HAPPILY HORMONAL | hormone balance for moms, PMS, painful periods, natural birth control, low energy, pro-metabolic

E56: Want Meals to Be Easier? 4 Simple Tips to Create Systems & Minimize Kitchen Time with Chelsi Jo Moore

• Leisha Drews, RN, FDN-P, holistic hormone coach, period expert

Share episode

Welcome back to the Happily Hormonal Podcast.  I'm so excited to have Chelsi Jo here with me today. She is the founder and CEO of chelsijo.co and the creator of Systemize Your Life -AKA the systems QUEEN. What that means is that she can help us really simplify our systems when it comes to food and food prep. Today, Chelsi is sharing with us the systems that she uses in her own super busy but intentional life that help her to prioritize clean and holistic food.

In this episode:

  • [01:32] How Chelsi became the queen of systems
  • [05:14] The first steps to simplifying your food
  • [11:33] Adding nourishment to everyday family meals
  • [19:03] Tips on making breakfast and lunch easier – especially for moms who are at home with their kids
  • [23:39] How to organize your refrigerator 


Other Episodes You Might Like


Resources

- Listen to episode 8 of The Systemize Your Life Podcast: The Menu Board Meal Planning System For Busy Moms: Easy Dinner Ideas And Simple Weeknight Meals The Whole Family Will Love
- Nourish Your Hormones Course: use the code HHPODCAST for $50 OFF Nourish Your Hormones!
- 3 secrets to balance your hormones workshop
- Free hormone balance guide

Send us a text with episode feedback or ideas! (We can't respond to texts unless you include contact info but always read them)

Don’t forget to subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review. Your support helps us reach more women looking for answers.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this podcast is to be taken as medical advice, please take informed accountability and speak to your provider before making changes to your health routine.

This podcast is for women and moms to learn how to balance hormones naturally in motherhood, to have pain-free periods, increased fertility, to decrease PMS mood swings, and to increase energy without restrictive diet plans. You'll learn how to balance blood sugar, increase progesterone naturally, understand the root cause of estrogen dominance, irregular periods, PCOS, insulin resistance, hormonal acne, post birth-control syndrome, and conceive naturally. We use a pro-metabolic, whole food, root cause approach to functional women's health and focus on truly holistic health and mind-body connection.

If you listen to any of the following shows, we're sure you'll like ours too!
Pursuit of Wellness with Mari Llewellyn, Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, Found My Fitness with Rhonda Patrick, Just Ingredients Podcast, Wellness Mama, The Dr Josh Axe Show, Are You Menstrual Podcast, The Model Health Show, Grounded Wellness By Primally Pure, Be Well By Kelly Leveque, The Freely Rooted Podcast with Kori Meloy, Simple Farmhouse Life with Lisa Bass

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Happily Hormonal Podcast. Now, if you're a little iffy on whether or not the word hormonal is a good one, you're in the right place. My name is Leisha Drews, registered nurse and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, turned holistic hormone coach, and, after going through my own hormone journey and having my three babies, i actually believe that our hormones are one of the greatest gifts that we've been given as women and that, no matter what you've been told, it's possible for you to have thriving energy, good periods and a stable mood all month long. And I am here to show you the way. I think it's time to change the narrative around words like hormones and hormonal and start to reclaim the power that we truly have as women, which is a power to change not only our own health but the health of all of our family for generations to come. Hormone balance doesn't have to feel hard. It can actually feel simple and fun when we do it in a way that aligns with how our bodies were made. If you're ready to start trusting your body again and feeling really good in that beautiful body that you've been given, then grab yourself a yummy drink and maybe a snack, and let's do this.

Speaker 1:

Okay, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so excited to have Chelsea Joe here with me today. She is from Systemize Your Life and she has, i think, been named the Queen of Systems. What that means is that she can help us really simplify our systems when it comes to food. I'm super excited to have you here, chelsea. Will you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and your life, and how did you even get into being the Queen of Systems?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, i love that. I definitely have heard that a few times, and I love the fact that my love of systemizing things is now what I get to do. My name is Chelsea Joe and I am the founder and CEO of ChelseaJoeco. I am the creator of a couple of products that I sell along as a whole management system, and then I have a business task management system for work from home moms. Then we're also getting ready to launch a company-wide operating system called Tobos for multiple six and seven figure business owners, which is really, really fun. Then I also am the host of the Systemize Your Life podcast, which we are just about to tip into two million downloads, and it's been such a journey.

Speaker 2:

I started this about three and a half almost four years ago now, but I've been working and in business for 11 years. While I was juggling my corporate career, i was a sign language interpreter. That was what I went to college for, was my trade, and I did that. I became a single mom, started an event-based business with my mom while I was a single mom to give us a creative outlet. I learned a lot about business, dedication, grit and hard work through that, and then I ended up getting married. We had a baby. My husband's a firefighter. I had two jobs.

Speaker 2:

Then, all of a sudden, i wanted to teach other moms how to manage all the things that they were doing with systems, because everyone kept asking me how do you have makeup on? How are you sleeping? You're doing so much, what are you doing? I'm like, well, i'm just doing the same things that we're all doing, and then come to find out no one was doing those things. I was like, oh wow, i could seriously help a lot of people. I started a blog and then I started a podcast and now we're here. So that's my story. That's what I do. Now. I have an 11 and almost six-year-old. My husband and I have been married for seven years and I am an avid, holistic, crunchy, nutrition-first, crazy lady that has had an insane journey with my own health and helping other people in my family have optimal health through food, and so I'm really excited to talk to you all about systems that I use in my own super busy but intentional life to help me prioritize really clean and holistic food.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, i love that so much And I love that you were just able to go into a few of the layers of all the things going on for you, because I think it's so easy for us as moms, and also when we work or work from home or homeschool, or maybe do all of those things at the same time. There's just like something in our society that says, well, if you're doing all those things, like you can't also eat well or you can't also take care of yourself. Obviously, i'm here to bust that myth over and over again and it doesn't have to be done perfectly.

Speaker 1:

I'm a huge fan of messy action and I'm excited about this conversation because I'd love to just get my action slightly less messy with some systems a little more in place. I do have my systems for meal planning and meal prep and they work for me and they could definitely still be better and feel easier, feel less overwhelming. Really, what I want to dive into today is for the women who are just trying to do all the things like how can we really start to simplify? What would you say are the first steps of starting to simplify food? Where do you see it get over complicated too fast? Then, where do we go from there?

Speaker 2:

Honestly, this whole business started with one of my number one systems, which I really focus on time and task management in home and in business. Regardless of what we're looking at, it's time and task management, because that's what everything boils down to What do I have to do and how much time do I have to do it? One of the number one systems that even got me to the place of understanding that I had a knack for creating systems was my meal planning system. What had happened is I realized very quickly that searching Pinterest for three hours on a Sunday before I had to go to the grocery store was not conducive to having a newborn and a husband and a house to clean and a kindergartner. This was not going to happen.

Speaker 2:

I was trying to make it happen and I was exhausted. I dreaded it, but at the same time, I refused to not put a worthy meal on the table for my new husband. Yeah, I wanted to not impress him but be everything that I wanted to be. I wanted to be her so bad and I was like there has got to be a different way to do this. Eventually, I was like do you care if I just feed you hamburger, or sometimes.

Speaker 1:

What do you even like to?

Speaker 2:

eat. What do you want to eat? I ended up having this conversation. I'm about to tell you what the system is, but I'm going to tell you how I created the system and then we'll talk about what it is. But I got to this point where I just was like what are your favorite things to eat? Like, of all the things I've ever cooked you, what are your favorite things? So they all told me. I asked my kindergartner at the time Newborn didn't matter, obviously, i went off with what I loved. So I sat down and I created this system that had automation in it.

Speaker 2:

I stopped wondering what was for dinner. I stopped looking for recipes, i stopped, and that's just for dinner, let alone what we can talk about for breakfast and lunch and for snacks. But dinner is a beast. Dinner just seems to be the bear of the day. And when I did that, i was able to step back and say, okay, i've simplified the process of what's for dinner And now I can look at cool, we have tacos, we have nachos, we have spaghetti, we have hamburgers.

Speaker 2:

And then we have one night where we eat out. How do I make different choices when I go to the store to make those hamburgers, to make them more nutritious for my family. It became so easy for me The time became immediately available for me to focus on the nutrition, not the what are we having for dinner, because that was now immediately solved. Now I can actually do what I really care about, which is nurturing my family through food. It wasn't just about what can we put on the table. It was how do I get really strategic about what I'm putting on the table, because now I already know it's hamburgers, or now I already know that it's meatloaf and mashed potatoes. How can I switch up that meal little by little to make it something that I really want to put on the table? So that's like the gist of how I was able to do that, the system specifically we can talk about, but it's also all summed up and buttoned up in a blog post and companion podcast episode that literally lays it out step by step.

Speaker 1:

We can definitely link to that. I'm sure everybody's going to want it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, It's episode eight and I have like over 350 episodes So it's like way back in the archives.

Speaker 1:

But I'll scroll back and find it for you, girls.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we'll link it. We can send it, you can. Actually. It may even be linked down below for you to listen to. But the gist of getting started, if you're in a place where you're like someone asks me at least once a day, once for dinner, you're getting text messages from your husband on the way home That's what are we eating? or you're texting him five minutes before he leaves the work saying can you stop by and grab this for me? If that's your world and that's your life. Or let me add to that and say if you can't cook what you thought you were supposed to cook because you didn't pull the meat out to thaw it, like if you're in that place and you don't have the preparedness, then it's just a simple tweak of how you're going about it And I call it my menu board meal planning system.

Speaker 2:

And so it consists of a menu board and it's a board that is in a common space. We don't write these things down where no one can read it. We have it out in a common area and it has index cards. You can make them queue. I have downloadable ones in that blog post that's linked so you can make them look pretty, because I'm all about aesthetics in my house And you literally download your cards or you get an index card and you write down your family's top favorite seven meals. You can even pick your family's top five favorite meals, and then we always have a leftover and an eat out card. So we do that once a week Leftovers once a week, eat out once a week and then five full meals And you recycle them.

Speaker 2:

And so if you can find your family's 10 top favorite meals, throw them on an index card one each meal, the ingredients that you need on the backside. Every weekend you're going to go to your recipe box, you're going to open it up and you're going to look inside and say, what five meals do I want this week And you're going to throw them on your board And it becomes very simple to say oh well, on Tuesday, thursdays we have extracurricular, so I need to find the simple ones, or I need to find the crock pot ones, and those are going to go on the board. For Tuesday, thursdays, monday, wednesday, fridays, i can cook. It becomes insanely automated, something that you never need to think about ever again. And then when you go to the grocery store, you don't technically even need to make a list. You can just grab those cards and bring them with you, because what you need is on the back of them, and that's what we've been doing for like six years now. It's amazing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it almost sounds like too good to be true that it's that simple, but I can see that, yeah, that that would work really well. Okay, so something that I would love to hear from you is definitely in my family we have a similar thing, where the kids love hamburgers, the kids love spaghetti, and so I feel the same way. Like we can make those nourishing meals, Like we can think of hamburgers as junk food, or even pizza like pizza is junk food, but it totally depends on the quality of the ingredients. It totally depends on what you're adding, like when we have hamburgers. That's one meal where we have probably a pretty large portion of veggies, because I don't generally buy hamburger buns ever, actually And so like my kids hamburgers and my house do not have burgers with them ever.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And so my kids think it's normal to just have like lettuce with their burger and then they do pickles and they do tomatoes, and I'll usually make a carrot salad on the side and then we'll do like french fries in the air fryer or sweet potato fries in the air fryer, and so like they're getting carbs and protein, they're getting veggies, and they like it And it's easy to a certain extent, depending on how many toppings we get out of the fridge, but like it's pretty easy. And I'd love to hear, like some of your go-tos, like how have you made some of those tacos spaghetti? like how have you added some nourishment to those? for some ideas.

Speaker 2:

I will tell you that the number one way that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that you can add nourishment is to be really strategic about where you get your food from, even if you still have. So this may be a personal preference here that I'm bringing to you, but systematically now I am looking for if it comes from an animal, it needs to have been raised on grass and had sunshine all day long, and that's what we're doing. And to me, if that peaks your interest, start reading on the difference in the micronutrients, and even sometimes the macronutrients inside of animal products that come from animals that had a wholesome life, that were treated with kindness, that were able to roam, that were able to do what they were intended to do for their life on the planet what they were able to do for the planet and then what that animal then, in return, by having an incredible life, is able to do for our bodies. So for me, it's like I know that ground beef has so many more nutrients in it than the beef that I used to get, and like it's so much more than just buying organic. It's a pastured animal from farmers that are connected with co-ops And at first it was like, oh my gosh, this is so expensive, but guess what? So many things that were able to ditch in our life. Now, because we're getting all those micronutrients, we don't have to eat out as much, which is saving us so much more money than it costs to buy this.

Speaker 2:

But even looking at like when we do nachos, I switched from regular tortilla chips overans to sweet potato chips, and so you can even make your own with some mandolin and shave them, put them in an air fryer and now you have an and it's not grain based, even if you like grain based great. But then there's other alternatives too that you can look at buying, and so I'm just literally looking at how can we load this with options for the kids of all of the things that we can put on their plate. That's what I'm looking at, and then, beneath that, which I think is the best place to start, is looking at cleaning up your macros. So for me, it's making sure that my cheese is raw and it hasn't been processed, my milk is raw, my eggs have been pastured, all of my meat has been pastured. If I do get seafood on a rare chance, I make sure that I know the fisherman that has caught that fish and brought it here to me.

Speaker 2:

It took me a minute to figure out where I was going to get those things from. I did a bunch of research one day for a couple hours. I did a bunch of research another day for a couple hours And I was like, boom done. I took my normal way of going and buying And that's why I talked to you about the first system, because you do that and you get that down pat And then you can take that and you can adapt that and say now, instead of going to this local grocery store, i'm going to go to this co-op And I know that every month I need to order, or every two weeks I need to order. So instead of doing bagged french fries that have been fried in some kind of seed oil, we make our own french fries and we I don't have an air fryer I fry them, i roast my french fries. My kids are super happy with them. Do I have a bag of french fries in my freezer that I bought from Sprouts right now? I do.

Speaker 2:

I don't do this all the time, but as often as I can, and I systematically told my husband I want three nights a week to make a meal from scratch, nothing processed, and that was a big goal for me. I started out with one night a week and then I went to two nights a week, so started out on Mondays, and then I went to Tuesday, thursdays, and then I went to Monday, wednesday, fridays, and that is the way that I've been able to make this change. When I'm running a company, i have multiple employees, my kids are super active, my husband has a rotating schedule. He's not home all the time, he's a firefighter. He's gone a lot. So hopefully that answers your question on how I'm making this happen, and I think that could be different for everybody.

Speaker 2:

You'll hear a lot of people say, oh, we'll just get rid of the grains. Well, maybe, maybe that's what's best for your family. If you could get an unprocessed carbohydrate, that might be cool, but maybe that doesn't really work for your family right now. Can you just get a higher quality of that carbohydrate or that protein? Can you start with that, especially if you're kids? I have one that won't eat anything and I raised the second one exactly the same, probably even gave her more options, and she gets super picky and it's really hard, and so we just keep putting that one little, teeny, tiny piece of the carrot on her plate. She's got all the options and she won't eat it. But guess what? Eight months ago she tried to bite at the darn thing and now she's not afraid of carrots anymore. So it's okay to know that this is gonna be a lifelong journey, especially for your kids. But for you, you can make bigger changes for yourself even sooner, because you have full control over what you do and don't wanna eat.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, i love that, And I think that again. Like you can start with one thing Like I get my beef from a farmer here, and what that means is I only get beef twice a year, so that's easy, right. Like she just shows up twice a year with like a quarter or a half of a cow and it's great. Like I have that in my freezer And what that means is I don't have to think about it when I'm making beef for dinner. Like I have it great. And I think there are even ways to save time with those type of things. Like we get raw milk from a farm, but I only go to the farm. It's only 30 minutes away too, but I only go there every 10 weeks because I have friends who go every two weeks and we rotate, and so it's not a huge time thing. And I still go to the regular grocery store too, but less of my food comes from there than it used to, and so I fully agree that the quality is so important And I think we're just like giving ourselves that permission to think okay, nachos can be a healthy dinner.

Speaker 1:

But like one of the questions that I was asking myself so much as I started to nourish my body better was just like how can I make what I'm eating right now just a little more nourishing? And so maybe it's just adding something, maybe it's not even taking something away, or maybe it is taking something away that you know isn't serving you well and adding something in in its place. But absolutely, like it can just be one step at a time, which can be so helpful, and even if you feel like you're at a pretty good place with your nourishment, like you can just do one little step further and still see some pretty big benefits to that. Okay. So another question that I have for you is I would love to hear systems or tips on making breakfast and lunch easier, especially for moms who are at home with their kids.

Speaker 1:

I know that sometimes I spend like an hour on each meal some days and I'm like what the heck am I doing? And it's not because I made something fancy, it's just because either I didn't have a plan and I had to find food to make or I just got interrupted so many times It just took forever, and that's not really. I wanna nourish my kids and I wanna nourish myself and I prioritize that, and sometimes I'm like this is taking a ridiculous amount of time compared to what it does when I have it more together.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, i will say, the first thing that's so important, and everything that you just said, is getting your family on board with the system, and that is the number one thing that I see moms not understanding how to do and not really leaning into the authority that they have with the position that they hold in their families when it comes to, look, i'm about to establish a system and then you all about that, you're gonna do it Like. You guys are about to do this and you don't even know it. And it's not even a conversation that I have often. Sometimes it is, but my kids don't even know when I'm systemizing them. You don't even know it, they don't know what's happening, and they don't need to know what's happening. When you have a knack for this and you're skilled at it you've practiced it a lot No one even knows that they're doing the things that you need them to do Getting everyone to be a part of the process, so you're not the only one that is in charge of the monster and the beast of food and food in general, from planning it, cooking it, getting it organized in the refrigerator which we're gonna talk about, because that is definitely something that can be extremely helpful is how you organize your fridge.

Speaker 2:

So I'm gonna talk about that next, but first what I wanna talk about is and just making sure that your family is involved. So make sure that you just like for you, when you go to your breakfast and you look at why it's taken an hour, look and see what, how their involvement either helped or didn't help. Did you need them more involved or did you need them less involved? Number one thing for people that have little kids and you need to be baby wearing. I baby wore. I wore my babies through all of me and all cooking almost 100% of the time And then, when that didn't work, they went into a high chair and they were active through that process. So getting the kids involved or getting them out of the kitchen depends on what you need. But just knowing that this is our breakfast routine, this is what we're doing. This happens every single morning after we come downstairs. This is what we do And everyone just rolls like dominoes. You tip a domino, everybody knows what to do and we do that. That is going to make it so much easier, and if you don't know what that looks like yet, that's where it has to start. You have to know that this is the way the dominoes fall. As soon as we start in a very specific time block of our day, we have three or four routines that all run one after another, after another after another, and that's what we do, and then you start training everybody how to be involved, and one of those is your before school routine or your breakfast routine, whatever that is that you want to call that.

Speaker 2:

For your family, my breakfast routine is actually just a part of our morning before school routine, and so we have the same three meals that we rotate through. When I go to the store, i know that we've got three options for breakfast at any given time throughout the week, and sometimes they want the protein pancakes and the scrambled eggs and the sausage and the berries every single day for four days And then we ran out of it, so now we're down to two options. Sorry, you can't pick that. Now we're down to two options. Or we go back and forth and I just offer hey, if I have the time and I have the bandwidth that morning, i say, hey, do you want pancakes, do you want waffles, or do you want yogurt and whatever? I'll ask them, what three of them, what do you want, and I'll be a short order cook sometimes. Other days you're getting this is what. Here's your breakfast And that's my go-to. I do the same thing for lunches, and when I was homeschooling kids, when I was full-time stay at home with all the kiddos, i packed lunches in the morning and we just ate what was in our lunchboxes. I packed them for myself and packed them for the kids, and now I have a little bit more luxury with my time And so I will actually make lunch in the middle of the day. But I know, if I know that I'm gonna have a busy day, i won't do that. I will make lunches ahead of time so we can all just pull lunchboxes out of the refrigerator.

Speaker 2:

The next thing that I said I was gonna talk about was the organization of the fridge, which is really important, so I'll touch on it quickly. Basically, here's a tip for you When you open up your refrigerator, you should have a section that is for meats, that is for cheeses, that is for fruit, that is for lunches, that is for breakfast. Everything should be categorized in your refrigerator. It should be grouped like so that everybody knows where to find things. You can tell your husband or your older kids hey, can you make breakfast for me this morning? Everything's in the breakfast bin or eggs, meat and fruit and they can literally see the bin. That's labeled and it says fruit or it says meats, and they just pull them. They pull the drawer out Like I've bought my own containers that act like drawers and put them in my refrigerator, and so I have all these little compartments all over in my fridge and it has helped reduce how much time I have to spend cooking.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely my fridge is not organized so I will just shout myself out there. But I think that's a great tip because then you're not first of all wondering if you have something and also you're not spending that time with three little kiddos running around. It is easy to open the fridge, have three interruptions and even forget what you were getting. So having it organized is a very good idea. So I love that. I also think that just planning to pack lunch and having that ready to go, even if you're not leaving the house, that's a job that big kids can do, which would be super helpful. And then I think cooking is a big thing for lunch, if we're home for lunch, but also cleaning up. And so if lunch was already made and in boxes, then that really minimized the clean up push of you.

Speaker 2:

So that's why it's like we are already cleaning up breakfast. Let's just clean up lunch too, which we do that when the kids go to school, we pack their lunches, and it's there to clean up. one of my number one rules, though, with cooking, i literally clean the entire time I'm cooking, so that by the time I'm done cooking, the only thing left are pots and pans. That's all I ever have left. I want the kitchen to, because there's nothing worse than sitting down for a meal, and probably sitting down for the first time. you sat down all day And now you're like de-stressing and relaxing, and now you got to get up and work again. That's the worst feeling in the world. So I try really hard to make sure that I clean as I go when I'm cooking.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, another really great tip. I think this has been super helpful. Is there anything else that you want as far as resources or anywhere else we can find you, besides your podcast, that you want to share with us?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, just you can come over and hang out with me on Instagram, chelseajoco. But the podcast is such a beautiful place. We have a really great Facebook group. That's totally free. You can just type in, systemize Your Life in Facebook, and it's a place where you can dive deep into the systems that I teach and you can get connected with all my resources there. We're currently just doing a little update with the website. We're going to have a really awesome quiz that's coming out here shortly closer to the fall that will help you know what system you need first in order to stop being overwhelmed and to get organized. But the podcast if you're connected with me there, you'll know whenever that is up and running and ready to go, and I look forward to hanging out with all of the women in your community.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. This has been great. I'm going to go organize my fridge and get myself together and I'll report back. Thanks, i can't wait to hear about it. Okay, awesome, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Any information shared on this podcast is solely for educational purposes, is not to be taken as medical advice or to be used as a diagnosis or a treatment plan for any medical condition. I'm sharing my educated opinions and experience, but nothing shared here can be taken on a one-size-fits-all basis. We always recommend that you do your own research, talk to your own doctors and take full, informed responsibility for any health and medical choices that you make. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today, for listening, and I hope that you were encouraged and learned something new. If you enjoyed this podcast, would you be willing to share it with a friend and to leave us a review?

Speaker 1:

I believe that every woman deserves to understand her body and feel great in it, and you can help me in this mission by sharing the podcast. If you're also feeling like you're ready for the next step and you're really ready to dive in in your hormone journey. My course Nourish Your Hormones is created specifically for you. I hope I set blueprint to increase your metabolism, restore energy and have better periods and mood every single month. I would love to connect with you, so come over and join me on my Instagram page at lisha druze and send me a message if you have questions or just want to tell me something that you enjoyed about this episode. I can't wait to meet you.