My Story

“I think little girls are born — body, mind, and spirit — whole. But we get so many confusing, aggressive, and objectifying messages about our bodies that we become ashamed of our bodies. And we cannot love or claim something that we’re ashamed of. So we just vote our bodies off the island. We agree with the world at some point that our bodies are not divine vessels of love and wisdom, but that they are objects. That their worth comes from their shape and not their existence. We women become people who don’t even know what we desire, because we’re too busy worrying about how to be desired. We don’t know what we want, because all we know is how to be wanted. That’s how we become the objects instead of the subjects of our lives.”
–Glennon Doyle Melton (paraphrased from the “Broken Lives, Courageous Living” forum)

First and foremost, I want to thank you for visiting Well Fed. My passion for holistic nutrition ultimately stems from a passion for helping others help themselves, and it means the world to me that you’ve already taken that first step.

One thing you can always expect from me is transparency. It is my sincere promise to meet with you not on a practitioner level, but on a human level. Like you, I am not perfect, and I’m here to show you how beautifully liberating imperfection can be.

My training, besides being formal, is also primarily personal. Whether in blogging, working with clients, or developing wellness programs, my intention is to apply my education as a Certified Health and Nutrition coach – and even more so my own life experience – to guide you down the road of self-love and actualization. It is a road I have stumbled down myself, taking many wrong turns along the way.

I’ve had my own journey of loss and gain, both of weight and of self-worth. I possess an intimate understanding of the damage done by today’s societal beauty standards, of the myriad of ways in which women are taught to make themselves small and silent, and the ways in which we’ve been conditioned to believe that our value lay in our capacity to comply with these pressures.

I started writing not long after I learned to read. Stories, poems, plays… anything that involved putting pen to paper. I was that kid who got in trouble for not paying attention in class, and then the teacher would visit my desk when the lesson was over, to see what I’d been writing. My dream was to be a writer. That was always the plan. More than a plan – it was my identity.

Then, in high school, I started losing weight. Fast. I was never overweight to begin with – at 5’4” and just under 130 lbs., my BMI was well within the healthy range. No one told me that the little bit of curvature I gained during puberty was not only normal but necessary, since physically mature women require a higher body fat percentage than men to maintain normal hormone levels. Or maybe someone did tell me and I didn’t listen. I don’t remember.

What I do remember was the desire to make myself as small and insignificant as I felt, to better fly under the radar of bullies both at school and at home. It had very little to do with body image, and even less to do with food, as much as I obsessed over it. What it came down to was control. I could control what I put in my body, and how much space I felt I deserved to take up in this world.

By my 18th birthday, I was 92 lbs. The particularly frightening thing about Eating Disorders is that, by the time you’ve lost enough weight for it to be noticeable, the disease has already taken hold.

Most people have a romanticized idea, I think, of wafer-waisted girls with pronounced collarbones. But anorexia…it ain’t pretty. I was seeing a dermatologist for severe hormonal acne, which I now know was likely the result of the immense stress I was putting on my body by starving it. My once-thick hair was falling out. My period had stopped and I was being sent for kidney-function and bone-density tests, which confirmed that I was border-line osteoporotic.

I also saw an endocrinologist, who looked at me for all of 30 seconds before “diagnosing” me with PCOS, and writing a prescription for birth control pills which had some other patient’s name on it. When my mom asked him about my weight, he seemed to notice for the first time that I “could stand to gain a few pounds”. “A couple of milkshakes a day will fix that,” he said.

Meanwhile, the writing had stopped. Creativity was a luxury and my body was in survival-mode. I had brain-space only for what was most immediately important: food. To say I was preoccupied by food would be a gross understatement. Food comprised 95% of my waking thoughts. I was constantly fixated by it, neurotic around it, and embarrassingly possessive of it.

It was only later that I learned about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a WWII-era study which demonstrated that a common psychological effect of chronic hunger – besides depression, apathy, irritability, and reduced cognitive function – is a sudden obsession with food. Subjects often lost interest in the things they were once passionate about, and food became their top priority.

I now know that this was my body’s way of protecting me. I have no doubt that had this not happened, I would not be alive today. I’m eternally grateful to my body for saving my life, and I wish I could tell you that I learned to listen to and respect it from then on. Unfortunately, my relationship with my body – and with food – was far from healed.

As a result of my newfound zeal for cooking and the jobs I took in restaurant kitchens, combined with the synthetic estrogen being pumped into my body on a daily basis, I gradually gained the weight back. And then some. Once I stopped being afraid of food, I became addicted to it. Long after my body needed excess calories to refeed itself, the neural pathways in my brain were still wired for food-fixation and binges. Very few people tell you that, should you be lucky enough to recover from anorexia nervosa (the deadliest of mental illnesses), you will then have to brace yourself for the aftershock that is Binge Eating Disorder.

The neurobiology behind food addiction is a subject for another blog. For the purposes of this story, suffice to say that food addiction is a very real, very painful illness both physically and emotionally. And it is very, very difficult to recover from. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves. Unlike other addictions, food addicts cannot quit cold turkey; they must wrestle with their addiction three times a day.

There is an excellent book called Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen, which explains in scientific detail the neurological processes of addictive behaviour, and how to reroute these processes even after they’ve solidified into habit. I highly recommend it to anyone suffering with BED.

At 25, following the particularly disastrous end of a particularly disastrous relationship (a relationship I now recognize as just another symptom of my lack of self-love), I reached my peak weight of 140 lbs. Now, I realize that, for some, 140 lbs. might seem laughably insignificant. But 140 lbs. is almost 50 lbs. heavier than 92 lbs. And on my small frame, it felt very significant. At the very least, it was enough for me to understand the grief associated with weight gain, the sense of lost identity, and the cycle of self-hatred that leads to more destructive behaviour.

For years, I’d known that, in order to fully recover, I had to reconcile my body, mind and soul. I wrote “Make Mind-Body Connection” under “Goals” every birthday and every New Year. But knowing what you have to do and knowing how to do it are two very different things.

It took a lot of therapy, yoga, self-help books and cheesy journaling exercises before I understood that self-love comes before change. Not the other way around. I had to do the work. I had to meet myself where I was, and accept myself just as I was in that moment. Only then would I learn the truth: that I was enough. Enough of a reason to heal. I was worthy of a healthy body and a healthy mind, of strength and confidence, of the woman I’d always known I could be.

It wasn’t so much that I “lost the weight” as it was that my body, over time, moulded itself to reflect the love I was showing it. I got off The Pill, and switched to a more whole-foods, plant-based way of eating that brought with it a new relationship with food, with the planet, and with myself. I started strength-training, focusing more on fitness than thinness. Without even really trying, or noticing, I woke up one day to find myself the healthiest I’d ever been in body, mind and spirit.

I’m happy to report that my body and I are on speaking terms again. I have an enormous amount of respect and gratitude for all it’s done for me, and all it continues to do. I’ve mastered the art of maintaining a weight that is ideal in all respects – something I never would have imagined possible a few years ago. I’ve come to realize the astonishing truth that you can have it all: confidence, a healthy weight, and a way of eating that is as nourishing for your soul as it is for your body.

And, as you can see, I’m writing again.

My BA in English Literature and Creative Writing led to promotional freelance gigs, which eventually led to full-time positions in the field of marketing and communications. After working for two years as a Marketing Coordinator, I found I was craving a career that would allow me to make more of a difference. I wanted to spend those eight hours a day with purpose, to leave the world in a better state than I found it.

I decided to go back to school for Holistic Nutrition. I took a retail job at my local health food store, which allowed me to study and get experience at the same time. In starting my own nutrition consulting business, I found a way to combine my marketing and communications skills, my passion for writing, and my knowledge and experience in the field of nutrition to create a career in which I’d be able to engage whole-heartedly.

My goal is to use my journey to blaze a trail for others, hopefully making theirs a little easier. I’m here to reassure you that, no matter how tall the mountain you’re facing, it is surmountable. I’ve made the trek, and it’s my job to guide you safely down the path I know so well. I can’t make the climb for you, but I promise to be by your side every step of the way.

There is another side to that mountain. And it is beautiful. Trust me. I’ve been there.