For my first blog post EVER on my brand new website I have decided it might be helpful for me to tell my own health story, the evolution of my personal health journey, at least as far as it's taken me. Hopefully this story will convey who I am, how I got here, and what I'm hoping to do as a health coach. This won't be the complete story (because ya'll don't want to read all of it, trust me!). All the problems of the story will not be solved by the ending either. That's because "health" is a process. It ebbs and flows with our lives as we encounter new struggles and successes. I'm still learning and changing my approach to my own health as my life unfolds. I hope my story helps you or inspires you in your own health travels. 

So here goes... 

To set the scene, it was more than a decade ago. I was in college studying music performance at one of the largest universities in the country, a place far away both in miles and character from the very nurturing, tiny private school home environment in which I had grown up. I was excited for this new step in life but also completely insecure and totally out of my element. Three months in, and I found myself involved in three very unhealthy relationships.

The obvious unhealthy relationship was the one with my boyfriend, who frequently put me down for my looks, for my privileged background, for things that were fundamental to my being. In short, he just made me feel like crap about myself. There's nothing that will rock your world more than someone you love making you question everything about yourself, including the things you can't change, and this boyfriend did that for me in spades.

Which brings me to the next unhealthy relationship - the one I had with myself. I just plain did not know how to care for myself! I had unreasonable expectations for myself (like thinking I should be able to get by on little to no sleep). I compared myself relentlessly to the other musicians around me inevitably falling short every single time. The things my boyfriend said to me were nothing compared to the thoughts I had about myself. On top of all of this I had absolutely no idea how to feed myself in a healthy way.

Which brings me to the final unhealthy relationship - the one I had with food. My cooking knowledge was, well, almost nonexistent, and after growing up on home-cooked meals with junk food being relatively rare in the house, I became OBSESSED with the terrible junky food in the college cafeteria. Every day I was gorging on the all-too-available pancakes, pizza, mozzarella sticks, soda, coffee, cakes, sugar, sugar, sugar. I was completely shocking my system. (And let's not even talk about the alcohol!) I was eating erratically, using sugar and coffee to fuel my violin practice sessions, and gorging on pizza with friends (and the TV show Friends) for all night long study sessions.

These unhealthy relationships all showed up in and on my body. They showed up in my increased weight, in the painful cystic acne that took over my face, in the excruciating and irregular periods I was having (until I went on birth control), in my inability to sleep at night but extreme difficulty keeping myself awake during the day. It also showed up in my violin playing. I was tense all over, constantly clenching my jaw, neck, and shoulders, having fits of shaking while performing, and just saying downright mean things about myself in the practice room. 

None of these relationships stood alone. They all fed into each other, fueling and contributing to a spiral of unhealthiness that just kept getting worse. My unhealthy eating habits caused unwanted weight gain and contributed to my worsening skin troubles. This led my insensitive boyfriend to say things like "You know you'd actually look okay if you lost a few pounds and cleared up your skin." (charming, right?) My boyfriend's criticisms led me to feel even worse about myself, which in turn fueled even more binge-eating junk food and negative self-talk, which fueled the skin issues even more, and around and around it all went. 

What I've noticed in my own story I've noticed in the stories of others - our health problems are not usually the result of any one thing. As was the case for me, there are many kinds of barriers in the path to health. Sometimes those barriers self-reinforce and fuel each other. The things standing in the way could be simple factors like time, convenience, knowledge, sleep deprivation, and stress, but they can also be more complicated factors - like unhealthy relationships, unsatisfying career life, insecurity in one's body, or unhealed emotional wounds. 

The good news here is that often a positive step in one area can lead to positive steps in the other areas of one's life. A shift in the balance can lead to other shifts down the line, and that entry point can happen from multiple angles. Looking back, I can't spot any one moment when I completely reversed the track I was on with my health. It was a combination of changing circumstances, decisions, and action steps I took for myself. It involved other people coming into my life who gave me support and unconditional love. Yes, it also involved work. It's still taking some work now to be honest, but taking those steps has been so so worth it. 

More on that in part 2!