Gut Health, Meal Prep and Fertility with guest Julie Nguyen of Methodology
I encourage all of my patients to find what I refer to as a “cabana boy.” I like the idea of someone fanning them with a big palm leaf, and taking care of their every need while they relax and take it easy during fertility treatment. Since it can be hard to find a good cabana boy these days, I am always on the lookout for ways to make things easier for my patients.
Eating right is super important during fertility treatment, AND meal prep and planning can be one more thing to add to your “plate” during an already busy time.
When I found out about Methodology, I knew I had to have CEO Julie Nguyen on The Egg Whisperer Show. I know you’ll be inspired by Julie’s story of how she started Methodology as a way to eat better, and eat healthier, while still having quick and easy options for a busy life.
In this episode you will learn about how gut health impacts your overall health, easy ways to eat a cleaner diet, and how some of those ailments (eczema, asthma, and sometimes sleep issues) you have might be the result of what you’re eating. Our current culture provides so many opportunities to pick up fast and processed foods, and while that seems like a faster option, it’s not always your best option. I hope you’ll join Julie and I as we talk about ways to fix this, especially during a time when you are looking for ways to eat healthier and have easy food prep options.
Julie Nguyen is the Founder & CEO of Methodology, a company that makes high-quality, fully cooked meals for busy professionals. Julie holds a BA in Economics from Stanford, and started Methodology after discovering that her own diet was negatively impacting her health and causing eczema, asthma, and poor sleep. Six years, two nutritionists, 3 personal trainers, and an enormous excel sheet later, Julie had unlocked the keys to tracking her own eating habits and that was the start of Methodology.
You can get 20% off your first week of Methodology by using the code “eggwhisperer”
Dr. Aimee: I am so excited to have Julie Nguyen on today, founder of Methodology. Welcome, Julie.
Julie Nguyen: Hi. It’s so nice to be here.
Dr. Aimee: We’re going to talk about gut health, meal prep, and fertility. There’s no one better to talk to us about it than you. Before we get into today’s topic, I want to share a little bit more with our listeners about you.
Julie is the founder and CEO of Methodology, a company that makes high quality fully cooked meals for busy professionals. She holds a BA in economics from Stanford and started Methodology after discovering that her own diet was negatively impacting her health and giving her things like eczema, asthma, and poor sleep. Six years, two nutritionists, three personal trainers, and an enormous Excel spreadsheet later, Julie unlocked the keys to tracking her own eating habits, and that was the start of Methodology.
That’s how we met. I was in the same situation, I Googled it and found Methodology, and it changed my life. I’m so glad that you’re here to talk to us about it. Your background is unique, and your original diet stemmed from a good place with your mom wanting you to eat healthy. I love that.
Can you share with us your background ties into your company?
Julie Nguyen: The whole reason why I started this business is because I was shocked when I learned myself how many of my health issues actually were curable. I had been on prescription drugs for years for things like asthma and eczema, and I was told that this is just genetic, or this is just something that I’m going to have to manage my whole life. No doctor at any point in my life ever asked me what my diet was.
That coupled with the fact that I had one of the best educations in the world and was surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world because of that, and still didn’t know how to eat properly, didn’t feel like anyone around me knew how to eat properly, it just made me realize my life in tech is fun and cushy and everything, but there’s this really big important problem that needs to be solved, which is people need to learn how to eat properly. On top of that, there needs to be a service that makes it fun and easy for people to eat properly as well. We know what we need to do in a lot of cases, but it’s just really hard to fit it into our busy lifestyles.
Dr. Aimee: That’s exactly what I love about Methodology, it’s fun and easy, and you’ve made it that way. How did you personally tie all of the conditions back to diet?
Julie Nguyen: It was just through a really strict elimination diet type of tracking. I cut everything out for months, and then saw so many symptoms get better.
For me, cutting out dairy was shocking for me. I had reduced dairy in my lifetime before, like I should cut back on it because I heard it’s not that good for you, but I never had been really strict about it. This is one of the things that I emphasize to our customers and to my friends a lot is that you really do have to be extremely strict. When I was strict about it, then all of a sudden, the acne I had since I was a teenager went away pretty much completely. I got 90–95% clear.
Every Spring when I used to have to take allergy medicine every day and carry an inhaler everywhere with me, I no longer had seasonal allergies, I no longer got asthma attacks. Once I cut things out and reintroduced things back one at a time, it became clear to me which foods were triggering which health issues. For me, dairy is my personal main bad food for me where I am really strict about it. It’s something I might eat once or twice a year at most. Some people might be like, “I love cheese, I don’t care if I get pimples.” I care, I really don’t want pimples, I really don’t want to be wheezing and struggling to breathe, which also makes it harder to sleep, harder to exercise, and all of that.
It was just through an elimination diet. It’s the only way to find out because even with food sensitivity tests, when you read the science around how those work, a lot of times they flag things that you’re just eating a lot of because when you overeat something you can develop an autoimmune response to it. That doesn’t mean that you’re fully allergic to it. I’ve used food sensitivity tests to give me hints on things that I might want to try to cut back on that I may have been overeating.
In the end, a regular elimination diet is something that I think everyone should try at least once in their lives. The number of times I’ve even overheard two men having dinner saying, “I used to make fun of people who said they didn’t eat gluten, and then recently my doctor made me go on a no gluten diet, and all of a sudden all of my digestive issues went away and my stomach isn’t bloated constantly anymore.” We just don’t really know until we cut things out strictly.
I think that if you are listening to this, no matter where you are in your health journey, it’s worth doing an elimination diet. You can look these up online. They basically say cut out dairy, gluten, refined sugar, some will say cut out eggs and other things, and then you reintroduce them back one at a time, one a week. It’s a multi-month journey, but it’s going to improve your quality of life so much.
Dr. Aimee: Yes. I don’t think people realize that until they actually start the process. Just like those two guys who were talking about it. Then my patients who go with your customized meals, it makes their fertility journey also so much smoother and easier, and then I send all of my patients a list of your egg retrieval must-haves. Having a meal planning service like yours, especially yours, I feel like takes the guesswork out of it. I love that you create prepared meals that are high quality, tasty, and easy. I’m curious, how do you approach what gets added to the menu each week?
Julie Nguyen: That’s a really good question because every meal prep service has very different philosophies that guide their menu design.
For me, I’ve been fortunate in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, and going to Stanford, I have a very close relationship with Stanford University nutrition researchers. In fact, I’m on a texting relationship with Dr. Christopher Gardner. We even collaborated on a study that was just published by NAH in the last few weeks. So, I have access to the best doctors. I also have a really good relationship with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz on Instagram, he’s The Gut Health MD, someone who I’m also on an email and texting close relationship with. So, on top of reading all of the research, when I’m confused about something, I can talk to one of these doctors.
The amazing thing is when you actually talk to a real expert, such as Christopher Gardner, what I love about him is he’s not backed by any companies, he’s completely neutral. Listening to him is really different from listening to a lot of these pop-science “doctors” that write books. I trust him more and I talk to him a lot about this. It feels like the research is conflicting, what do we do, but when you talk to Christopher Gardner, he’ll say the research doesn’t actually conflict, there’s a lot of red herring “research” being put out there by the dairy industry and etcetera to intentionally confuse consumers into thinking that milk is healthy. They sponsor a lot of these studies. For researchers like him who know which research studies are the gold standard and how to interpret them, to him it’s really clear which foods we should be eating more of and less of.
With that as the foundation for where I am finding guiding principles for the menu, there are a few guiding principles that we use that I trust and rely on because they are in line with what Dr. Gardner and what Dr. Bulsiewicz both believe.
One of the most important things we can do for our gut health, which affects every impact on our health, is eat the largest amount of plant variety possible. We have gone all-in on this in a totally psycho way because it is a more the merrier type of principle. It’s not there’s diminishing returns. We want to maximize it.
The minimum is 30 different types of plants a week. Methodology goes further than that. My co-founder and I stepped back and asked ourselves, 30 is something if you’re cooking at home that you can do if you really put in the effort, but we are in this privileged position as a business to be able to serve a large amount of people and can use a larger amount of ingredients than anyone could possibly grocery shop for when they’re shopping for themselves. So, we aim for around 200. If you’re eating your way across our menu, you’re getting an obscene amount, an amount that you could never grocery shop for if you were just shopping for your family.
That’s one of our guiding principles is to just get that rare produce in there. We care about it so much, we actually have a partner farm in California who grows very rare things for us, will grow custom things for us. It’s really a farm-to-table service so that we can get these rare types of produce into the menu. It’s the same kind of sourcing principles that fine dining Michelin Star restaurants use, we apply that to our meal prep. Plant variety is one of the biggest ones.
The second thing I feel really strongly about is not talked about a lot anymore because it has grown unsexy and out of favor, that is people have to eat the right amount of calories. I’ve been so annoyed by the marketing out there that says calories don’t matter, it’s the quality of the calories. It’s really both. The first thing I mentioned has a lot to do with the quality of the calories. You want it coming from as many plants and the widest variety of plants as possible. The second thing is we still have to eat the right number of calories in total.
People don’t think this is a sexy cool thing to talk about, but it is really important. From all the research out there, the fewer calories we eat, the longer we’re going to live, the less fat we have around our organs, that’s the kind of fat that gives us heart disease and other health issues, just the better we’re going to feel. The meals have to be calorie controlled, so I have very strict calorie constraints around the standard meals and the large meals.
That’s another thing that is just really important for all of the meals we design, it’s just the quality of all of the ingredients. Even when we’re using meat, even when we’re using seafood, it has to be really sustainable, really ethically grown, fed, produced, and all of that. For me, I think everyone has a different amount of meat and seafood that they will feel really good eating, so I am not prescriptive about that in the meal program. But I will make sure that if you are getting seafood or you’re getting beef from us, let’s make sure that seafood is wild or extremely sustainably farmed, and if you’re eating beef, it should be grass fed beef.
Those are the main things. Then on top of that, we just want to make everything tasty. One of the reasons why I started this service is because I was using other meal prep services once I learned how I needed to eat, and I remember just feeling like so tortured, meals were something I had to get through, that I didn’t look forward to eating at all. Eating is just one of life’s greatest pleasures. It just felt like why do I have to choose between eating healthy or enjoying food? That’s the way it felt with all of the other services out there.
For us, we really do put flavor first. We will not add something to the menu unless it tastes very yummy and comforting. Also, we don’t want people to feel deprived, ever. We want to make it as easy as possible for you, our customers, to make it part of a lifestyle. In order to do that, we have to genuinely enjoy and look forward to our meals.
We spend a lot of time on just the creativity and the recipe testing to make it fun and delicious and familiar. I don’t want people to feel like they’re on some bland salad diet or some bland bodybuilding chicken breast and steamed broccoli diet. I want them to feel like it’s just as tasty as the restaurant food they might get out there, but we’ve taken those dishes and removed the things that negatively impact our health, we’ve trimmed down the portions so that the calories are right, and then we’ve even leveled it up by using rare and interesting produce that you really only normally find in fine dining restaurants.
Dr. Aimee: And it shows. The other thing is my husband loves it, too. I think that’s the thing, some of these meal prep companies cater more, I think, to women. I would buy them, because I did a lot of research first before I landed on yours, the one that I love the most, and he wouldn’t touch any of those meals. It was so annoying because we eat together, so I was like, “What are we going to do now?” Methodology was the single and only meal prep company that he loves as well.
That brings me to the next question. Do you have that mindset that it should be both for men and women? Do you do anything different if, let’s say, someone identifies as male and they’re ordering from you?
Julie Nguyen: I’m so glad you brought this up. I always forget to talk about this. Yes, we intentionally design our product to be very couple friendly and even family friendly. We try to have enough things that kids will like as well, which is why we always have things like meatballs on the menu.
I realized that the services out there either fall into the very catering to women only, so they’re just not hearty and comforting enough for men where you feel like you’re eating this, frankly, rabbit food type meal is the way I think a man would make fun of some of those meals. Or the food that is catered toward men are these bodybuilding meals where it’s just really bland and it’s a ton of meat, which just not every man needs to eat that much meat every meal, every day.
What I wanted to give men was you can have steak, we’re going to give you an amazing coffee-crusted grass fed steak, it’s going to taste as good as what’s out there in the restaurants, we’re going to put chimichurri with that, it’s going to be made with a really nice avocado oil, we’re going to blend in some walnuts to get you that omega-3, and all the things that men are used to eating when they eat out, but let’s just level it up, make it a little healthier, but without ever sacrificing flavor.
I’m glad to hear that your husband likes it, because couples have to eat together. That’s one of the things. How could we possibly expect a woman to sustain using Methodology if the man doesn’t like it or if it’s too much work for her if she has to shop for herself and then buy something separate for the man or cook something separate for the man. That’s not reasonable. That’s why we try to make the product gender neutral.
Dr. Aimee: Or the other way around, he has to cook something else for the woman.
Julie Nguyen: Yes. We definitely have a lot of couples where the man manages the account as well, for sure. For us, there are two portion sizes. Most of the time it’s the women in the standard and the men in the large, but sometimes it flips. It just depends on people’s age, how active they are, how big their appetites are, and what their eating plan is. If someone is doing one meal a day, for example, we have a lot of people who do a lot of fasting, they only do one or two meals a day, they might want a larger meal. It really varies depending on the person and their lifestyle.
Dr. Aimee: Can people change their preferences? Let’s say they’re pregnant and they don’t like the thought of chicken, they just can’t eat chicken.
Julie Nguyen: Yes. They can change their preferences at any time. We have this feature called foods to avoid, they can add or remove from it anytime. Once something is on your list of foods to avoid, it’s always flagged on the menu for you in red, just to make sure that you don’t accidentally add it to your cart. Then we also never put it into the menus that we custom design for you each week, just as an additional layer of protection.
Dr. Aimee: I think we should work on doing a study together showing that people who are having a hard time trying to conceive and switch to Methodology can get pregnant sooner and faster. I really do think that there is something to the meals that you’ve prepared, how mindful you are about how healthy they are. It’s basically an anti-inflammatory diet that people are following. It’s great for women with PCOS or endometriosis. I’m just putting that out there. If someone out there is listening and wants to sponsor us, we’ll enroll like 50 people.
I’m kind of joking, but not really. I think eating right is so important and I’m just so glad that you’re here talking to us and teaching us about what you do. I tell patients to just do it for two weeks. You don’t have to commit to doing it for one or three months. You can literally turn the service on and off. If you go on vacation, you turn it off. Around the first trimester, let’s say nothing seems appetizing, you turn it off. Then maybe during the second trimester, you turn it back on. Correct?
Julie Nguyen: That’s exactly right. I would love to find someone to do a study like this. I’ve learned a lot about how to eat for fertility over the years because I went through my own egg freezing process and we have a lot of customers who come in for this. People need to realize how important food is for hormonal health. Hormonal health is just so key to fertility. For hormonal health, it’s all about the quality of the ingredients, that’s definitely one of them, but also we really need to manage our insulin during this time because that really affects hormonal health.
One of the things at Methodology that we always do is every meal has to be designed to be very balanced. I will never put some kind of super carby, sugary meal on the menu that doesn’t also have protein, fiber, healthy fats to make sure that you’re not going to have this crazy insulin spike after you eat which is going to negatively effect hormonal health, which is going to increase hunger and cravings over the long term.
There are a lot of vegan restaurants and meal prep services out there that don’t think this way. They just are putting a vegan meal on a plate for you. I just want to caution you, it should be a red flag to you if you eat one of these meals and one or two hours later you’re hungry again. Most likely, that meal wasn’t properly balanced with the right macronutrient ratios. We always make sure that it’s balanced because I want to make sure the insulin isn’t spiking, that people’s hormones are balanced, whether they’re trying to get pregnant or not.
That’s just really important to us. Even our vegan meals, we make sure. There’s no such thing as a junk food vegan meal on our menu. We won’t do that. It would make our lives easier because people love that kind of stuff and it obviously tastes really good, but we’re just very principled with how we design our menu. It’s so important to us that people actually feel better, get to their healthiest version of themselves and stay there.
Dr. Aimee: Right. I love portion control. For me, working as much as I do, I get hangry. Also, what I do is so emotional, it’s just nice to know that I actually feel less hungry. You’re right, after a meal, I don’t feel like I need to have another meal. You’re right, the rabbit food meal prep companies, which we won’t name, you don’t get that feeling, you feel like you need to have another meal a lot of the time.
Julie Nguyen: Exactly. I have to test those all the time. I’ve found every time I’ve tested one of those, I have ended up eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner within three or four hours. It’s 2:00 PM and I’ve already eaten my whole day’s worth of food, so what do I do now?
Dr. Aimee: Right. Julie, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate the advice that you’ve given us. I’ve learned so much from you and I know you’re going to help so many of my patients. We’ll maybe have some Methodology babies to report later, too.
Julie Nguyen: I would love that. There have definitely been Methodology babies born already, but we need to make sure that there are more of them.
Dr. Aimee: Think about sperm health, too. I tell my patients to eat healthy for sperm health as well, so there’s also the dude component when it comes to improving sperm health by eating healthy and eating right. Thank you again for making my patients parents through healthy eating.
Julie Nguyen: Thank you for your support. I appreciate it so much.
Dr. Aimee: Is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap up?
Julie Nguyen: No. Whether or not you are trying to get pregnant, look us up. We’re @ GoMethodology on Instagram. To your point, diet makes a huge difference in fertility. I get emails all the time about people who struggled to get pregnant, switched to Methodology, and were able to get pregnant. Do not forget about food as a key factor in improving your fertility.
Dr. Aimee: Awesome. Thank you, Julie, once again for sharing your wisdom with us. Have a great day.
Originally published at https://draimee.org.
