About Me

It's been a long time leading up to where I am now but I know the journey has only just begun. I'll try to capture most of it here in a nutshell and then fill in the gaps in later entries. First, some background:

As a child my mom strove to provide wholesome, home-cooked meals with your typical food groups all included. I'd say it was a pretty typical American family diet - veggies from a can or frozen (fresh from our garden in the summer), white bread or some sort of starch (maybe even both), meat and lots of milk (especially strawberry milk). I was always a picky eater and my parents felt, like many parents, that making small adjustments to my meal was fine so long as I was eating. For example, I always said I HATED spaghetti so I'd eat the noodles with butter. I never was good about eating vegetables and they were never forced upon me.

Yep, that's me. Looks like it must have been Christmas.
All the boxes are a dead giveaway.

Fast forward to my teen years, after my parents divorced, I mostly lived with my dad who made rotating dinners of bbq'd steak, chicken, and pork chops and usually some sort of starch or starchy vegetable. For all other meals, I pretty much sustained on cereal, pizza rolls with Dr. Pepper, and fast food. Somehow [with this nutrient dense diet] I actually maintained pretty good health. Chop it up to good genes, ha!

In my 20's I started to grow up and pay attention to my health. Like I said, I was relatively healthy my whole life. I was very active and played sports, rarely got sick, never had issues with allergies, and have always been very slim (actually underweight). But now I was struggling with my energy levels, memory/retention, and digestive health. This was when my romance with caffeine, especially Starbucks coffee, budded. Oh, how I love coffee! Mmm...coffee....

Sorry, I'm back now. I really started to pay attention to my digestive health - constipation!! Sorry, getting a little personal, but you better get used to it; our digestion is HUGE indicator of our health. At this time my mom started having SERIOUS digestive health problems which probably sparked my attention to the issue. She battled diverticulitis, fighting several infections, one landing her in the hospital for about a week, and eventually she had part of her colon removed.

Ironically (or maybe not so ironically) this is about the time that the whole "high fiber" craze started in the food industry. So I, along with my mother, started eating Fiber One cereal and whole grain, high fiber bread and Activia Yogurt. This helped to get things moving and got me paying better attention to eating more wholesome foods. Of course, I didn't know much about wholesome foods and still probably ate on average three servings of vegetables a week. Crazy!! But I was starting to correlate how I felt to what I ate. If I abstained from sugary foods, especially soda, my energy was better and I generally felt better.

In my late 20's I started dating and then married my wonderful husband and I tried to influence his diet to be a little healthier. He still ate like I did as a teenager. I generally kept highly processed junk food out of the house. So of course he would gorge himself whenever we visited his mom's house (AKA - MaryMart).


 

August 9, 2011 I gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Charli. I had a relatively normal pregnancy with the exception that her 20 week ultrasound showed only one kidney. This was the first sign of something amiss. Once born she had various issues, none too serious, but it eventually led us to a geneticist and a diagnosis of Kabuki Syndrome. This is where the journey REALLY began. Of course, it always starts with the love of a mother. I now have a completely different perspective of what's healthy. Now, I said this is a journey, so it is still evolving and I'm still learning and struggling with finding a balance. I hope you join me on this crazy ride and together we can learn, laugh, and live healthier.