When you’re in the role of a mother, you just have so much more responsibility as you care for your beautiful little humans all day, every day. Having energy to do this is SO important!
I hear that this is a common thing that a lot of mom’s struggle with. They just don’t have the energy to get through the day and support their families.
I can totally relate!! After having my second son, my energy was super shaky and I was not in a good spot. My sleep was a wreck and even if the baby was sleeping, I couldn’t sleep well!
I would get easily agitated, which is not really like me, and with children you just can’t be that way! Even though kids are the best thing ever and I love motherhood more than anything in the world, being easily agitated will really make you agitated all day, every day. Emotionally, I was a rollercoaster – I would drop things a lot and would just start crying due to frustration and too many raw emotions.
Something had to change!
My health was not where it was supposed to be, especially with all the effort that I was putting in. Not only was I not enjoying motherhood – an incredibly special season of life – but I wasn’t able to support and love my family as well as I wanted to.
I think I needed to forgive myself a bit first.
I had dabbled in the intermittent fasting and keto approaches for years and it was just not right for me. I had to recognize that this was a bad decision because after multiple years of this, it kind of just messed up my system. And I don’t want to offend anyone (everyone has their different ideas on nutrition) because I know you can feel really good for a little while on keto or intermittent fasting. I definitely felt awesome for a bit and I liked that feeling and so I kind of just ran with it and kept it going. Then eventually it backfired on me. It did some damage to my thyroid and it totally messed up my energy, my sleep and my moods.
I was breast-feeding at the time and somehow I managed to nurse both my boys until they were two. However, I had to take tons of supplements constantly because I was feeling so depleted of nutrients. Between nursing, surfing, traveling and working out, my body just had nothing left to give.
What I love most about health is that we can be our own advocates. I love the idea that we can problem-solve for ourselves and heal our bodies. So I started taking note of all the things that I felt like were going wrong with my body and started doing lots of research.
I love the idea that we can problem-solve for ourselves and heal our bodies.
My brother, who’s a diabetic, turned me on to Matt Blackburn’s Podcast and so I really dove into that. I was fascinated to listen to what my brother was listening to. He’s on his own health journey and I’m on mine and I love to support him in any way I can. This podcast got a lot of questions flowing in my mind and I realized that I had been extremely deficient in carbs for a while. I had dabbled in a low carb diet for a season and my body was doing too much and not being fed enough of anything, but especially of carbs.
So as I researched more, I became really fired up about pro-metabolic nutrition.
There were a lot of resources I really liked, but a favorite was (and still is!) definitely the Freely Rooted Podcast hosted by my friends Kori Meloy and Fallon Lee! After learning more about this lifestyle, I decided to stop avoiding the foods that were ‘demonized’ or unpopular in our culture such as some types of fruits, potatoes, animal fats, dairy, bone broth and liver meats. I also decided that I was going to eat the amount of food that my body needed and eat only what I was intuitively craving. This was a big change from stressing out about eating only low-carb foods, counting my calories and doing intermittent fasting. I focused on eating large varieties of whole, mostly unprocessed foods of all types.
It’s been really fun to fast forward and I’m still on my healing journey, but I have this sense of peace and relief now that I know I am on the right track.
I just feel that I’m supporting my body a lot better than I ever have. Just to give a quick little snippet, I’m a mom of three now, I’m very athletic (I’m working out less than I used to, but I’m still doing a lot) and I went from eating probably about 2,000 or less calories a day to probably about 3,500 or 4,000 calories now. It’s way easier for me to manage my weight, my energy is awesome, my sleep is way better and my emotions are more stable! Yay!
Looking back, I wish that I started this journey sooner! I think the restrictive eating was just destroying my body!
My poor husband haha. We would do everything together because we’re kind of on the same health journey and his body was like shriveling away during our intermittent fasting phase. He would just lay on the couch, exhausted. It was so bad! He’s a very muscular, strong human and now every day I’m like, “hun, have you eaten enough?”. If he’s laying on the couch, I’m like, “here, eat some fruit juice or a healthy carb”.
My journey has taught me that when we support our bodies in the right way, we will be able to overcome the challenges that the world throws at us a lot better and love our people more fully, whether we are a mom or not! The world needs more loving humans right now so I am cheering you on to keep going on your health journey.
Life is such a gift!
