Hello blog family! Did you miss me? I sure missed you! I have been MIA for the past few months since I started school to become a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner… it has been basically a second job keeping me extremely busy! But I am back now and ready to start sharing the incredible journey that this has become and all of the amazing things that I am learning about the human body, nutrition and our relationship to the food that we eat.
I am doing this program through the Nutritional Therapy Association and it is an extremely in depth, intense 9 month long program that includes 3 weekend workshops where we meet in person. I was lucky (or rather it was fate) that after looking at this program for the last two years the Spring session this year included a workshop venue here in Denver, so I wouldn’t have to pay for plane tickets and hotel rooms for the workshop weekends and I could come home every night! This was important because well, we just got married last August and everyone knows weddings are expensive…
We had our first weekend workshop at the end of April and I feel like I have found my people, the place that I have been searching for where I feel like I truly belong. Most of the time I don’t mind being the odd one out with dietary restrictions or always being “so healthy” and either praised or criticized for it. But sometimes it’s just tough and I won’t lie about that. All weekend long we talked about nutrition, food, future goals and plans for what we would do with our certification when we were done with school. It isn’t a competition, we are all supporting each other and rooting for one another to succeed because we all have the same passion for wanting to help others heal! It is truly amazing.
The past few months have been a crazy juggling act between working full time, school, seeing friends when possible, finding out in April we had an opportunity to purchase our dream house/property with 2.5 acres of land and trying to take care of myself. Truth be told I don’t think I was taking as good of care of myself as I thought because a lot of things caught up with me in the last month. Stress is EXTREMELY hard on the body and all of it’s functions and so many things both in our lives and outside things cause stress to us on a daily basis. So here is your friendly reminder to RELAX. Stop trying to do everything. Make sure you are listening to what your body is telling you whether it is more sleep, skip a hard workout for a walk, chill on the couch for a day. Never feel guilty about taking time off from everything you have to do to take care of yourself. I had a shoulder injury creep up on me (that didn’t really creep, all the signs were there but I ignored them) and recently have caught an awful spring cold that has me coughing myself awake all night and early in the morning even this weekend- woke up before 6 each day. Looking back I know there are things that I could’ve done differently to prevent the shoulder injury, maybe not the cold because those are sometimes hard to avoid but taking care of yourself first is always important.
That’s it for today, just wanted to check in and let you know I’ll be more active here in sharing things that I am learning. As a community outreach project I want to use this blog to share all of the awesome things I am learning about nutrition. Hope everyone has a happy rest of the weekend and gets some relaxing in before the start of another week!