My story-part 1

Hello!

If you have been training with me, you already know that I am an advocate of the holistic lifestyle, and that I can sometimes be…ummm…well…a bit extreme when it comes to the way I live my life. A life without sugar (most of the time :)? Processed food? A microwave? What kind of life is this?

Well, to put it honestly, a life I truly enjoy and find no difficulty adhering to. But I wasn’t always like this-I once enjoyed eating massive amounts of donuts, ice cream, and other treats which I shudder to think about. However, the journey to where I am now has been a long one-a bit rocky at times-but one of truth and self-discovery.

It begins when I discovered my love for running in high school. I joined the track & cross-country teams, and quickly fell in love, and I wanted to do everything in my power to become the best runner that I could.

Well, a 15 year old usually doesn’t know the last thing about proper nutrition, yet I took it upon myself to start eating more healthfully and in better accordance to my new athletic lifestyle. Up until this age, I ate whatever I wanted (my parents used to own a bakery and donut shops), and mass amounts of it-I had a crazy metabolism and could literally eat whatever I wanted.

But when I started running, I started to cut out the fat from my diet, I no longer ate desserts, and I started cutting back on meat, too. I thought this was the right thing to do; however, my body paid the price. I didn’t lose weight as one would expect, but my menstrual periods ceased, and little did I know that this would be the beginning of a very long journey-one of getting back to optimum health.

Throughout high school, I maintained this semi-vegetarian diet and continued to run quite well. Off to college…a different animal (in regards to competition) than high school. 18 years old and still naive and stubborn…by my sophomore year I had dropped 20 pounds and I was in complete denial. I continued with this yo-yo type of weight loss and weight gain throughout my 4 years at DePaul University.

Regardless of what anyone would tell me, I continued to believe that I was in good health. By my senior year, I was so exhausted emotionally, mentally, and physically that I couldn’t bear to run another interval around a track. I was done.

Post-collge. I continued to run and work-out, but suffered from a sense of great loss. Not running two times a day, no team, no races…and my diet wasn’t any better to boot. I had gone completely vegan-no meat, no dairy, no animal products of any sort.

My menstrual period still had not returned. Still being stubborn and in my early 20’s, I figured my body would return to its normal state, eventually. And I continued to abuse it with extreme exercise and diet habits. My weight stabilized a bit, but it still hadn’t returned to my normal weight (pre-college).

During this time, my mother and father struggled with their personal health battles. My father became diabetic (a few years earlier-a very strange case because he had always been and still remains very thin, but did have a diet high in sugar and fat, and a life HIGH in stress), and my mother discovered she had Multiple Sclerosis and cancer in the same year. My world was shattered, and we (my family) was devastated.
We were not sure in what direction we wanted to turn for my mother’s bleak prognosis, but we soon found answers via the Internet.

Part 2, next blog. 🙂 I want to keep this from becoming a novel!