You’ve heard it all before: kale smoothies (did anyone really do this?), magical chia seeds, and overpriced hype-of-the-week powders that just don’t taste good. We’re all tired of the same old “superfoods” marketing gimmick. But what if the key to better health wasn’t in another trendy health store purchase but in the foods our ancestors thrived on?
These food challenges aren’t about starving yourself or choking down something just because a wellness influencer said so. From organ meats to wild foraging, these challenges help establish beneficial long-term dietary habits while upgrading your energy, resilience and performance.
Challenge #1: Eat Organ Meat
Most people get their protein from the same handful of sources: chicken breast, ground beef, or maybe some salmon. But muscle meat alone doesn’t cut it. Organ meats have fallen out of favor in modern diets because of their strong flavor and different texture.
Here’s the truth: the nutrients packed into these cuts make them the most powerful foods you can eat. Loaded with vitamin B, iron, zinc and bioavailable nutrients, liver, heart and kidney support everything from testosterone production to brain function.
Wondering how to start? Here are some tips:
- Beginner: If the idea of organ meat makes you hesitate, start with grass-fed liver capsules for an easy, tasteless introduction.
- Intermediate: Mix ground liver into ground beef for burgers, meatballs or chili. Liver pâté is another easy option to spread on crackers and toast.
- Advance: Seared heart steaks, kidney stew, and crispy fried liver are chock full of bioavailable nutrients.
Challenge #2: Buy a Quarter Cow
While convenient, do you know where grocery store meat really comes from? With factory-farmed conditions, mystery additives, and inflated prices, supermarket beef leaves a lot to be desired. If you want top-tier, nutrient-dense meat, you need to think bigger– literally.
Buy a quarter, half, or even whole cow from a trusted local farm that offers bulk beef sales. Remember that a chest freezer is essential– a quarter cow takes up about 4-5 cubic feet of space.
If you’re not ready for the full quarter, team up with family or friends to share the cost and the meat. More than stocking up, this allows you to take control of your food supply, ensuring that you know where your meat comes from, how it was raised, and what’s in it.
Challenge #3: Make Yogurt from Scratch
Too many brands load their yogurts with added sugars, artificial flavors and thickeners, turning a gut-friendly food into a processed mess. Making your own yogurt eliminates the junk, lets you control your own ingredients, is extremely easy and cost-effective, and most importantly, tastes way better.
Ready to give it a shot? Start here:
- Choose your milk: Use raw, organic or A2 milk for better digestion and nutrition composition.
- Pick a starter culture: You can use a store-bought plain yogurt or a probiotic powder as your starter.
- Heat, culture, and ferment: Heat the milk, cool it, mix in the starter and let ferment for 8-24 hours at a warm and steady temperature.
- Experiment: Try longer fermentation for a more tangy flavor or strain it for Greek-style thickness.
Challenge #4: Cook with Lard or Tallow
For too long, fat was wrongly demonized, encouraging people to swap traditional cooking oils for highly processed vegetable oils. The result of seed oil consumption? Poor inflammation response, hormonal imbalance and metabolic dysfunction.
Lard and tallow are actually healthy cooking fats because they are heat-stable, rich in essential fatty acids, and a good source of vitamin D (when sourced from pastured pigs). Whether crisping up potatoes, searing meat or baking a flaky pie crust, lard outperforms any processed oil.
Challenge #5: Eat Nose-to-Tail
The Western diet prioritizes muscle meat, ignoring other nutrient-rich parts of the animal: skin, bones, tendons, and connective tissue provide collagen, minerals and amino acids. These nutrients promote joint health and gut health as well as overall resilience.
Here’s how you can make the most of the whole animal:
- Bones: Make a bone broth by simmering for 12-24 hours to extract collagen, minerals and healthy fats.
- Skin: Bake or fry crispy pork rinds or chicken skin for a collagenous snack.
- Tendons and cartilage: Slow-braise beef tendons or chick feet or a gelatin-rich broth.
- Blood: Use in blood sausage (black pudding) or as a thickener for soups and stews.
- Oxtail: Slow-cook for melt-in-your-mouth meat in stews and soups.
- Beef cheeks: Braise for a deeply flavorful, fall-apart tender taco meat.
- Tongue: Boil, peel and slice for juicy, protein-packed sandwiches.
Challenge #6: Eat Local
Commit to eating at least 50% more locally produced food for the next month. Sourcing from local farmers, markets, and producers supports your community, is environmentally beneficial, and ensures fresher, nutrient-dense, and pollutant-free food.
If you’re wondering where to start, try to identify local farms, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), and farmers’ markets. At the grocery store, look for regional brands instead of imported goods and challenge yourself to cook with in-season ingredients. In making local foods a habit, you will strengthen local food systems while deepening your connection to what you eat.
Challenge #7: Ferment Your Own Veggies
Modern diets strip food of natural probiotics. Fermented vegetables like sauerkraut, kimchi and pickles restore the beneficial bacteria your body needs and making them at home ensures maximum probiotic benefits, including supporting your digestion and gut health and strong immune function.
Take the first step with this simple process:
- Choose your base: Cabbage, cucumbers, carrots and radishes are great starters.
- Use salt, not vinegar: Salt naturally preserves and ferments, creating the ideal environment for probiotics to thrive.
- Let time do the hard work: Pack veggies into a jar, cover with a salt brine, and let them ferment for a week or more at room temperature.
- Adjust for taste: When you’ve hit your desired tanginess, store them in the fridge to slow the fermentation.
Challenge #8: Harvest and Eat Wild Edibles
Though convenient, grocery stores create a disconnect from real food. Before modern agriculture, we thrived by foraging and relearning this science will help you deepen your food knowledge while delivering next-level nutrition.
It can be challenging because foraging requires knowledge, patience, and a willingness to experiment, but the effort is what makes it rewarding. Learn from an expert through a local foraging group or a guided hike for the safest way to get started. Also, begin with easy, recognizable plants like dandelion greens, wild berries, and purslane and incorporate them into your diet with food staples like salads, pesto sauce, or herbal teas.
Wild foraged foods have high vitamin and mineral content, which you can boost even further by including a daily boost of high potency bioavailable Choq Minerals to facilitate healthy digestion, energy production, and immune function.
Challenge #9: Drink Bone Marrow Broth
Bone broth is a nutritional powerhouse loaded with collagen, amino acids, and minerals that support joint health, immune response, digestive function, and overall recovery. Glycine present in bone broth is known to promote healthy cognitive and brain function as well as sleep quality. Add in Choq’s potent APEX Glutathione to further supercharge your cognition.
Unfortunately, store-bought stock is watery and saps the nutrition out of one of the most powerful superfoods, so it’s time to buck up and rise to the challenge of making it for yourself:
- Source high-quality bones: Look for grass-fed, pasture-raised chicken or wild-caught fish bones.
- Simmer for 12-24 hours: Low and slow cooking extracts the maximum nutrients.
- Add flavors and nutrients: Boost the flavor with herbs, garlic, apple cider vinegar, and sea salt.
- Drink daily: Sip it straight, mix it into soup or use it as a base for stews or sauces.
Are You Up to the Challenge?
You don’t need to go full caveman overnight, but even if one of these challenges gets you eating something more nutrient-dense than another sad, over-processed meal– that’s a win. Pick one challenge and try it for a month.
Maybe you’ll develop a taste for crispy pork skin, start sneaking liver into your ground beef, or sip bone broth instead of the mystery-laden energy drink you’ve been leaning on. Either way, it beats eating another bland, nutritionless meal.