***DISCLAIMER: Ok Sister, I just want to preface this today with a little disclaimer… the next two weeks, I’ll be sharing my journey to where I am today. I’ll be honest, it’s messy, and I’m going to be talking about my struggles with an eating disorder, my unhealthy relationship with food, and more, which may be triggering for some of y’all. So please skip this if it may be triggering for you.

However, I feel that it is SO important for me to share my journey with you, because at the end of the day I know that there are women who might be in the same boat I was in, and my story may shine the light I so desperately needed in those difficult times. The Lord is GOOD and He has brought me and my family through all of the things I am about to share. I pray that He continues to work in me so that I can be a testament to His goodness and faithfulness to other women. ***

My fitness journey started about 15 years ago and I’ll be honest, it has been a roller coaster ride with a ton of ups and downs. However, it’s heavy on my heart to share it with you all because it’s made me into who I am today. So let’s go back and start at my life prior to me ever thinking about health, fitness, and all that.

In highschool, I was a softball player, and super athletic and active. I was popular and voted Most School Spirit, but I used food and how much I could eat to get attention in any way that I could. And even though I was active, I was extremely overweight and I didn't realize the damage I was doing to my body with overeating.

I graduated from high school at 175lbs at 5'2. For that height, I was at least 35lbs overweight and honestly, didn't really know it. That size was all that I had ever known, and it was completely normal to me.

This carried over into college, where I played collegiate softball and experienced the same things. We played ball for months with practices and conditioning before the season would start. Workouts, practices, games. It was an intense schedule and lifestyle, however, I was still struggling with my weight and the foods that I ate were always counterproductive to the amount of time I spent being active.

This continued on until my sophomore year, when my teammate Lisa, convinced me to start running with her. Y’all ...I HATED it. But because I am super competitive by nature, I sucked it up did it. And she pushed me and was a great accountability partner. To my surprise, I even started making better choices with the food that I ate as well. Once school ended, I continued to run that summer, lost weight and really for the first time thought "there might be something to this running and eating better." So, I kept going, mainly because I was seeing the numbers on the scale go down, and I kept pushing.

Let me just say, even though this period in my life had a bit of an upturn, it hasn't been all roses and rainbows. Things started to go downhill my senior year of college. Unfortunately I got caught up in bad eating habits again, and drinking which caused me to gain my weight back. The day that I finally realized it was the day of my graduation. On a day that should have been happy and celebratory, I remember being so unhappy and sad because nothing fit that morning while I was getting ready. I just felt defeated and devastated.

For awhile, I tried to keep my spirits up. I was about to start graduate school 2 hours away from home, a place where I could have a fresh start. I hoped I would change my eating and get back to getting healthy and I could go back to feeling confident in myself again.

Sadly, just the opposite happened. I was going to school full time, working late nights at a bar and grill and living by myself. I was unhappy, overworked, stressed about school, and I felt out of control of my life. Being an extrovert, I get my energy from people, so living by myself did not help at all and before I knew it, I started down the spiraling road of an eating disorder.

Because I didn’t know how to cope with everything that was happening in my life, binging and purging were my choice of escape - a way to take control of just one thing. For a minute, doing this “seemed” to help the stresses of life that I was feeling.

However, I got to the point that I realized what I was doing to my body and I just couldn’t any more. So I quit grad school one month before I was supposed to graduate. Even though it was a hard decision (and I’ll be honest, my pride was HURT), I was so done and fed up with being sad. I was done with being lonely. I was done with being stressed to the point of harming my body as a way to take control. So I packed up my things and headed back home to start a new chapter of life.

I’ll be continuing my story next week on the blog. But before I go, I want to share a few notes as I look back on these years of my life.

First of all, if you or someone you love struggles with an eating disorder, I encourage you to reach out to the National Eating Disorders Association’s hotline where you can find local resources to help start your journey to recovery. Their number is (800) 931-2237.

Finally, I pray that as you read my story that you’ll understand how extremely difficult this is to share, open up, and show the hurt in my life. But more than that, I hope that you can look at how the Lord has worked in me, brought me to a healthy place of loving my body for how He made it to be. There is ALWAYS hope, no matter where you are or what you are struggling with! YOU, my dear friend, are so incredibly loved, wonderfully made, and WORTHY of knowing and living your life in a way that reflects that way He sees you.