My Ayurveda Health Journey

Today, I wanted to dive in deeper with you and get a little bit vulnerable myself. So while I'm a health coach now, and though I feel really amazing most days, though please know that I'm by no means perfect, there was a time when I was pretty sick in body, mind, and spirit. And I'm now living a life that I'm really excited about with so much love for my body and with confidence and self-awareness. But it was definitely not always this way. So this is my story, the journey that brought me to Ayurveda, the struggles I had along the way, and how I really came through to the other side. My hope is that you might resonate with some of my story and know that A, you are not alone, and B, there is hope for changing these things and coming to a place where you feel happy and healthy in your everyday life. If you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, hit the subscribe button and the bell to be notified every time I post a new video about creating a happier, healthier mind, body, and life. For the past 4 years, I've coached people in the habits of Ayurveda and their relationship with food, their bodies, and themselves. And this is the story behind why I started doing what I do. I do want to note that I will discuss some disordered eating patterns today as they are a very real part of my past. So please be mindful. If this kind of talk is helpful for you, please tune in. But if it's triggering for you, please skip it or maybe save this one to listen to in a safe place with people who can support you. Ever since I can remember, I felt guilt and shame around my body and around food and food behaviors. So growing up, I was very body conscious. I had this incredibly full and happy life. My parents were wonderful. They were super into personal development and they were into healthy eating and living long before it was actually like a trendy thing. But I remember even when I was very young, I felt very self-conscious about my body. I would wear clothes that covered me up, you know, as modest as possible. I would opt for bathing suits that hid my stomach. I would Sometimes just keep my clothes on even when I was at the beach, you know, or on a boat or whatever. I would talk about how I wished I was skinnier like my sister or my mom who just had naturally taller, thinner bodies than me. And this all really started before I was even 10 years old. So please don't get me wrong, I had an absolutely beautiful, wonderful childhood. I had awesome friends and family. I did well in school. I was on the swim team. I did theater. I had a really happy life. But underneath a lot of it, I felt really self-conscious. I also took things very personally. And I also got sick a lot. And I fluctuated back and forth between feeling pretty good and feeling honestly pretty terrible, both mentally and physically as well. And I was also really disconnected from my body. I was a big reader, and I remember reading stories where people could actually feel what their bodies were telling them. I, you know, I thought that this was literary hyperbole, that when someone's hair stood up on the back of their neck when they sensed that someone was staring at them, I thought that was just like kind of a way to move the story forward. I didn't even really know how to tell between when I was hungry or when I was full. I always just kind of relied on external portion sizes or, you know, binging until I felt really sick. The binging also started when I was young. I would constantly think about when I would get to eat again. Food was And because I was so disconnected from my body, I didn't even recognize hunger or satiation. I just wanted to eat whenever I wasn't doing something else. And I didn't realize at the time that emotions were connected to the desire to binge. But now looking back, I realize that it often happened when I was feeling left out or bad about myself. Lonely, some other emotion that made me want to numb it. The binge eating was exacerbated in high school when I was a swimmer, when I had 2.5-hour practice after school each day and morning practices 3 days a week. My friends and I just loved being able to eat whatever we wanted whenever we wanted without gaining any weight. And of course, every offseason when I no longer had swimming every day, I would gain weight again because I just kept eating in the same way that I did when I— when it was the swinting, which was not a very healthy way to eat. And so I would go on diets with my friends. I would experiment with calorie counting, trying to find another exercise routine that would be the one. But the more I restricted, the more I subsequently lost control and I wanted to eat everything in sight. And so sometimes I would eat within the confines of a diet. But I would just eat huge amounts of whatever food I was allowing myself to eat at the time. You know, mozzarella sticks when I was vegetarian, or Oreos when I was vegan, because those are vegan, weirdly. Peanut butter and honey when I was trying to eat like no processed foods. And the list goes on and on. And sometimes I would eat something that I wasn't supposed to, and then I would just be like, oh, screw it, I'll just start tomorrow. And then I would proceed to eat everything that I had deemed Bad for the rest of the day. And sometimes I would binge with my friends like I had done during swim season in high school. But most often my binging would happen when I was by myself, when I didn't wanna be alone with my feelings or my thoughts. It's really, it's hard to explain how a binge eating episode feels to someone who hasn't experienced it. And I've tried to before, but if you have experienced it, You understand the loss of control that you feel. You feel like, you know, you're in sort of an altered state. You're not really able to rationalize your way out of it. And then once it's over, there's just this deep sense of regret and sometimes a sense of self-contempt that creeps in. And, you know, I just want to reiterate that I hadn't even considered that my eating habits were what would be called disordered eating. I didn't even call it binge eating. I thought that I just needed more willpower with food. I just needed to restrict myself more. And it wasn't until one of my friends actually described one of her binge eating episodes to me later that I realized that I had been doing that for most of my life. This continued throughout high school and college. My weight fluctuated and I never actually felt really Good in my body, no matter what my weight was. I was always trying to find the right way of eating. I thought that if I could just find the right plan and stick to that, you know, maybe plus a workout regimen, then all of my problems would finally be solved. I honestly believed that. I honestly believed that my biggest problem was overeating. And if I could just stick to a diet and an exercise plan, then I would finally be happy. But of course, this always led to restriction and then the subsequent binge that accompanied. And the more I pushed and prodded myself to make changes, the worse it got. The more I beat myself up about not making the changes I wanted in my life, whether that was eating or exercise changes or morning routine or any health habits, the more I felt really discouraged and the worse my mental and physical health became. Unfortunately, it got worse before it got better. So when I went to undergrad at University of Michigan, I started getting sick even more often. I would get bronchitis, I got ear infections, pink eye, just other colds and flus and illnesses fairly regularly. And then my skin flared up with psoriasis, and I had large red inflamed patches of skin all over my body, and especially on my face. Around my eyes and everything, which made me feel even more self-conscious about what I looked like. And I also threw my back out for the first time at the age of 20, and then again a couple of times after that the next few years. I felt groggy and tired all day. I needed multiple cups of coffee to wake up and then also a good amount of alcohol to have fun at night. And then I suffered multiple day hangovers. As well. I would struggle to regain mental clarity and also just struggle to feel even remotely better physically for, you know, a couple of days after going out with my friends. I also felt a low-grade but consistent sense of sadness, and I was pretty irritable almost all the time. I just, I remember being so annoyed with everyone, with my friends, my family, my teachers, my classmates. And the person that I was most annoyed with was, of course, me for not doing all the things that I knew I should be doing for my health. And also just not actually being the kind of person I wanted to be. I was not super nice. I was honestly kind of a bitch, which was wildly out of integrity with the person that I wanted to see myself as. I wanted to see myself as someone who was kind and thoughtful and compassionate. And not being that led to even more suffering. I also felt like time was passing by me without me really wanting— knowing what I wanted to do or be in my life. So I was both scared of the future and completely frustrated with the present as well. I felt like everyone around me had figured out something that I just hadn't. I felt like there was more to life than what I was currently living. Like I was just kind of going through the motions, but never feeling truly alive. fulfilled. And I felt like there was some sort of missing key to all of this adulting that everyone else knew except for me. And of course, my dysfunctional relationship with food became even more dysfunctional with restriction and bingeing becoming more and more pronounced throughout my days and my weeks. So I constantly dieted and obsessed about my weight, even as that weight crept up and up and up, not realizing that this was just making the problem worse. If you are resonating with my story, if you've experienced any of these things, give us some love and hit the like button below. Around this time was also when I started following the body positivity movement, which was really great, but I was really confused about how to love my body when it felt like my body was falling apart. I was frustrated that there seemed to be this dichotomy, which of course I now realize is a false one. So either toxic diet culture or do whatever and just love your body anyway, and who really cares about the health ramifications? But I didn't want my body to feel like crap anymore. I wanted to actually feel good. I wanted to be healthy. And that was when I found Happy Healthy Habits. Well, it wasn't yet Happy Healthy Habits. It was a program that used Ayurveda health principles, which I was very, very interested in. And it also incorporated behavior change science, which is what I was also studying in school, to help you consistently implement the habits that are essential for a thriving mind, body, and life. So I learned how and when to eat for optimal digestion. I developed an exercise routine. I actually started sleeping enough. I started cultivating a healthy relationship with my body and with myself. I implemented health habits that made my body feel really vibrant, my mind really clear and focused, and my emotions a lot steadier, as well as my mood being a lot more positive. And interestingly, I also spent less time studying, but started getting better grades. I no longer needed coffee to wake up in the morning, and I was actually really happy to wake up and start my day. I started having a more positive relationship with myself and with other people, and I was more pleasant to be around. I started to feel really grateful for the people that I had in my life and blessed instead of annoyed all the time. And I also started to take things less personally and build more emotional resilience. Another piece of this is that I no longer needed alcohol to have fun. In fact, I went out with friends and had more fun than I'd ever had without binge drinking or feeling so hungover the next day. At this time, I was also in grad school getting a master's in public health. I was studying how the response to the obesity epidemic was egregiously missing an essential ingredient: teaching people not just what foods to eat and not eat, but actually how to have a healthy relationship with food and with their bodies. For one of my school projects, I actually developed the concept of a program for teaching girls how to tap into what their bodies were communicating with them, while at the same time teaching them how to love and respect their bodies as they were. This, plus the work I was doing with the Ayurveda Habits Program, slowly but surely led to me no longer obsessing about my weight or the food that I was eating. And I started honoring my body's needs without punishing myself for eating something wrong or not working out as hard as I should. I started feeling my body's cues and knowing what to do with them and Started really loving my body, first for all it could do, at first, and then even for how it looked later on. And though, you know, this part took a little bit more time, my binge eating episodes decreased in frequency and decreased and decreased, and then they eventually did stop altogether. And I do just want to point out that though I no longer experience the worst of my previous health woes, I'm still not perfect. I slide back into some of my old thoughts and behavior patterns. I don't do the habits every single day without fail. I, I feel sadness and stress and the wide range of emotions we experience as humans. But I, I think that's honestly the way I like it. I'm no longer interested in doing things perfectly. I used to be, and I know now that I'm not a slave to health habits, but rather that they're here to support me. And, you know, they— I don't need to be on or off the wagon when it comes to doing them. And the same goes for food and exercise and my body. I don't need to be perfect in order to feel fulfilled and happy and joyful and just really good in my body almost all the time. And the other great part about this whole journey was that I found my purpose. I realized that this was exactly what I needed to be doing, helping people implement these habits, embody the growth principles I had learned, and change their lives to become ones that they were excited about living on a day-to-day basis. So once I finished my master's degree, I got certified as a health coach so that I could teach the things that had so drastically changed my life. And this is why I do what I do now. I know what it's like to feel So physically and mentally low. I also know what it's like to feel like there's something missing, to feel stuck, to feel like there has to be more to life than what I was currently living. And I'm so passionate about helping people finally feel amazing in their bodies and their minds and their lives. This stuff really matters if we want to create a world that has more love and less hate and fear. If we want to show up as the best version of ourselves, if we If we want to make a difference in the lives of others, we do have to start with ourselves, as cliché as that might sound. Once we do this work, we are so much more capable of living our purpose, feeling fulfilled, and also being happy and healthy. If you resonate with any part of my story and think there's a part of you that might benefit from creating consistency in your health and wellness while at the same time improving your relationship with food, food, your body, and yourself, check out my signature Happy Healthy Habits coaching program. I want you to feel as great as you can possibly feel. I care so much about your health and happiness, and I know that there's a way to get you to where you want to go. I am ready to help you get there, and if you are ready too, I encourage you to sign up for my Happy Healthy Habits coaching program. Click on the link in the description below and let's freaking do this thing. And if you want to learn more about the secret beliefs that we have about food, check out this video on the diet culture language you might be using without realizing it. And if you want more on creating a happier, healthier you, make sure you subscribe and hit the bell to be notified the next time I post another video. See you in the next one.