HIBT Lab! Against All Grain: Danielle Walker

Growing up, Danielle Walker’s family often convened for big meals prepared by her Italian grandmother, Grandma Marge. Back then, Danielle enjoyed a wide variety of food without restriction; but she began experiencing severe abdominal pain in her 20s that ultimately led her to totally transform her diet—cutting grains, lactose, sugar and more. As Danielle found relief in this approach—and realized that others with similar ailments could as well—she began compiling her recipes in an online blog called Against All Grain. Before long, the self-taught chef became a bestselling cookbook author, more recently branching out with her own product lines and cooking courses. This week on How I Built This Lab, Danielle talks with Guy about being an ‘accidental entrepreneur’ as she chronicles her journey to building a multifaceted business centered around healthy eating. Plus, Danielle shares her advice for other creators looking to build an audience and discusses food’s potential to help millions suffering from autoimmune diseases. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 5:13Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So I'll admit that I'm a total sucker for trendy diets. I've tried paleo, gluten-free, Whole30, keto, intermittent fasting, vegetarian, vegan, you name it, I've done it. And the thing is, in each case, I actually benefited from sticking to those diets. And while I pretty much eat everything these days, those diets have really helped me organize the way I cook. And I should mention here, in our family, I do all the cooking, but it means I get a free pass when it comes to the dishes. Anyway, back in 2014, when I was trying to eat a strictly paleo diet,

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  I came across a cookbook called Against All Grain. And that book completely blew my mind because it was full of recipes I could cook for my whole family and eat a grain-free, dairy-free, sugar-free diet. The book's author, Danielle Walker, wrote the book because she struggled with an autoimmune condition called ulcerative colitis. And she found that changing her diet in a pretty dramatic way allowed her to control the symptoms. Over the next few years, Danielle built her brand of cooking into a business, a business that today publishes cookbooks, sells spices, offers cooking courses, and much more. Her newest cookbook is called Healthy in a Hurry,

• 6:40Guy Raz?

  and a lot of the recipes are inspired by her grandma's recipes.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  You know, I grew up in a family that used food to gather. My grandmother, my dad's mom, is Italian. We grew up in the Bay Area. And she regularly, from the moment that I can remember, hosted huge gatherings. Fifty, sixty people. She would cook everything from scratch. There were no potlucks at Grandma Marge's house. And, you know, she didn't take shortcuts. She made everything from scratch. And she always prepared multiple proteins and multiple sides so that anybody that came into her house could eat. My mom worked, and I also grew up in the 90s. So it was a lot more kind of convenience items, casseroles that were thrown together with some things from the pantry. But every Sunday, we sat down together.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  So, you know, I was in the kitchen, definitely, a lot from a pretty early age, making, whether it was like Taco Sunday or making a casserole that my mom taught me how to make.

• 7:38Guy Raz?

  So, pretty kind of sort of standard, American, omnivorous diet?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:45Guy Raz?

  Macaroni and cheese, casseroles, you know?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Spaghetti, yes.

• 7:50Guy Raz?

  Taco's, meat, yeah, spaghetti, right. And you ate everything, growing up?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. I ate everything. I had no trouble with any of the foods. I don't know that I would say I particularly cared, you know, what I was eating, as long as it was nourishing and fulfilling and it was easy to make. I occasionally remember my stomach being a little just uneasy in the mornings, and I would just kind of eat a later breakfast. But I had no trouble digesting or tolerating anything until after college.

• 8:21Guy Raz?

  What do you remember? Because you, I mean, you've talked about this on your blog and in your books. You were like 22 and you started to experience severe pain. And, and you didn't know what it was.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it started just a couple of months before graduation from college. And it started, I think I just had some sort of a stomach virus because I remember going to the ER one night and just having a ton of pain. And then that kind of subsided, but I got married in September of 2007. And, you know, I remember now looking back at photos and just seeing that my stomach was kind of distended. And, you know, I was very young. I was 22 years old. So that wasn't a normal symptom for me. And I chalked it up to stress at the time because I had just planned a wedding, moved, graduated college, and gotten married. And that's a whole lot, you know, of life changes. I just figured everything would kind of get back to normal after the wedding, but it really just ended

• 9:21Speaker 01

  up getting worse.

• 9:22Guy Raz?

  So you presumably, I know you started to go to doctors. And initially, I mean, how long did it take before they were able to actually diagnose something?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I saw three different specialists and a trip to the ER. They did a test, a CT scan, I think, in the ER and saw that my entire colon was impacted. So I think that was, you know, it was like, oh, you're just stressed. You probably just are stopped up. So just throw a cup of fiber into your smoothies for a few days, or take some Metamucil and you'll be fine. And so ultimately, when I walked into this specialist's office, when I finally got the appointment, at that point, I had been in so much pain, was losing some blood, and just was in really bad shape. And he kind of saw me immediately. I was pretty pale at that point. And he said, we need to get you in and do a colonoscopy

• 10:15Speaker 01

  right away. And nobody had performed any tests, really, besides that kind of CT scan in the ER at that point. So I didn't know what a colonoscopy was, but quite honestly, I was just glad somebody was performing some sort of a test to try to figure out what was going on.

• 10:28Guy Raz?

  You were diagnosed with something called ulcerative colitis. And what did they say it was? I mean, presumably you'd never heard of this before.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I had never heard of it before. I remember waking up from the anesthesia. And, and at that point, he said he had, he had done some biopsies and he needed to, to decipher if it was ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease. Both of those were foreign to me, so he didn't really give any indication as to if one was worse than another. But he definitely said that there was something going on. There was some sort of disease and inflammation in the colon. And yeah, you know, I asked him, the first thing I asked him was if I'd still be able to have kids. I was a newlywed and kind of had my life planned out. He looked at me reassuredly and just said, yeah, there's medications. You can live a completely normal life.

• 11:15Guy Raz?

  Right, okay. But at the same time, I'm sure it was a relief that you got this diagnosis. It validated your, you know, your concerns.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It was a relief to know that there was something going on for sure, that it wasn't just, you know, in my head or that I was making it up. But it also almost led to more confusion and frustration at the same time, because I remember, you know, just being given this two-page little pamphlet, trifold type of a thing, and kind of sent out the door with a couple of prescriptions and left to my own devices to try to figure out actually what this diagnosis was. You know, I feel like I went in and all I came out with was a two-word name for, for what I had, but not a whole lot of information.

• 12:00Guy Raz?

  Hmm. This condition is, is, is part of sort of, I guess, like the umbrella term is inflammatory bowel disease and like 3 million people in the US experience this, have symptoms of, of these conditions.

• 12:15Guy Raz?

  You took the medicine and did you get better? Did it work right away?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  No, it didn't, unfortunately. It took some time and, and quite honestly, the side effects from, from one of them were worse. I felt worse than I did going into the hospital. And then, and then eventually it did. It, it did calm it down. But yeah, the, the side effects were just so debilitating. I didn't feel better, let's just say that.

• 12:40Guy Raz?

  And at one point, after all this happened, you, you took a humanitarian trip to Uganda with your husband and some friends. And I know this because I've read your MRI, you wrote about it. While you were there, you had a flare up again. You got really, really sick. And I mean, I think to the point where you were, you're almost close to dying. And you had to be like flown back to the US from Uganda. Can you just talk about a little bit what happened? I mean, you were following your doctor's instructions. You were taking medication, but it wasn't working, right?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I was, I would not say I was in full remission before we went, but I did check with my doctor and he was like, you're going to be fine. But yeah, by the time, actually, we'd stopped in Dubai to get over there from San Francisco. It's definitely a long journey. By the time we were in Dubai, I felt like the world was spinning. And then I just was like, okay, I just need to get, you know, get to Kampala. We were going to spend a few days in a hotel there before we headed up to the northern Sudan border to do some humanitarian work. And I thought, I just need to rest. I just need to, you know, get used to the time change. And I just declined very, very, very quickly and ended up in a little two, two-room hospital in Kampala, Uganda, actually.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  So not, we didn't, we did not get too remote at that point, thankfully, and had, had really good care there. But yes, after about eight days in the hospital there, the doctor just said, you have to get back to the United States for blood transfusion.

• 14:05Guy Raz?

  Oh, my God. All right, you get back to the US and you clearly, this, the medication isn't working. Something's wrong. I mean, now, of course, you know, we're talking about it today. Now it seems painfully obvious, but, but in 2007, it wasn't necessarily obvious. How did you start to think about food? And maybe, maybe there was a food connection with what, what was going on?

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Honestly, the first little hint of anything food-related did not come from any of my doctors in San Francisco. It came from the doctor who treated me in Kampala. He was a British doctor that had been living there for about, I think, 13 or 14 years and had been just working in the community and running this hospital for a really long time. And he was the first one that told me that my disease was an autoimmune condition, which I had not heard thus far. And, you know, he talked to me a lot about the gut bacteria and about- How we over sterilize in, you know, the Western cultures and, and that we do antibiotics. And he's like, you probably packed four things of, you know, hand sanitizer in your bag to come

• 15:11Speaker 01

  here. And he just talked to me a lot about how we kind of kill off anything that could be vital and healthy for our guts and that the bad bacteria just thrives because we eat a lot of sugar and a lot of, you know, carbohydrates. He didn't go too, too into depth and mostly probably because I was very close to death, as you mentioned, but it did spark kind of something in me that I went back to later, once I recovered.

• 15:36Guy Raz?

  So tell me about it. I mean, you, you, this idea is in your head, sort of this doctor plants these ideas in your head. And when you start to think, maybe I need to take a look at food, where did you turn to? Did you like, did you start to go online and just, you know, go down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what you should do?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I did, I did. Yeah, I just started typing in food and ulcerative colitis, or food and autoimmune diseases. And this was, again, I think this is probably 2008 at this point. This was pre, you know, social media groups, things where you could find people that might be suffering of similar, you know, diseases and ailments. And there were a lot of medical forums and chat boards at that time. And I just remember stumbling upon it and first of all, feeling relief because I had never heard of my disease before, nor had I met anybody in person that had it. And so there was a bit of relief of just, oh, I'm not the only one in the world that's suffering from this. And then I started seeing people, you

• 16:37Speaker 01

  know, chatting back and forth and saying that they were using a gluten free diet or a specific carbohydrate diet, which I had never heard of before, to manage their symptoms. And I, you know, started seeing little glimpses of hope of people saying they'd been in remission for two years and were able to wean off of their medications. And so that's really what kind of led me to start researching it.

• 16:58Guy Raz?

  So you, from what I understand, you, you found out about this diet, SCD, specific carbohydrate diet. And you see these, you see that SCD symbol in a lot of now, in a lot more cookbooks. You decide, all right, I'm gonna try this out. And, and I guess we should describe, I mean, this is a, like, there are foods that you cannot eat, like it's grains, for example, like certain grains and, and, you know, bread, pasta. Obviously candy, a lot of dairy products, potatoes.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the list is pretty extensive. It came from a book called Breaking the Vicious Cycle. And you know, when you first crack open the book, or you look at it on the website, you're just like, this list is so extensive. I don't know if I can do it. But yeah, no grains, no, no lactose. You could have some dairy products, but they had to be lactose free. No refined sugar. Let's see, you could do legumes, but they had to be soaked and sprouted. There were a lot of different nuances. And then, and then it was almost like nothing processed, nothing packaged. They didn't want to use canned goods. It was a lot of cooking from scratch. I ended up having to go a little bit further, and I had to cut all dairy and the legumes that were allowed in there. And that's kind of where I ended up more on a paleo diet. And when I did that elimination diet, my symptoms decreased

• 18:12Speaker 01

  by 75 to 80% within just about two days. It was, it was a significant difference.

• 18:19Guy Raz?

  All the while, you were, I mean, you were working, you had different jobs. I know you were like an assistant to a venture fund manager. But 2009, you start to blog about what's going on in your life. And you just, it's like a WordPress blog, I think that you start. And you called it Against All Grain. And you did this just for fun, like just to kind of like as a public diary of what you were eating and what you were going through?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was still working for that venture capital firm. And I was just kind of getting by. But I was starting to think, gosh, this food is pretty bland. It's really boring. I don't know that this is going to be a sustainable thing that I can do forever. You know, if this disease is incurable, but this way of eating helps manage the symptoms, then that's not something I could turn back from. So I was starting to to kind of tinker with and tweak the recipes that were found in that book. And I was starting to just kind of play with them a little bit. Or I was taking recipes, my grandma, you know, again, we were newlyweds, and she had given us this whole book of just like handwritten, you know, three by five cards of some of her recipes. And so I started to look at some of them and think, okay, well, I can't have, you know, the pasta, for instance,

• 19:31Speaker 01

  or I can't put flour. In this to make a rule, what ingredients am I allowed to have, you know, coconut flour, almond flour, things like that. So I just started doing it more as a personal experiment so that I could enjoy food. And our neighbors or our family, they would ask for the recipe. So he, my husband, Ryan, suggested that I start a blog. And I didn't know what it was at first. So yeah, we started, we called it Against All Grain, and it still had the dot WordPress. We didn't, you know, didn't want to invest in owning our own domain. And it was, yeah, it was just an opportunity for me to be able to point my friends and family to one place instead of having to kind of retell what the recipe was or write it out. And then a lot of them were asking how I was feeling. And so I started just kind of writing

• 20:14Speaker 01

  through the journey of it so that I could just point them in one place.

• 20:17Guy Raz?

  And presumably, I mean, I know it was small at first, right? It was like probably a few tens of people and maybe a few hundred people, but 3 million people in the United States alone have, you know, some of these symptoms. And you find a blog that's writing about it, probably a lot of people are like, this is me, this is my story. And is that, did it kind of just grow organically? Did people just kind of discover it through word of mouth?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I started a Facebook page in 2009, I believe, too, after I'd had the blog up for a bit. And I remember publishing a cookie recipe, a chocolate chip cookie recipe. It used almond flour and coconut flour. And, you know, it went from the normal five to 10 comments from my sister and my mom and my grandma, Grandma Marge, who always signed off, you know, under her Facebook comment, Grandma, love Grandma Marge. And I started seeing names that I didn't recognize. And then I started seeing that, you know, the share button, that it was just ticking upwards. And I'm like, well, who are all these people? And so I think it might have started, you know, with my mom or my sister sharing it on their Facebook page, and then somebody they knew shared it. And yeah, it just was

• 21:25Speaker 01

  this crazy, organic growth that I saw that I just remember being so excited. I still remember, you know, when the Facebook page hit 1,000 people. And I just, I just thought that was it for me. I was like, we've, we've done it. We've got 1,000 people. But then I started getting all of these emails and comments on these posts from People that had other autoimmune diseases, not the one that I had, and ones that weren't actually even digestive related.

• 21:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  And I quickly started to think, like, why is what I'm doing and the food that I'm making working for other people that have other diseases that, you know, are in their joints or their skin or, you know, other things that are not just directly in the gut. And that was kind of the first eye-opening experience for me. And then I remember reading, oh, there's, there's 50 million Americans that have autoimmune diseases. So while mine felt somewhat, you know, small and kind of niche.

• 22:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  All of a sudden, this world of people needing to eat like this got significantly bigger.

• 22:25Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Danielle Walker, bestselling cookbook author and founder of the food blog Against All Grain. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 26:19Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Danielle Walker, author of several gluten-free, grain-free, and dairy-free cookbooks. All right, so you start blogging, and this is really just for fun, because you were not, at this point, and even today, you weren't a trained chef. But now you had to learn how to cook, and you had to cook specific foods. So presumably, you're getting better at it as you do more of it. Were you posting photos and videos on the blog, too?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no videos at the time, that's for sure. I did kind of get just a point-and-shoot Canon camera and was taking one or two photos of the dish just when I'd finished it. And the lighting was terrible, and there were terrible shadows, and it was very yellow. But I would just snap it and upload it, just so people could see what it looked like. But yes, so I was publishing, probably, you know, at that point, I started to release two recipes a week, and then would share them over on the Facebook page. And it grew. I started ending up, I was doing about four to five recipes a week, probably around 2010 or so.

• 27:24Guy Raz?

  I mean, your approach was, I mean, you wanted to make food that you liked to eat as a kid, as a teenager, food that your family wanted to eat. And so you were trying to recreate it without grains, basically. I mean, you liked fried chicken, or burgers, or tacos. And you were just trying to figure out how to make these things that were essentially grain-free, dairy-free, paleo-compliant. And that was sort of how you began to develop recipes?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It really came from, you know, either craving something or missing something that I couldn't have. And then, as my son was born, too, you know, thinking like, oh, well, I grew up getting to make chocolate chip cookies with my mom. And sure, I could make, you know, the recipe that I made growing up for him, and just sit there and watch him eat it, and not be able to even take a bite of the dough while we're cooking together. Or I can try to create, you know, something else that I know is good for my body, and then we can actually enjoy it together. And that's really where it started. But then, I just started asking, you know... These strangers who were coming to the blog and to the Facebook page, what do you miss? And I was getting all these requests, you know, from people and people that grew up in the South that wanted biscuits and gravy, which, you know, as a California girl, I'm like, I don't

• 28:37Speaker 01

  actually know what that is. Shrimp and grits, you know, things that I didn't have as my pastime. But then they kind of became this mission and passion for me to recreate for these people because I knew how, how just devastated I was to lose my family traditions and the foods that I grew up eating. And so I didn't want anybody else to feel that way.

• 28:56Guy Raz?

  Today, you can walk into Trader Joe's, right? And a lot of grocery stores, Target, you know, Walmart grocery stores, and you can find coconut aminos and almond flour and coconut flour and the kinds of things that are standard in a, in a paleo grain free diet. But it wasn't that easy in 2009, 10, or 11. I know, because I did paleo for a couple of years. I mean, how are you even discovering what to substitute, what to use?

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Gosh, I lived in the Bay Area, so we probably had things in our grocery stores long before some other places in the country. But even still, there were days I'd have to drive to, you know, three or four grocery stores to find what we needed because I loved to shop at Trader Joe's because it was more affordable as newlyweds, you know, with a husband in law school, but they didn't have coconut flour and things like they do now. So then I would go to, you know, go to Whole Foods to get a few things, but that was so expensive. And then I would go on Amazon and see if I could get a bulk of, you know, something. And so I was piecing it together.

• 29:56Guy Raz?

  Wow. You did this for, for, I think about four years before you actually put out a cookbook. But at what point did the idea come to you that maybe this could be something bigger? It could be something bigger than just a personal, you know, blog that, you know, obviously was open to people, but maybe could be something that went beyond that?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yes. So, I mean, as you mentioned, I was not formally trained and I felt like I was almost learning to cook, you know, at the same time that I was learning to cook with these new ingredients and I didn't know that I even had the credibility to publish a book. So that wasn't even a thought in my mind. I thought you had to be, you know, either fully trained or have a Food Network show. I thought cookbooks were kind of reserved for the Ina Gartens of the world, Rachel Ray. You know, I'm like, oh, I'm not even allowed. Really, you know, it started at, I had my son in August of 2010. So I had been running the blog just kind of while he napped and at night. And it actually started almost out of a necessity. You know, I was like, well, I'm spending so

• 31:01Speaker 01

  much money on all these ingredients and testing it. And I thought, well, I don't really want to charge people money because they all are like me and they're suffering and they have autoimmune diseases and they're just looking for recipes that taste good, that can give them back, you know, their pastimes. And so the first move was just to do some Amazon affiliate links. Because I'm like, oh, well, I can make a little bit of money by recommending the products that I use, you know, and then we started doing a few sidebar ads through Google. And to me, that felt good because I'm like, I'm not asking them to pay me anything. But you know, if they're viewing it or they're clicking it, then I will at least get a little bit of income. From there, it actually kind of came from, I had so many recipes that I had logged in my journal that I

• 31:43Speaker 01

  was just not able to blog quickly enough. And I just was seeing so much excitement and people wanting more and more and more. And so I thought, oh, well, I'll just do an ebook and charge, you know, a couple dollars for it and self-publish it on Amazon. And that way I can give them 20 or 30 recipes all at once. And I don't have to wait to blog every couple days. So that was kind of my first thought was that I would just, I would just put out this little self-published ebook.

• 32:10Guy Raz?

  All right. So that was the first thought. But did that happen? Did you put out the ebook? Or, or did you, because I know you published your first book in 2013. Was that?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:19Guy Raz?

  Is that what actually happened?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  No, yeah, so no, I had just started working on the ebook and then I got this email that I I thought must be a joke from a publisher offering me a cookbook deal. Uh, and she was so kind, she went into kind of the reason why she found my blog. She had a child with an autoimmune disease and a chronic illness and had the child eating grain free and dairy free to help the symptoms, but uh, they had a weekly cereal day at school. And uh, it was, I think it was this, her son uh, just felt left out every single week, you know, on that cereal day because he couldn't partake. And I had a, a grain free granola recipe on the blog that she had stumbled on just searching for something to make her child feel, you know, less, less left out and, and more involved.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  And so she would send my granola in a little thermos of almond milk to school every week. And that's how she found it. And she said, I showed your blog and your photos and your recipes to the publisher and he wants to offer you a cookbook deal. And uh, I remember calling Ryan and being like, you're, you're never going to guess what just happened.

• 33:24Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So your first book comes out 2013. And really at this point, your only kind of quote unquote, marketing engine was your blog, right? And, and I guess, did you have a sense of how many people were reading your blog by that point?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Facebook and, and the blog were really the only marketing engines. Uh, didn't have a newsletter, anything like that. And uh, I had announced that I was getting to write this cookbook. And I also, you know, I had to photograph the whole thing myself as well, uh, and learn how to write a recipe, quite honestly. I, I think I thought that I had around three to 5,000 people that were kind of actively visiting it a month. Um, and so that's kind of how I set my goal. I wanted to sell a thousand copies of Against All Grain in 2013. Um, I'd hoped for five, but you know, I didn't know if everybody that was looking at the recipes would be willing to purchase a, a book. And that, you know, that's the other thing. I, I asked the publisher, kind of in that same vein, I just, you know, my true north

• 34:21Speaker 01

  was always just to try to help people and, and help them feel

• 34:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  less deprived and less alone and charging people for anything just, you know, made me so nervous. Um, and I asked the publisher if I could charge, charge 9.99 for the book. It was uh, almost 400 pages and he was like, we can't even print it and sell it for 9.99 and make a profit. So he's like, no, we would not be doing that.

• 34:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because a lot of people will say, hey, you know, I've got a blog or a podcast or whatever, and I'm only getting 1,000 or 2,000 people coming to it. And you had 3,000 people. But what people don't understand is having 3,000 people regularly coming to your podcast or your website or whatever, that is massively powerful. That is a, that's 3,000 super fans. I mean, there are people who have 50,000 fans or 100,000 fans, and if they have 3,000 super fans, those are the ones that really push out their, you know, their brand. And so this book comes out, you have 3,000 followers on the blog, but the book becomes a bestseller. Can you, I mean, this was 2013, now we're 2022.

• 35:28Guy Raz?

  How many copies has Against All Grain sold, roughly?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. I'd have to look back, but yeah, it's, it's definitely more than I expected. And to that point, you know, these, these people that were there were, were just so hungry, if you will, for recipes that they could enjoy and that would make them feel good, so much so that they actually did an Indiegogo fundraiser to send me on tour to get to go and meet all of these people when this book came out, because there was no marketing budget for it and there was no PR budget for it.

• 36:00Guy Raz?

  I mean, what, what explained it? I mean, was it just like the whole CrossFit Paleo world was really starting to take off? And what do you think happened?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think it was a combination of things. I do, CrossFit had, had recently kind of acquired a Paleo diet. I think they were Zone Diet before, and, and it was, it was absolutely having its kind of heyday at that time. There were a lot of people coming to eat that way for various reasons, but I think, you know, for mine particularly, not only did I put 165 recipes in it, it was one of the first cookbooks in the category that had a photo for every recipe, which I think is, is a, is a big selling point for it. And then I think my story just resonated, you know, with people. There were some other bloggers and authors at the time, but most of them weren't eating

• 36:53Speaker 01

  this way out of, you know, 100% kind of live or die necessity like I was. And then the recipes, you know, I tested and tested and tested until those things were perfect. And then I also had my audience test them, which I had never heard of an author doing before. It was kind of a new concept. And for me, it was just, you know, especially when you run a blog, you kind of get immediate feedback, right? You put something out there, if there's a typo, or if, you know, you forget to put a temperature for the oven, people will tell you right away. And I'm sitting here writing 165 recipes over a year or so and photographing them all myself. And I did the layout of the book myself. I kind of did everything. So I really poured not only

• 37:38Speaker 01

  our savings into it, because I didn't get an advance, but also all my time and all my energy. And I didn't want to put this book out into the world as a published product that I couldn't go and edit like I could a blog post and have something fail.

• 37:53Guy Raz?

  As you know, I'm such a big fan of your books, but what's so surprising, and maybe that's not surprising, but you're not actually naturally kind of the kind of person that puts yourself out there. Like, you're not, you know, now you see like 18 year olds who are happy to just like tap dance and sing in Times Square and put on YouTube. And you're not that kind of person, naturally. You're sort of more of a background person, but you had to become a foreground person. You had to become the person on stage. And, you know, I know that probably some of that was hard for you, because maybe you felt it was self promotional or too self referential. How did you kind of get over that, you know, obstacle that maybe you place in front of yourself, or that mental block that enabled

• 38:37Guy Raz?

  you to say, you know what, I do need to put myself out there?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  That's a great question. I, yes, I am a bit of an introvert. And, you know, just by the nature of the things that I was sharing, it was a lot easier to write behind a laptop and put them on a blog. I mean, you know, ulcerative colitis is a pretty intimate disease to be sharing with people. But I realized pretty quickly that people needed somebody that they could trust. And so when I first started blogging, I was just photos of the food. It was just, you know, a name behind kind of a blog. My people would, if they ever met me, they'd be like, oh, you're the against all grain girl. They didn't even know my name. And so I realized that they needed a face. They needed somebody that looked, you know, like a friendly person that they could trust, that that might look like them, kind of staring back at them.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  And so it was, it was pretty, we did plan. I put myself on the first book for that reason. I hadn't really been out there much and they wanted to put food on the cover. And I remember telling the publisher, I need my face on this because I need other women who are suffering with this disease to see that, that somebody like them understands it. So yeah, it was a strategic move. I fought back against it. Actually, I think it was Ryan's idea to put myself on the cover at first. And it was that same, like you said, it felt, it felt a little self promotional. But then it, after hearing from people, you know, more and more, I've heard from people that just picked up the book in Whole Foods because they thought I looked kind, you know, and then they opened it and started making recipes and they found their life changed for the better for, you know,

• 40:05Speaker 01

  autoimmune and other dietary symptoms. So yeah, it was a hard decision, but now it's just part of what I do.

• 40:12Guy Raz?

  When did you, I mean, I have to assume when this book really just like, just connected with people and became a bestseller really quickly, I have to assume that at that point, you're thinking, this is a business, you know, what I do and what I'm doing around this kind of eating paleo cooking and recipes, this is, I can develop something even bigger out of it. Was that book the catalyst?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Kind of, but also not really. I just, I just always went back to just wanting to help people. I just, I felt so alone when I first started out. And so, yeah, you know, after the first book came out and I saw it hit the New York Times Bestsellers list and I just had no idea, first of all, what it took to even get there. But then seeing that book up there, you know, with the other 10 or 15 spots with other cookbook authors who were able to write and create recipes for the broader, you know, audience, for anybody. They used flour and sugar. And, and I just thought, wow, there's, there's actually a market for this. There's actually people that need this. And so every book that's come, you know, since then, and even every blog recipe, it's kind of just back

• 41:25Speaker 01

  to that original question of, you know, what are you missing? What do you need? What can it give you to make this way of eating a lifestyle and sustainable for you?

• 41:36Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another quick break. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 43:22Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Danielle Walker. Her new book is called Healthy in a Hurry. You have now written, I think, six books, five cookbooks and one memoir, is that right?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:36Guy Raz?

  And your new book is called Healthy in a Hurry. It's really great. Now you have really expanded out. I mean, the cookbooks and the memoir, but you now have a line of apparel. You have, you sell spice mixes. You've got T-shirts and water bottles and recipe flags. And tell me a little bit about kind of developing the business around what really started out as a blog. You know, now it's It's a whole sort of ecosystem around this kind of cooking and eating.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, it came from people requesting things and asking for things. I think I realized after the first couple of books came out and as I was just watching and seeing what people were asking for or commenting on, they, you know, wanted to know a lot more about my entire lifestyle. And so they would just constantly ask. And I think I became kind of a trusted voice in their kitchens, not only for the recipes, but also for which ingredients. Why I chose this tomato paste over this tomato paste. And so originally I just built like an Amazon affiliate store, or I would pull other affiliate links in when I was recommending things. But I would quickly find that either they would go out of stock, or the price would change, or the link would stop working, or that, you know, a brand would all of a sudden

• 44:52Speaker 01

  change maybe an ingredient or packaging or something. And I just had no control over that. And I thought, well, you know, I can create a few things of my own that can live on forever and that I'm really engaged in the process of developing those things. And if I'm going to be pointing people back, you know, to products, why not make them my own?

• 45:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And then those spices and, you know, more recently, my digital courses, kind of the same thing, you know, just listening and hearing what people were wanting and what made this way of eating feel more approachable and a little less scary. Because I think when you first look at the ingredients that you need to cut out, or you look at a recipe and, you know, the few things that we've mentioned already, like coconut aminos or arrowroot powder, you might look at that if you're new and think, oh, gosh, I don't know what that is. I can't do this because, you know, it's all too foreign. But when you see coconut aminos on video or a photo and you see arrowroot starch, you're like, oh, well, that looks like soy sauce. And oh, that looks like cornstarch. And so it kind of takes, I think, a little bit of the fear out of it for people when they're able

• 45:52Speaker 01

  to see those things visually, or to be able to buy a bottle of my seasoning blends. It's just another tool that I've wanted to give people to make things more accessible.

• 46:02Guy Raz?

  You are what I call an accidental entrepreneur because this started as a blog, right? 2009 and now you've got a whole brand around you and what you've built. I mean, there's a lot, I mean, just a lot of different kind of revenue streams coming in. And I wonder, how do you think about, when you think about sort of building it out and what you want it to be, where do you, sort of where do you imagine this becoming? You know, is it television shows? Is it live tours?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's funny because I call myself an accidental entrepreneur as well. However, if you were to look back into my childhood, I was constantly creating new businesses to make money, always. I was always selling things. I was always creating things. I always had big dreams. And so, yeah, you know, while this started as not something that I planned on ever monetizing or even knew that I could, once I realized that there was a market for it, I will say, my kind of marketing and business brain did go into work. And it still comes from what can I give, what can I give people? What can I do to make this easier for them and more accessible? And so, yes, I mean, a TV show is something that we've been working on for a long time. And hopefully, at some point, those doors will open sooner than later. And the reason why I went ahead and

• 47:16Speaker 01

  did the cooking courses digitally in 2020 was because people need to see this food made. They need to see that it can actually look and taste amazing. They need to see that it's really not as difficult as it might look on the page. And when, you know, when they see it made, they're much more willing to try it. And we noticed that even with Instagram and YouTube. When I make something on camera, the amount of people that then the next day make what I made and start tagging me and showing it, you know, it just gives them this confidence of, oh, it didn't look that difficult. Or, oh, the ingredients actually didn't look that foreign. They look, you know, look like things I'm used to. So, yeah, TV show, you know, I purposely named my seasoning blends, you know, my name is on there, but

• 47:57Speaker 01

  I named them Healthy in a Hurry because I really see so much coming from this book and the title and the ethos of the book of wanting to eat healthy but not always having the time. And here's the shortcuts. And I kind of left against all grain and a little behind even in the last five years. Five or six years as well.

• 48:13Guy Raz?

  And you transitioned from againstallgrain.com to DanielleWalker.com.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Right, right, yes.

• 48:19Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and very intentional. We kind of had always planned on doing it.

• 48:22Guy Raz?

  I should mention that you are not, what you do and what you advocate for is not anti-medicine. You are totally supportive of medicine and for people who require medical treatments. And you have too. I mean, you've, it's not something you oppose at all. But because of now of your platform, your voice, your influence, you know, there are probably some arrows that are, you know, kind of thrown your way from people who, you know, say, well, this isn't science or this isn't science-backed. And how do you handle that kind of weight and responsibility of being somebody that now people really see as an authority on this type of eating?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's not always easy. I will say, one thing that I had always said back in, back in the very beginning, because I had seen, you know, Western doctors and more like Eastern or functional kind of natural doctors, and I just said, I just always wish that they could, could work together. I think there's such a synergy, you know, even from my own personal experience, when I am eating a clean paleo diet, the medications that I am on at the time seem to just be drastically more effective. I almost feel like the inflammatory kind of diet that we tend to eat on a day-to-day basis almost acts as a roadblock sometimes for some of those medications. Because, you know, I mean, specifically for me, I was on these medications that were supposed to reduce inflammation, but then I'm, you know, causing more by the things that I'm eating.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  So I've found over the years that it doesn't have to be black and white and, and that they can really kind of come together and create a more synergistic effect for your health. I will say, I am so pleased to start to see how much is being researched in the medical profession of diet, you know? I mean, even just really starting to look at the root causes of all of these diseases and ailments. And, you know, now that I, I'm still building my business and still putting out recipes and still doing all the things that I want to do. But I just, you know, I met a fifth grader last week who was diagnosed with Crohn's last year, and I called my husband and I said, I need to do more than just write recipes for these kids. I need to get involved somehow. I need to be working with the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation to try to figure out

• 50:32Speaker 01

  how we can do some research on diet. And I kind of just take these people's stories and it's really what pushes me forward to want to do more. I mean, I will always give them recipes, but I want to do more than just give them recipes at this point. I want to figure out why this is happening. I want to push for more medical studies because, I mean, like you said, until there's peer review, there's scientific studies on this type of eating, it's not going to be widely recommended. And while it may not be a cure all, it significantly can help with symptoms. I've heard it year after year.

• 51:02Guy Raz?

  All right. So just for a moment, put on your sort of, again, I'm going to ask you to put on your sort of business person's hat, your kind of creator's hat. And I know you, again, like what I love about this story is you didn't, this wasn't like a strategic plan, like you didn't say, I'm going to start this blog, make a business, have cookbooks, have a product line, affiliate courses. But all of that happened and these are the stories I love the most because I think some of the most interesting companies start that way, you know, as a passion that somebody has that they discover. It solves a problem for lots of other people, right? When there are 3 million people with these symptoms, what you do solves problems for a lot of people. But now we're living in this sort of YouTube world, right?

• 51:46Guy Raz?

  And TikTok world where you've got tons and tons of bloggers and amateur cooks who are doing some really great things. In fact, I have a friend who is a trained chef and said, you know, nowadays you can probably learn pretty much everything you need to learn from YouTube. Like you probably don't need to go to culinary school. Of course, I'm exaggerating, but that's essentially what he said because so many resources are out there, including things that you do. If somebody wanted to kind of get into this space, right? Somebody listening. How would you recommend they they go about it to kind of, I don't differentiate themselves or do something that that could stand out?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, I think you need to find your passion, clearly. And you do need to figure out what makes you different from from the next person. Because, yes, there are so many now, you know, grain free or paleo or vegan or whatnot. There's there's something for everybody out there. And I think you need to find your voice, too. You know, I will say, you know, just don't do something just because it's trendy, you know, whether it's it's TikTok or YouTube Shorts. I know for me, I know I like to teach in long format. I know that my current audience likes to learn in more of a long format, you know, where they get to really see the steps. And so I could go and I could make a ton of short TikTok videos, but it's not really true to to me and what my mission and what my message is.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  And so I think that's really figuring out what what, even if you don't have a full company built, you know, finding out what your mission statement is and really keeping that as your true north and everything that you're creating around that is there to service the customer that you're looking to service.

• 53:21Guy Raz?

  I mean, 10, 15 years ago, right? Paleo, gluten free, I mean, they were still kind of fringe diets. And and now they're very mainstream. I mean, we've really changed as a country how we eat over the last 10 years in a pretty radical way. And we've become, you know, more conscious about the ingredients and our food and where it comes from and the impact our food has on the environment. So how are you thinking about evolving your cooking as dietary habits in our country and across the world continue to change?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I find myself constantly thinking about that. I will say, there's definitely a decline in people searching for paleo recipes. Grain free is continuing to grow, and of course, gluten free, that industry is just continuing to boom. But I strategically named the new cookbook Healthy in a Hurry. And, you know, it says that they're grain free and dairy free and gluten free on there. But I've just found from listening to my audience, I just heard from so many people that they don't have to all the time. They may not have something as As severe as I have, but they feel better eating that way. And they're looking to, you know, know what they're putting in their kids' bodies. And they're looking to make one meal that is healthy. But, you know, they're not having to make multiple different meals depending on people's dietary needs.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And so I'm, you know, always just kind of trying to get out of the smaller paleo niche because I think that my recipes are good enough to withstand any sort of, you know, diet that you need to, or even if you eat a standard diet. I think the next biggest hurdle is going to try to make that more affordable and accessible for everybody, which is, you know, one of the biggest problems with, with our country. But even just the amount of ingredients, like we've mentioned, you know, I mean, the fact that you can buy cassava pasta or chickpea pasta and you could not buy anything like that back in the day. It's, it's encouraging to me to see that, you know, there's big brands that are, that are acquiring smaller health food brands that kind of started in infancy when I started writing my cookbooks.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  And just to really see that there is an emphasis on it and, and that people are wanting to at least look to food as, as a tool in their healing toolbox. I feel, you know, for myself and my business, I just feel like there's only room to grow. And there's so many more people, you know, that can continue to be reached.

• 55:46Guy Raz?

  Danielle Walker's new book is called Healthy in a Hurry. Danielle, thank you so much.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 55:53Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. You can follow How I Built This on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. The next episode is available right now, or you can binge all of our episodes ad free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. If you want to follow us on socials, we're at How I Built This on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Guy Raz on Twitter and at Guy dot Raz on Instagram.

• 56:24Guy Raz?

  This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer, with editing by John Isabella and with research help from Sam Paulson. Our music was composed by Rameen Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, Josh Lash, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.