In episode 271, we chat with Cristina Curp, blogger at The Castaway Kitchen, about how she got her life back after having a health crisis of her own and connected with her own audience through this journey.

We cover information about the power of niching down into a wide array of diets people are seeking help with, how you can be a resource and encourager to others and be sure to continue to educate yourself on these diets and connect with valid resources so you offer solid help.

Listen on the player below or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.


Guest Details

Connect with The Castaway Kitchen
Website | Facebook | Instagram

Bio Cristina is a certified nutritional therapy practitioner, former restaurant chef, and autoimmune warrior. After hitting rock bottom with her own health she took to food to get her life back. This birthed her popular food and wellness site: TheCastawayKitchen and both of her cookbooks, Made Whole and Made Simple. She lives in Hawaii with her family and you can often find her dancing Salsa or at the beach.

Takeaways

  • Take the time to be well informed on a diet that you are creating content for as you become an expert to your audience by doing so.
  • Do research, find authorities to learn from and verify information and parameters of the diets your sharing content for.
  • You can tag recipes for specific diets or protocols, even if your niche isn’t 100% one.
  • If you have your own dietary needs at home and think I don’t want to be making food for the blog and family completely separate, build it into your business model. There’s going to be someone who’s going to benefit from that.
  • Every blogger listening has at least one recipe on their blog that’s already paleo. Maybe a salad or grilled veggies that’s paleo but not tagged that way. Add those tags so they’re searchable for people. 
  • Food intolerances, food allergies and auto-immune disease are more prevalent. Offer variations and tweaks to recipes to make them safe for others to eat, but share that why and how you’re honoring that culture it stems from.
  • Expand your blog to include diet restriction recommendations by adding recipe modification notes that would make it paleo or keto or vegan or AIP. Then you aren’t changing the one that your readers already love.
  • People really appreciate that they can follow a healthy journey and realize that we’re not static and our needs change over time. Then in that way, there’s something for everybody there. 
  • When you’re creating recipes, you will attract people with food intolerances or chronic illness who are a different audience than just the typical foodie.
  • The audience who needs a diet protocol might not feel well. They might be in pain or fatigued. You have an audience who’s going to come back, leave comments. There’s a higher responsibility to make sure that you’re not going to waste their time and you’re not going to make them sick. When you delve into this food as medicine or healing protocol, recipe development, understand it’s literally people’s quality of life is in your hands. Take that very seriously. 


Resources Mentioned

Bodywise Podcast Episode 31

What is the AIP diet

Auto ImmuneWellness Handbook

Wellness Business

Transcript

Click for full text.

271 Cristina Curp

Cristina Curp: Hi, this is Cristina Curp from the Castaway Kitchen, and you’re listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

Megan Porta: Hey, awesome food bloggers. Before we dig into this episode, I have a really quick favor to ask you. Go to your favorite podcast player. Go to Eat Blog Talk, scroll down to the bottom where you see the ratings and review section. Leave Eat Blog Talk a five star rating if you love this podcast and leave a great review. This will only benefit this podcast. It adds value and I so very much appreciate your efforts with this. Thank you so much for doing this. Okay. Now onto the episode. 

Hey food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, sponsored by RankIQ. I’m your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode number 271. Today. Cristina is going to talk to us about creating recipes for people with chronic illnesses and food allergies. Cristina Curp is a certified nutritional therapy practitioner, former restaurant chef, and auto-immune warrior. After hitting rock bottom with her own health, she took to food to get her life back. This birthed her popular food and wellness site, the Castaway kitchen, and both of her cookbooks, Made Whole and Made Simple. She lives in Hawaii with her family and you can often find her dancing salsa or at the beach. Oh my gosh, Cristina. Hawaii, dancing and beach, please, yes. Sign me up. That sounds all amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’m super excited to have a chat with you. 

Cristina Curp: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

Megan Porta: Before we dig into it, we all want to hear what your fun fact is. 

Cristina Curp: So I’m a left-handed middle child, which I always feel is funny. Cause I’m the typical rebel. I think that it comes out in a lot of my personality traits.

Megan Porta: That’s funny. So left-handed and middle child.

Cristina Curp: Black sheep to the core. 

Megan Porta: I love it. I love that you embrace it. Go with that. Okay. We were chatting a little bit before we recorded and I’m really excited about this because I feel like this is a topic that we don’t talk about enough and it falls into our laps a lot of the time it did for me. I have my own journey with having to create recipes based around a food allergy unexpectedly because my husband seriously overnight, just had an intolerance to yeast extract and gluten. It’s been a few years now. It was like this huge process we went through. He didn’t know what was going on. Then we finally nailed the culprits. Then I had to start creating food that was not containing yeast. Do you know how many sauces and things from the grocery store contain yeast? A lot. 

Cristina Curp: Oh everything. 

Megan Porta: So some of us are thrown into worlds like this, like I was without even knowing it was coming. But sometimes we can start dabbling in it because we want to maybe reach more people or just expand our blogs a little bit. So a super valuable topic. So where do you want to start with this conversation? I’m just going to let you take it away. 

Cristina Curp: Yeah, absolutely. When you are cooking or creating recipes and resources for people with food intolerances, it’s important to be well-informed because we are essentially the subject matter experts. Someone’s coming to us for something. So let’s say if you label a recipe that’s going to be for auto-immune protocol or specific carbohydrate diet, or a gaps diet appropriate, someone who’s coming to your blog to find this recipe isn’t going to be the expert. Although they are looking for it, they might have just found out about it or their doctor might have just told them to follow this. So it is important to do your research and find the authorities on these blogs and follow the parameters. Because there’s very specific rules for very certain healing protocols. I think that’s a good place to start. The benefit of let’s say going by these protocols is that your recipes will be easier to find. If you want people to find your recipes because they are gluten-free or dairy-free or nightshade free, or specific carbohydrate or gaps, or low-FODMAP, you want to then use these tags in your SEO so they come up in the searches.

Megan Porta: Not only will your recipes be easier to find, but you’ll be a more trustworthy source because I can imagine how awful that would be if you were putting out content and you were unsure about a certain diet or a protocol and then, oh my gosh. What if you provided a recipe that had gluten in it or something that someone couldn’t eat? How awful.

Cristina Curp: You don’t want to make people sick or feel bad. So it is important to know the rules. So when you start, I think it’s a good place to educate yourself around the rules and parameters of whatever diet or protocol you’re going to do and then make sure you tag your recipes appropriately. I think one of the biggest or most popular I guess, one of the protocols that covers all the bases is the autoimmune protocol AIP. There’s a ton of, a huge community out there for AIP diets. People like, the godmothers of AIP is Dr. Sarah Ballantine and she blogged at The Paleo Mom. So she would be a great resource to go to her website, to find the rules and then apply accordingly if you were creating AIP recipes. There’s over 50 million Americans with auto-immune disease and more people being diagnosed every day. So this is a growing niche. It’s still a niche, but it’s growing and it’s growing rapidly. So that’s definitely where I operate, in the auto-immune space and creating recipes for AIP or Whole30, which again is its own type of elimination protocol. A lot more popular, again. Very specific rules for Whole30 recipes. We do see a lot of Whole30 recipes online, which sometimes break the rules. I think they changed the rule now, but they had a thing called sex with your pants on. So it’s Whole30 paleo, but paleo pancakes would not be Whole30 because there’s no bread or pancakes or treats allowed. Things like that. It’s important too, if you make a grain-free dairy-free sugar-free, whatever pancake or muffin or bread, it’s not Whole30 compliant if you tag it Whole30. Like you mentioned, you lose people’s trust, because you’re like, oh shit. They don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s not accurate. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Okay. So Whole30, if somebody wanted to have a resource to know what those rules are, where would they go for that?

Cristina Curp: So wholethirty.com has a ton of stuff online. The interesting thing with Whole30 is that it’s a business that Melissa Urban who’s the founder really grew because of bloggers taking it and creating free resources for the Whole30 program. Bloggers are totally allowed to make Whole30 compliant recipes, tag them Whole30. There’s entire blogs out there that revolve around the Whole30 model. They’re very successful because every January and every September, millions of people do Whole30’s and the SEO is really good for that. However, what’s interesting with that is because they are trademarks, you can not create any resources that you make money off of and use the Whole30 terms. So you cannot sell a Whole30 ebook.

Megan Porta: But you can write 30 content on your blog. 

Cristina Curp: Yeah. A hundred percent and make revenue from your ads. Yes. But not directly selling it. There is a benefit to niching down with these kinds of protocols, or allergen friendly type recipes, is while there might not be as many people looking for them, it’s going to be a very specific search. So whether it’s nut-free recipes or grain-free, nut-free, nut-free paleo or dairy free keto, there’s so many different combinations. Even within the bigger umbrellas of plant-based or paleo or keto, you can then go into people who do those diets and then have further niches. So gluten-free vegan, nut free paleo, dairy-free keto. Nightshade free paleo or whatever. It can just really niche down and down. Sometimes you might find yourself, like you did Megan with your husband’s diet, with your own dietary needs at home and think well, I don’t want to be making food for the blog and food for the family completely separate and that’s exhausting or too much work. There’s always a way to build it into your business model because there’s going to be someone out there who’s going to benefit from that. I personally can’t eat nightshades among a few other things, but nightshades include tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and peppers. So you can imagine how many foods that I have to eliminate. 

Megan Porta: Oh, it’s, it is interesting, isn’t it. Once you find that there’s an allergy or sensitivity, how creative you can start getting. Like with my husband’s issue, oh my gosh. I couldn’t buy any sauce. So I was like, okay, fine. I’m going to just make my own sauces. I started putting those sauces on the blog and guess what? Those sauces are my favorite, I wouldn’t say they are the most popular, but they’re in the top 10, a handful of them. I never would have guessed that. So you never know what can come from this and just getting creative and experimenting. Then, like you said, you don’t want to do double duty and buy a sauce from the store and then make one. Just make it and share it with the family and put it in your recipes. You never know what’s gonna come of it. 

Cristina Curp: Absolutely. If you have the need, I guarantee you, so do many people out there. I saw that I was a restaurant chef before I was a food blogger. When I discovered all my food intolerances and really I realized that the foods that certain foods like nightshades and gluten and dairy were causing my autoimmune disease to react. So I took them all out. I thought I’m never going to work in a kitchen again. I cannot work in a restaurant kitchen if you don’t eat tomatoes. So I thought, this is the end of my cooking career. But then my friends started a blog. I was like, what’s a blo? .Anyway, that was a long time ago, obviously. It’s incredible. Not only do I have a whole website, along with hundreds of recipes, but two very successful cookbooks, all nightshade free. I don’t necessarily market them as nightshade free, but I do a lot of AIP recipes, which are also nightshade free and you’d be surprised at the number of people that find me just because they also have nightshade intolerances. It’s crazy because, again, you think I’d never in a million years, would’ve thought a nightshade free cookbook would interest people, but there’s always a need out there. Share it because someone else will find it. 

Megan Porta: This really does provide an opportunity for people to niche down into really specific, unique ways. You just went through a bunch of variants of combinations of diets and gluten-free and whatever, fill in the blank. It really is an opportunity for food bloggers. Especially if you’ve got a need in your home where you need to cook differently. See that as an opportunity to slide into a really specific niche. So you mentioned keto. I wrote down a few of the things you mentioned, like keto, paleo, gluten-free, dairy free. Do you have resources for those as far as learning how to adhere to those diets as well? 

Cristina Curp: Absolutely. So keto’s obviously very popular right now. A lot of people know keto. It’s low carb high fat. While there isn’t like a major authority on keto and there’s lots of variations, typically keto is about the macro. So recipes that are less than 10 grams of carbs per serving and higher in fat can be classified as a keto recipe. The interesting thing with keto, it’s more about the macronutrient ratio. So there are recipes that are online that are keto that have gluten and all sorts of recipes, but there’s a lot of people who follow a ketogenic diet who then want to do it through something like a paleo lens or a grain-free lens or gluten-free. Then on top of that, there’s a lot of people who do keto, who can’t have a dairy. When you look online for most keto recipes, a lot of cheese, sour cream, mozzarella, becomes the base of people’s recipes, because it’s really easy to make things low carb using cheese, really delicious things. But like for myself, when I started going lower carb and I can’t eat cheese, I felt like there were almost no resources online for me. So I started creating dairy-free keto recipes. I did it for long enough where I created a guide for how to do dairy free keto. It’s one of my top performing posts on my blog because there was a need out there for that. There weren’t enough resources. Again, you go to my website for that blog post, but again, if you want to do a keto recipe, it doesn’t matter how you cook, you just want to look at the macro. So it’s really easy. There’s websites like ketogenic.com or the diet doctor, who’s like a Scandinavian doctor who has this website but he’s a pretty good resource for those kinds of things.

So that’s more about the macronutrient ratios. Within that, a big umbrella of these low carb recipes, you could literally niche down, like way down. Like vegan keto, paleo keto, dairy free keto, nut-free keto, nightshade free keto. There’s so many different ways to do it. Again, if you have a need in your home or even within your audience, if you start polling your audience and people are asking you for a specific thing, run with it. Because it might not be something that lands on like a lot of searches, but on a very specific search you can get on that first Google page easily when you fill in a very specific need.

Megan Porta: Can you explain the paleo diet just really briefly? 

Cristina Curp: Yes. So paleo diet is essentially an ancestral template and it was originally, I guess, invented by Dr. Loren Cordain. Rob Wolf also had a hand in it. Essentially what the paleo diet is supposed to mimic is what cavemen ate, right? So nothing processed. So if it roamed on the earth or grows from the earth, you can eat it. So it’s, grain-free, meaning no rice or gluten or barley, wheat. It’s dairy free for the most part, although there’s the primal paleo, which allows some raw dairy and stuff. I would say plants and animals is the easiest way to put it. But then you can use like coconut flour, almond flour, like all those grain-free baking flours and they don’t use cane sugar, so everything’s coconut sugar or maple syrup. But the biggest things is grain-free and dairy-free so lots of tubers. Oh. And no legumes. So no beans either. 

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Cristina Curp: Under that big paleo umbrella, you get a lot of little subsets of Whole30 is essentially a challenge slash elimination diet, but it’s paleo by another name. Someone was really smart and trademarked the clean paleo diet and made a bundle on that. Then there’s people who do keto, but under the paleo umbrella as well, where they follow those principles of grain-free, dairy-free, no legumes. Then the autoimmune protocol or autoimmune paleo is an autoimmune elimination diet that follows the paleo principles of grain-free, dairy-free and then also omit other foods like eggs, nuts, seeds, coffee, chocolate, binders, sweeteners, anything processed. The purpose of the autoimmune protocol is that it omits foods that have high anti nutrient content and keeps them foods that are really nutrient dense. The goal is to heal the gut and find out trigger foods for autoimmune disease. 

Megan Porta: Is there a good resource to go for all of that paleo information? 

Cristina Curp: The Paleo Mom, Dr. Sarah Ballantine. She’s a very good resource. She’s been putting out information on the autoimmune protocol and just paleo at large for many years. Rob Wolf has a lot of obviously, he’s one of the founders of paleo online as well. Dr. Loren Cordain as well. So you can find some of the parameters for paleo online and many resources. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So I’m gonna put these all in the show notes, because I can imagine if there’s a blogger listening who wants to dig into this and just be like I don’t even know where to go. So I want to be able to have a place where people can go and just click over and find reputable, trustworthy resources. So I really appreciate you talking me through all this. I absolutely know nothing about this. So thank you for being patient. Then gluten-free, I think is pretty obvious and dairy-free is obvious. Is there anything we’re missing? So we have AIP auto-immune, Whole30, keto, paleo, gluten-free, dairy-free. Is there anything else? 

Cristina Curp: There’s other ones that I personally don’t dabble in as much. But I’m aware that they’re a thing. I just don’t like eating that way, it would be miserable. So I don’t do it. So there’s a specific carbohydrate diet, which eliminates certain carbs. So eliminates things usually that are more starchy and then there’s the gaps diet, and that also eliminates higher FODMAP or starchy foods. Then there’s just the low FODMAP diet, which would be like eliminating onions and garlic and it’s sad. Because onions and garlic are life. But even those are very specific protocols that people use a lot of times for candida overgrowth or like people with IBS do FODMAP. FODMAPs are actually growing to the point where there is a brand called Foody with a Y that’s in most stores now. And even Rao’ s tomato sauce made a low FODMAP version because low FODMAP is a diet that’s conventional medicine. A lot of gastroenterologists will use that and will tell their patients with IBS or IBD to try a low FODMAP diet. That one’s a little more mainstream. Again, creating resources for that could be a great way to niche down. I did want to mention paleo, what’s interesting is I bet almost every blogger listening has at least one recipe on their blog that’s already paleo. They just didn’t even know it. I bet you have a salad recipe or a recipe that’s grilled veggies with a cashew cream, something like that that’s already paleo and it’s on your blog and you just didn’t know. It might not be tagged that way, but it could be good to add those tags so they’re searchable for people looking for those recipes. 

Megan Porta: That is such a great recommendation. I did that too with a couple of my recipes a couple of years ago. I did the whole 30 diet for one month just to see what it was like. So I really dug into it, read the book. Immerse myself in that world for a month. Then of course I’d eat that way. So I was taking pictures and I might as well put this on the blog. So I did, but then I was thinking, I might have other recipes that adhere to the diet that I didn’t even know. So I combed through and sure enough, I did. I tagged them that way. Guess what happened? They went crazy, bonkers. They are some of my most popular content. So go through your stuff and either find Whole30 or paleo, like Cristina said. Maybe just experiment with putting some H2 in with the word paleo or Whole30 or whatever and see what happens. I feel like that’s gold. So the whole moral of the story here is that there is a need to be a resource for these diets and maybe even a combination of these diets. So think through that, even if you have no desire to niche down into these diets, at least experiment with maybe one or two of your existing recipes, just to see if it takes off because you never know. Cristina, what do you think about when you make food? This is along the same lines, but a little bit different. Something that I’ve gotten into trouble with in the past. Making foods with maybe unique ingredients that you’re not familiar with that are supposed to go into a certain cultural dish. Then people get really mad at you if you use the wrong kind of tomatoes or the wrong kind of spices. How do you deal with that sort of thing?

Cristina Curp: It’s such a touchy subject, because there’s a lot of food and cultural appropriation and people get upset about a lot of things. I definitely understand that there are a lot of bloggers. So I’m Cuban, right? There’s a lot of people, especially in the paleo space that do a lot of Cuban recipes because they’re very easy to be Whole30 or paleo because we use a lot of plantains and tubers and things like that. As long as someone likes making it right, and likes it’s tasty, I think it’s great, more resources. I, myself, again, with the nightshade intolerance, I can’t use tomato sauce. So even if I’m making a dish that is Cuban, that is of my culture, I have to swap out a ton of ingredients to make it edible and healthy for my body and my family. I have gotten comments before about oh it’s not authentic. I’m like, my grandmother, who’s watching me from heaven, would rather have me feel good, then make it the way she made it and get sick. Especially when it comes to tweaking recipes for food allergies, people have to understand that, a long time ago, these weren’t even a thing. But food intolerances and food allergies and auto-immune disease are more and more prevalent and more and more people are dealing with it. So having variations and tweaks to recipes to make them safe for others to eat, I think is honoring that culture. I, for example, have a recipe, that’s sticky cauliflower rice, that’s like sushi rice. Someone was like, oh my gosh, it’s an abomination. I don’t necessarily expect someone who’s Japanese to make this. But if someone who wants to make sushi at home, who can’t have rice, for some reason, this is an option for them. It’s not meant to be offensive in any way. I would never claim that it’s authentic in any way. It is a version of something. That’s an option for someone with a specific need. 

Megan Porta: It’s easy to say that inside of a post, right? You can explain that and say, I have a need to create the sauce because I can’t have X, Y, Z. If anyone takes the time to read that, they’re going to understand. I definitely understand how, having the idea that, oh, this is supposed to be authentic and you are insulting my cultural dish. I get that. But at the same time I see your side too. You sometimes have to adapt and it goes back to what we were saying earlier about being creative. Sometimes you just need to get creative if you have some of these food intolerances. So it’s a gray area. It’s really hard to navigate because people can get really upset about this.

Cristina Curp: Absolutely one way that I’ve found that I think covers all the bases and honors the authentic recipe, and even maybe someone like that culture creator. I have a friend, Jean and she blogs at What Great Grandma Ate, she’s Korean. I’ve made a recipe for a Whole30 beef bulgogi on my blog and what I did is that I talked about the history of the dish and what it means and why you change it the way I change it and the reasons for it. I also then tagged and linked Jean and her blog and her version of it, that’s authentic in the blog post. If you’re looking for a Korean creator who creates an authentic bulgogi dish, check out my friend, Jean, she’s amazing. Here’s her recipe. If you have intolerances like me and can’t have soy or whatever, here’s my recipe. This is the version I have. I talked about why I love Korean food. When I was in San Diego, my friend Lisa was Korean, and would take us out for Korean barbecue, that kind of thing. So I think there’s a way to honor that. I remember one time there was a creator who had a really big page. This person absolutely loves Cuban food. Is always cooking Cuban food and playing Cuban music in their stories. One time they made a recipe and they shared it and it was super wrong. A lot of people in the comments were really upset and I went to defend them until I realized how he was behaving. There’s someone saying, this is my cultural dish that you’re not doing it right. Let me tell you how. They completely disregard the people. I’m like, that’s not cool. Listen to people. You can at least listen and say, I understand what you’re saying. I know this isn’t actually right. But just say maybe why you made it different. So I think there’s ways to handle it. I have an Indian butter chicken on my blog that I use a change of spices because of nightshades. I use ghee which I guess is authentic and coconut milk. I made it into the pressure cooker and someone’s like, that’s not authentic. I’m like, you know what? You’re right. It’s not that the result is a very tasty dish. I actually have a lot of people who follow me, who are from India who have the same autoimmune skin condition that I do. These recipes also help. I’m not claiming it to be authentic. I’m just here to help people give them an option. 

Megan Porta: I think you made a really great point. It’s about how you deal with it and how you present it and then deal with it, if people have an issue with it. It’s all about that. If somebody still has an issue after that, then it’s probably more likely their issue. 

Cristina Curp: Right. You can’t please everyone. 

Megan Porta: But if you, yeah, but as a blogger, it is our responsibility to explain why we’re doing something. If people bring it to our attention that we’re doing it wrong, then we need to handle that in the right way. If we don’t, then that’s on us. This is again, such a gray area and which is why it’s good to talk about it. I’m sure that you have thought through this many times, so we really appreciate all of this. If somebody is listening and they’re like, oh, this sounds really intriguing and they don’t necessarily have any food allergies that they have to adhere to or anything like that. How do they get started? Would you recommend doing what you said earlier, just by going through their existing content and maybe changing up a few of their posts or what would you recommend?

Cristina Curp: So a really good way is to go through existing content. Well, first of all, pick your niche. Go through and think, maybe you can do it through SEO searches or maybe type in maybe some of your top performing posts and then add like paleo at the end. Your recipe, name, title, and paleo, or vegan or keto, and see if there’s anything that would come up while you’re like, oh, this is worth niching down into this. What you can do is you don’t necessarily have to change your recipe, but you could add recipe modification notes that would make it paleo or keto or vegan or AIP. Which is a great way to add that option to your recipe without changing the one that your readers already love. But then, using your existing SEO, to then also get new people on there. Oh yeah, I can easily make this dairy free. I could easily make this gluten free. Then that way you open up to so many more people. 

Megan Porta: That’s a really good recommendation too. So if you’re looking to get started, I’d say take that advice. If you do have an intolerance or a sensitivity with you or someone in your family, then use that as a way in, and just start incorporating those recipes into your existing content. Hopefully it aligns with your existing niche. But I think there’s a lot of ways to get in the door with this, and it can only benefit you. I just told you earlier that I have a handful, like probably five or less Whole30 recipes on my blog. My blog is not a diet blog at all, but they’ve done really well. So you just never know. 

Cristina Curp: Absolutely. Another thing, if you were personally going through it, even talking about that with your readers, you’re going to be surprised how many people are like, oh my gosh. Or maybe they might start experimenting with that. Or they might know someone, even opening up over the course of the last few years. My blog started with AIP or Whole30. Then I went through a phase where I personally was eating keto for many years. So I then started sharing a ton of keto recipes. Then I’ve added carbs back into my diet and it’s okay. I’m always sharing and creating recipes and sharing them on my blog with what I’m personally doing at any given moment. Sometimes I think people really appreciate that they can follow that journey and realize that we’re not static and our needs change over time. Then in that way there’s something for everybody there. 

Megan Porta: So just because I have a super comforting comfort food blog does not mean that I always have to post that sort of content. I love that. So my journey can look like, yes, somebody who eats crap all the time, and then occasionally does the Whole30 diet. I think a lot of people can align with that. As you were talking, I was thinking, oh my gosh, how cool would it be to go on Instagram now or when the New Year’s upon us and just say, look what I did a few years ago. I did the Whole30 diet. Are you guys going to try this? That would be a good way to introduce, re-introduce some existing content, right?

Cristina Curp: Absolutely. With Whole30 specifically, because they do their own work they get people into their marketing and their following, they get thousands, if not millions of people, they do January and September, the big Whole30 months. If you have Whole30 content, January and September is the time to push it out, because it’s going to do really well. When I tried gluten-free for a month a while back and put out a newsletter and linked all your gluten-free recipes and shared it on social media. You’d be surprised how many people are going to be like, oh yeah, let me try this. Or share that with a friend who’s gluten-free. They already trust you and your content. They’re going to take that and share it with someone who they know needs it. 

Megan Porta: I’m inspired, Cristina. I am thinking of all of my Whole30 recipes that I’m going to revive today. So I really loved this conversation. Is there anything that we’ve missed?

Cristina Curp: I think we’ve covered a lot of it. I think the one thing to also remember is that, when you’re creating these recipes, you might get people with food intolerances or chronic illness who are a different audience than just the typical foodie who wants to go make your delicious decadent, triple layer, chocolate cake. These are people who might not feel well, right? They might be in pain. They might be really fatigued. So it’s a little bit not riskier per se, but you have an audience who’s going to come back. They’re going to leave comments. There’s a need there. I think there’s a higher responsibility to make sure that you’re not going to waste their time and you’re not going to make them sick. So when you delve into this food as medicine or healing protocol, recipe development, understand it’s literally people’s quality of life is in your hands. So take that very seriously. 

Megan Porta: Oh, that was very powerful and well said. Thank you. Thank you for joining me. This was such a, just, I feel like valuable chat that we all needed to dig into a little bit more. So we appreciate all your expertise. Clearly you have done so much research and you’ve thought through a lot of this. So thank you so much for being here today, Cristina. 

Cristina Curp: Yeah, my pleasure. Great conversation. It was awesome being here, Megan. 

Megan Porta: Do you have a favorite quote or words of inspiration to share before we say goodbye? 

Cristina Curp: One thing with content creators that I see a lot is the kind of analysis paralysis. Don’t let that stop you. You don’t have to be an expert in Whole30 to put out a Whole30 recipe. Just do your due diligence, but don’t let that fear of perfection stop you from creating content. 

Megan Porta: Great final takeaway. Thank you for sharing that. Your show notes can be found at eatblogtalk.com/thecastawaykitchen, Christina. So if anyone wants to go peek at those again, I will put all of those resources we talked about if you are looking to dig into any of the specific diets a little bit further. You can go find those at her show notes page. Tell everyone where they can best find you online, social media, all of that. 

Cristina Curp: Yeah, absolutely. So my blog is thecastawaykitchen.com and I have tons of recipes from all of the kinds of diets we talked about today. I’m on social media and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. I’m at The Castaway kitchen. My TikTok, which is so weird, I feel like I’m like an old person there, but it’s actually blown up recently but that one’s actually my name, so it’s Cristina_Maria_Curp. Yeah, I’m on there a lot talking about autoimmune disease and food to heal so you can come learn some stuff. 

Megan Porta: All right. Thank you again, Cristina, for being here and thank you so much for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro: We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.


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