About Me
Hi everyone! My name is Faith. I’m the blogger behind For the Health of It, a healthy living website that encourages women to embrace their bodies and find confidence in who they are beyond the scale.
I started the website in Spring of 2010, when I was just beginning to confront my eating disorder head on. I’d been miserable in my skin for the past three years, and I’d almost allowed insecurities to ruin my life. I’d been the girl who subsisted on coffee, wintergreen lifesavers, and chicken broth. I’d been the university student who gained the freshman junior fifteen thanks to regular social indulgences, and later tried to remedy it with diet bars and canned fruit. I’d been a meal-replacement shake fiend, a low-carbie, a salad bar devotee, and everything in between.
Finally, though, I realized: I was worth more than the number on the scale! As with so many other women, I’d been living as a slave to the scale. I never thought that I was good enough.
One day, a friend asked me why I always put myself down when he gave me a compliment. Up to that point, I’d never thought the compliments were true, never thought that I was deserving of the term “pretty” or “beautiful.” That particular conversation, though, made me confront the doubt that I’d been harboring for years. I finally understood that I had plenty of reasons to be proud of myself and confident in my appearance. I let go of the negativity and allowed myself to see the things that everyone else had already seen in me: a strong, happy, confident woman.
I’ve been transitioning to clean eating since fall of 2009. In May 2010, I made a commitment to go vegetarian for a month. It began as an experiment of sorts – I wanted to see how I would feel if I cut meat out of my diet. During the trial month, I didn’t miss the meat one bit and decided to continue on as a full-time vegetarian. Now, over a year later, I’m still loving my vegetarian lifestyle! Although I dabbled in veganism, I felt that I was walking a fine line of depriving myself of foods I truly enjoyed and felt great eating, so I incorporated eggs, cheese and yogurt back into my diet, but in great moderation.
As I’ve embraced a plant-based diet, I’ve fallen in love with eating a healthy, balanced variety of natural and minimally processed foods. I’ve got an equally voracious appetite for brownies as I do for broccoli. The deprivation of diets past is no longer welcome in my life! Life was never meant to be a world of counting calories, obsessing over fat, or running yourself ragged exercising just to burn off your last meal. I’m so blessed to have learned that…even if it took me three years of extremely destructive habits and a very tedious, rocky road to recovery.
I enjoy running, although I hardly consider myself a runner. I have grand dreams of one day running a marathon, but training is very hard for me. Once I feel trapped into something, my body naturally rebels against it. For that reason, I try to enjoy multiple forms of exercise instead of dedicating myself to just one. Yoga, running, weight training and elliptical sessions are each sporadically incorporated into my workouts!
I’m constantly striving to work my love for food and fitness into my hectic life. I’m a writer/editor, and I adore my job – especially after spending several months time in a preschool teaching position that made me outright miserable. Taking a leap of faith in a career change was one of the most beneficial decisions I’ve ever made. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in English in May of 2010, and I hope to pursue a Master’s degree in Non-Fiction Writing in the near future. In the meantime, I continue to foster my NFL and Neiman Marcus addictions while embracing the crazy things that life throws my way!
