My Health & Wellness Journey
Growing Up
When I was younger, I was lucky enough to have lived in a place where people were relatively healthy. Most of my meals contained a protein, a starch, & a vegetable & I was rarely allowed to eat fast food. Lunches at whole foods with my mom were fairly common, but lunches at taco trucks & subway with my dad were also just as frequent. We almost always had ice cream in the house, but rarely had processed c&y. Because of this lifestyle & balance, I did not have an unhealthy relationship with food. I was one of the lucky few little girls who was able to love food & love my body. Exercise was not a necessary evil in order to look good, but was instead just a part of what my family did together. This lasted through the majority of my childhood, but not unlike many teens, it changed a bit once I got to high school.
I danced for as long as I can remember but my schedule for both school & dance picked up drastically in high school. Between balancing countless advanced classes & spending hours at dance team practices & at the dance studio, I began to see food as one of the many things in my life I felt I could control. With so much uncertainty as to where I would go to college, who my friends were, & what was to come, I developed some unhealthy obsessive compulsive behaviors. & for me, these behaviors looked positive from the outside. I felt the need to appear put together, get straight A’s, keep my room extremely organized, & only eat extremely healthy foods. I lost any sense of balance that I had previously had & became obsessed with the idea of being able to plan & control as much of my life as possible.
Slipping Up
Growing up as a dancer, it was easy to compare myself to other girls around me, & as we got older, I soon learned that girls with “better bodies” were rewarded in many different areas of life. As I started obsessing over colleges & feeling the need to be absolutely perfect in order to attend a top tier university, I began to want to control everything in my life, including my diet & my weight. I began to test myself to see how long I could go without eating x,y,or z junk food & became competitive with myself. This led to an unhealthy way of looking at food as either a reward or a punishment, not simply as the fuel my body needs. I would go weeks without touching junk food, then all the sudden pig out of pizza, tacos, & ice cream all at once. Needless to say, my weight fluctuated & my mental health deteriorated.
Studying Up
This attitude lasted until right before I started my freshman year of college. I wanted to get in shape before starting school in the fall so I spent hours at the gym & even more hours browsing through health journals & articles about what was truly best for my body. I read every medical article I could get my h&s on, found a mentor who taught me about traditional Chinese medicine, learned about how stress & other emotions can impact my body, & began a journey into learning how to best take care of myself.
Owning Up
Today, I aim to take a holistic approach to health, beauty, & wellness. What does this mean? Well, it means I am human, but it also means I aim to incorporate healthy habits into daily routines. I am a HUGE routine person, which ultimately helps me feel on track & balanced without slipping into obsessive & unhealthy behaviors. As of now, I have decided to take a semester off of school to focus on both mental & physical health so I have way more time on my hands at the moment! Because of this I am learning to find balance between routine & spontaneity at the same time. I aim to fuel my body with foods that I know will help me look & feel my best & have recently transitioned to using all natural hair, skin, & beauty products!
