Category Archives for "Life"

Holiday Shopping Ideas & Cyber Monday

I’m sure you are getting a ton of emails today with awesome deals. I just thought I’d share some of my favorites! Some of these are affiliate links where I do recieve a small commission that allows me to keep adding content to this site!

Amazon Items:

Other Ideas & Deals!

I love making gift baskets like a “spa basket” or a healthy eats basket. One year I included one of the cook books above and make some of the pancake mixes in a cute jars ready to go for my sister-in-law.

  • Essential Oil gifts can be great. Cyber Monday deals are live on over on my Young Living Store. If just shopping Retail (hit “no thanks” under the become a member) But consider a starter kit as a great way to learn about the oils and split some up for gifts. Pinterest can open up the world of gift ideas to create with essential oils. Hand scrubs are super easy with oils and salt in a cute mason jar. I also love snagging chapstick sets to split, plus facial and bath products to create my gift baskets. Orange Blossom Face Wash, ART Renewal Serum, and the ART Cream Masque are my favs!
  • Young Living also has the best clean make-up called Savvy Minerals. Eyeshadow pallets make great gifts as well as make-up brushes.
  • Vital Proteins also has a great sale today. Free 5 oz can of collagen peptides with a $50 order. If you missed it, check out my post on collagen’s benefits on the skin. Lots of options for gift baskets, including the coffee creamers with a bag of your favorite grounds.
  • We also have a sale on my Fullscript store today 15% off! Everyone needs some Vitamin C or Viracid in their stocking right? You can also make gift baskets with Vitamin D, Zinc lozenges, Thieves hand sanitizer, Vitamin C, etc. Perfect teacher gifts!
  • Myobuddy Massager is a great gift for you or your loved ones. This keeps me pain free between OMT and Chiropractic visits! Use the code CYBER at checkout for $50 off Pro 2 or $100 off NEW Pro 2 Plus+.
  • I’m also hosting a Beautycounter Pop-Up with my friend the Rogue Pharmacist. They have a great day 15% off site wide. I love the new CounterTime Collection & the Overnight Resurfacing peel , Shop through Monday December 2nd.

Vacation Meal Planning

We spent the last week in Hilton Head Island, SC, and it was so fun! It was as relaxing as it could be with our 5 y/o and 2 y/o in tow. They were the best little travelers! I was a little nervous about the 10.5 hour drive, which turned into 13, but they were great. We had my husband’s parents join us which is always fun and a huge help! They enjoyed themselves and we got to take some walks together while the kids were sleeping. 


Traveling is pretty much a must in this house, and we try our best to fit it in the budget. We do use a Marriott travel rewards credit card for monthly expenses, but I haven’t quite mastered the travel hacking like the Points Guy.

I grew up going to the beach every year, and when we were little, we often tagged along on my dad’s work trips, especially in the summers. My mom would drive behind him in his service truck. He would work and we would explore. I have only 1 state left to go to, guess which one that this.. Alaska! Between all of the normal travel and a couple driving trips out west we hit all the rest. And my Dad saved all his Holiday Inn points from traveling all the time and converted them to Delta miles and the five of us flew to Hawaii the day after I graduated from high school. 

This post is a little bit more in the life category of this blog, but I wanted to document what we took with us this year for meals so it’s easy to pull up next year. I figured if I was writing it down, I might as well share, since it might help some of you! Generally our plan is to cook at dinner at least 3 times, sometimes 4 times during our week long vacations. When traveling as a family we book places that have full kitchens. This was our first time as a family in Hilton Head, and we stayed at Waterside by Spinnaker. It was a perfect location and had nice pools as well. Cooking several meals saves money and keeps us on track with healthy eating. It’s also nice because we can stay in the pool longer in the afternoon and not have to get “ready for dinner.”

The trick is to make it simple. Most condos or VRBO type places have basic kitchen supplies but you won’t find a Blendtec, immersion blender, muffin pans, etc.  Today I made 4 meals for this week and 3 of the 4 required the Blendtec, so those aren’t on the vacation list.  🙂 

The best part about this trip (ok not the best part) but a convenient part was there was a Kroger on the island, new since the last time we were there. So that meant it was super easy to do Click-list and no roaming around the store after a long day of travel trying to find items. It was also right next to a Whole Foods so we were able to grab a few items Kroger doesn’t carry.

 Here was the menu

Breakfast Ideas: We brought a bag of Pamela’s whole grain gluten free mix, so we made pancakes a few mornings and I also made chocolate chip cookie bars with it as a treat later in the week. Funny the ingredients weren’t much different between the pancakes and bars, just different ratios + dark chocolate chips. 🙂 I sort of follow the pancake recipe on the back but add almond butter and applesauce and they are perfect!

Our son loves Applegate Farms chicken and apple sausages so we got those, The weekend before the trip, I had frozen these morning glory muffins, so we had a dozen of those that we brought with us for other days. We purchased some frozen fruit and avocado so we had some collagen fruit smoothies too. The ingredients doubled for popsicles too! Eggs and bacon are super easy as well. We did eat breakfast out once at The French Bakery Hilton Head and it was amazing! See my instagram feed for pictures. 

Lunch Ideas: Chicken Salad, Applegate Farms- Grass fed beef hot dogs, guacamole (pre-made from the store), salad (I brought a few Primal Kitchen Dressings from Thrive Market), some Boar’s Head lunch meat, fruit, raw veggies, or leftover dinner. 

Easy Dinners:

  1. Bunless Burgers – Hawaiian style with Grilled Pineapple on top, with Roasted Cabbage (use olive oil instead of Canola oil)  
  2. Spaghetti Squash and Meat-sauce- Muir Glen Organic Pasta sauce, Meat of your choice (or Veggie Version), + Roasted Spaghetti Squash. Condos don’t have the greatest knives, so microwaving the squash a few min before cutting can be helpful! We also had a bag of frozen broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower steamed to go with it. 
  3. Grilled Chicken, Baked Sweet Potatoes, steamed veggies from above. 

On Mother’s Day we enjoyed dinner out at Chow Daddy’s Hilton Head, the roasted veggie hot bowl with grilled fish was very good. Another night we checked out Giuseppis Pizza, I had the gluten free cauliflower crust pizza (Kale Pesto version!), and the last night we had a local Mexican restaurant called Amigos Cafe Y Cantina. It was literally right across the street and a friend had texted me that week to recommend it. It was a small, authentic mexican restaurant. It was fun to practice our Spanish too. 

A couple other tips: I brought 3-4 seasonings (mostly Trader Joes Blends), a small 8 oz mason jar of olive oil and one of apple cider vinegar, some collagen peptides in a baggie (for smoothies and popsicles), popsicle molds, salt and pepper. I also mixed up the seasoning in a small baggie for the chicken salad in advance as well as the seasoning for my burgers, so I just had to dump it in on vacation! My mother-in law also brought raisons, nuts, and seeds for throwing on salads at lunch, in addition to some snacks. She finds the best deals at what we call the “junk stores” in their area. Recently they snagged a whole box of Rx Bars for $2!

If you are traveling with kiddos and need some easy meal ideas for while you are gone, I hope this is helpful. If you happen to be traveling to Hilton Head, check out some of these yummy restaurants too!

Dr. Hartzler

3 My Journey

My husband Dustin and I welcomed our first child, our daughter (pictured!) in March of 2014. We attempted to go with natural labor route but after 21+ hours of being induced I got an epidural, it was my best chance of pushing her out because I needed rest.  She was a healthy baby, except she was colicky and didn’t sleep well. Through chiropractic care I learned about food intolerances and started to remove foods from my diet that she was reacting to. After a tongue tie and lip tie release procedure, probiotics, and my elimination diet she was a much happier baby!

About six months later I personally started to have awful GI symptoms and when she was 8 months old she had her first allergic reaction to eggs. While it wasn’t the extreme of what it could have been it made me very anxious every time she ate about anything new. Between the already damaged gut (high stress schooling & job, good amount of antibiotics as a child, and poor diet as a teenager), plus now the stress of figuring out what my child could and couldn’t eat, by the time she was about 10-11 months old I had awful pain in my right lower abdomen after literally everything I ate.

I had the full work-up and everything modern medicine was looking for came back negative. I thankfully already knew about the Paleo lifestyle and elimination diets, so I started there but ended up losing a good chuck of weight because I was eating so limited and still breastfeeding. The stress and worry of not knowing what was wrong was also making everything worse.  I had a good friend who had been to a local physician who practiced some functional medicine and got in about a month later with him. After some functional medicine testing including allergy testing ultimately I had “leaky gut” and bacterial overgrowth. And while I didn’t realize it at the time, likely a large deficiency of B vitamins.  I took some natural and conventional approaches to treatment.

Along the way I learned about histamine intolerance, gut healing protocols, the gut’s link to inflammatory diseases, and food allergy testing, while I knew this wasn’t a quick healing process I was frustrated that I didn’t feel too much better even six months later.  I ended up seeking a few other practitioners (including a gastroenterologist), all of whom I’m grateful for their part in my journey. From those providers, I learned about the impact of stress on the symptoms I was having, and natural approaches to balancing stress with both supplement and lifestyle medications. I also learned how even my low hormone levels were impacting my symptoms.

Two years later, after treatment for fungal overgrowth, about six months of acupuncture, and a change in supplements, was when I really started to feel a lot better. At this point, I felt like my body was healthy enough to consider trying for another baby.  Thankfully God was on the same page and after a wonderful 6 weeks in Spain with my family and teaching for a study abroad program, we got home and found out we were expecting!

For my daughter thankfully we have learned a lot for her too. There is a wonderful DO pediatrician nearby that we take her too occasionaly for the natural approaches to allergies and gut health. I’ve learned about how important early introduction of probiotics can be vital for babies (blog post coming soon on that!), how foods effect skin conditions like eczema, natural approaches to constipation and much more.

During the midst of all of this, I spent a lot of time in prayer, often asking for healing, and a purpose for all of this.  Thankfully my prayers were answered. During my second pregnancy I had minimal GI symptoms which has been wonderful for maintaining a well balanced diet. But most importantly all that I have learned along the way has impacted so many people.  After a conversation about all of this with one of my dear friends whose little boy had awful reflux symptoms, she visited the pediatrician mentioned above and learned his symptoms were due to a corn allergy, and with elimination diet and some supplements, he is a new kiddo. His reflux was so severe he was hospitalized during the first year of life.  I hope I can get her to write a guest post on that because she is also a PharmD! The many other people that have been impacted have been friends and family as well as my patients.  My goal for this blog is to continue to share what I have learned and what I am continuing to learn with a broader audience.

I hope you will join me on our family’s continued journey towards wellness!