Patti’s Personal Journey

     My journey to wellness is not a destination but rather a daily process of growing while making the best decisions adjusting to the constant changes of life.  I have learned patience, flexibility and self-awareness on my journey; each day bringing new challenges of maintaining balance and joy.

    My ah-hah moment begins in 1995 when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, an autoimmune thyroid disease.  I had just read “Homemade Health” by Raymond & Dorothy Moore and slowly began to realize a direct connection between the food I ate and how I felt.  My daughter had just finished her 9th round of antibiotics and she wasn’t even 2 yet and I needed to know “why” she kept getting sick; so began my journey.  The following year, I became pregnant with my 3rd child just as we broke ground on a house we were building ourselves.  We were living with a 3 and 5 year old in the unfinished basement while building with no kitchen, just a crock-pot and a utility sink.  I was still working part-time outside the home having no computer and just the library and newsletters for a resource, I read anything I could get my hands on, eager to learn.  Ten months later we finished the house, my son was born and I was able to stay home and began homeschooling my daughters.  I experimented on my growing family and tried different approaches to eating, finding local resources for healthier food, blending my new knowledge into everyday life.  My mindset at that time was “all or nothing” and I’d jump into a diet all the way.  When one diet didn’t work, I tried the next one and dreamed of going to school to learn more, but the funds weren’t there nor was the timing right, so I kept researching and studying, finally getting a computer with internet making things more accessible.

     In the meantime, my son became ill after a short virus and I spent 18 months traveling to doctor appointments in three states trying to get him diagnosed, finally to be told to remove gluten from his diet and he’d be fine.  But what was gluten?  I had just spent the last few years learning how to make my own whole-grain wheat bread!  I felt like I was starting over, now embarking on a gluten-free direction to learn how to feed my son.  Back then I experimented with coconut flour at a whopping $8/lb.; gluten-free was unheard of in the mainstream.  While my son was now on the road to recovery, our oldest child was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, she had just turned 13 and it was 2005.  I didn’t help my family transition well to healthier eating as I didn’t seem to be able to define it.  “Healthy” was always changing as I learned new things and I was still “all or nothing” and now overwhelmed to have 4 children and a husband, all with different needs and likes for food.  Our world was upside down and filled with day and night research, more traveling for doctor appointments, surgery and radioactive iodine.  I became a patient advocate, joined an international support group, took being screamed at by the head of nuclear medicine for becoming “educated” and daring to question the poison they were giving my child for treatment. I also saw my husband be laughed at by a prominent endocrinologist after my husband suggested something had gone wrong with my daughter’s immune system to have cancer in the first place.  The doctor said the immune system was not related to the endocrine system, I was shocked.  My passion grew stronger and I learned more about myself and my strengths and weaknesses.

     The next several years were spent learning more, making connections and being at home feeding my diverse family with all their special dietary needs.  I continued to study and learn. My extreme personality was softening with all my experiences and I had now collected the pieces of nutrition from different diets that worked for our family, but none worked as a whole and each of us had different needs.  Following one plan would have been so much easier.  I also encountered negative, outside influences and watched people love their food so much they would choose to slowly suffer rather than make dietary changes.  I became aware that how people are influenced by food is related to emotional attachments, family history, habits (good and bad) and parents, each coming from a different background and working together to make new habits for their children.  I learned food isn’t everything; it’s a piece of the “whole” puzzle of the wellness of the human body.

     Finally the funds were available and the timing was right, and in 2018, I completed the Nutritional Therapy Consultant™ program under the Nutritional Therapy Association.  The foundational principles focused on nutrition along with digestion, blood sugar handling, mineral balance, healthy fats, hydration, importance of sleep and relaxation, cooking techniques, food sourcing and stress management.  I chose this training specifically from many other choices since those 20 years of self-studying I felt their principles and viewpoints represented all I had learned through my trial and error methods.

     There is no magic moment or a quick fix or one way to do things, but there is hope that the body is very resilient and if we focus on feeding it properly, we can be our best self.  I am now in a new season of life and have created Nutrition for Healthier Living in hopes of encouraging others to follow their journey to wellness.