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Have you struggled to find answers to make your gut issues and other health issues go away? Have you tried everything, changes in diet, exercise, supplements, but still don’t have any solutions? Our Co-founder, Jeff Schmidgall, has an inspirational Paleo journey story that might help.
For the majority of his life, Jeff struggled with gut issues, and through his passion for helping others,he eventually discovered that he could heal himself through the Paleo diet. His journey on the Paleo diet inspired him to make a difference in the food industry by offering choices to those who want to eat real snacking food at grocery stores.
Jeff’s problems started in his mid-twenties after graduating from Iowa State University. Similar to most American’s, he lived on a diet of processed foods and carbohydrates. This was a “normal” way of eating. This diet soon caught up to Jeff, who started getting vicious gut pain, cycles of diarrhea and constipation, and he was losing significant weight.
After discovering ulcers in his intestines, Jeff was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Disease and potentially even Crohn's disease--something his mother suffered from. His doctors prescribed Jeffwith a lifetime of medication that seemed to provide no relief. Jeff called his treatment plan a “hopeless life sentence.”
Seeking alternatives, he went on a Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) for the next ten years in hopes of repairing his gut so he could eat “normal” again. This resulted in continuous cycles of feeling okay that evolved to terrible gut pain and back again.
At the time he went on the SCD diet, Jeff was a co-owner of his family’sglobal industrial machinery manufacturing business, Hawkeye Concrete Products. There Jeff led the Sales Engineering team and North American sales team. While he enjoyed the family business, he discovered his real passion was helping people get their lives on track.
After fourteen years at Hawkeye, he decided to change career paths and become a life coach with a concentration on improving people’s health.
This ledJeff into founding a Health Coaching and Personal Training company, Jeff Schmidgall Training.” He became a certified CrossFit trainer, guiding people throughhigh intensity exercise programs that combine olympic weightlifting, cardio, and gymnastic style movements.
Through helping clients that wanted to lose weight, he realized that no matter how much exercise is in our daily lives, true wellness is derived from food.
In an effort to discover alternative research on how our bodies are designed, Jeff attended and graduated from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition (IIN) where he became a board certified Holistic Health Practitioner. During his time at IIN, two sources of information particularly resonated with Jeff--Dr. Terry Wahl’s “Minding Your Mitochondria” TED Talk and Mark Sisson's Primal BluePrint book.
“What I discovered,” he said, “Was that our bodies were actually designed to eat a Paleo type of diet, and that the ‘normal’ way of eating is never a good way to feed the American body.”
Jeff made the conscious choice to stop being a victim of the normal American diet. Rather, he chose to become educated and empowered who knows how to fuel himself. Within one week on the Paleo style diet, Jeff remarked that it “erased nearly all of my 10 year’s worth of IBD symptoms.”
After Jeff had been on the Paleo diet for some time, he missed the accessibility and tastiness of many of the snacks he used to enjoy. To his surprise, his brother-in-law and B’s Co-founder, Jared Menzel, had the solution Jeff was looking for in a homemade Paleo snack mix he brought on vacation. It was a bit of an ‘ah ha’ moment for Jeff when he realized this snack mix could be a way to help people like himself heal and enjoy great tasting snacks.
Jeff moved to Colorado, with Jared following shortly after, to be around people who are a part of the food startup rebellion against large food corporations. Jeff believes it “shouldn’t be so difficult to find foods that we should be eating in grocery stores.” With Jared’s partnership, they created B. Fine Foods in 2014 with a mission to fix the food industryby focusing on “profits for a purpose” rather than “profits at any cost.”
Throughout Jeff’s Paleo journey, he has always focused on his choice to be healthier, and he has now chosen to keep fighting against the normalization of poor diets contributing to disease. Through his work and our work at B. Fine Foods, we desire to change food ingredients on a mass scale so that we can empower consumers and stop the victimization of hopelessness, loneliness, and unhealthiness derived from the normal American diet.
“B Fine Foods is here to make your choice easier to change your food life. We are here to offer support to those who don’t know where to start,” he said.
Through our work at B’s, Jeff, Jared, and I hope that we can help build a community that supports each other to grow in health and happiness. We hope that you get the chance to try our products, and we hope that you get the chance to become involved in our community. We are here to help support you on your journey!
Share YOUR Story
Where are you on your journey of health and happiness? Would you be willing to share your story? I would love to hear it and post it on our blog. Please reach out to us at connect@awakenedfoods.com or leave a comment under this post if you would like to share your thoughts. If we feature your story, we will send you some B's snacks as a thank you.
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