This is Part 2 of my Health Story. The beginning of the story is found in Part 1. This part of the story picks up the summer of when I was 18 ad I was really starting to notices that my tummy did not feel right. Come back the next couple of weeks for Parts 3 and 4.
Over the summer I started to get sick I didn’t think about my gut much because I thought it would go away on its own and I was busy getting ready to leave for college. One thing I was noticing was that I was starting to gain weight. I was the girl that ate when I was hungry and stopped when I was full. I could eat what I want and not gain weight. I always liked healthy food and didn’t overindulge or eat crappy food. So don’t misunderstand me when I said I ate what I wanted. My eating habits didn’t include eating 5 donuts or a dozen cookies and hoping to stay the same size. Up until this point my body worked well. I now started to get this puffy feeling and my clothes didn’t feel right on me. Really, nothing felt comfortable to me. When you start gaining weight for no reason it starts to mess with your head.
At the end of the summer I moved to Oklahoma for my first year of college. I was so excited to go on this adventure, meet new people and start this new season of my life. I look back at this year with so many wonderful memories and friends I made that I still have. My health in the south was not so wonderful. I wasn’t feeling well and the south is known for fried food and a lot of gravy. My nutrition knowledge didn’t stand a chance against the food that was available to me. I didn’t feel well, had pretty unhealthy foods in front of me and I just felt worse.
I started to get obsessed about my body. I felt fat (which I now know is a toxic symptom because of my leaky gut). I started to try and control how bad I was feeling by controlling my foods and eating habits. I thought that following a certain plan or a set of rules is what would heal me. I tried a lot. I tried to eat sprouted bread with coconut oil for breakfast. I tried to not eat past 5pm. I tried to walk on the treadmill while studying everyday. I tried to eat as little as possible. Rules became my friend because to me rules equaled success. But no rule ever helped my problem, I actually got worse and felt worse.
Something else happened during this time. I started to get crazy sugar cravings. They were out of control. If I had sugar in my dorm room that was what I obsessively. I had leftover birthday cake in my dorm room and I ate two pieces for breakfast and then had a stomach ache the rest of the day. I’m not saying you can never have a piece of cake for breakfast, but it was a craving I couldn’t say no to and was controlling me. With those sugar cravings I also started to experience guilt. Guilt about food is horrible and I feel for you if you are experiencing a lot of guilt with the food choices that you are making, good or bad.
I was home over spring break and I was feeling tired everyday. I remember sitting in the car with my mom falling asleep at 3pm because I couldn’t stay awake. I would go to bed at 10pm, sleep until 9am and then be tired all day. This was when my fatigue started, which was result of my unhealthy digestive system. When your gut is on fire your brain is on fire.
Next year I transferred colleges to back home in Minnesota. I loved being back home but the problem was that I was getting a little overwhelmed by my gut bloating, weight gain and sugar cravings. I started to feel even more intense hunger. My hunger symptoms got so turned around that I was always hungry, craving sugary foods, grains and junk food. I only felt full when I overate and was stuffed to the brim. I got really obsessed with food and my body. I had gained the “freshman 15” down south and more of it had to do with my bad gut and less of it had to do with any unhealthy food choices during that year. Because I was so obsessed about following a plan, keeping my foods in check, trying to willpower through my sugar cravings I became a very isolated person. This time of my life was one of the most emotional ones. I moved away from some amazing friends in Oklahoma and I found myself with no friends and an extremely unhealthy relationship with food and with my body. I learned that the less I ate, the more weight I would lose. I still felt horrible but at least I didn’t look as bad (or at least I didn’t think I looked as bad). I got down to my high school weight again but felt worse then ever and I felt like I was going crazy. I would obsess about good foods vs bad foods.
This was the hight of my disordered eating and it went on for about 2 years. I feel like I could write more about this, but the one thing I want to share with you is that during this time I thought that I was the problem. I didn’t think my mind was strong enough to lose weight and feel better. I thought I was weak and lazy and I could never live up to this level of perfection that I was wanting to achieve. All I wanted was to eat less, weight less and wear a smaller pant size. As if that was actually going to fix anything. This obsession stemmed from not feeling well, but it was expressed in me having the desire to control everything around me. If I could transfer the control to what I ate and how I ate it, then I didn’t feel as sick and tired, right? It didn’t solve my problems, but it was my way of trying to make it better and not really feel the emotions of being sick. (I also have no pictures of myself from this time, that’s how insecure I was).
On top of it I still didn’t know that my physiology was causing this and it wasn’t something I wasn’t doing well enough. When your body is sick it becomes as much of an emotional battle as it does a physical battle.
I want to take you on another part of my journey. Remember that little spark of natural health information I knew? Well, it kept growing. Slowly growing, but it was growing. I would read books on nutrition and I was a total food network junkie. I loved watching people cook food and learn techniques on how to make dishes. This is when I fell in love with nutrition. I believe this is an area that God allowed me to love so it would save me from a potential eating disorder. Even thought my thoughts and my beliefs were so close to eating disorder thoughts, I always said I knew too much to allow my body to get into that. I never starved myself because I knew the dangers and I never threw up because I knew too much about that too. I had my times where I would limit my food as much as I could and then would overindulge or give into a major sugar craving.
I knew my health knowledge saved me from really hurting my body and beating it up too bad. I remember talking to my mom one time about how much I wanted a mega muffin at the grocery store and how strong that craving was. I ended up buying 2 pears, eating them on my way to school and then crying in the parking lot because the cravings were so strong. It was like a prison for my mind. I was either obsessing about food or beating myself up in some way because of food. As I continued on my journey and got healthier my relationship with food became. I’ve had to work on it a lot over the years and is something I still continue to gain more and more freedom in.
My love of natural health knowledge led me into chiropractic school. I know that God led me into it, it was the path he had for my life. But I couldn’t get nutrition and natural healing out of my mind so I took the classes I needed to get into chiropractic school, studied my booty off and got accepted into the program. I started chiropractic school in 2007.
More in Part 3 (Read Next Week)
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