YouSaid · the spoken record

Danielle Walker

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-04-18
most recent: 2024-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This episode was produced by Catherine Cypher with editing by John Isabella. Research help from Sam Paulson. Our music was composed by Rumtin Arablui. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Massini, Elaine Coates, Josh Lash, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. Eva 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Daniel Walker's new book is called Healthy in a Hurry. Danielle, thank you so much. 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 Ibuel This on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at GuyRaz on Twitter and at guy.roz on Instagram.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of 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 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 encouraging to me to see that, you know, there's big brands that are acquiring smaller health food brands that kind of started in infancy when I started writing my cookbooks. And just to really see that there is an emphasis on it and that people are wanting to at least look to food 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 growing, 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 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. 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean ten, fifteen years ago, right? Paleo gluten-free. I mean, they were still kind of fringe diets. 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. We've become 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?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the next person because, yes, there are so many now, grain-free or paleo or vegan or whatnot.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the most interesting companies start that way as a passion that somebody has, that they discover, it solves a problem for lots of other people, 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 YouTube world, right, 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, 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, what I love about this story is you didn't, this wasn't like a strategic plan. You didn't say, I'm going to start this blog, make a business, have cookbooks, have a product line, have affiliate courses. But all of that happened. And these are the stories I love the most because I think”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now that 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 Kaleitis Foundation to try to figure out 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, it's not always easy. I will say one thing that I had always said back in the very beginning because I had seen Western doctors and more like Eastern or functional kind of natural doctors. And I just said I just always wish that they 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 causing more by the things that I'm eating. So I found over the years that it doesn't have to be black and white and that they can really kind of come together and create a more synergistic effect for your health. I will say.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, it's not something you oppose at all. But because of now of your platform, your voice, your influence, there are probably some arrows that are kind of thrown your way from people who 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?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As it might look on the page, and 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 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 a little behind even in the last five or six years as well.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, it's 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 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are what I call an accidental entrepreneur because to start as a blog in 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 imagine this? This becoming, you know, is it television shows? Is it live tours?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of developing those things. And if I'm going to be And then the 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 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 starts, 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 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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. 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 a brand would all of a sudden 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to take another quick break. Stay with us. You're listening to how I built this lab 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? 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. It's a whole sort of ecosystem around this kind of cooking and eating.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of, but also not really. 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 audience for anybody. They used flour and sugar. And I just thought, wow, 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 to that original question of, you know, what are you missing? What do you need? What can I give you to make this way of eating a lifestyle and sustainable for you?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When did you, I mean, I have to assume when this book really 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. Kind of eating paleo cooking and recipes. I can develop something even bigger out of it. Was that book The Catalyst?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is because I need other women who are suffering with this disease to see 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 a little self-promotional. But then after hearing from people 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, autoimmune and other dietary symptoms. So yeah, it was a hard decision, but now it's just part of what I do.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, ulcer of 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, yeah, it was just photos of the food. It was just, you know, a name behind kind of a blog. 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 might look like them kind of staring back at them. And so 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'm such a big fan of your books, but what's so surprising, I maybe not surprising, but you're not actually naturally kind of the kind of person that puts yourself out there. Now you see 18-year-olds who are happy to just 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? Obstacle that maybe you place in front of yourself or that mental block that enabled you to say, you know what, I do need to put myself out there.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the recipes. 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 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 our savings into it because I didn't get an advance, but also all my time.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was a combination of things. CrossFit had recently kind of acquired a paleo diet. I think they were zone diet before. And 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 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 this way out of, you know, 100% kind of live or die necessity like I was.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh gosh, I'd have to look back. But yeah, it's definitely more than I expected. And to that point, these people that were there 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 indiego 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a thousand or two thousand 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, your website, or whatever, that is massively powerful. That's 3,000 super fans. I mean, there are people who have 50,000 fans or a hundred thousand fans, and if they have 3,000 super fans, those are the ones that really push out their brand. And so this book comes out. You have 3,000 followers on the blog, but the book becomes a bestseller. This is 2013. Now we're 2022. How many copies has against all grain sold? Roughly.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less deprived and less alone and charging people for anything just made me so nervous. And I asked the publisher if I could charge $9.99 for the book. It was 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 will not be doing that.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Facebook and the blog were really the only marketing engines. We didn't have a newsletter or anything like that. And 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 and learn how to write a recipe, quite honestly. I think I thought that I had around 3,000 to 5,000 people that were kind of actively visiting it a month. And so that's kind of how I set my goal. I wanted to sell a thousand copies of Against All Grain in 2013. 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 book. And that's the other thing. I asked the publisher kind of in that same vein. I just, you know, my true North was always just to try to help people and help them feel. Yeah.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. All right, so your first book comes out 2013, and really at this point, you're only kind of quote unquote marketing engine was your blog, right? And I guess, did you have a sense of how many people were reading your blog by that point?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, no, I had just started working on the ebook, and then I got this email that I thought must be a joke from a publisher offering me a cookbook deal. 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 they had a weekly cereal day at school. And it was, I think it was her son, just felt left out every single week, you know, on that cereal day because he couldn't partake. And I had 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 left out and more involved. 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 public.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so that was the first thought. But did that happen? Did you put out the ebook or did you, because I know you published your first book in 2013, was that... That's what actually happened.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Logged in my journal that I 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, well, 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 put out this little self-published ebook.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, you know, it started, 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 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. 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 Eina Gartens of the world. Rachel Ray, you know, I'm like, oh, I'm not even allowed.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you did this 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 blog that obviously was open to people, but maybe could be something. That went beyond that”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 newlywed, 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, you can walk into Trader Joe's, right? And a lot of grocery stores Target 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 paleo grain-free diet. But it wasn't that easy in 2009, 10 or 11, I know, because I did paleo for a couple years. I mean, how are you even discovering what to substitute, what to use?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it really came from 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 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, your approach was 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 finish 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. 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 Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross, and my guest is Daniel 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 are 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 food. Presumably, you're getting better at it as you do more of it. Were you posting photos and videos on the blog, too?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And I quickly started to think like, well, 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 50 million Americans that have autoimmune diseases. So while mine felt somewhat, you know, small and kind of niche, all of a sudden this world of people needing to eat like this got significantly bigger”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 ten 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 this crazy organic growth that I saw that I just remember being so excited. I still remember, you know, when the Facebook page hit a thousand people and I just thought that was it for me. I was like, we've, we've done it. We've got a thousand people. But then I started getting.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our own domain 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 some of these symptoms. And you find a blog that's writing about it, probably a lot of people like, this is me, this is my story. And did it kind of just grow organically? Did people just kind of discover it through word of mouth?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experiment so that I could enjoy food. And our neighbors or our family, they would ask for the recipe. So 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.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 through the journey of it so that I could just point them in one place.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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, or I can't put flour in this to make a roux. 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it's like a WordPress blog, I think, that you start, and you call it against all grain. And you did this just for fun, like just to kind of as a public diary of what you were eating and what you were going through?”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you, from what I understand, you found out about this diet SCD, specific carbohydrate diet, and you see that SCD symbol in a lot of now in a lot more cookbooks, you decide, all right, I'm going to try this out. 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 bread, pasta. Obviously, candy, a lot of dairy products, potatoes.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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-social media groups, things where you could find people that might be suffering of similar diseases and ailments. And there were a lot of medical forums and chatboards 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 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.”
2024-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Healing through food with Danielle Walker of Against All Grain (2022) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT