Good morning, good evening, good night,

Thanks for joining me on day one, whatever time it may be for you.  I am starting this blog as a place to document my journey to healing my body, mind, and spirit. I hope you follow along and I hope I can inspire you in your life as well. 

Today, January 15, 2025, I went to an acupuncture appointment and prayed for the time to be relaxing and healing and to have God deliver peace to me. If you aren’t a believer, I promise, this blog will still be a good read. When I say good read, I don’t mean written eloquently or precisely. I do tend to ramble in words, so we will see how this goes. Turns out, God wanted me in that appointment, and he showed me some eye-opening things when I relaxed and allowed my mind to calm. This blog is one step in the direction I am feeling called to. 

To start, I want to give you a backstory of what I have been going through and dealing with most of my life. I think it paints a picture of where I’m at now, and I think will help you relate to my story more and maybe reflect yourself in what I have dealt with. 

I was never someone who saw myself as thin. Looking back, I was definitely in an ok spot. I was never super skinny, but I was a good weight. I think in Highschool I was around 115-120 pounds. I gained a bit as I got older, went to college and the like. I got comfortable in my relationship etc. I was sitting about 150-160 and dropped a bit when I started running in 2016.

This was a great phase in my life. I started jogging after having done some in-home strength workouts and it turned out running was fun. I went almost daily, and I ended up running a half marathon. During this time, my dad and stepmom introduced me to the book Eat to Live. I started eating this way and I was in great shape. I did it for a period before I got pregnant in 2017. I felt great and running felt better. 

Move to the first trimester of my first pregnancy, and there was a bug in my salad. With the aversions that go along with pregnancy, I fell off the wagon and went back to the Standard American Diet. I ended up gaining a lot of weight during the pregnancy and went from about 130 pounds to 203 pounds at 37 weeks. I had pre-eclampsia and the process was very difficult.

Once the baby was here, I quickly dropped 30 pounds and sat about 165 pounds for a while. I tried getting back to eating Nutritarian, but I was working as a nanny for my cousin and with a new baby, I didn’t know how to make it work long term. On to my second pregnancy, about a year later. It went a lot better than the first, but I gained from 170 to just under 220 pounds with a pregnancy at 40 weeks and 5 days. I did drop weight fairly easily after that to about that 170-pound range. 

At this point, my family and I spent some time trying Nutritarian again with a little fudge room. Eventually, without any true commitment, I fell back off again. I tried different things like Intermittent fasting, but for me, there was too much room for choosing whatever I wanted, and I wasn’t feeding my body what it needed, and I was still craving the wrong foods. I have tried weight watchers 2 or 3 times, calorie counting many different times. Nothing has ever given me the results or the comfort in knowing I am choosing the right foods for my body.

 

Fast forward to last year. With the yoyo dieting I have done I gained back what I lost and then some. I hit about 195 or so as a top mark, but never really weighed at that point because I didn’t want to see it. I tried Weight Watchers one more time and intermittent fasting but barely lasted a few weeks. Mid-summer I ended up in a position where I was having some serious anxiety and panic attacks. I went in to the doctors for heart palpitations and they assured me all was ok, that it was likely stress and anxiety related. Then this past December I ended up in a similar spot again and had a more extensive check with a 48-hour holter monitor. All was well. I also connected with my Naturopath to balance some hormones. 

I also received a referral to counseling, where they suggested I get evaluated for ADHD. I did NOT want to get medicated for that. With the combination of what I was physically experiencing with the palpitations as well as the high level of anxiety, I knew I didn’t want to keep feeling this way. After a few conversations with my dad, I decided I needed to commit to Nutritarian and the Eat to Live book’s philosophy for life. No “I will give it a try”, “hopefully it will work this time:”. This time, this is my life, and I will keep this forever. 

I wanted to document my journey. Partly for myself but also for others. There is very little out there on the topic other than Dr. Fuhrman’s website and two or three other blogs. The amazing thing about Nutritarian is that it’s not just a Vegan diet or a weight loss plan. It is a life span extending, way of life and eating that yes, does go against a lot of what we are told by a majority of the medical industry, but has proven results and decades of examples of people who have had success. The reason I want this for myself is to document how I am feeling in the moment. I am terrible at remembering how potent certain feelings were once they have faded. Like you eat something that disagrees with you, but 3 months later you try it again because you don’t remember it being that bad. Turns out, past you was right. 

I am committing to myself and my family, that I will be doing this for me and them. I never want to feel the level of panic and anxiety I felt this past year. I don’t want my kids to ever feel that. I want them to live to be 100 years old! I want you and your family to live a long and healthy and joyous life without disease as well. You deserve to feel good in your body, feel less stress, less worry, less pain, less brain fog, fight off diabetes or eliminate it among a few of the benefits.

This blog will likely start out as what I am eating and what I am learning and feeling, so follow along, reach out if you want. I love to talk about this topic, and I would love to encourage you. 

As a reference and a “hello, this is me”, I am including a picture of myself (and my handsome husband, Willis). I was probably about 190 pounds. I don’t have an exact number but my eight is obvious in my face. Cheers to better selves!