My History

Missed the first part? Check it out here.

The worst of my symptoms was debilitating fatigue. But I wasn't a stranger to being tired, because I had a toddler. I remember asking my sister-in-law one day how tired she felt because she too had a toddler. I remember just telling her that I was exhausted by the end of the day, and she said the same thing.  The one thing I didn't tell her was that I didn't have any energy to spend doing things with my son. I could barely get up and make breakfast. If I did make breakfast, I couldn't clean up the dishes. I spent several months in this state. No matter how much sleep I got at night, I was still completely wiped by 9 am.

I had been working daily on my health journey. I was eating the right foods. I was following an eating plan, and I knew it worked.  It had worked prior to getting pregnant, but I wasn't seeing much progress at all. Now...to understand the lessons that the Lord has taught me over the last year and a half, you must understand more of my history.

Before getting pregnant, I had struggled with binge eating disorder, but in some strange way, being pregnant helped me with that. It wasn't as big of a struggle for me once I had my son. I'm not sure why that is, but I was working furiously at changing my relationship with food. I knew I needed a better relationship with it, as I had been very much in one extreme or another.

In 2014, I found the Whole30 program and used it as a way to live life. I had completed 8 rounds in just a few years, and I thought it had changed my life. Reading the book about finding food freedom forever is what I needed, and I really wanted to find it. But in reality, the program (which should be used as a 30-day elimination diet and nothing more) started the process of ruining my relationship with food. It makes you take out all inflammatory foods (gluten, dairy, grains, legumes, sugar, alcohol), doesn't allow you to recreate any sort of baked goods using "approved" foods, and it doesn't allow you to step on the scale at all for the 30 days.

I'm a black and white person...who's learning to live in a grey world. But this program was one I could definitely follow since it had strict guidelines. But instead of using the knowledge I learned from the round of the program, I began to see this as my lifestyle...a Whole365. As a perfectionist, it was so hard when I couldn't sustain it. Looking back, I see that it wasn't meant to be sustained. But what it did do was put me in a vicious cycle of restriction (taking out foods), deprivation (not having them for a long time), and binging (once I could have them, I couldn't stop). It was a cycle that began in 2014 and didn't slow down for the next 4 years. It consumed my thoughts and my actions.

In May 2018, a brand new eating program came out from the network marketing company that I've been a part of for the last 9 years. I was super skeptical at first. It promised to be the "undiet" where you could eat whatever you wanted to with no limitations on the amount of food. Seems crazy, right? With any program that is launched, it's tested by lots of people. In one of the test groups, I watched a couple of women with PCOS use the program and share about it. They had tremendous success, so I thought, "Yes! I'm going to try this. I'm going to prove to myself that I don't have to give up bread and dairy products."

So started my journey with my most favorite eating plan called the 2B Mindset. I tried it out on the go right away. We went to Europe for 3 weeks in May 2018, and I came home having lost a pound, even when eating the fun foods of other countries. I tried my best to stick to the principles of the plan (which are SO easy to implement), and I had seen progress on vacation. I was hooked. I later became a Certified Mindset Mentor, which just means I took extra classes and a test to be able to dig in deeper and help more people.

This plan, however, can feel very liberating....sometimes too liberating. There are no set guidelines on how much to eat, so it works well if you like or need to eat a lot of food. There are guidelines around certain types of food, such as "Fiber Filled Carbs" or "FFCs." To look for a great option, you want it to be 150 calories or less per serving, with 1 g of fiber per 10 g of carbohydrates. You want the fiber to be more than the sugar, and you want it to be a food that you will not overeat. If you can't control yourself around it, then it's not a good option for you.

This eating plan really allows you to dictate what works for you. And the longer I'm on this journey, the more I realize that every single person should be eating differently. Not one eating plan is going to work for everyone. We are all bio-individual. We each have different health needs. So finding the food that works for your body is truly an experiment, and one worth investing in.

Anyway, at first, I went hog wild. I really didn't understand the importance of figuring out which foods worked for me. I just knew that I wanted to include bread, sweets, and dairy products. I wanted to "prove" to the experts out there that I didn't have to go gluten and dairy-free. So sure, it was a little bit of pride. But off I went. The binge eating disorder ramped up again in late 2018 and I reached out to my coach about it. Yes, even coaches have coaches. ;) She was so encouraging, offering me ideas to implement. And then I got pregnant.

The weird thing about my pregnancy is that I didn't gain any weight. I was the exact same weight from the day I found out I was pregnant to the day I went into labor. I was definitely expecting to gain weight, and I wasn't sure I was ready for that part. But the Lord, gracious as He is, kept teaching me about nutrition in those 9 months. I kept learning, and I kept implementing. I still didn't take anything out of my diet (like gluten or dairy), but instead, using the scale, I learned what foods my body liked (when I lost weight) or what my body didn't like (when I gained weight) postpartum.

You can find part 3 here.