This is my Great Grandma Lillian. She is one of the six generations of women in my family who milked her own cows and collected eggs from her own chickens on our family farm in Colorado. Every day, she made a pudding with that milk and those eggs on a wood-burning stove. She always kept the pudding in her icebox - one of her most prized possessions - so that anyone who had been doing hard work on the farm (and was therefore in danger of being hangry) could come in and be nourished with all the best proteins, fats, and carbohydrates she had. She didn’t know it then, but the pudding she made would one day save my life.

Decades later, in a kitchen in a little house on the very same farm Great Grandma Lillian lived on, my Grandma Joyce taught me how to make Great Grandma Lillian’s pudding using milk from her own cows. When she did, she told me all about how important it was to keep myself fed so that it would be easy for me to be kind and optimistic. She didn’t know the biochemistry of brain health, but a lifetime of feeding and caring for others gave her all the evidence she needed to know she was right.

I followed her advice my whole life until one day in 2017, when I joined a high-growth startup. I had everything I wanted - compelling work, a kick-ass team, and a great paycheck. The pace of work was so intense, and the mission was so intoxicating, that I began to feel that meals were optional.
I started to skip breakfast because I was on the way to the office early.

I started to skip lunch because I felt like I was letting my team down when I took a break.
When I felt hunger, I felt triumph because everyone complimented me on how skinny I was.
When I finally burned out of that job, I was a grown-ass woman who weighed far less than I did on my high school driver’s license, and I had a fraction of the brain power I should’ve had.

When I left that job, I was on a mission to rescue my body. I flew home to Colorado, my body totally undernourished and my brain exhausted. I napped on a couch in Grandma Joyce’s sunroom, watching the light filter through the leaves of her cottonwood tree, the very same cottonwood tree that many decades ago, shaded the kitchen window next to which was an icebox, that held the pudding my Grandma Lillian made.

Grandma Joyce and I started making the pudding again. I started eating it again. My brain and body started feeling better again. I learned later that the eggs and the milk in that pudding come together to make something very special:
a complete package of vitamin B, choline, tryptophan, and phenylalanine to build the neurotransmitters that power my brain
the richest, most efficient source of the special amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine that can keep my body and brain healthy and strong.
A touch of sugar to feed my brain the glucose it needs to function.

Today, I make that pudding for myself, but I’ve added oat flour to it so I can keep myself satiated and high-performing for longer. I’ve converted the milk to a higher density form of milk protein - micellar casein. This milk protein comes from my mom’s dairy farm. The genetics of the cows on her farm can be traced back to the same cows my Great Grandma Lillian raised.

I wanted to be able to take my pudding with me so I could walk my dog with my husband every morning in the Colorado sunshine, so I started to put my custard-y oats in a squeeze pouch. This allowed me to start every day nourished, body and soul, with zero prep time, and one hand free to hold hands with my husband.
Together, the eggs, lactose-free milk, oats and squeeze pouch made something that brought me true joy: a brain and body that could keep up with me. This is the most precious thing in the world, just like a gem.
I wanted to share this precious thing with all the people who are also chasing their dreams, so I founded Joygem to bring it to you.