You GUYS!!!! Welcome!!! I am so excited you are back! It has been so fun to start a blog again! My last blog started in 2008 I think?? Haha! Blogs were the best connection to others before Facebook took off! I am finding more and more the idea of a blog super exciting. I am so ready to bring you continual content that you find interesting, teach you (and me) something, and leaves you feeling both fulfilled in the moment AND wanting more!! I totally know it is possible!
Lately, I have been thinking SOO much about my journey and have even had several friends reach out to chat about it also! They are seeing me step into this new role as a business owner and certified coach and I have LOVED hearing their thoughts on my process to get here! Some friends have known me since I was a little and others are newer friendships, but no matter when we connected, it has been amazing to hear their thoughts on my path so far!
We could take it WAY back… to when I was super little kids obsessed knowing what was for breakfast the next day or I would not go to sleep, lol. Or we can go to high school when I first experienced burnout from doing WAY too many things! Or in college when I dealt with chronic illness for the first time or when I got married young and raised 4 kids getting sick again or when I made my first Facebook video hustling to sell a top direct sales makeup product!
The more I have thought about what has led me here, to creating Huntress Coaching, I see that ALL things I have done and been through have led me here! I feel ALL the feels when I think about my life especially for all the things that did not make sense and all the times I felt alone and insignificant. If you are reading this and have felt those same things… know that I GET you and HEAR you! It’s never fun in the dark times…. the times that feel like you will never make it out! I have been there too!
I want to tell you about 3 main parts of my journey: the battle with food, the battle with chronic illness, and the victories that have led me here!
#1- The Battle with Food-
My disordered eating consciously started around the time I was 15 years old. As I mentioned above, I was aware of food and its comfort from a super young age. But the teenage years are when I really discovered the safety bubble food brought! No matter WHAT emotion I was dealing with, food was there! From celebrations to feelings of complete despair, food could momentarily fill that void! As I grew up, went to college, got married, started a family…. my relationship with food just became more intense AND complicated.
I felt like a failure repeatedly every time I would overeat. So many nights I would cry alone feeling like no one in the entire world was going through what I was. Looking back, I see so many situations that I took WAY out of context which now seem like super little things.
The problem with my battle with food is that it felt helpless because I needed to eat to survive! It’s not like I could stop eating! So, I would eat more and then workout more and do more which created massive burnout!
#2- The Battle with Chronic Illness-
Several times I can specifically remember, my body sent me signs I was not ok. My labs would be all over the place and many reoccurring diagnoses would be rampant including mono, adrenal fatigue, cortisol imbalance, and anxiety.
Now I can look back and see how this burnout triggered the chronic illness. I was caught in this vicious cycle of a lack of self-worth, overeating, feeling worse, exercising and/or doing too much, and then dealing with physical and mental symptoms of the burnout. My body was screaming for help and it took so long to understand this! SOO many doctors, counselors, therapists, coaches, and holistic approaches and still I could not get a long-term plan in place!
In June of 2018 I was introduced to some amazing superfoods that changed my health drastically! I still use them today! I was able to find a balance I had not experienced in my body for over 10 years, but I would still deal with the emotional eating up until the end of 2020.
#3- The Victories
· Finding these superfoods led my path to share with over 200 people and help coach them on their journeys. I developed leadership skills with the support of amazing mentors that taught me the importance of boundaries, setting goals, and achieving them.
· Supporting others with their health allowed me to see how many people, besides myself struggle with their own relationship with food! How is this a victory? It is a victory because I followed this path that led me to ask the question…
· The question: How can I help them overcome their emotional connections with food? How can I find the tools to not only help them heal their relationship with food but for myself as well?
· The question led me to go back to school, obtaining my life coaching certificate, my NLP (Neuro-Linguistics Programming) practitioner’s certificate, and most recently my EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) certificate specializing in emotional eating.
· And the victory of sitting here typing this thinking of all the things that have led to this moment: the eating, the anxiety, the illness, the English degree in college, the joys and pains my husband and I have experienced, being a mother, starting a business as a professional harpist when I had young children, moving our family to raise them in Utah, triathlon races, finding direct sales in 2014 so I could learn about taking risks and finding my voice online, finding my health company in 2018 so I could have the nutritional support my body needed, to the question of how I could help my clients, to all the school, to now…
· Here I am ready to serve you with the tools I have learned, invested in, and continually practice on myself and now, for as many of you as I can!
· Celebrating officially my new healthy relationship with food and with myself! The ENTIRE journey has led me here… loving and living my life more fully than I ever thought possible! For the first time in my life, I am full of more hope than I ever imagined!
· Now I get to share these tools and techniques with YOU!
Here’s to hope! Here’s to loving life! Here’s to know we are enough! Here’s to the process of removing the negative thoughts that have led to the reasons we have been stuck in the first place!
Xoxo,
Leanna
