ChipMonk Baking<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"Chipmonk](\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\")
<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019d asked me ten years ago what I\u2019d be doing now, I would have never, ever guessed that I\u2019d be baking cookies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jose\u2019s path began soon after college, when he began to work as a personal trainer. He found the work so rewarding that he began to rethink his planned future in traditional medicine. \u201cI fell in love with helping people holistically. I was treating the causes of disease, not just the symptoms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diet and nutrition was a big part of his practice, and the trickiest: \u201cFood was easily the hardest thing for my clients to fix. People always told me that there was never readily available food, that they worked too much and didn\u2019t have time to cook.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Jose thought that he was taking pretty good care of himself. He was working out constantly, and had a lean and strong body. But he wasn\u2019t really taking his own dietary advice.<\/p>\n
\u201cLooking back now, I realize I used to put sugar on everything. I put sugar on my cereal, I poured sweetened condensed milk on my ice cream. The more sugar I ate, the more I liked it. I guess I justified it. I\u2019d eat 8 slices of toast for breakfast. I thought I was eating healthy, because I didn\u2019t gain weight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strange symptoms crept up in his mid-20\u2019s. Foremost among them were intense drowsiness and energy issues, issues bad enough that they caused a brush with death.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started falling asleep in the middle of the day, just falling asleep. I didn\u2019t have energy in the morning, my energy levels would really change and fluctuate with food. That was kind of a red flag.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne day I was driving home one day and I fell asleep at the wheel. I hit the rail of the highway and it jolted me awake. Nothing happened except some damage to my car, but it was terrifying. That was the jolt that I needed to go see a doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI went in, got the bloodwork done. My doctor called me a couple days later and said, \u2018Hey, you\u2019re in really good shape, there\u2019s nothing super wrong with you, except you have Type 2 diabetes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a huge wake-up call: \u201cMy doctor said \u2018Come in, and I\u2019ll prescribe you some metformin, and you\u2019ll be good to go.\u2019 But I stopped him there and said, \u201cNo thank you. I\u2019ll see you again in three months.\u201d And that was it. From that day to the next, I changed everything about the way that I ate food.<\/p>\n
\u201cI gave up processed carbohydrates, I gave up all the sweets that I grew up eating, I gave up juice and beer. It wasn\u2019t necessarily strict keto, but it was very low-carb. The only carbs that I had were coming from nuts, seeds, berries.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter my next visit, my doctor called me and he said, \u2018I think you need to come take the test again. Your numbers are really bizarre. Your A1c is 5.3% now. That just does not happen.\u2019 We did a second blood test, and my A1c was even lower the second time.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe asked, \u2018What did you do?\u2019 I told him that I changed everything about the way I eat. And he was blown away. He said that people just don\u2019t do that. But I was looking for a cure, and not a band-aid. I wanted something holistic that would help me for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jose\u2019s new diet not only plunged his A1c back down to healthy levels; it also cured his fatigue and foggy brain. \u201cIt was like night and day. I would wake up and have energy in the morning, and steady energy all day long.\u201d It also led to effortless physical gains: \u201cIn two or three weeks I lost an inch off my waist.\u201d<\/p>\n
One thing that didn\u2019t change was that sweet tooth. Jose was happily chowing down on spaghetti squash, cauliflower rice, and other popular low-carb alternatives, but the low-carb, alternative sugar desserts he bought off the shelf were not satisfying.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I discovered monkfruit sweetener, I was really happy because it was nice and sweet and didn\u2019t have any blood sugar impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I started baking for myself, something I\u2019d never done before. One weekend I made some chocolate chip cookies monkfruit. My roommate, who was not eating low-carb, said, \u2018Hey, this is pretty good. Can you bake other flavors?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Jose kept on baking and trying new flavors. At this point Jose was working in a Houston startup hub, his roommate was working in venture capital, and the two of them together were looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. They started handing out samples, and then moved to selling their cookies, initially to co-workers and acquaintances. Jose says that they just \u201ckinda ran with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flash forward to today: ChipMonk Baking has its own certified gluten-free kitchen and sells its many flavors of cookies and keto bites nationwide over the internet, in addition to locally, mostly in independent grocery stores. For sweetener, with assistance from a local food scientist, Jose has settled on a combination of both monkfruit and allulose. The baked goods are mostly made with almond and sunflower flours. Packed with protein, healthy fats and fiber, each serving has as few as 1 gram of net carbohydrates.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Why is it called ChipMonk?<\/h3>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a nut-based product, and chipmunks and squirrels eat lots of nuts and seeds. We spelled it with an \u2018o\u2019 because we used monkfruit sweetener. And at the same time, monks represent a very holistic way of life, conscious and aware of everything they do, especially what they put in their body.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how Jose hopes to live his life, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cDiabetes is a very long-acting disease. There are no immediate consequences to having a little cake here and there. But I made it top of mind. Three or four years down the line, I\u2019m still eating low-carb.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":437,"featured_media":53275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1453,1434],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
The ChipMonk Baking Story: How Diabetes Turned Jose Gonzalez into a Baker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ross Wollen\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272\",\"name\":\"The ChipMonk Baking Story: How Diabetes Turned Jose Gonzalez into a Baker\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/PXL_20210124_154346063.PORTRAIT_2-scaled.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-03-09T15:33:01+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-03-09T15:33:01+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/#\/schema\/person\/dad5417f3e14b1fd142730c7fa616283\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/PXL_20210124_154346063.PORTRAIT_2-scaled.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/PXL_20210124_154346063.PORTRAIT_2-scaled.jpg\",\"width\":2560,\"height\":1920,\"caption\":\"The ChipMonk Baking Story: How Diabetes Turned Jose Gonzalez into a Baker\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=53272#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The ChipMonk Baking Story: How Diabetes Turned Jose Gonzalez into a Baker\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/\",\"name\":\"ASweetLife\",\"description\":\"The Diabetes Magazine\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/#\/schema\/person\/dad5417f3e14b1fd142730c7fa616283\",\"name\":\"Ross Wollen\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/3baf28ef14013e66fec763fe108e4bff?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/3baf28ef14013e66fec763fe108e4bff?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Ross Wollen\"},\"description\":\"Ross Wollen is a chef and writer based in Maine's Midcoast region. 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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ChipMonk-Keto-Low-Carb-Gluten-Free-Chocolate-Chip-Pecan-Cookie-Bites-18-300x298.jpg\")
One thing that didn\u2019t change was that sweet tooth. Jose was happily chowing down on spaghetti squash, cauliflower rice, and other popular low-carb alternatives, but the low-carb, alternative sugar desserts he bought off the shelf were not satisfying.<\/p>\n