Today, I am excited to introduce you all to Leanne Vogel from Healthful Pursuit. She is full of sweetness and cuteness. I have been following Leanne’s blog since my son was diagnosed with food allergies last year as many of her recipes are allergy friendly. Leanne and I have similar food philosophies that flavor doesn’t have to be sacrificed when you eat healthy.
Leanne and I thought it would be fun to swap blog posts today, so after you read Leanne’s guest post here, pop over to her blog to see my guest post.
Hi everyone! My name’s Leanne. I’m the holistic nutritionist behind Healthful Pursuit, a healthy gluten-free, dairy-free, often sugar-reduced food blog where I share my passion for eating intuitively and leading a balanced lifestyle.
I started Healthful Pursuit as a way to share my passion of creating whole food eats and healthy treats, document my pursuit to health, and provide insight into common issues many of us struggle with while trying to become healthier.
My journey to wellness has been an ever-evolving process. Numerous trips to the hospital, personal struggles, and painful symptoms resulted in me researching ways to improve my health. This eventually led me to alternative approaches to wellness through nutrition, meditation, yoga, and eventually landed me in a classroom of like-minded individuals working toward receiving an education in holistic nutrition.
Learning about how my body interacted with the food I was filling it with changed my life. The information I was learning was challenging to accept at first, scary at times, and often hard to believe, but I sucked it all up.
A couple weeks into the program, I decided to begin working on improving my diet. For years, I’d known I was sensitive to sugars, corn and gluten, but was often overwhelmed at the thought of removing these things from my life in fear that I’d be stuck eating boring food forever. Previously, when I’d thought of going gluten-free and dairy-free, visions of rice and chicken danced through my head. I don’t know about you, but consuming rice and chicken for the rest of my days was anything but inspiring.
Little did I know that there were hundreds, if not thousands of natural foods out there that were gluten and dairy-free. Sure, I couldn’t rely on boxes of chocolate chip cookies to get me through my afternoons, but was that really a bad thing?
Going gluten-free while already being vegan required that I spend a bit more time educating myself on what I could and couldn’t have, learn how gluten-free ingredients interacted with each other, and pretty much swear off all pre-packaged foods. It was a lot to handle at times, but the overall experience was a positive one! Even with just a couple of changes, I felt healthier than I ever had before. I had more energy, my brain fog dissipated, and my excruciating stomach pains ground to a halt.
After a year or so of experimenting with ingredients like coconut flour, ground flax seed, medjool dates, unpasteurized honey, almond flour, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, cacao, I began getting really comfortable with preparing delicious, nutritious gluten-free, sugar-reduced, corn-free and dairy-free snacks, meals and even desserts! Ha, who knew?
With every kitchen experiment I embark on comes a new opportunity to improve the health of a favorite dish, play around with a new ingredient, and try out fun flavor combinations that get me excited to enjoy the food I’ve prepared. Some of my favorite recipes that do just this are:
Raw Carrotcake “Cheese”cake
A raw carrot cake, sweetened with dates and apricots and topped with a cashew vanilla cream cheese.
Strawberry Cheesecake ‘Blizzard’
Made from ice cubes, fresh strawberries, apple cider vinegar and crushed gluten-free graham crackers.
Beach Bum Lentil Trail Mix
A nut-free trail mix with baked crunchy lentils to maintain the protein profile.
Fudge-Tastic Brownies
Sunflower butter brownies that are vegan, gluten-free, grain-free AND nut-free. Pretty much everyone can enjoy these, no matter their dietary restrictions.
I swear I eat more than cakes and cookies, but when it comes to getting excited about allergen-free cooking, nothing says dietary freedom quite like a fudge brownie that absolutely everyone can enjoy!
For more healthy treats and whole food eats, feel free to stop by the blog to say hi, connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or visit my YouTube channel for healthful tips and advice.
Thanks for having me over, Jeanette! And have a fabulous day, everyone 🙂
*All of the photos in this post are ©Healthful Pursuit
Hiiii Leanne! I’m not sure how it’s possible that I haven’t discovered your raw carrot cheesecake recipe yet, but I’m totally heading over to it now – sounds amazing and you know I can’t get enough carrots!! 😉
Thank you for introducing me to Leanne’s blog. I’ve recently started down the vegan diet trail and I’m always looking for new inspiration. Thanks again for sharing!
Looking forward to you checking out HP, Danielle!
how fun! I love her site! Great post Jeanette!
Dear lord, just look at all that goodness!
I love seeing a “long time friend” over here, my new friend! 🙂 now that I think of you two at the same time, there ARE many similarities to your food – everything always looks amazing!
What a great sampling of Leanne’s work. I am familiar with her wonderful blog and creative, healthful recipes. Thank you for bringing her to us today!
Such great recipes! I’ve got to try that Strawberry Cheesecake ‘Blizzard’.
It’s a favorite of ours! Hope you enjoy it 🙂
i love both you and leanne. both of you have such fabulous healthy recipes!! 😀 have a great day jeanette!
Thanks for introducing us to this great allergy friendly blogger! Those dishes are droolicious!
Everything looks fantastic. So nice to have met you through Jeannette’s blog. I am striving to be healthier as well, no allergies but I believe I would feel much better if I cut down on the process stuff a bit more. Will follow your blog and try some of your recipes!
All these recipes look fantastic! What a great selection :-).
p.s. just voted for you on circle of moms. Good luck!
So glad you all like Leanne – she is very creative as you can see!
A nice compilation of healthy yet nutritious recipes!! All of them looks great and I can’t decide which one to start first. 😉
Thanks so much Jeanette. I just made Leanne’s a favorite also. With a hubby that has celiac I am always on the hunt for different recipes