the sloppy Joe recipe that is the recipe [00:15:46.18] Jess created on the blog. So it was really just combining the two, and then we went with traditional mashed potatoes on the top for the book. I’m in Minnesota. I would have named it sloppy Joe hot dish because I’m in Minnesota, but sloppy Joe casserole. It is really good. I tested that one several times, so thank you, thank you for enjoying that recipe. 

Jess: It will forever be a hot dish in my mind too. I’m from Minnesota as well. Casserole just doesn’t roll off your lips like hot dish does.

Claire: I also caught that when you were like, “I love egg bakes.” No one else calls it an egg bake. 

Jess: Just like a casserole, or what do you?

Claire: That food group just doesn’t really exist places outside of Minnesota. No one else is like, “Oh, you got leftovers? Just crack a bunch of eggs in there in a casserole dish and put it in the oven.” Maybe a quiche would come to mind.

Stacie: That sounds a little fancy.

Claire: You’ve got to make a crust. It’s very French. I went to a bachelorette party in Minnesota a couple weeks ago, and we had these leftovers from a crudité, and one of the [00:16:53.21] girls was like, “I’ll take that home and put it in an egg bake.” I was like, “What’s an egg bake?” [laughing]

Stacie: That is too funny.

Claire: I think it was a French onion dip, and she was like, “That would be good in an egg bake.” I’m like, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Jess: You just nailed my childhood. My mom was always like, “Oh, there’s leftovers? Add eggs.” 

Claire: Is this now an egg bake?

Jess: And everybody asked for the recipe. 

Claire: Just literally whatever you can find around the house. Just add eggs, put it in a casserole dish, problem solved. Except Jess who can’t eat eggs. Joy, I feel like I’m asking all the questions. Do you have anything you want to jump in with?

Joy: I want to know quickly what your influences were? I’m always really impressed by people who are really good at cooking and creating in the kitchen because I am not. So what was the basis for you to become what you became in the field that you went into. 

Jess: I started to cook really young. My dad taught me to cook really, really young. It was never gourmet, but it was get it done. It was delicious, it was good, it was healthy, nourishing. I just kind of kept on with that. As I went to college, I got a little more adventurous with my cooking as I moved away from the Midwest and I worked in restaurants. Just always cooking. I suppose one time I did train for an ultramarathon, and I had to do it indoors because I lived in Alaska, and I watched The Food Network [00:18:15.26] for hours on end. 

Joy: You trained for an ultra indoors on a treadmill?

Jess: It was terrible. It was so cold and so icy, so I had to run on a treadmill for four hours.

Joy: No, absolutely not. No, no, no.

Jess: I would watch The Food Network. [00:18:30.26] I probably looked really disordered. Like here I’m watching Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee [00:18:32.28], and I’m running. Nobody knew what I was doing. So yeah.

Joy: How did you do in the ultra?

Jess: I finished.

Joy: That’s just amazing. Is that, what? 50? 100?

Jess: It was 50 miles.

Joy: I mean, whatever. Anything over a marathon, even a marathon to me is a lot.

Claire: More than. 400 meter warm up, I’m like, eh, I’ve got to train for that.

Jess: Now I hate running.

Claire: You have earned the right to hate running if you trained for a 50 mile run on a treadmill.

Jess: I can’t really think of any one thing.

Joy: Sometimes I just feel like it’s in your bones. It’s what you do. It’s the hobby that you really love, and I think I’m just jealous for anyone who has that bone in their body. When you were training and evolving through that piece of exercise and food, were you really focused on the diets? Or were you always like, no, food should be nourishing? I feel like that’s also something that people get really tangly in. We can just eat to eat good food. Lately I’m just seeing so much on social about making sure you eat this food because it has a vitamin or whatever. You need protein, and you need this different type of vitamin. Make sure you eat this liver. Can we have a cookie? Every single meal doesn’t have to have a purpose.

Jess: No, I was definitely several times since I became a dietician, which is over 20 years now, been very diet-focused. Even to the point of getting to where diet was super restrictive and somewhat disordered, usually centered around physical performance or physical appearance. Now I’m not anywhere near there. So yeah, food is delicious, it’s wholesome, it’s nourishing, it’s meant to be shared. Which before it was like calorie counting, avoiding entire groups of food. Yeah, I feel like I’ve kind of run the gamut with dieting and now I’m in a place where food is food, and here we are. I’m still eating well, healthy, focusing on lots of fruits and veggies and stuff. But I’m not crazy, like I have to eat my liver today. How about you, Stacie?

Stacie: Yeah, similar journey as Jess. Definitely went through periods of more restrictive eating, calorie counting, all of that through the years. I think I’m at a good place right now. I think also I had my first baby three years ago. She’s a girl. And that has definitely made me like, I’m raising this girl and I want her to be healthy. I want her to have a relationship with food. It just made it much more important to me for me to be that good example for her. 

Claire: You talked about this a little bit when you were talking about how you got started. But Jess, I know you have a background with managing [00:21:20.07] wick program. Stacie you talked about working in a hospital. One thing I love about nutrition influencers or recipe influencers, for lack of a better word, who are also dieticians and who have that clinical background is having that perspective of knowing the barriers that can come between people and eating healthy that have nothing to do with motivation or meal planning or meal prep. That there are really these systemic barriers that can keep people from having access to that type of choice or having the ability to make that type of food. Even just having the time and resources to cook your own food at home. How does that come into how you approach the blog? Or does it have a place in the process that you go through now that you’re on this side of it?

Jess: We take that into consideration a lot. I’ll let Stacie talk more about this, but especially knowing that not everyone can get the ingredients. We’re always really selective about which ingredients that we’re using. If you can’t get it fairly reasonably, easily, and locally, then it probably doesn’t need to be in one of our recipes. And we can find ways to create the same flavor or texture or mouth feel or whatever using something that is readily available. But then also speaking to barriers, sometimes we know as dieticians that people don’t always have access to abundant, healthy, safe, and nutritious foods. It’s teaching people how to do the best with what they do have. I feel like our recipes do a good job of that. They’re easy. They’re approachable. People can look at our recipes and say, “I can make that” and I have pretty much everything I need or can everything I need pretty easily to make that. And that we don’t preach only organic or only grass-fed. Of course we’re here to educate people that these are great options if you can afford them. But if you can’t, non-organic dairy, non-grass-fed meat is going to be healthy and nourishing, and it’s also an excellent choice. So we try to make everything very accessible.

Stacie: Like Jess said, it’s quite a drive for me to get to a big grocery store. So when we’re coming up with recipes and there’s an ingredient that I can’t get at my local grocery store that is still about 20 miles away, we try not to include it. I’m sure we have a few recipes that are a little more of a stretch, but for the most part I would say 95% of our recipes are recipes that I could go to my local grocery store, get the ingredients, and make. And also we always encourage using what you have on hand. Again, that comes down to when I am at home and I am cooking a recipe. Oh, I’m out of sweet potatoes or whatever. I’m not going to make a 40 mile roundtrip to the grocery store just to get sweet potatoes. I’m going to use something different. Maybe another starchy vegetable like a potato or a squash or something.

Jess: As we’re talking about this, I’m just thinking, we don’t preach. We don’t preach, like I said, organic or has to be grass-fed or anything like that. But being aware of how we develop recipes and what we use, we’re addressing that issue for so many people without calling it out.

Claire: Yeah, I thought of that as you guys were answering around, like, “I don’t feel like I have to take my liver today” or “I’m taking my X, Y, or Z” because I think that those types of rules can make it feel very inaccessible. And you know, it’s one thing to say, here is a meatloaf recipe where you could hide some organ meats if you wanted to. It’s very different from saying, every time you make this, make sure it has grass-fed liver in it. Well, where the heck am I going to get grass-fed liver? Let’s take a quick break and mention and talk about and let you guys know about our amazing sponsor who we love, Ned, our favorite CBD products, based out of Boulder. You know them. You love them.

Joy: If you don’t know them, you better get to know them so that you will love them as much as we do. This month, they are doing a new bundle. It’s called the Dream Set. You know that Claire and I talk all the time about the great sleep we get from the Ned products. Now, they have just bundled it all together for you. The new Dream Set includes their best-selling Sleep Blend and Mellow Magnesium, two products specifically developed to optimize your body for sleep and relaxation. It’s the ultimate combo to revolutionize your sleep. Claire, I think you have this combo down. Because you do Mellow at night right before you go to bed, and you do the CBD, right?

Claire: I do. 

Joy: It’s a little routine. It’s really cute.

Claire: I have my little routine. I have my Sleepytime tea, and I have my Mellow, and I have my CBD. I’m starting to experiment with the timing and how far in advance I take it. I also again just want to make this plug. If you are ordering Mellow, maybe start with half a packet because magnesium is a natural laxative and the last thing you want is you’re almost falling asleep and all of the sudden you’ve got to poop. Just bringing that up now so that you’re not surprised if it happens. Doesn’t mean something is wrong. Just maybe ease yourself into the magnesium.

Joy: Ned’s new and improved Sleep Blend contains CBN, a powerful –

Claire: Cannabinoid.

Joy: Cannabinoid. 

Claire: [singing] Cannabinoid. 

Joy: I love when we say that word. It’s the best word. Cannabinoid that promotes sleep. 750 mg of USDA certified organic CBD. Yes, organic. The purest single source hemp flower extract and 20% more organic and wild crafted botanicals than the previous formulation. Our listeners, if you would like to conquer sleep, conquer it with Ned’s Dream Set. Joy and Claire [00:26:45.11] listeners get 15% off with code JOY. Go to helloned.com/JOY or enter code JOY at checkout. That’s helloned.com/JOY to get 15% off. Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listens a natural remedy for some of life’s most common health issues.

Claire: [singing] Cannabinoid. I’m just going to do that now every time we do those ads. 

Jess: You guys, I’m sitting here with all of my Ned products showing the camera.

Joy: I mean, way to show off.

Jess: This isn’t even half of them. 

Claire: They’re so good, right? Have you met the guys?

Jess: Which one?

Claire: Have you met them in Boulder?

Jess: No, I haven’t.

Claire: Have you been to their spot? 

Jess: No.

Claire: It’s off of Arapahoe, just north of that Oso [00:27:37.27], Arapahoe and 55th. Right there where the goal light used to [00:27:42.28] be. It’s there.

Jess: Cool. Now we need a field trip.

Joy: The Ned quarters.

Claire: They’re so cute. The Ned quarters. So I want to talk about a few other recipes that are in the book. First, I want to talk about the broccoli salad, which we also have made so many times. If you’re at home listening thinking, I don’t love raw broccoli. Why should I eat this? Let me tell you that I don’t love raw broccoli either, but I do really love this salad. So tell us a little bit about the inspiration for this. Jess, I messaged you about it a little bit. I know this is a favorite of your grandma’s?

Jess: Yeah, I think broccoli salad is kind of like the state salad for Minnesota. Stacie and I both have our own variation of it. Mine has sunflower seeds, which my cousins and I affectionately named wood ticks. So it became known as wood tick salad, which is so gross but kind of funny. And I think Stacie’s might have cheese in it. Yeah, it’s raw broccoli, which I don’t even like broccoli. And we mix it with mayonnaise or yogurt. It has bacon and red onions, so it’s sweet, savory, crunchy, creamy. It hits all the spots. Grapes, it has grapes. My grandma used raisins.

Claire: I like the grapes, the little burst of juiciness. Yeah, I don’t love raisins.

Jess: I just cannot get on board with raisins. The taste of sadness.

Claire: Tase of sadness. It’s the taste of disappointment.

Joy: Aw. I’m team raisin, it’s okay. 

Claire: I like raisins in trail mix. 

Jess: No.

Claire: Not into it. Stacie, did you have any dueling options about how this broccoli salad should go. I really am trying to create a conflict with you guys that I feel like is not there.

Jess: It was the salad that almost broke the business. 

Stacie: No, I was totally on board with that salad. Definitely something that you would see at a Midwestern grill out or potluck. Jess hit is on a nail with that one. It’s great.

Claire: It was. I just instinctively added cheese to it. This feels like it needs cheese.

Stacie: Yeah, definitely. And it’s funny you mention the conflict, just trying to find something that we – we really don’t. We work so well together.

Claire: That’s so great. I am always just curious. I know some people, particularly if you’re from similar areas in the United States, you have really strongly-held beliefs about these traditional dishes, and sometimes those can clash. If you have an apple pie, do you pre-cook your apples or not pre-cook your applies? There’s these very strongly-held beliefs. I just didn’t know if any of those were brought into your recipes about broccoli salad.

Stacie: No, I think we both grew up in Minnesota. We were both indoctrinated in the cult of broccoli salad and potluck salads.

Claire: I was really good, really good. Highly recommend. The two other recipes that we have made are the meatloaf sheet pan recipe, which was really good. And I had an inspiration. Which you guys say to use ketchup or barbecue sauce. I’m going to make it again with Korean barbecue sauce and add a little bok choy on the sheet pan. Mix it up a little bit.

Jess: You are hired. We want to hire you. That’s how we develop recipes.

Claire: If that shows up on the blog in two months –

Stacie: We were talking about that recipe. So we have a barbecue version of that mini meatloaf, the sheet pan recipe, so that’s how that inspiration came for the book. But we were also just talking about, we could do exactly what you said. All different flavors for sheet pan mini meatloaf. So thank you for that idea. 

Claire: It’s like mini meatloaf slash giant meatball is how I was thinking about it. And the other one that we have tried is the beef and broccoli, which I feel like that is such a standard. Because we eat so much ground beef – you guys are noticing a trend. All these are ground beef because in my life all I am doing is looking for new ways to eat ground beef. I just love having a fresh take on that because there is a million ways to do it. It is always fun to see how different people approach those basic dishes. I think that’s what’s so cool about your cookbook and what you guys are talking about of wanting to keep it approachable. There’s really nothing in there that you’re like – I mean, not nothing. The sloppy Joe recipe obviously [00:31:51.25] blew my mind. There’s nothing where you’re like, “I’ve never even heard of this before. What the heck is this?” It is just sort of a new way of thinking about a lot of classic home recipes. 

Jess: Yeah, that’s exactly how we would describe what we do. We take comfort food recipes that everybody knows and loves and just make it slightly healthier. We add our own little twist and [00:32:09.14] spin to them.

Joy: And the photos are beautiful, by the way. Your Instagram page is really beautiful. Any time I see a photo pop up on the feed with you guys, it looks really good. 

Jess: Thank you.

Joy: Which isn’t what I’m finding with a lot of food bloggers. It’s not always easy to make some foods look good. It could taste delicious, but some foods don’t look that great. You guys make it look really enticing. So I also want to know from your expertise, what are the common questions you get from people about nutrition? Just basic nutrition. What are the things you find yourself repeating a lot to people when it came to their health and feeding themselves?

Jess: You know, we don’t get a lot of these anymore. The people that have been with us for so long know that we’re not here to talk about any one diet. We don’t think that any one diet is the right diet. We are definitely not preachy. We’re just here to give you recipes that no matter how you eat you can make it work for you. So we don’t get a lot of questions. We get a lot of questions about protein powder. What’s your favorite protein powder? So we recently – actually Jessie did this article. There were two of them, and they were so great. We reviewed whey protein and plant-based proteins. Jessie wrote two blog posts that were all about the best whey proteins and the best plant-based proteins. Other than that, can you think of anything else, Stacie?

Stacie: That’s exactly what I was going to add. We do get that question a lot. Any time we are making a smoothie and add a scoop of protein, that’s a popular question. What protein powder do you recommend? Which is what sparked the idea of creating those review posts.

Claire: That’s so fun. We’ll have to link to that in the notes because we get that question all the time too. It’s like, it kind of depends on what you like and what you’re looking for and what your priorities are. I love that Jessie did that. And having known Jessie from her previous life as the food editor at the last place that I worked, that’s so her jam. I once had to spend three whole day sampling plant-based burgers for something that she was doing about plant-based burgers. Let me tell you, eating one bite at a time of 30 different types of plant-based burgers and being like, “This is my breakfast.” Everyone in the office was just… would not recommend it.

Stacie: We ended up with so much protein powder. Every day, we’re getting more protein samples in the mail. Like, Jessie, this is a lot of protein. 

Jess: Stop having it sent to the house please.

Claire: I trust your methods, but I’m starting to feel a little worried.

Joy: Can you share what the consensus was? What was one of the best ones? Or whey versus plant protein, is there a best, better, worst?

Jess: I think for each person. There are people who love whey and do really well with whey. And then there’s people who really need or want a plant-based protein. So that’s why we split them up into two. And then we had different categories. There was the best for pregnancy and breast-feeding. The best for men, for women, for athletes. I’d have to look at the post honestly. 

Stacie: We even had a category that was looking for a protein without any type of artificial sweetener, even stevia, monk fruit, anything like that. So we had a category for that. We had an overall. And what was great is Anna, who I mentioned earlier, social media coordinator, she can’t have dairy. So she tested all the plant-based protein powders. We obviously trusted her opinion there because that’s all she can have. Of course, we also tested those as well, but she definitely had a big say in the plant-based protein powders. For me, I personally prefer whey. That is just my go-to when it comes to protein powder.

Claire: I’m with Anna. I can’t do whey. It just will be all I’m doing the rest of the day is dealing with the consequences of that decision. I would rather just not build muscle. Sorry.

Jess: We probably have a plant-based protein that is perfect for you on the blog.

Claire: I’m going to have to go check it out.

Joy: We’ll link to that for sure.

Stacie: So there’s two separate posts. One is for plant-based, and the other is for whey protein. There’s seven in each category. 

Jess: That’s kind of the only question. This isn’t a question, but when we do share what we eat, we call them A Dietician’s Day of Eats. [00:36:20.14] It’s not meant to be, if you eat this, you’re going to look like us or perform like us. It’s really like, this is an example of how we take an easy weekend meal prep and we put it together during the week or we grab three or four recipes that we make at dinner time, how we fill in the holes. So we’re always very careful to say this is not to say how you should eat. We don’t think it’s right or wrong. We just think that this is how we do it. People always want to know – it’s kind of like when they go to your house and they want to look in your medicine cabinet – people always want to know what we’re eating. I think that’s the second question.

Claire: Do people come in your house and look in your medicine cabinet? 

Jess: I don’t have one, but – [laughing]

Claire: [laughing]

Jess: I think that’s a thing, right? 

Joy: It’s totally a thing. Because when you’re a dietician, I think about that all the time. You must have this optimized knowledge of food. If you’re feeling bad, it’s almost like you can create a witch’s brew. You know what I mean? It feels like you have this insight into what we all have to do and we all have to “eat better” or take care of ourselves. I mean, it is tied to health. So whatever that looks like for you. But I think that intrigue of what your knowledge is around something that we all have to do every day and how we can feel better. Because we all want to feel better, and how do we do that? How do we do that as we age? How do we do it as an athlete?

Jess: There are so many great dietician out there who are speaking to all of those things, so we never felt that we needed to be the ones speaking to certain diets or performance or pre- and post-workout and all that stuff. We see our job as putting out recipes that other professionals can use. We have a lot of dietician that follow us and they say, “Yeah, I share your recipes with my clients all of the time.” So I feel like that’s kind of our sweet spot. We don’t have to do the day-to-day, the talking about the diets. We are just creating tools for others to use.

Stacie: And when we get those questions, we happily refer them to the dietician we feel is an expert in whatever they are asking.

Claire: Who are some of the people you find yourselves referring out to most often?

Stacie: For any pregnancy-related question, Lilly Nichols. [00:38:29.19] She is amazing.

Jess: If people are coming about macros or performance, I always refer them to more holistic functional bend and then we send them off to dietician we know there. Or people who are just looking to eat healthy and not have a lot of food issues, we’ll often refer to Laura Ligos. She does a good job of looking at food as food and not necessarily food as a number or a function.

Claire: You guys know we love Laura. 

Jess: Yes.

Claire: Now that your book is out in the world and now that you have a third person on your team and you guys are just continuing to grow and, I imagine, get more ideas and get more questions and more opportunities, what’s coming up next for you guys? Or what are you excited about?

Jess: I think we have a long list of things we don’t want to do. 

Stacie: Yeah, the last year and a half has been a lot. We wrote a book. We had a new website created, just an update of a website. We had an SEO audit. It was just a lot that we had going on in the last year. I had a baby. Jess had some family personal things in her family that she was going through. We’re just ready to slow down and take a step back and chill out for a little bit.

Jess: Yeah, last week we were in Salt Lake City for the Traeger Summit [00:39:57.23], the Traeger Girls Summit. We left there just wanting to go home and be creative again and cook and grill all the things and just play with food and not take ourselves so darn seriously.

Claire: That’s fair. I mean, you know, it’s been just a light two years for everyone as we all know. So I feel like that’s on par with what we’re hearing from a lot of people. “You know what? I’m just ready to have a regular year.”

Stacie: For sure.

Claire: Well, where can our audience find you if they are not already following you? 

Stacie: We are a blog, therealfooddieticians.com. And then all social medias @therealfooddieticians. 

Jess: Except for Pinterest. I think we’re still The Real Food RD’s, like registered dietitians. But you can find all of those on our website. So if you go to the top, you can click the social button and get to where you need to be.

Claire: I really would love to know who else out there is still using Pinterest because I am still an avid, avid Pinterest user, and I feel like I am the only one. People are always like, “You’re still on – “ Of course I am, it’s the best. 

Jess: My stepdad loves Pinterest.

Claire: Well, me and your stepdad should hang out because I love Pinterest. I’m on there all the time. Well thank you guys so much for being on the podcast. It’s been such a long time coming. I’m glad we were finally able to have you guys on here. Hopefully we’ll be able to do it again. And everybody, you can find us on Instagram @joyandclaire_. You can go to joyandclaire.com. Although, our website is currently under construction. Just bookmark it for future. It’s going to be exciting. We have some website updates coming. You can email us thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you. We love your comments, your questions, your recommendations. Please send us a note. We will talk to you next Thursday, just like every Thursday since 2013. We are here for you. We will continue to be here. Thank you so much for being here. See you guys later.

Joy: See you later. Bye, guys.

Claire: Bye.

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This is Joy & Claire Episode 115: Friendship and Health Maintenance

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Transcription Completed: March 12, 2022

Audio Length: 56:36 minutes 

Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy.

Claire: And this is Claire.

Joy: Hi. Hello.

Claire: Welcome back. It’s Thursday. We’re so happy that you’re here. I can’t believe we’ve almost been podcasting for nine years.

Joy: Is that too long? Sometimes I wonder. You know how shows run for like ten years, like Friends.

Claire: Like Grey’s Anatomy.

Joy: Yeah. And you’re like, it’s been too long.

Claire: How many cast members can you kill off?

Joy: Right.

Claire: We promise to never kill off a cast member.

Joy: That’s a good point. 

Claire: This will become the truest true crime podcast ever.

Joy: Yeah. What if one day we just parlayed it into a true crime podcast? What if we just all of the sudden decided –

Claire: To start doing true crime?

Joy: Yeah, wouldn’t that be funny.

Claire: By murdering your cohost? That’s a concept for a fiction podcast right there. A murder mystery podcast where they murder your cohost.

Joy: That would be so meta. Because it started out as a fun flighty –

Claire: Right. And now you’re investigating the murder of your own podcast cohost that you secretly murdered.

Joy: Lifestyle bloggers.

Claire: Trademarking that idea right here right now. Strangled by a – what would be a funny thing to be strangled by as an influencer? Strangled by a –

Joy: Microphone cord? Aw.

Claire: Aw.

Joy: This is getting real weird. What do you think about –

Claire: Bludgeoned over the head with a jade roller.

Joy: [laughing] Oh my gosh. You froze your skin off because you put too many products on it. Yeah. 

Claire: Poisoned by micro greens powder. You’ll never know.

Joy: The options are endless, really, to kill off a coworker. Let’s not go there. This is feeling really 9 to 5 where they put whatever in his drink. I know you don’t like true crime because it stresses you out. Like, you wouldn’t watch a murder documentary. You wouldn’t watch a spooky show. You wouldn’t watch scary things. I always find it very interesting. So we have a lot of things to talk about as it relates to Iliza Shlesinger. We just saw her comedy show last night. She talked a little bit about this. Basically it’s like, why are white women so fascinated and so addicted to true crime? Why? It’s very interesting to me. I don’t know, that’s a bigger question for another day.

Claire: Actually, do you follow… oh my gosh, there are so many wholesome people on Instagram these days. I am enjoying it. The algorithm has finally stopped showing me people that I hate and showing me people that I love.

Joy: Oh good.

Claire: Jeffrey Marsh?

Joy: No.

Claire: Jeffrey Marsh is so wonderful. They are a non-binary influencer, I guess you would just call them. They had a video the other day. It starts out very lighthearted and then quickly is like, “Hey, don’t forget you can wear glitter eyeliner if you want. Because you are worthy of love and acceptance, and no one can take that away from you.” But the way they say it, you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m hearing this for the first time.

Joy: Yeah, you hear it deep in your soul.

Claire: Check out this person because they are really quite something. But they had one the other day that says, “I know why you like true crime. And I do too. It’s because you feel less alone hearing about someone else go through something horrible all alone.”

Joy: Yeah, I don’t think that’s wrong.

Claire: And it says, “It feels like the chaos and evil of the world is not just yours. It didn’t just happen to you because you are singularly horrible. It could happen to anyone.” So there is a deep take by Jeffrey Marsh.

Joy: There is a very deep take. I think that we like to compare, and I think that the social media world – which that’s kind of a side topic for a second because I also want to talk about what Iliza said about about that. But I think that we like to compare. We like to compare. We like to see where we stand. And I think there’s an element of, how did this happen to this person, and how can I avoid it? I don’t know. There’s probably a lot of different reasons why people like it. I always have a hard time because I always think about the victims. If you were a victim of a crime –

Claire: And it showed up on a podcast.

Joy: Oh my God, I would be furious.

Claire: I remember I had never listened to My Favorite Murder [00:04:46.11], which was the original true crime podcasts, or one of them. I had never listened to them until you and Julie Bauer [00:04:51.19] and I went and saw them in person. I just remember sitting in the audience being like, this is it? This is the whole show? 

Joy: Right. They’re just reading about crimes.

Claire: Reading old crime news reports.

Joy: Yeah, yeah. The only real crimes podcast that I will listen to now, I try to be mindful of the victims. I don’t want to use someone else’s pain for entertainment. I think that feels really icky. So I only listened to Real Crime Profiles, [00:05:19.26] which is actually a podcast by an FBI profiler and people in the field who have actually prosecuted crimes and worked very closely with victims and know how to speak about it from a really honoring the victim standpoint. And then Confronting Columbine [00:05:35.05] or the whole series of that that show, which also was Confronting OJ [00:05:39.29]. So the whole confronting series where it is from the voices of the victims. And that to me is a really important thing to switch.

Claire: Right, to have that perspective that they’re going to tell their story on their own. It’s not someone else telling the story for them.

Joy: Yeah, it’s on their terms. They get to decide how and when. I’ve made it my new rule of I’m not going to be listening to these true crimes. I get frustrated, and I know this is just something I can’t control, but all of the top podcasts are true crime stories. Like Crime Junkie [00:06:12.19], Morbid [00:06:16.21], My Favorite Murder [00:06:17.08]. Those are the top three, and they’re all just regurgitating people’s pain. I know that there are some episodes where they will talk with a victim of a crime, a survivor. And I think that’s great and all, but I think I just have a hard time I think because I watch this and I’m like, what does this say about us as a culture that we’re just drawing people’s pain for our enjoyment? That’s something I’m trying to be mindful of as I’m consuming content, and giving these people downloads just rubs me the wrong way. I know that’s another area where I just can’t police the internet. And I really want to. I really wish I could.

Claire: And actually, I just want to clarify. Last night, Joy and I both saw the Elisa Schlesinger show. [00:07:07.02] We didn’t see it together, kind of ironically. If you don’t know Elisa Schlesinger, [00:07:13.07] she’s a comedian. She’s very, very funny. She has some great Netflix specials. Elder Millennial. I’m pretty sure the oxytocin from watching that Netflix special put me into labor. I laughed myself into having Evie because I just binged a ton of Elisa two [00:07:27.21] days before she was born. So Brandon and I had bought tickets to the show in November 2019. The original show was supposed to be in March 2020. Obviously nothing happened in March 2020 that any of us had planned, so it’s been rescheduled. I think this was the third date that they had rescheduled it for. So we finally got to go see it last night. The true crime comment, I just want to say, was I think made by her opener whose name is Laura Peak [00:07:49.16]. 

Joy: Oh, good call. 

Claire: So check out Laura Peak [00:07:53.15] on her Instagram because she was really funny. There were moments in the show where I was like, oh my gosh, Joy and I could be comedians. We talk about these things, and we’re so funny. One of the ones was waking up in the morning and trying not to get too muscular when you work out. My biggest fear is waking up in the morning going, “Ah, look at these abs! What do I do?”

Joy: “What do I do with these washboard abs?” Yeah, she was really funny.

Claire: Ridiculous.

Joy: She was really, really funny.

Claire: “You don’t just wake up one morning and go, ‘Oh shit, I got jacked.’ How did this happen? No. It doesn’t work like that.” And then, yeah, Elisa [00:08:23.03] had a whole bit about TikTok. About how all TikTok is is monkey see, monkey do. 

Joy: Yeah.

Claire: I was like, you’re not wrong though.

Joy: Not wrong.

Claire: What is a trend if not monkey see, monkey do? It’s literally things that trend are just content repetition. What did she say? You’re not creating, you’re just repeating.

Joy: Exactly. But she’s like, I’m addicting to watching it. That’s what I love about her. That’s what I love about certain artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift is they don’t use – I mean, they’re a whole different level of success. But at the same time, I think we need to be mindful of that. Sometimes I think that’s why I’m not as active on social media posting because it’s that weird fine line of trying to make a brand but also wanting to live your life and not get caught up in this weird loop of wanting people to like what you post.

Claire: And content-izing your life.

Joy: Yes. Yeah. I get it. I get the superficial stuff. But on a deeper level, I just don’t want to get sucked into the dopamine hits of being like, “How many likes do I have today?” That feels really weird to me. And what she said about TikTok I thought was super fascinating about how people just go so into the dancing, and then people just start to repeat, and then you get in this loop where you cannot think for yourself. So I will always watch to see what she’s doing on social media – which kind of sounds like a hypocritical thing to say. But I really will just to be like, I love to see her take on things. She will also talk to her followers about something she saw on social media and have a stance about it. It almost wakes me up to be like, I can’t fall into this rabbit hole of social media likes and making sure – the other thing she brought up was around how people just don’t communicate with each other. In the past, in the olden days before social media, we couldn’t be passive aggressive over a text. We couldn’t be passive aggressive in a post.

Claire: Yeah, in a post. A text, even, would be direct. 

Joy: Sure. Sure, sure, sure.

Claire: You can’t be passive aggressive by a status update. The best we had were away messages. You could do a passive aggressive away message. And unless somebody IM’d you while you were on MSN Messenger Live at 9pm on a Tuesday night, they were not going to see your away message about keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Like, “Oh my God, her and Becca are totally in a fight. I know this is about the breakup with Travis.”

Joy: Yeah. And in junior high, you’d have people do it for you. Like I’d have my friends break up with my boyfriend for me.

Claire: Absolutely.

Joy: I’d be like, “I don’t like him anymore.” That was really interesting too because I’m like, I have sometimes done that. That is so weird because you just hope the person sees it and is like, “This must be about me.” But really, the thing is, because we get so angered – the things that I have passively aggressively posted is because I didn’t know the person really well that I’m passive aggressive over. It’s more of a global message of, why are people following diet culture bullshit still? So then I will passive aggressively post against it. But it’s just what I come down to all the time when I see crap that makes me angry is I’m like, oh, this will always be here and I just can’t give it my attention. I can’t give it my attention. So I just loved what she had to say about that. It was a really great show. If you have the chance to see her live. I know that all of her materials that she did for us last night I’m sure will end up in a Netflix special because it was really good. She’s so great.

Claire: It was really funny. Okay, speaking of Instagram people that I like to follow, speaking of not living and dying by social media but using it as a tool for good – the other account that I really enjoy right now is The Official Madame Adam [00:12:22.03]. It’s just @officialmadamadam. [00:12:25.21]

Joy: I am just obsessed.

Claire: Yeah. Madam Adam’s pronouns are he/they. I am still learning how to use pronouns. I know this is a me learning things. I am not asking for advice. I am not telling anyone that they need to help me with this. But the gendered singular, nongendered plural. JVN talked about this on –

Joy: Getting Curious [00:12:44.08]. 

Claire: No, it wasn’t Getting Curious [00:12:46.09]. Queer Eye. Come on, Claire. [00:12:46.22] Where he said, “My pronouns are he/they. You can go by either one.” So Madam Adam’s pronouns are he/they. He is a tarot card reader –

Joy: I think Damian is he/she/they. That’s what he said. He/she/they.

Claire: Oh, okay.

Joy: That’s a good question of which one to use when.

Claire: Yeah. Madam Adam is a tarot card reader who is so sassy. You guys know how I feel about tarot cards. Not into them. But I still do love this. I think he’s really big on TikTok, but he’s coming into Instagram as well. I don’t TikTok.

Joy: I appreciate that –

Claire: I appreciate that all the good stuff on TikTok eventually ends up on Instagram.

Joy: Eventually ends up on Instagram, yeah. 

Claire: So if you guys need another wholesome follow, @officialmadamadam.

Joy: I actually emailed Madam Adam to see if he would come on the show.

Claire: That would be fun.

Joy: Haven’t heard yet, but we’ll see.

Claire: TBD.

Joy: Yep.

Claire: Okay, so Joy and I this morning got together in real life. Did a little content creation. There’s this super cute photo studio near my house on Longmont where you can rent it out on an hourly basis. It’s meant for photographers to rent out to do family photo shoots or brand shoots or whatever. But we just showed up with our iPhone and Joy’s little tripod ring light. It had such good natural light. It’s super cute. The woman who owns it is really great at styling it. So we just did our own little DIY photo shoot. It was the first time that Joy and I had seen each other in real life… when was the last time we saw each other in real life? I literally don’t remember. I think it was over the summer.

Joy: It had to be when we did something with Jess, I’m sure.

Claire: Yeah.

Joy: Because the three of us probably got together for breakfast. I’m sure. It was probably at Just Be.

Claire: And I think that probably was in like April of last year.

Joy: Really?

Claire: Yeah.

Joy: Aw, man.

Claire: Because we were going to get together for Jess’s birthday, and then we were going to get together for your birthday, and then we were going to get together for birthday, and then we were going to get together to celebrate our new jobs. None of that ever happened because people kept getting COVID or –

Joy: That’s right. It’s COVID. That thing with the “C” word, yeah.

Claire: So we’ve been meaning to talk about this. It just sort of comes up occasionally that people always ask, how do you and Joy – first of all, they’re like, how do you know each other? How does it work to do something like a podcast with someone you’re so close with? For those of you who have been listening for a long time, you guys know that Joy and I really didn’t know each other that well before we started podcasting. The joke is always, I don’t even know how Joy had my phone number. That’s how casual our friendship was. And not even friendship – our acquaintanceness was. We went to the same gym, but we didn’t even go to the same workouts. We would see each other on a Saturday partner workout every couple of weekends, but we both had blogs at the time that were kind of lifestyle/fitness blogs. And our gym owner TJ, not to be confused with JT who is Joy’s dog. TJ, who owned the gym we both went to, would sometimes send out a newsletter and he would link to one of our blog posts. It was very cute. He was so supportive. So we knew each other had blogs. So Joy one day texted me and was like, “Hey, do you want to start a podcast?” And here we are nine years later. I think a big piece of that is since we didn’t have a close friendship before we started the podcast, we weren’t worried about ruining a friendship by going in on this project together. Which I know can be very touchy if you’re starting any sort of project with somebody that you’re close with. Well, what if we have a difference of opinions? Whatever happens. We’ve been really lucky. It’s just worked out so well. Our personalities, turns out, are really great – and our lifestyles, the stuff that Joy has time for that I don’t have time for and the stuff that I know how to do that Joy doesn’t know how to do.

Joy: Super complementary in a very weird way.

Claire: In a way that we couldn’t have planned.

Joy: No.

Claire: And also now nine years in, people sometimes are like, how do you fit it in? It’s just part of my life. It’s like brushing my teeth.

Joy: Right.

Claire: You just do it. It’s like remembering to take the trash out once a week. We just podcast once a week. It’s just part of what we do, literally for almost nine years. For a quick bunny trial, I was thinking this morning as I was brushing my teeth, I wonder if we are the longest continually-podcasted Indie podcast.

Joy: I often wonder that. I often wonder if we’re the longest.

Claire: We’re up there.

Joy: We’re up there.

Claire: With non-network podcasts. 

Joy: Yeah, that have the longevity.

Claire: Every single week, no breaks, no seasons.

Joy: We’re not talking about the people who release four episodes every quarter. Someone who started maybe five years before us but then they stopped.

Claire: Even WODcast [00:17:16.15]. There have been long stretches where they didn’t release anything, and then they come back and do a reunion and the guys all kind of have their own projects going on. But that as a platform. Or Barbell Shrugged [00:17:26.27], which I don’t even know what those guys are doing anymore other than ayahuasca. 

Joy: [laughing]

Claire: I said it, and I’m not taking it back.

Joy: I said what I said. I said what I said. 

Claire: Can’t deny it. I do love those guys. They’ve never been anything but so great to us.

Joy: No, but just, come one.

Claire: They do a lot of ayahuasca. So anyway, I was wondering that. But the other thing that it always brings up is I live about 40 minutes north of Joy, which is too far to drive once a week in the middle of the week. Especially for someone like Joy who doesn’t really like driving far and someone like me who doesn’t have time to drive far. I don’t have time before or after work or on the weekends. I have to make sure my kids don’t die. And Joy is kind of a homebody.

Joy: You know what, I was thinking about it today too. It was interesting because I was thinking today, now I get it when you were working from home. Now that I don’t drive anywhere, I’m like, it actually is fine to drive. I’m starting to feel how people were feeling during the pandemic when they were home all the time, or you’d be like, “I really want to get out of my house,” and “I want to drive 30 minutes to my gym.” I’m at that point where I’m like, oh, no biggie. I don’t drive anywhere. Unless it’s snowing obviously – whatever. But I’m starting to get that feeling of, yeah, let’s go, let’s go somewhere. 

Claire: Yeah.

Joy: Turning over a new leaf.

Claire: But it works out because neither one of us are secretly irritated that the other one doesn’t want to meet in person. And we have this long, pretty close friendship – also with Jess, our friend that we always talk about. One day maybe we’ll have her on the podcast. Where we really only see each other a couple times a year even though we don’t live that far. I think this is more common than we think. I also have long distance friends. My closest best friend who I have been friends with since high school hasn’t lived in Colorado since high school. She moved out of state for college and has never come back. So even though she is my closest best friend, I have not lived in the same state as her since I was 18. So way more than half our friendship, she has been in another state, and I have only seen her a couple times a year when she comes home for holidays, or maybe I’ll go out to visit her every other year or so. I have close friends in Minnesota and in Utah. But also in Denver who I just don’t get to see all that often. And I know you do too. You have super close girlfriend in Arizona. We all have these friendships that even before the pandemic and especially with the pandemic, we figure out how to keep them close without seeing each other in person. We do get asked about that a lot, and we’ve been posting about it a little bit more on our Instagram stories. I posted this morning we had this studio session and I was like, we’ve actually seen each other in real life. We only see each other a few times a year. And I got a couple messages about like, how do you make that work? So I don’t know if I have any tips, but I will tell you sort of what the behind-the-scenes of our friendship looks like. I always think back to this time years ago, Brandon made this joke of, “You and Joy have this ongoing conversation 24/7, and the podcast is just an hour-long snippet of it that you record.” 

Joy: We’re texting every single day. I feel like every single friendship is different. There’s certain types of friendships that people need different things. So what works for one friendship isn’t going to work for another. It’s not a universal formula. But I know there’s some friends that I’ll rarely hear from, but every once in a while they’ll say hi. Even my close friends that I consider close friends in Denver. And I think the pandemic changed a lot just for people being more isolated and homebodies. That’s fine, and I respect that because I’m kind of feeling the same. But I think just the ebb and flow too of how friendships can change and evolve. Some of my friends will do Marco Polo every day, and some of my friends will text every day. I think it just depends on what you need and the effort you put into it. I’ll always feel the pull to check in with you every day because I’m like, what’s going on? I can’t all of the sudden podcast with you without talking to you throughout the week. I think there’s levels of being really involved, and I think that will change over time too. But I think about the past nine years of all the different things that we’ve been though individually or the moves or whatever. But I think the commitment – and also that this has never been a job job. It’s never been something that we’ve had to keep afloat. You don’t have those pressures on it.

Claire: Right. We don’t have to rely on it to pay our bills.

Joy: Makes it totally different too because there’s not a lot of pressure. I mean, granted, we’ve always had that wonder if we really, really put the heart and soul into it. But it also feels like that’s what keeps the longevity of it is that it isn’t that pressure. It fits into our lives at certain stages of our lives. We go through different things where you don’t always have the time to make it your job.

Claire: it’s interesting too because I honestly think if it weren’t for the podcast, there’s no reason that we would have stayed in touch after I left Denver. There’s no reason we would have ever gotten as close as we are because our lifestyles have very little in common and our lives have very little in common. We don’t have all that many of the same interests apart from general healthy lifestyle interests. But when I think of my other friends who are out of state or just who are longer distance, it is about keeping them in the loop. Even if it’s only a couple of texts a month, just “Hey, this meme made me think of you. How are you doing?” And sometimes I will just send a meme and then send a two-paragraph update where I’m like I know that this is not bothering you. I know that you might not write back, and that’s fine. But I also know that if I wait for an established time to talk to you about this, I’m never going to send it. So I’ll send a two paragraph where I’m like, “Hey, this meme made me think of you. We’re doing great out here. Miles started kindergarten and he’s learning how to read. And Brandon started a new job. And I’m…” blah, blah, blah. And they’ll just heart it. And then ten days later, they’ll send me something and be like, “Great to hear from you. Here’s how our lives are going.” And you kind of just hit the ball back and forth across the net forever. And then every once in a while, you will have the chance to talk a little bit more in an actual conversation or maybe you’ll get on FaceTime. Maybe. I can’t Marco Polo. I just can’t. I don’t like it. I finally learned. It’s just another channel that I have to manage, and it’s too many. But I know that works really well for some people. Yeah, I think it is just about keeping them in your mental awareness of if something interesting happens I’m going to reach out to them. Or if I see something funny, I’m going to share it with them. So they kind of have that moment of, oh, this made Claire think of me. That’s so cute. I’m going to go about my day, but I have that ping that I’m on her mind, and that’s going to keep her on my mind. I think it’s just interesting that now that we have such instant forms of communication – you’re not sending a letter. Like imagine coordinating a visit by letter.

Joy: Oh my God.

Claire: To be like, “I will be there in the spring.” 

Joy: Yeah. Connection has really evolved. I just had this flash of – I told you guys I used to write missionaries all the time because I was friends with tons of Mormons in my high school and was friends with a lot of guys who went on to serve their mission. And they aren’t allowed to call, and cell phones weren’t a thing back then. Or at least we didn’t have them. And I would write letters to them every week or month. I would record messages on a cassette tape, and I would talk to them throughout the day. I mean, that’s like the old school Marco Polo. I actually invented Marco Polo, you guys. I would record tapes and send them tapes throughout my day, and then they would record them back. I still remember that of the ways that you would communicate and stay in touch with people. And I’m someone who it’s important to me to maintain contact with people that I love. Really important. So I always have some touchstone of what’s going on with the people that I want to keep in touch with. But it took me some time to learn some of my friends just don’t have that bone. So if I don’t hear from them, it’s not like – I used to get really emotional or sensitive about that, back in my 20’s. And then I learned some people just don’t keep in touch as much as I do. They don’t have that bone in their body to be like, let me text you every day or let me send you a card or whatever. So I do the same thing like you do. So every once in a while if I’m thinking of somebody, I’ll just send them a text message. I know that I’m not going to get a response for a while. I’ve noticed this about myself too. I don’t have a lot of friends that I get into conflict with or that I feel like I can’t talk about difficult things with. Meaning I don’t really get into fights with friends. I say that because Elisa [00:26:37.25] brought that up too last night of how you should be able to just call things out. I don’t know if I have friendships like that. Let me put it this way. I have a couple other friends who are friends with people – let’s use an example. One of my hometown friends is friends with a girl who gets really upset with her all the time over things where I’m like, what? I don’t understand why she’s upset. When she tells me why so-and-so is upset, I’m like, really? That just sound exhausting. They maintain that friendship, but in my mind I’m like, I wouldn’t put up with that shit. That’s exhausting. [laughing] I just don’t want to associate with people like that. So I think that’s an interesting thing too to know. I’ve chosen friendships that are pretty cut and dry, easy to maintain. I don’t really put up with drama.

Claire: I know, I can’t think of a single friend or even a single interaction where I’ve been in an ongoing fight with a friend. Maybe I’ll have one conversation where it’s like, hey, you did this thing, or you said this thing. It rubbed me the wrong way, or it was inappropriate, or whatever. It’s like, oh okay, well let’s talk about it for a minute, and then let’s smooth it over and move on with our lives. I have friends like that too where they have a couple people in their lives who are just always kind of irritated with them. “Me and this person just aren’t on good terms right now.” What do you mean you’re not on good terms right now?

Joy: I get it if there was some higher layer of complication where I could see a true reason for a conflict. But if we are talking a 1 to 10 scale, this is like a 2 for me. Where I’m like, that’s not really that big of a deal. That feels like petty drama. And yet this friend will continue to smooth things out, which then makes me a little annoyed because I’m like, why do you put up with this shit? But whatever. If you want to do that, that’s your life. I just don’t do that with close friendships. And if people like that come into my orbit, I’m quickly like, I’m out. I’m taking myself out of this group chat. 

Claire: I’m just going to go for a walk and not come back.

Joy: Alright. Let’s take a quick break to talk about our favorite people in the whole wide world. Are we ready to revisit some Ned?

Claire: I’m always ready. I love Ned. I’ve recently reupped on some mellow, their magnesium drink powder. It’s so delicious and calming. I don’t know what’s going on with my body lately, but I’ve been getting wild restless legs and restless arms. Have you ever had restless arms?

Joy: No. I’ve had restless legs but not restless arms.

Claire: Okay, imagine it in your arms. It’s the worst. I lay in bed, and I feel like I have to do wacky, wavy inflatable arms. It’s horrible. I’m getting it right now just thinking about it. I had terrible restless legs when I was pregnant. They started coming back, and I’ve started getting restless arms. The only thing that helps is magnesium powder and CBD. Those are the only two things. I have tried so many things out there. I have tried Epsom salt baths. I have tried lotion. Compression. I’ve eaten bananas. Make sure I’m hydrated. I’ve done all the things, and the only two things that help are magnesium, like a drink mix and/or supplements, and CBD. When I was pregnant with Evie, I had such bad restless legs. I didn’t sleep for weeks. And then I started taking CBD, which there’s no data about CBD and pregnancy. It’s up to you. Side note, this is not a doctor’s recommendation. Please discuss these types of choices with your medical professional. But I did take it when I was pregnant, and it was the only thing that worked for my restless legs. So just a fun little tip. I’ve been using the mellow and it definitely helps. If you struggle with moderate restless limb problems, check this out.

Joy: Check it out. And I have been loving the destress blend. You know that I love the sleep blend. So here’s a great example of how I use the destress blend or the sleep blend. Both kind of have the same effects on me. The sleep one is a little more intense just for sleeping, obviously. But I got home later than my bedtime last night. Of course, I’m really big on my sleep. So the second I got home, I was like, I need to take some Ned because that will really wind me down quickly versus me being there trying to wind down. Because especially after a show, you’re socializing, you’re out on the town. So the second I got home, I took some Ned and then washed my face, got into bed, and I was out and had a great night’s sleep. You guys know we love Ned, and we truly believe in their products. Not only are they great people, but these are really quality products that you can trust. If you would like to give Ned a try, Joy and Claire [00:31:26.01] listeners get 15% off Ned products with code JOY. Visit helloned.com/JOY to get access. That’s helloned.com/JOY to get 15% off. Thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life’s most common health issues.

Claire: Yay. And we’re going to have the Ned founders on the show. Don’t forget. We are interviewing them in a couple of weeks. If you have any questions specific to CBD or even specific to starting a small business or running a wellness brand, send them to us, thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. We would love to ask them your questions. So what’s next? We have been chatting a little bit behind the scenes about some healthy lifestyle choices. About some different lifestyle choices –

Joy: If we want to get murdered, we should talk about health and wellness. Diets. I’m just kidding.

Claire: We’re not talking about that. But so a couple weeks ago, maybe the second week of January 

Joy: It was a month ago actually because I’ve been tracking the days.

Claire: Joy texted Jess and I and was like, “I believe in accountability, so I’m letting you guys know that I’m giving up alcohol for a month because I am using it too much and I don’t like that I’m using it as much as I am, and I want to just see what life is like without it.” I responded, “Cool. I’m three weeks into a Whole30, so I also have not been drinking alcohol.” Just so you guys know, it’s possible to do a Whole30 and not talk about it. 

Joy: And not post it on Instagram.

Claire: I know. A lot of people found this podcast originally because we did that Whole30. I don’t regret doing that. And as you guys know, I love macros. I do them for a couple weeks every year. I do love the Whole30. I think it really helps me find a new baseline or kind of come back to the diet – and diet as a noun, not a verb – the diet baseline that I want to have, which is majority Whole Foods, majority cooked from scratch. That is something that I personally value. So it’s not about cutting out food groups, though I already am lactose intolerant, so I should not be eating as much lactose as I do anyway. But it’s not about cutting out grains or whatever. It’s about having those meat and vegetable focused meals at the top of my mind. So it helps me remember to plan out my meals and to plan out my day of eating. I’m more likely to eat more when I’m tracking macros or doing something like a Whole30 because I am paying more attention to what I am eating. My biggest problem when it comes to my diet – again, diet as a noun, not as a verb. Diet, meaning the collection of food that I eat – is that I don’t pay enough attention to it. And then I get to the end of the day or even the end of the week and feel so worn down because I’m not eating enough. If I’m paying more attention, whether it’s through counting macros or whether it’s through something like the Whole30, I eat a lot more. This is consistent for me in any way of eating I’ve ever tried. The more awareness I have around it, the more I remember to actually eat.

Joy: Right.

Claire: So that’s the Whole30. I also thought it was interesting when you brought up alcohol. I don’t know if people are going to start hating me because I’m just like, “That’s never been an issue for me.” I feel like I say that every time diet culture things come up where I’m like, yeah, body comparison has never been a huge issue for me. Getting into a diet and not being able to get back out has never been a huge issue for me. Blah, blah, blah. But alcohol has never been a huge issue for me. I can go in and out of it however I want. And also, I think when you are someone who has gone through pregnancies, giving up alcohol kind of loses its drama because it’s like, oh yeah, I’ve done this for years at a time already as an adult. Whereas a lot of people don’t ever give up alcohol for more than… like I’ve gone, between pregnancy and breast feeding, close to a year and a half at a time where it just wasn’t an option. So talk about how it’s been. It’s been 31 days now. Are you going to go back?

Joy: Well, I really hesitated of how I wanted to talk about this on the podcast because it feels a little charged and there’s so many emotions around it for people. I have been talking to a couple friends who stopped drinking alcohol. I was like, yeah, I saw you post about this last year, and I hated you for it because I was like, ugh, God, someone else going alcohol free. It was very annoying for me to see all these people just giving up booze. I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. It just is a testimony of, hey, wherever you are in life, that’s where you are. You don’t need to compare. Everyone’s got their own journey, so let’s just leave it all alone. So one day, the nutshell version – and I’ll just keep talking about this as it evolves. I am a pretty light drinker, relatively speaking if you were to compare it. I don’t love the – in behavioral health, there’s a spectrum of what kind of drinker you are, and we go through a whole screening of how much substances you use and how many drinks you have per week. I always knew the barometer, and I knew the baseline of what was a heavy drinker versus a mild to moderate drinker verses a light drinker. So having all that knowledge of course, I’m like, I don’t really have a problem. But I noticed during the pandemic I was drinking every day. I started drinking every day. It just became an afternoon habit. And then it started to just get a little bit earlier. I was like, oh, 4 o’clock? Okay. It wasn’t a lot. I’m not going to say exactly what I was drinking or how much, but it was definitely, relatively speaking, not a lot. However, when I started noticing that I was looking forward in a very desperate way to that time of day, almost to a point of that anticipation. Everybody knows that feeling if you’ve ever had anticipatory dopamine where whether it be shopping or food or something that you’re looking forward to, you get that hit when you anticipate it. I started getting that pretty strongly. I would still drink and then feel guilty. So it was more of the rollercoaster of emotions that go along with it. And then afterwards, I would feel guilty. Which is a little bit of a disorder. So one morning I woke up, and I was so sick of my own shit – meaning, I just woke up feeling like, I am sick of feeling this way. I am sick of anticipating it, feeling guilty for drinking it, and then having a shame spiral afterwards. So I just woke up one day and I texted my friend who I knew had not been drinking for a year. I texted her and was like, “I am so sick of this. I need to stop drinking, and I need to tell someone about it.” She was like, “Yep. Great.” And actually, I texted two friends because they have been alcohol free for about a year. They were like, “Yep. I hear you. Here’s what helped me. Stop.” So it’s called the alcohol experiment. I’m sure everybody knows about it. There’s a book called The Naked Mind [00:38:39.26]. There’s a podcast called The Naked Mind Podcast [00:38:41.25]. There’s a million and one different resources. This just happened to be something that I could get on board with, and it just leads you through 30 days of not drinking. So as I’ve been going through this, A, it makes me realize that habits really just take some time and patience, B, I was extremely irritable because I no longer had the dopamine hit from the anticipation, and C, holy crap did I feel better. That was the thing that I hated hearing people talk about. Because I was like, “I don’t drink that much. What do they feel? How much better are you going to feel?” I was super, super skeptical about it. And also because I don’t think I was ready to let it go, I was just continuing to try to be like, “Whatever, whatever, [scoff],” dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. Because I still wanted to drink what I wanted to drink. Then when I started cutting it out, I super clear thinking – like sharp, sharp, sharp, sharp mind to where I felt like if you could just have this haze lifted off of your world. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can actually think and use my brain. And my sleep has been phenomenal. I’m a pretty good sleeper, but man am I getting good sleep. And then on top of that, I don’t like the feeling really. So learning about it and learning what alcohol does to your body, I kind of knew about but just relearning in a different context has been really, really helpful for me. So that’s it. I don’t call it sobriety. I don’t know why. There’s no label or negativity associated with that. I want to make that clear. It’s just more of I don’t want people to think I’m on a heroic journey of sobriety. I think that’s something that is completely different that I am just doing something that felt like –

Claire: Right. That doesn’t identify with what this experience is.

Joy: No. And I also kind of think, yeah, there’s a lot of different labels that people can put on it, and I don’t think any one is bad. But for me, I think I’m having a hard time being like, “Oh, look at me.” I don’t want praise for it. It’s more of I saw a problem and I didn’t like how I was feeling and I wanted to do something about it. I also found that alcohol is a real big piece of our lives in the world. I immediately started noticing, oh, I have these two events coming up and I have to explain why I’m not drinking. It turns out, nobody really cares. The people who matter just are like, “Oh, okay.” And then on the added motivation for me is I’m donating bone marrow very soon, and you can’t drink for that. That was something that initially when they told me I couldn’t drink during bone marrow donation, I was like… really? Can I have like one drink? I was starting to bargain with that. That was about 31 days ago. By the time this goes out, it will be like 35 days. I don’t plan to drink any time soon, and that’s really where I’m going to leave it for now. If anybody has questions – I’ll link the alcohol experiment in the show notes. [00:41:55.19] It’s an app. It’s a really helpful app that you can put on your phone, and they do lessons every day, like ten-minute lessons. Totally doable. And that is my story about alcohol.

Claire: Alright. We all know Joy hates a label.

Joy: I hate a label. But the other thing is – and people will argue with this too, but I don’t really see this as a big deal – I’ve been really loving my kombuchas and my alcohol-free beers I’ve been drinking. I’ve been drinking occasionally an alcohol-free beer. And I’m like, oh, interesting how just the taste of it and not necessarily wanting to feel anything associated with it is enough to satisfy that need in my head. 

Claire: Right.

Joy: I know there’s a lot of opinions about it. But for me, that’s been a fun hobby to be like, oh, what kombuchas are good? What alcohol free beers are out there? And man, there’s a lot of companies that make alcohol free beers. It’s really pretty cool. That’s my latest adventure. Scott of course loves to help me find those.

Claire: Yes. I mean, between your love of beverages and Scott’s love of –

Joy: Finding things. Yeah.

Claire: A task that can be solved by buying things.

Joy: Oh yeah. If he can scavenger around town –

Claire: Yeah, I can see him coming home with a whole bag just clanking – little insulated tote full of beverages.

Joy: Which by the way, my favorite so far is Untitled Art is the brand. They have a great alcohol-free beer. Actually a whole series of them. And then Athletic Brewing Company is another good one. It’s just fizzy and kind of tastes like hops. It’s kind of like drinking water.

Claire: Yeah, HopTea. 

Joy: Hop tea.

Claire: I think it is interesting how loaded that choice is in our society that it feels like you can’t just decide you want to or decide you don’t want to. It has to be a statement. 

Joy: Yeah.

Claire: It’s like, it doesn’t always have to be a statement.

Joy: Yeah. That’s kind of where I’ve been like, I don’t even know if I want to post about it. I’ll talk about it, but I don’t want to be like… I don’t know.

Claire: And for some people it is, This kind of gets into the conversation that we sometimes have around any sort of declaration – I can think of an example we’ve done in the past is people are like, “I took my shirt off in the workout today, and I want to post about it.” And you’re like, you don’t have to post about it. But for some people, that is a postable, worthy moment that it took so much for them to get there, and they want to recognize it. And for other people, it’s like, hey, this was a choice I made. It doesn’t really feel like it’s worth shouting about. And not “worthy.”

Joy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just for them.

Claire: But I don’t feel the need to call attention to it. For each person, it’s different.

Joy: It is different.

Claire: I agree with you that there is a big difference between choosing not to drink versus “being sober.” 

Joy: Yes.

Claire: I feel like sobriety is a whole community that is its own thing.

Joy: Yes. There is something sacred in that word.

Claire: I agree.

Joy: But the thing that I want to make clear – and I work in behavioral health, guys. I know what goes into addiction and recovery. I think where I’m going with this is I very much honor that that is a very hard journey. I guess what I’m doing is I’m comparing myself where I’m like, I didn’t have an addiction that needed a medical supervision to go off of that substance. I had a pretty mild experience stopping drinking. I think that’s what I’m saying is I don’t really want to be like, “Oh, I’m sober” because that is such a difficult thing to go through that I didn’t experience on that level.

Claire: Right. Great. Keep us posted.

Joy: Okay, I will. So the next week, I think I feel comfortable sharing that I’m going to be donating bone marrow next week. So by the next… I don’t know. Maybe we will record while I’m sitting in the chair because I’ll need to do something. So maybe the next episode, you’ll hear me in a hospital bed. Want to do that, Claire?

Claire: Sure. So if you guys have been listening and following us since November/October when you were first contacted, your donation date has been scooted back a couple times based on the recipient’s health. So now you’re finally given the brighter green light than you were before. And yeah, it’s really exciting.

Joy: Yeah. Just keep this patient in your prayers and that the transplant goes smoothly. I’m going to be flying to Houston this weekend with my momma. We are going to be donating some bone marrow. Again, if you want to look up where to register.

Claire: Your mom isn’t donating though?

Joy: No, she’s just going with me.

Claire: The way you said that, it sounded like your mom was doing it too.

Joy: No. You can take a buddy with Be the Match. So if you have to travel for it, they send you a buddy.

Claire: Yeah, your mom is the perfect person for that.

Joy: Yeah, she’s the best person for that. It was really funny because for a while Scott’s like, “Do you want me to go?” You know, with pets and everything, I’m like just stay home with the pets. Hold down the fort. It’s only going to be a quick trip. So my mom’s like, “I’ll go.” I’m like, “I don’t know if you really need to go. I can just do this on my own.” And my mom’s like, “You’re not going alone.” Excuse me, Joy. My mom doesn’t put her foot down for much. She was like, “You are absolutely not going alone.” Anyways, so you get to take a buddy, but if you are interested in joining a registry, you can sign up at bethematch.org. Right now, the age range is 18-35 to join a registry. So if you’re outside of that age range, we had a listener right in that you can also donate blood. She had a son that needed platelets, so donating blood is really in demand right now. So that’s going to the Red Cross website and seeing where you can donate blood. I know that is very important as well. So bethematch.org or going to the Red Cross. 

Claire: Okay, two things we have to address before we end because they have been taking up a lot of time in our DM’s. The first one is the JVN air dry cream. Have you had a chance to form an opinion yet?

Joy: Not yet. So I just bought this yesterday. I went to Sephora, got a good haul of things, and I bought the Air Dry by JVN Hair. My friend Donna said that it’s great, so I took her recommendation. I have not used it yet, but I will review it, I promise. So far, I love the packaging, and I love the feel of it. So far, so good.

Claire: Okay, alright. Now tell us about Love is Blind. So you finally started watching the new season of Love is Blind. 

Joy: Oh my gosh. Okay, really quick recap and then maybe we’ll go into another time. But I’m maybe five episodes in right now, and it is just as addictive and trashy as the last season.

Claire: Just as much of a wild ride.

Joy: Oh my gosh. You know what I realize? 

Claire: Okay, so the first season came out right at the beginning of COVID, right?

Joy: Yeah, Which everyone was like, “This is perfect.”

Claire: This is only the second season?

Joy: Yes, only the second season. Which I just have to say, I always love that Nick Lachey and his wife – Veronica? What’s her name?

Claire: Vanessa.

Joy: Vanessa.

Claire: How do I know that?

Joy: I know. Vanessa. So Vanessa and Nick, I love that they just waltz in for literally 30 seconds. They’re like, “Is love blind?” And then you never see them again. You see them in Mexico when everyone is in Mexico. They have the best gig here because they are getting paid for 30 seconds of introduction to the show, and then they just show up at a Mexico vacation in Cancun. I’m just like, they have the best gig. You never see them otherwise. That’s the only time you see them. They’re just never in the show. So the couples are interesting. I don’t want to ruin it for anybody, but it’s just the same characters as last season. The annoying blonde chick who is a blogger who they kind of make her sound really superficial. I want to know – in the real world, she can’t be that in love with herself. Self-love is great. Preach. But she’s in the rooms being like, “Yeah, I have a lot of followers, and everybody wants to date me.” I’m just like, uh…

Claire: No one says that in real life.

Joy: No one says that in real life.

Claire: “But you agree… you think you’re really pretty?”

Joy: You think you’re really pretty. I guess that’s not a bad thing.

Claire: So basically, they went back through the casting and were like, “That worked. Get someone else like that.”

Joy: Totally. But the other thing that I noticed is that they really rushed through the first episode. They really rushed through the dating and sifted out the couple that were going to be together. So the rest of the episodes are about spending time afterwards and the family –

Claire: Dating is the funniest part.

Joy: Yeah. Well because they’re kind of talking through a wall, you can’t really… I don’t know. I think it’s interesting they do the marriage and the wedding and the aftermath. So the first episode, everything goes really, really fast. The couples that kind of emerge – what I find out too, this experiment, I get it. But it’s kind of like The Bachelor or The Bachelorette where it’s like one in a million where this works out. One in a million. Because you can see it happen right in front of your eyes. The lust and the fantasy and the magical thinking about someone of just how addictive that feeling is of this fantasy you make up about this person. And then when you meet them in real life, it’s like, oh my gosh, and then you’re on this reality show that just makes it so special and glorious. And then real life sets in, and then the shit hits the fan. So really, what you’re doing is just making this really grand, overexaggerated meeting –

Claire: Right, only to find out this guy can’t load the dishwasher. 

Joy: And the same shit happens as if you were to just meet someone at a bar. So you don’t need to go on this… I love how they call it an experiment. They’re like, “This is an experiment. Can you really just fall in love with someone who you’ve never seen before?” It’s actually interesting because – I also think it’s interesting, first of all, these are all CIS gender males and females that I know of, from what they present. That’s the gist of the show is the population is CIS gender males, CIS gender females. I don’t think any of them that I’ve seen – I think one might be bisexual –

Claire: Right, they’re all straight.

Joy: The others are all straight. So you’re kind of dealing with straight couples. But the interesting thing that comes into it that I saw was an Indian couple finds each other and matches. They talk a lot about arranged marriages, about how you don’t ever see the person. I thought that was a really interesting take. Culturally speaking, this is not new to their families.

Claire: This is not that weird.

Joy: No, it’s not. But it’s also weird in the sense that it’s being taped, and their families are kind of like, “Yeah, that’s weird.” So that piece, I thought was really interesting that they brought into the conversation. But overall, if you’re watching this from an in general how people meet and hook up with one another, it’s pretty rare that you’re going to find somebody that you just sort of gel with. So I’ll let you know how I feel about the second half. But I’m real excited to see who leaves who at the alter because I know it’s going to happen.

Claire: I never got past the first few episodes of the first season because I only thought the interesting part was the blind dating. And then once they met, I was like, this isn’t fun anymore.

Joy: Well, yeah. Because the dating piece, everyone is so flirty and fun and joking. 

Claire: It’s hard to watch. But at the same time, haven’t we all wished that a bad first date would sit next to us at dinner. If that’s ever happened to you, please email is.

Joy: A bad first date?

Claire: If a bad first date has ever happened next to you at a restaurant or if you’ve ever overheard or witnessed a bad first date that was not related. Sure, if it happened to your friend or something, that’s fine. But have you ever just completely, anonymously eavesdropped? Yeah, let us know. Because that’s what those first couple of episodes feel like is you are a fly on a wall for a really awkward first date.

Joy: Yeah.

Claire: We have all wanted to be that person.

Joy: Oh my gosh. Yeah, that’s really true. And you are just witnessing – separately too because they can’t see each other. They’re just kind of in their head about this person. But I do find it interesting that after they meet each other face to face, you can so tell who is truly attracted to one another physically and who is kind of like, “Uh…”

Claire: Wow, it’s great to meet you…

Joy: It’s so obvious. They don’t kiss. They just kind of hold hands like, “Let’s take it slow.” No, if you’re really attracted, you would be all over each other. The people who are really, really, really intensely attracted start making out the second that they meet. They are all over each other.

Claire: Right. Versus the ones that they get this look on your face, like the look that you get when you accidentally drop a jar of pasta sauce in the supermarket and it splatters everywhere. But you don’t want to make a big deal out of it because you’re wondering if you can still walk away and if anybody will see.

Joy: Totally. Totally.

Claire: It’s pretty much the exact thing that’s happening mentally. 

Joy: Exactly. I broke my camera. We’re going to have to watch this video someday and I don’t want to look like I’m disgusted.

Claire: I don’t want to ruin my chances of being a TikTok influencer by blowing this guy off.

Joy: Oh, it’s so great.

Claire: Weird life we life, you guys. It’s a weird world.

Joy: It’s a weird world.

Claire: Well, thank you for hanging in there with us again this week. Don’t forget to check out our sponsor. Go to helloned.com/JOY. Use discount code JOY for 15% your order. Check them out. We love their products. We really, really trust them. And if nothing else, go buy yourself some hemp Chapstick because it really is still just the best.

Joy: It is.

Claire: You can find us on Instagram @joyandclaire_. You can email us thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. You can find us on our website joyandclaire.com. You can find this podcast wherever podcasts are found. Please share us with a friend. Please tell a friend about us. That is how we grow our podcast. It’s really just great to know that word of mouth is still powerful, especially when it comes to podcast. It is the way to get new people because podcasting is a crowded pool these days. 

Joy: Everyone’s peeing in it.

Claire: Everyone is peeing in the pool except for us. [laughing] As my mom says, it’s hard being the only perfect ones. No. So, please share us with a friend, and we will talk to you next week. 

Joy: Bye, guys.

Claire: Bye.

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