What Gluten Free Sage is all about:
knowledge, wisdom, strength and inspiration.
Gluten Free Sage is the power of perspective and the ability to heal through healthy food, healthful lifestyle, mindfulness and minimalism. It is a gluten free wellness blog that offers support and understanding around how a food-related illness or celiac diagnosis impacts the body, and how our spirits need healing too.
I believe there are four principles to consider when on the path to health and healing:
- Finally Knowing you have celiac disease or gluten intolerance
- The Wisdom you gain from your life experiences, lessons, and yes… adversity
- The Strength to have control of your diet, fitness and well being
- The Inspiration you get from being healthy, focused and peaceful
It’s important to identify and treat the cause of what’s making you feel bad. Walking around with celiac disease or gluten intolerance and not knowing you have it is the equivalent to standing on the center of a seesaw and trying to balance it. You’re upright but you’re not. You never feel right. You have low energy, the inability to focus and feel exhausted.
Health and illness are conditions of the whole individual: physical, spiritual, genetic, environmental, social, and other factors. We must treat the cause by taking all of these factors into account—for both healing and prevention of disease.
And you don’t know how bad off you were until you are healthy and strong again.
That’s where the name JET (short for Jeanette) comes in. My kids gave me this nickname once I became healthy and transformed into a new person. It goes with my story of standing tall, living life with strength and taking off with enormous energy and vitality.
Jet Zengine is where I impart all the wisdom I’ve accumulated since being diagnosed 13 years ago. It’s full of my favorite quotes that help and inspire me, the poems I write and overall positive vibes and happy thoughts! I want to educate and delight through photography, poetry, design, inspirational quotes and recipes, as we need to be well and feel inspired to help us become the best, most beautiful versions of ourselves that we can be!
Jet Fuel is the diet that I use to stay healthy and feel great. It’s low carb/no carb, 100% gluten free and mostly fresh meats, eggs and veggies, which is explained in the Jet Fuel section of the site. I have discovered through my illness that there’s a need for education around the gluten-free diet and believe you cannot achieve or maintain wellness eating food that is not healthy.
Jet Rocket is about strength building and posture. It’s my super simple workout routine with tips to slowly build yourself back up once you’re eating healthy and feeling great again. It’s difficult to workout when you are zapped of energy. Once you’re able to work out again, it’s baby steps to feeling invigorated by a workout, instead of knocked out. You can go from walking a mile to finally hiking six miles up a mountain in the Rockies like I did. Really!
Who inspires you?
One of my fitness inspirations was my late father-in-law, Fritz. That man would be watching a football game and manage to get on the floor and start doing sit-ups, while everyone else sipped beers on the couch. He had his own “in house scooch” on the oriental rug routine! Fritz also didn’t live to eat; he ate to live. Who else can say they ate soup everyday for lunch at NASA space center, where Fritz worked hard for thirty years? Even when he was feeling older and more frail, Fritz never failed to take big walks or a climb up on someone’s roof (with permission!) He did what he loved in his life and that positivity bled into his health routine as well.
Another one of the most physically fit people I’ve ever known was my friend Big Bill, who was bigger than life. In addition to being peaceful and kind, Big Bill was the most in shape 80-year-old I’ve ever seen! At the age of 80, he rode his bike through Texas from Houston to Austin and loved every second of it. Biking was his sport. How did he do it? I think the secret is he loved it. He loved being outside and making the world his gym.
Being strong will open your world to your athletic side, the activist in you, or even your inner artist. I began writing poetry on my journey and now have two illustrated poetry books Sage Words and Sage Spirit that I self-published in 2016 and 2017, and a newly released children’s poetry and picture book White Wild Indigo. This opened up my world once I could focus on something other than health.