What's Your Story?

Words that people speak over us have the ability to affect us, but the words that matter the most, are the ones we speak over ourselves. You might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with health or fitness? My answer is it has more to do with it, than you could ever know. Our story and the narratives we tell ourselves affect not only what we do, but who we become. If you want to change your life, you have to first know what your story is and the narrative you tell yourself. Once you change your story you can change your life.  

From a young age I was painfully aware of my body, specifically my weight. Both my sister and mom were tiny, and I always seemed to be bigger than both of them. I loved to eat breakfast and I never passed up on sweets. I watched my mom pick apart her image in the mirror, never being happy with her weight or how she looked. My father was always one to pick on my weight. His words would ring in the back of my head, reminding me how I didn’t need to snack, or how I was bigger than I should be. By the time I was a teenager I filled my days with cheerleading, weight training and extra gym sessions in order to bear looking at myself in the mirror.

I developed a love hate relationship with my body. I loved to work out, but I also hated how I looked. Instead of fueling my body and being proud of how it performed, I worked out to avoid the ugly image peering back at me in the mirror. My high school years were filled with me rarely eating, or when I did, I would have a shake or a piece of cake.  I had a deep-rooted belief that I only deserved love if I was thin, and I never felt like I was enough. Skinny enough, pretty enough, light enough etc. No matter how hard I worked the narrative of not being enough played in my head.

When I came back from my first year at college, I had gained more than my freshman fifteen. I immediately put myself on an insane diet of 500 calories. I ran anywhere from 5-7 miles a day and quickly lost my weight. The problem was that I wasn’t running because I enjoyed it, I ran because I thought that was the only way I would stay thin. I routinely ran on 700 calories even though I was moving constantly for my job as a waitress. I was skinny, but I never had any energy, and I had no idea what healthy even was.  In my mind, health was being a certain weight or fitting in my size 2 pants. I slowly developed an eating disorder. I was able to get it under control at first, at least so I thought.

I remember being in the gym watching a woman walk by that was lean, strong and had beautiful muscles. I thought to myself, “I want to look like that.” I hired her to train me and went on my first prep for a bikini competition. She taught me how to count calories, track macros and, how I had to eat in order to put on muscle. The first time I stepped on stage I fell in love with myself, the determination, and will power I had. I had never pushed myself so hard in my life, and I had never felt prouder. I wish I could say that my healthy journey only went up from here, but as we know life has many highs and lows.

After my first show, I struggled to stay at my stage weight and was on a desperate mission to stay stage lean. The week after my show led to multiple binges on food that I couldn’t have during my prep. Not long after my first show, I went through a terrible heart break from my first love.  The man I thought I was going to marry wanted a different woman, which left my heart in shambles. Before I knew it, the eating disorder I thought was under wraps, peered its ugly head out and overtook me. The belief that I was only loveable when I was thin was confirmed the moment we broke up.

A vicious seven year eating disorder took over my life. It led me to keeping secrets, missing out on family events, friends, and life in general. The strict competitor diet only made my eating worse. I quickly deemed food as bad, or good, and would have severe anxiety when I would eat anything that wasn’t on my meal plan. When I decided to stop following a meal plan my grocery trips were filled with tears. I felt so confused on what healthy even was. With the large amounts on conflicting information on the internet I had no idea what to even eat.

My darkest moment was when I was living in Texas alone. I sat on my 14th story balcony and thought about jumping over. I had such a deep hatred for my body and felt like it was betraying me. I had found my identity in being a bikini competitor but the body looking back at me said anything other than that. The years of binging and purging took its toll and caused my body to hold onto everything. Thankfully a promise that God had given me many years prior kept me from jumping over the edge.

Fast forward a few years, I landed myself a job as a police officer. My life was packed with going through an academy, finishing field training, and learning my new job. My eating disorder was still around but the structure from the academy limited it immensely. My first few years on the job were spent on graveyards. The sad calls I went to slowly began to affect me, at that time my family felt like it was falling apart. The brokenness I felt is what led me to going to therapy to deal with what was truly going on.

For the first time in my life, I opened up about my eating disorder and the hatred I felt towards my body. I recognized that the story I kept telling myself was that I was only loveable when I was thin. I had a deep-rooted belief that I wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until I started working on changing this belief that my life began to change. I quit competing and went on a journey to teach myself what healthy meant for me. I learned to fuel my body, to prioritize sleep, recovery, and hydration. I found that the key to living is enjoying everything in moderation.

 I thought I would never step foot on a stage, yet alone fulfill my dream of getting my pro card. Ten years after my first steps on stage I found myself winning not only my pro card but winning the whole show. My struggle led me to start Signature Habits, which is a health and nutrition coaching business. I focus on simplifying health and teaching healthy habits that last. If my narrative of not being enough had never changed, I wouldn’t be sharing my story with you today.