I was twenty-five years old when I started to notice the changes. I couldn't eat like I used to. Gone were the nights where I could devour an entire Hungry Howie's pizza and wake up the next day with a flat stomach.
I shrugged it off. "It's my metabolism," I would say. Sigh. "I'm getting older."
I accepted a little extra padding in my midsection and just a tad too much booty in the pants (you know, the kind that jiggles and droops and has, ahem, dimples) as a rite of passage. There was nothing I could do about them. After all, I was twenty-five. I was getting old.
By the time my late twenties rolled around just a few years and little more padding later, I was no longer getting old. I was old.
Crackling knees?
Check.
Aching joints?
Check.
Wince and moan when I stand up after sitting for a long time?
Double check.
Little flexibility? Low energy? General feeling of the blahs?
Check, check, cheeeeeeeeeck!
My friends and I would laugh about it.
"Can't party like we used to!"
"9:00 p.m.? Waaaaay past my bedtime."
"You wanna do what?! Sorry, I'll pass. I'm too old."
Being "old" was a running joke.
But then, one day, as my 30th birthday approached, it stopped being funny. Three things happened that made me rethink how I felt, what I ate, and the type of life I wanted to live.
1. The first was very simple - a question I asked myself: If this is how I feel at 30, how am I going to feel at 40? 50? 60? Do I even want to reach 70 and beyond???
2. I started reading. And learning. I read Waking the Warrior Goddess by Dr. Christine Horner. The book is about how to treat and prevent breast cancer and how the food we eat every day can have a tremendous influence on our chances of staying healthy or developing a disease.
This book is what I call my trigger (more on that later).
3. One of my dearest friends of more than 20 years was diagnosed with lupus. Lupus. At 30.
Suddenly, 30 didn't seem so old. In fact, 30 was young. Far too young to have lupus, or any other autoimmune disease.
Growing up, my friends and I would talk about our futures. We talked about husbands, and babies, and great careers doing important things. And of course we talked about staying friends forever and leaving said husbands, babies and great careers behind at least once a year for a much needed girls weekend at a fabulous and exotic location.
We imagined all those things. But disease? Cancer? Depression? Anxiety? Not only were those things not in our rose colored picture of the future, they weren't even dancing on fringes of the picture frame.
It's hard to imagine when you're young that any of the choices you make today could one day affect your future self in a negative way. I'm not suggesting that my friend did or didn't do something that gave her lupus. The fact is, sometimes life just sucks. Sometimes, you can do all the right things, and the end result is still wrong.
There are no guarantees in life. There is no guarantee that bad things won't happen to you. There is no guarantee that you will feel happy and healthy and seize the day every day. I mean, really. Can you seize all the days? There is definitely no guarantee that you won't get sick or die young.
As the big Three-Oh got closer, I was okay with not having a guarantee. But I began to ask, "What if?"
"What if I could equip my body with the tools it needs to have the best chance to prevent disease?" Or, if I did get a disease, "What if I could equip my body with the tools to fight it off?"
I had tried before to "clean up" my diet. Get rid of the crap, eat only the good. My mom is a health guru. I had been hearing for years how certain foods can heal you and others can harm you. After my husband and I would visit my parents, we'd get all jazzed up about eating healthy. "We're going to give up the crap!" we'd say. "Only good food for us from now on!"
We'd get home and our newfound lifestyle would last all of two seconds. We'd open the fridge and wail that there was nothing in there we could eat. And all those healthy foods we were so excited about less than two hours ago? Forget it. We didn't want to eat those. And our addiction to "bad" food (food I now affectionately refer to as poison) assured we never would convert to a whole, clean lifestyle.
You see, I believed all the things my mom said about food, but I didn't believe it. Kinda like believing there is a god, but not believing in God.
Enter Waking the Warrior Goddess. Toward the beginning of the book, Dr. Horner explains in scientific, yet in totally understandable and "non-believer", terms what happens to our cells every time we eat something. We may not know it's happening. We may not be able to feel it (or maybe, just maybe, we do and we just don't realize it), but it's happening.
Call me a nerd, a dork, a geek, or whatever you want, but learning about DNA and cell division made me a believer. It was my trigger - the thing that changed my life. Suddenly, eating whole, clean foods was no longer about what I was giving up, but about what I was gaining.
I started changing the way I eat in February 2013. My decision was fueled by my desire to make decisions that my future self would one day thank me for. What I didn't expect was all the changes in the present. Amazing, wonderful changes that I didn't think were even possible.
I will talk about those changes in my next post. But for now I just want to say to those of you who are struggling, to those who believe food can make a difference in how you feel but don't know where to start, or what to eat, to those who are feeling there is nothing you can eat, to those who are discouraged, confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, sick...I get it. I have been there. Right where you are right now shouting at the computer screen telling me I have no idea what you are going through... I have been there. In some ways, I still am there.
Changing your life is hard.
But I want to help. I'm starting this blog because I hope that my experiences will encourage you. I hope that the things that I have learned will help you go just one more day, to try just one more time. I hope that I can help you feel better. If nothing else, I hope you will know that you are not alone on this journey.
I will say it a million times throughout this blog, I am not a doctor, nutritionist or dietician. I am not an expert and I most certainly do not have all the answers. I'm just a girl trying to live the best life I can and help others along the way.
I was twenty-five when I resigned myself to the fact that the no good, very bad changes in my body were inevitable.
I was thirty when I realized the facts were wrong and I took my life back.
I have been married to my angelic husband (seriously, he's an angel. my mom and I are sure of this. only a supernatural being could put up with my shenanigans) for 8 years and I am Moma to two furry canines: Sweet Riley and Evil Cody. Don't let their names fool you, Sweet Riley is sometimes quite evil and Evil Cody can be oh-so sweet. In the photo above, Evil Cody is on the left, Sweet Riley on the right.
That picture at the top of my blog? I took it! I am not a photographer at all, but I've recently developed a passion for capturing sunrises and sunsets and anything else in nature I find beautiful and miraculous.
I love to run. It sounds totally bizarre to me to hear me say that because I used to loathe running, and I rejected the notion that anyone could love it. But now I'm one of those people who wake and say "When is it going to be time to go running?!" (The answer? At night. I do not run in the morning. I do not do anything in the morning by choice. If I am forced to do things in the morning, they are done with much dragging of feet, grumbling and slamming of doors.)
The most bizarre things happen to me in grocery stores. Seriously, is it too much to ask to go in, get my food, and get out? I do not need to to know that the large, lumberjack looking guy with way too much neck hair protruding from his flannel shirt could never imagine walking in the very high heels that I so expertly don, and that the one time he did wear cowboys with a slight heel, he nearly toppled over. Honestly, this is not information I need to know while I fondle the avocados! (In case anyone thinks I'm some sort of avocado perv, fondling is totally necessary in order to find avocados with the perfect amount of ripeness to make the world's most amazing guacamole.)
Lastly and very importantly (this one isn't so much about me, but about you)...any changes you choose to make to your diet, lifestyle or medications based on the information contained on this site should be done so under the guidance and supervision of a doctor or licensed and qualified health care professional.
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