Show Notes
🌿 Earthley creates truly natural, non-toxic herbal remedies made with simple, real ingredients you can trust. Use code ancestral10 for 10% off → https://www.earthley.com
The crunchy movement has a dogma problem, and even the homesteaders are starting to question it.
In this episode, Corey and Christine sit down with Sarah Stutsman of Wellfolk Revival, a homesteading mom of three teen daughters in Pennsylvania who has spent nearly two decades raising chickens, milking cows, fermenting everything, and teaching community classes in her renovated garage. But Sarah comes to the conversation with a confession: she's been holding her ancestral lifestyle a little too tightly. She's reading *The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry*, taking candle-light showers, and just last week, she bought cereal at the regular grocery store. Not the organic kind. And she's wondering if some of what she's been doing has cost her joy.
Together, they unpack the trap of "perfect" ancestral living, why Sarah is rethinking the high-fat carnivore-leaning approach as she enters her mid-40s, the truth about perimenopause (and whether the word itself is a pharmaceutical invention), and how chronic stress may be spiking our blood sugar without a single bite of food. Corey and Christine also get into the cultural addiction to busyness and self-sabotage, the power of effort-based dopamine, and why Sarah installed a landline in her farmhouse to fight the constant phone reach.
✨ *Topics Covered in This Episode:* ✔️ Why ancestral living can become its own form of diet culture ✔️ Sarah's countercultural rhythms: candle-light showers, dry brushing, castor oil packs ✔️ Installing a landline in 2026 (and why more families are doing it) ✔️ Cory's no-baby-containers approach with her newborn ✔️ The truth about perimenopause and whether it's a modern construct ✔️ Why indigenous women historically didn't experience perimenopause ✔️ How stress alone can spike blood sugar without food ✔️ Effort-based dopamine vs. instant gratification (and why your brain needs the hard stuff) ✔️ "Power-down hours" for the whole family, including teens ✔️ Raising three daughters with one shared phone ✔️ Why busyness is its own addiction and self-sabotage is a cultural pattern ✔️ The lost art of doing hard things together (canning, processing, putting up food) ✔️ Why your friends actually want to be your burden ✔️ Sarah's Wellfolk Revival community classes and how she built them from scratch
🧠 *More About This Episode:* This episode is for any mama who's deep in the crunchy world and starting to feel the weight of it, anyone questioning whether perfect ancestral living is actually serving her family, and every mom navigating the messy middle of hormonal shifts, teen daughters, and modern motherhood. It's honest, reflective, and a little bit of a permission slip.
📚 *Resources & Links Mentioned:* 📍 *Wellfolk Revival* (Sarah's website, classes, and upcoming hormone guide) – https://www.wellfolkrevival.com 📍 *Sarah on Instagram* – @wellfolkrevival 📍 *The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry* by John Mark Comer 📍 *Join our Patreon Community* – https://patreon.com/modernancestralmamas 📍 *NEW Website* – https://www.modernancestralmamas.com 📍 *Knead Your Cure Conference* (August 2026 in Oxford, MS) - https://www.kneadyourcure.com/ 📍 *Earthley* – https://www.earthley.com (code: ancestral10 for 10% off)
✨ *Support the Show!* 👍 Like & Subscribe for more ancestral motherhood conversations ⭐ Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 💬 Comment below: What's one part of crunchy living you've started to question?
#homesteading #perimenopause #ancestralliving #crunchymom #slowliving #ModernAncestralMamas #RealFood #MotherhoodWellness #MomLife #WellfolkRevival
📲 Stay Connected: Patreon Community | https://www.patreon.com/c/ModernAncestralMamas @fornutrientssake | https://www.instagram.com/fornutrientssake/ @nourishthelittles | https://www.instagram.com/nourishthelittles/
More from The Modern Ancestral Mamas Podcast
📍 Unsifted Freshly Milled Flour: Enjoy $10 off your first purchase of $100 or more (Code: MAM10) https://unsifted.com In this conversation with Dr. Ben Edwards, a conventionally trained family physician from Texas, we hear a healing story that changed the course of his career. Dr. Ben grew up the grandson of two small-town country doctors and was on top of the world running a rural clinic in West Texas. Then his nurse practitioner, who had lived with celiac disease for years, came to work one day and ate gluten right in front of him. That moment led Dr. Ben to a doctor who challenged everything he had been taught, and eventually to leaving the insurance model behind and building a clinic focused on getting to the root cause of illness. This is the third episode in our grain series, where we look at the health benefits of freshly milled flour. Dr. Ben shares why he believes the modern American gut struggles with refined flour, how stomach acid, the microbiome, and leaky gut all play a role in gluten reactions, and why freshly milled whole grain behaves so differently in the body than white flour. We also dig into phytic acid, the fermenting and soaking debate, when to introduce grains to babies, and why he encourages his patients to bring these decisions to prayer and not just protocols.
📍 Unsifted Freshly Milled Flour: Enjoy $10 off your first purchase of $100 or more (Code: MAM10) https://unsifted.com
📍 Unsifted Freshly Milled Flour: Enjoy $10 off your first purchase of $100 or more (Code: MAM10) – https://unsifted.com In this conversation with Jen, a registered nurse of nearly 40 years, we hear her story of chronic illness and how she came back to bread. After years of microscopic colitis, psoriasis, and a long list of autoimmune diagnoses, Jen tried nearly every protocol out there, including carnivore, GAPS, and low FODMAP, and stayed gluten-free for close to a decade. Then she felt led to eat bread again, and what happened next surprised her, her doctors, and her family. This is the "healed" episode in our new series on grains, where we look at wheat through the eyes of the farmer, the miller, the baker, and the healed. Jen shares why sourdough made with store-bought flour didn't work for her, what changed when she started milling her own grain, how her labs and digestion responded, and what she experienced in the first few weeks. We also talk about choosing a grain mill, how she bakes six loaves a week, and why she believes the real issue is not gluten but what has been stripped from our flour.
📍 Baja Gold Signature Minerals: use code MAM10 for 10% off – https://bajagoldminerals.com/ 📍 Vintage Traditions Whole-Food Skin Care: use code MAM10 for 10% off – https://www.vintagetradition.com
📍 Baja Gold Signature Minerals: use code MAM10 for 10% off – https://bajagoldminerals.com/ 📍 Vintage Traditions Whole-Food Skin Care: use code MAM10 for 10% off – https://www.vintagetradition.com