Hello there! I am excited that you are visiting my site. Let me tell you a little about myself and why I became a Health Coach.
I wasn’t always a health nerd. As a youth I thought organic was just a way for people to charge more money for food. I was very athletic and skinny and so everyone, including myself, thought I could eat whatever I wanted. It became something I was known for. Everyone referred to me as “The black hole”, or “Bottomless pit” and I enjoyed the attention I got from eating extreme amounts of junk food. I was known to eat 2 dozen donuts in one sitting, whole XL pizzas washed down with a 2 liter of soda, and entire bags of Halloween candy bars. It all seemed fine, because I never gained any weight. However, I soon found out that health isn’t just about what you look like on the outside. I began to have severe joint pain and cystic acne. I went from running 6 miles with ease to not even being able to run a mile, because my knees would get so swollen and painful I couldn’t even walk. My body was falling apart.
Things began to change when I got a job working at Trader Joe’s and started to eat higher quality foods. Then I got a position at Whole Foods and took advantage of their employee education program learning about how foods affect our health and that there are more important things in food than calories. I began learning about nutrient density, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and their relationship to a thing called inflammation. It turns out that my problems could all be traced to systemic inflammation due to all the over processed foods I was eating. I cleaned up my diet by preparing the majority of my meals and cutting out all fast food and soda. I noticed a very rapid decrease in all my symptoms and was able to start running again. I felt great and that further motivated me to continue learning about how to live a healthy lifestyle. I then moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming in 2010 and started working at Natural Grocers where I took advantage of their abundance of free education opportunities. I also started getting into health related podcasts and YouTube channels.
How this led to me becoming a health coach and wanting to start Fungi Health Coaching is that with all this research I was doing I found the idea of health to be very confusing and clouded by differing opinions and misinformation. I had to become really focused on facts and weeding out what is opinion presented as fact. It was a lot of work and took a lot of time and devotion to get a sound understanding of what is healthy and I wondered how the majority of people were going to be able to pursue health with the same kind of devotion that I had poured into it. I worked at a job that provided access to that kind of information, while most people don’t. This is when I shifted my dream of being a firefighter to being a health coach. I always thought I could help people as a firefighter, but in my pursuit of my own health found that I can help a great deal more as a health coach. I hope you find a lot of helpful information on this site and please reach out if you need assistance or clarity. I’m here to help. Cheers!
Fungi Health Coaching 