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I mostly wept my way through writing this update.

I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t some embarrassment wrapped up in this because I’ve (innocently) cried wolf about it more often than I care to think about.

Every time I’ve said, “Our Essential Thyroid Cookbook is coming soon!” I truly thought that it was. But oh, the things that Lisa and I have learned about writing a book. And more specifically, a cookbook. It’s hard, hard work.

[This is Lisa and me in August of 2013, creating the book outline on a working vacation. Oh, how far we’ve come.] >

Many of you signed up to get regular updates from us about our process and I’ve sucked at writing them. Clearly. For various reasons that I explain below, I’ve struggled with doing the work and simultaneously blogging/updating about the work. 

We know that there are other authors who are great at it. Good for them, truly.

As you may know, this is actually two books – an exhaustivly researched thyroid health book (by me) as well as over 100 original and creative recipes by my close, close friend, Lisa Markley, MS, RDN, and culinary nutrition expert.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Lisa and I have created a truly first-of-its-kind thyroid- and immune-supportive cookbook for the Hashimoto’s community – and beyond. In other words, you don’t have to have suffered from Hashimoto’s to enjoy and benefit from Lisa’s truly amazing recipes that incorporate minimally processed, nutrient dense, whole foods free of gluten, dairy, white flour, white sugar, and poor quality oils.

At the onset of this journey nearly four years ago, we spent weeks and weeks researching the most thyroid- and immune-supportive nutrients, which ultimately helped us determine the specific foods that Lisa has highlighted in her recipes.

The recipes are for the home cook, with many easy enough to make in 30 minutes or less.

Lisa and I never anticipated how difficult writing this book would be. It’s been a gargantuan project and we’ve put every cell of our perfectionist beings and a tremendous amount of creativity, pride, and yes, obsession into making this cookbook the best it can possibly be.

One of my clients is a multiple New York Times bestselling novel writer. She said, with a hearty laugh, “I wrote a cookbook once. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” I felt so vindicated.

For a lot of the reasons that I’ll share in this post, this process has pushed and stretched me like nothing else, not even architecture school.

I’m not the same person because of it.

A few years ago, a close friend called me immediately after she’d given birth to her son. In a breathless voice, she said, “I can’t believe people do this.”

Likewise, publishing a book has been likened to a birthing process – by many authors. Obviously, they’re different experiences and publishing a book may not be physically painful, but it is a birth of sorts. And indeed, I’ve said to myself many times, “I can’t believe people do this.” 

It’s certainly easier for those who have a ghostwriter and who don’t have a small child and another business they need to keep the wheels under.

At the end of the day, we don’t really owe anyone an explanation.

But Lisa and I would like to share some of the serious personal s**t we’ve experienced over the last few years that’s slowed us down. There have been a lot of fits and starts in this journey, which doesn’t exactly make for a cohesive story.

I can’t be too self-conscious about how long this has taken because I know of a few cookbooks that took four years to get published. I spoke with a bestselling author last week who threw away three years of research and writing and started all over.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “All right already, when is this thing coming out?”

Okay, so here’s the short story. 

This cookbook is expected to be available on Amazon on January 10. You can stop reading here if you’d like.

[Go here for a January 2017 update on our publishing process.]

Here’s why. 

After months of intense research, writing, recipe development, and testing, the content was “final” earlier this summer, including having gone through editing. We sent the manuscript to our colleague, the amazing Dr. Aviva Romm, who has written the beautiful foreword to our book.

In a few fits of lack of impulse control, I added to the educational component. Lisa made some recipe changes and additions. We couldn’t help ourselves.

These additions had a ripple effect through the whole book. As this post says, “Every bit of writing encroaches on the recipes.” Indeed, to some degree or another, the manuscript altered the recipes and the recipes altered the manuscript. How would they not? Every small change caused a domino effect throughout every component of the book.

Repeat. Repeat again. It was several more weeks of work. By now, it’s August.

We’d already begun the process of corralling our creative team, who we’d hired long ago – art director, book designer, food stylist, and food photographer. And given that they’re some of the best in their field (we’re so lucky), it wasn’t exactly as easy to coordinate their schedules as we’d anticipated.

[This is Anthony and Courtney, two of our designers, at a cookbook design meeting.] >

Poor planning? Maybe. But we were bug-eyed and weary from creating content.

We’ve had one photo shoot that went swimmingly. The photos are gorgeous.

Our final, three-day photo shoot starts on Monday of next week. Lisa will be sharing some photos and video of that process on our social media sites. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more of our process and more frequent updates.

The word count of the educational component is 69,000. There are over 100 recipes. It’s a lot for our designers to format and flow, including photo placement, and it’s anticipated that they’ll be done the week of November 14, after which the book is out for indexing. That’s expected to take another three weeks. We’re then looking at the first week of December, which, according to our book launch consultant, isn’t exactly a great time to unveil a book.

Depending on how things go, we could change our minds and publish this cookbook early December. But after four years of working on this thing, I don’t mind the idea of knowing that it’s ready, taking some much-much-much-needed time to ourselves during the holidays, and then making our big reveal in January.

Although this has been an excruciating process, I want to make it clear that it’s been insanely rewarding. It’s been an exhaustive process, but I’m not exhausted. Lisa and I couldn’t be happier with ourselves, each other, our amazing creative team, and our wonderful families for all of their unending support.

For those of you who’ve followed us for a while and who’ve so lovingly asked along the way, “When’s your cookbook coming?” and, “I can’t wait for this cookbook,” THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE. We love you all. And believe us, we can’t wait for you to have this book in your hands.

I can now say, with confidence, our cookbook is coming – pretty soon.

If you want to know about the s**t that I referred to, read on.

Lisa and I don’t share the following stories with you in the vein of garnering your sympathy. If that were our goal, we’d have written them a long time ago.

As Steven Pressfield titled his book, Nobody Wants to Read Your S**t. The double entendre isn’t lost on us and is entirely applicable to our situation.

1. Maybe you don’t want to read anything below – our personal s**t. That’s entirely fair.

2. From Pressfield: “When you understand that nobody wants to read your s**t, you develop empathy. You acquire the skill that is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs – the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your reader/gallery-goer/customer. You learn to ask yourself with every sentence and every phrase: Is this interesting? Is it fun or challenging or inventive? Am I giving the reader enough? Is she bored? Is she following where I want to lead her?”

And indeed, that’s the mindset with which Lisa and I have approached this book.

The Journey
We began talking about writing a cookbook for the Hashimoto’s community on November 13, 2012.

At that time, my husband and I were taking a break from an adoption paperwork process because my mother’s health was failing and I was traveling back and forth between Minneapolis and Kansas City to help take care of her.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s of that year, my husband and I finished the laborious pre-adoption process and were finally available to be matched with a baby. We were told that, on average, it can take anywhere from 8 months to 2 years to be matched.

I knew it would happen much quicker – I could feel it – and we spent most of January getting ready. Given the stated average, my husband thought I was a little too anxious about being prepared and thought that we had time. (He’s a stats guy and had already calculated the small probability of being an outlier.)

By the end of February, we were matched with a baby girl who was due to be born in just a few weeks in Florida. Right before the birth mother’s due date, my father was hospitalized. Things were serious and I thought I would be sitting vigil with him while we waited for her birth.

It was insanely stressful. I was prepared to leave Missouri and meet my husband in Florida if necessary, but my dad made a bizarre, if not full recovery. He was waiting for his granddaughter.

On March 29, we flew to Florida to pick up our beautiful newborn daughter, Harriet. In June, on her 3-month birthday, my dad passed away.

The following January, I started the writing process in earnest – I spent a few days in a cabin on a peninsula on one of Minnesota’s lakes, building on the outline that Lisa and I had created.

The first morning, I open the kitchen cupboard for a coffee cup and this is what’s staring at me. >

You may know that the thyroid is sometimes referred to as “the blue butterfly.” It’s a butterfly-shaped gland and the 5th chakra (the throat chakra) corresponds to the color blue. Chakra means “wheel” or “turning” in Hindu.

The image of this cup is forever imprinted in my mind and has largely been the wind at my back throughout this process.

Fourteen months after my dad died, my older brother passed away after a painful battle with lung cancer.

Six months later, on my baby girl’s 22-month birthday, my mother passed.

In the first 22 months of my baby’s life, we flew together 17 times, going back and forth as family members’ health failed. It was pretty nuts.

It was a time of great joy of being a new mother and also great loss. I’m so grateful that all of my immediate family members who’ve passed on got to meet Harriet – they were all crazy about her.

I was still operating my coaching practice, if on a limited basis. After all, what self-employed mother of a newborn would choose working full time over spending time with her new baby?

A year rolls around and I start thinking seriously about the book again. Demand for my coaching was at an all-time high, so I chose to hire and mentor a small team of coaches so that I could focus on the cookbook while still serving clients. Let’s just say that that didn’t work out so well. I spent well over a year mentoring and hand-holding, only to very happily go back to a one-woman shop at the end of last year.

Although that whole process was a huge distraction and actually gave me none of the space I’d hoped it would, I wouldn’t exactly call it time wasted. Oh, what an education it was. 

I spent the week between last Christmas and New Year’s holed up in a friend’s house hammering on the book. It was lonely, we had a blizzard, and I missed my daughter and husband. It wasn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy, holiday-y time.

I went to the co-op every morning for a good cup of coffee and breakfast to-go and ate mostly frozen lunches and dinners so I wouldn’t have to cook.

I also had a raging sinus infection, my first ever. I didn’t know what had hit me and come to find out, it was a “super infection.” I was miserable, but I refused antibiotics and tried to treat myself with loads of probiotics and oregano oil in my neti pot. (Yes, it feels like you’re shooting wasabi up your nose.) I dug my heels in the sand until I couldn’t stand it anymore and ended up succumbing to the prescription.

But that week, I finally broke through a major wall and wrote a tremendous amount of content for the book. And I kept going at any point I could, well into spring and early summer.

In June, Laine and I started the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy program, in collaboration with the prestigious Institute for Functional Medicine. So yep, I’m now in school too. (The program is fantastic.)

The last few years threw me into early menopause. It’s not necessarily easy to admit this, given that I’m a hormone coach and work with women in this boat in my coaching practice, but it is what it is.

After years of a regular cycle and then realizing that things were a little wonky, I looked back on my calendar and realized that my cycle got off right after my mom died. Makes sense. I think I was too busy relishing in being a new mom to notice at what point things started to go sideways.

I’m going to write a more substantive post on it all, including the fact that I hired a menopause coach, but the only thing I’m experiencing is – no cycle. I only had a few bouts of warming. I’m not even going to call them hot flashes. I sleep like a rock, thankfully, and I would say that my mood is pretty stable. But maybe you should ask my husband about that one. 

I did gain some weight this spring/summer, but it’s because I mostly had my a** planted in a chair, writing. I’ve lost some of it already and plan on getting rid of it all. *#@*?!

Before I tell a little of Lisa’s story, it’s important to say that in these last few years, Lisa and I have read a few stories of cookbook authors who got ill from pushing themselves so hard to finish their books. One author wrote a substantive post about how the process threw her back into full-blown Hashimoto’s. Another wrote of how she crashed from chronic fatigue syndrome after her book got published.

Lisa and I thought, “We’ll be damned if any of this happens to us.”

So while there have certainly been extenuating circumstances for both of us, and we’ve done our share of beating ourselves up about not getting this book done, we’ve also given ourselves permission to slow our roll, given what life has dealt us.

Lisa is going to write her own story, which we’ll share with you sometime soon, but the short of it is that in the last few years, she has suffered – greatly – from Lyme disease, with a Bartonella co-infection; mycotoxicity (from mold exposure); and Hashimoto’s, which these conditions can exacerbate. 

She’s experienced whole body malaise, joint pain, tingling and numbness in her hands and feet, and sharp pains in her hands. Early on, she wisely ignored the misdiagnosis of carpal tunnel from a neurologist who was quick to suggest surgery.

Her story is nothing short of heartbreaking. She’s endured great pain and intense fatigue and she’s left no stone unturned in treating these conditions.

She’s also the parent of a small child. And she’s continued to work nearly full time at the same time she’s brought her culinary expertise and killer recipe writing and development skills to our cookbook.

I stand in awe of her journey and I’ve told her repeatedly – I couldn’t have done this with anyone else. She is my perfect partner. We get each other.

“Books become part of you, and you of them, and it helps enormously to build them with someone who understands your take on things, who ‘gets’ you.

“What’s the best thing about producing [a cookbook]? Apart from having a book at the end of it all, something you can actually hold and read and cook from, it’s the creativity that you share with other people. And it’s the joy that comes from making something with people who are perfectionist. I am amazed by how much people care about their work and by how talented they are.

“A book is never just written. It is made.” – Diana Henry, cookbook author