Holistic by Steph

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Holistic by Steph

Holistic Health Coach. Sharing a love for healthy food

17/06/2026

Roasted tomato & bell pepper sauce, so easy and so Lucious!

Simple roast summer sweet tomatoes, bell pepper, onion and garlic (you can leave the peel on as it comes off easily after roasting).

Sprinkle with some sea salt and a little avo or sesame oil and roast in the oven at 175C for 35-45min until crisp, soft and sticky.

Blend with a little bone broth (or water) add in fresh parsley or basil and you’ve got a winner tomato sauce that you can use as a base for a soup - add some coconut milk or cream or more bone broth, or a delicious pasta sauce or in a lasagne or for shakshuka eggs (add smoked paprika and a bit of cumin).

Tomatoes are in season now and are linked to the summer element in TCM which governs the heart + small intestine - see my last two posts for more on that.

Let me know if you make this & how you used it, any comments of feedback is so welcome and helps keep my motivation for sharing up.

Xx
Steph

16/06/2026

You’re the one who runs hot even in winter. Who gets irritable when you’re hungry. Who pushes harder than anyone in the room and wonders why your body keeps pushing back.
And in summer and in it intensifies.

Ayurveda recognises three constitutional types — doshas. And if summer consistently wrecks you, there’s a very high chance you’re Pitta dominant.

Pitta is the dosha of fire and transformation. It governs digestion, metabolism, ambition, focus and drive. In balance, Pitta women are sharp, capable, warm and magnetic. Out of balance in summer — when the Fire element is already at its peak — they burn.

Here’s what excess Pitta in summer looks like:
— Acid reflux or heartburn that worsens in heat
— Loose stools or urgent digestion after meals
— Skin that flares
— rashes, redness, acne
— Irritability and anger that feels out of proportion
— Feeling overwhelmed, overheated and overstimulated all at once
— Inflammation that shows up everywhere
— joints, gut, skin, mood
— Waking between 1–3am, mind racing

None of this is random. In Ayurveda, Pitta’s seat is the Small Intestine — the very organ TCM identifies as summer’s digestive governor. When summer heat overwhelms an already fire-dominant constitution, the Small Intestine is the first place it shows up.

The answer isn’t to push through. It’s to cool down.
-> Bitter greens, cucumber, coconut, mint, mung beans, coriander. Meals eaten slowly, in the shade, without a screen. Early dinners. Less coffee, less alcohol, less doing.

Summer isn’t asking you to slow down as a punishment. It’s asking because your fire is already high enough.

Are you Pitta? Tell me what summer feels like in your body. 👇

❤️

15/06/2026

Most people chasing better gut health are focused on one thing: what they’re eating.

But in Traditional Chinese Medicine, the when matters just as much.

Summer is ruled by the Fire element. Its organ pair is the Heart and the Small Intestine — and the Small Intestine’s job is discernment. Separating what nourishes you from what needs to be released.

When summer Fire is out of balance, that sorting function breaks down. Bloating that appears from nowhere. Food sensitivities that worsen in the heat. A gut that felt fine in spring and suddenly doesn’t.

These things are connected. They always have been. Western science now calls it the gut-brain axis. TCM mapped it thousands of years ago.

The foods that support you right now are bitter and cooling — rocket, dandelion, mung beans, cucumber, watermelon. And your Small Intestine meridian peaks between 1–3pm, making an unhurried lunch in that window one of the simplest things you can do for your gut this month.

How much this affects you depends entirely on your constitution. Same season, very different bodies, very different needs.

Which symptom on slide 4 surprised you most? Drop it in the comments — I read every one.

13/06/2026

Cutting out foods can feel as thought it helps, temporarily. But here’s what no one told you: A shrinking list of safe foods isn’t your body becoming more sensitive. It’s your body becoming weaker.
And restriction — however well-intentioned — cannot fix that.

There is no tradition in Chinese Medicine of removing entire food groups in the hope that the gut will heal itself. None. Because the premise doesn’t hold.

When your digestive fire — your Spleen qi, your agni — is weak, it cannot properly process food. Any food. The problem isn’t the gluten. It’s that your system no longer has the strength to break things down the way it’s supposed to.

Eliminating gluten doesn’t rebuild that strength. It just removes one thing the fire was struggling with. While the fire continues to weaken. While the list of foods you “can’t tolerate” quietly grows.
Sound familiar?

In TCM, a weakened Spleen is treated by nourishing it — warm foods, gentle movement, reducing the cold and raw that damp it down further, addressing the stress and overwork that drain it in the first place.

Elimination has its place. I won’t pretend otherwise. In the short term, removing an actively inflammatory food while you rebuild can be useful.

But it was never meant to be the destination. It was always meant to be temporary scaffolding — not a permanent way of eating.

If you’ve been eliminating for years and your list of safe foods keeps shrinking, your body is not becoming more sensitive.
It is becoming weaker. And it needs something fundamentally different.

The question worth asking isn’t “what else should I cut out?”
It’s “why can’t my body handle these foods anymore — and what does it actually need to heal?”

That’s root cause. That’s where the real work starts.

If this is you, I’d love to know — how many foods have you eliminated in the last few years? And do you actually feel better?
Tell me honestly below. 👇

12/06/2026

Save this if your digestion has felt off and you can’t figure out why.

Sometimes the answer isn’t what’s on your plate. It’s the conditions around it.

Questions? Drop them below. 👇

11/06/2026

To the mother who graze all day and call it eating — this one’s for you.

You would never hand your child crackers and call it lunch.
You need something real too.

In Chinese Medicine, digestion is a fire.
Grazing keeps it permanently half-lit. Never burning fully. Never resting fully.

Food sits. Things ferment. Bloating, fatigue, brain fog follow.
Not because of what you ate. Because of how.

Signs your digestive fire is struggling:
Bloating after even small meals ✓ Fatigue food doesn’t fix ✓ Brain fog every afternoon ✓ Hunger that never feels clear ✓

Sound familiar?

One warm meal. Early. Sitting down.
That’s it. That’s where it starts.

Food doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to nourish.
Start with yourself.

10/06/2026

A bit about me, for those of you new followers.

I’m 42. Mother to two boys and (our new addition) Roo a dog that’s completed our family.

Swedish, Dutch and even though I speak both languages I feel most comfortable speaking English.

I’m married to a Dutch American for 16 years, and it happens to be his birthday today - love of my life.

We’ve lived in Amsterdam and London and now we’re living my best life in Portugal, close to the sea and nature.

Food is my passion, I love to feed and cook for those I love. Which lead me to become a Health Coach, also because I desperately wanted to learn to heal my gut after decades of bloating, elimination diets and tests that gave me not solutions or permanent healing.

I share here only what I hope will educate, inspire or motivate you to feel more connected to the healing powers of food.

And for that reason recently I’ve posted a lot less because I’ve felt there was less to share and because to be honest I have come to understand that prefer to put time and energy into human interaction 😆.

I have a LOT of educational materials in my older posts - check out the highlight or scroll back in my feed.

I’ve also got a lot of free downloadable material on my website. Plus a Dosha quiz that helps you better understand what your body type typically will need and not.

Thanks for following me 💛💛💛
do reach out if you have questions as I said I like human interaction!

09/06/2026

It’s a memory.
Your great-grandmother didn’t need an app to tell her she was hungry. She didn’t track her macros. She didn’t eliminate food groups.

She made soup when she was cold. She ate less when the heat took her appetite. She fed her family what was growing outside the window. And her gut worked.

Somewhere between then and now, we stopped trusting ourselves. And we’ve been paying for it ever since.

The hardest part isn’t learning what to eat.

It’s unlearning the belief that eating well has to be hard.

We have been sold complexity. Thirty-ingredient smoothie bowls. Supplement stacks. Elimination diets that require a spreadsheet. And underneath all of it is a very profitable message: you can’t trust yourself. You need a system. You need us.

The wisdom was never lost. It was just drowned out.

08/06/2026

What if your gut problems have nothing to do with gluten?!

I know. That’s not what you wanted to hear.

You’ve eliminated the usual suspects. You’ve done the protocols. You’re eating “clean.” And yet — the bloating, the sluggishness, the brain fog that arrives right after lunch — it’s still there. Quietly. Persistently.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with people through the lens of TCM and Ayurveda: most digestive suffering isn’t about what you’re eating.

It’s about how disconnected you’ve become from when, why, and what your body is actually asking for.

That disconnection has a name, hint it’s the opposite of intuitive eating. And it starts the moment we outsource our hunger to an app.

05/06/2026

I’m not saying you should stop having smoothies altogether, I’m just saying if you are bloated, have sluggish digestion or constipation smoothies won’t help…read the full post to understand why.

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