How I got here...

Before we dive into where I am now, I think it's important to explain how I got here, and for me, my personal issues really bloomed into my professional endeavors or simply - my mess became my message. There are 3 'threads' that have woven me into my current reality - my poor diet as a child when we didn't really understand how important nutrition was, my high school shoulder injury that still haunts me today and my childhood lifestyle that turned into my adult health struggles. If you are a 'Spice Girls Millennial' I'm sure you can relate; so many of us have accepted these things as 'normal' but they aren't. 

So let's roll back to the late 80s & early 90s - the age of prepackaged and convenience food. My childhood diet consisted of lots of Schwann’s food, pop-tarts, TV dinners, cereal, canned vegetables & off-brand Kraft. Don’t get me wrong — we also had a lot of home-cooked meals but they were casseroles with condensed soups, sides of potatoes and canned corn, Prego spaghetti sauce, bread & butter, Van De Kamps fish sticks, turkey sandwiches — everything was very brown. Being born & raised in the midwest traditionally means residing on meat & potatoes - even though the original recipes were once based upon ‘scratch’ ingredients, freshly canned garden produce & local protein, the modern day version just isn't quite the same. 

Towards the end of elementary school these eating habits had started to catch up with me; I was the 'chubby' girl in my group of friends. I don’t explicitly remember getting teased about it but always felt uncomfortable compared to my thin pre-pubescent friends. I believe this period not only started a couple decade long tumultuous relationship with food but also my people pleasing tendencies.

I hit a growth spurt in 8th grade and that 6 inches evened out all my 'baby fat', but was still never thin enough. I stayed active in high school through sports & although my eating habits weren’t perfect, I was able to keep a slenderer frame. I was pretty much able to eat whatever I wanted by staying active just like most teenagers. I was still self conscious about my body; I opted to wearing tankinis instead of bikinis to 'hide my stomach' and wouldn’t hang out with only a sports bra on like many of my friends.

I got to college and kept “pretty good” habits in the college cafeteria in effort to avoid the infamous freshman 15….& I succeeded for the first semester. By second semester the weekend drinking &  decrease in exercise had caught up with me. That led into diet culture's low-fat, low-carb phase. Each week I’d load up on skim milk, low-fat cheese, tortillas in lieu of bread, Lean Pockets, baked lays, low-fat yogurt, Lean Cuisines or whatever knock off was on sale and sprinkled in some vegetables as condiments on my wraps. I baked items instead of fried and had a binder full of recipes from Self that promised the perfect physique. I found running [which I had always hated] after a break up which helped with some temporary weight loss but a general lack of movement, poor food choices, late night study sessions & liquid calories - Starbucks White Chocolate Mochas mixed in with weekend 'extracurriculars' in an effort to unknowingly deal with life's stressors or treat myself for making it through the week was costing me my health.

I got to chiropractic school — at my heaviest weight & feeling very uncomfortable in a health-focused environment. Through classmates and curriculum I started to learn more about healthy eating - swapped out whole grain pasta for regular, decreased my liquid calories and started to learn more about real food quality. I started cooking more and got back into working out many of my classmates came to chiropractic school with ingrained movement habits. Up until this point I had really only  associated food choices with body composition, but not health. And despite missing the mark on some of these things, it was the beginning of understanding the importance of fueling my body purposefully instead of focusing and worrying about calories. Little did I know I was just getting started!

to be continued in part 3