Wedding Inspiration : Health
When we sat down to think about all the wedding inspiration posts that we wanted to do on our blog one about health came up. So many brides worry about dieting to be able to fit into the perfect dress or be their smallest on their wedding day. There is so much pressure to be perfect on the wedding day rather than focusing on having a healthy lifestyle that can continue after the wedding. We’ve seen this bring about unneeded stress and anxiety so we wanted to share with you a post from one of our brides. Below Samantha shares a little of her story about searching for wellness that lasted after the wedding day!
For the longest time I thought my journey with food, abdominal issues, and general “wellness” was this weird thing I was always going to deal with through life. Sometimes the foods I’d eat would affect me positively, sometimes they’d affect me negatively. Sometimes I’d not feel hungry and then realized it has been 8 hours and I only had a small cup of oatmeal for breakfast and didn’t feel an ounce of hunger. It wasn’t until I had to start sneaking out of nursing school classes to take a packet of 6-10 supplements about three times a day that I realized more and more that something was off. While learning the ins and outs of normal and abnormal organ functions, I had been seeing a nutritionalist for 9 months after experiencing a minor medical mystery that’s only explanation was “everything seems okay,” but there was never a reason why is happened, how to prevent it from happening again, or how to fix it.
The nutritionalist had kick started a road to recovery for me and I was so very thankful, but after about 9 months of eating a diet more strict then Whole 30 and taking tons of supplements I woke up one day and decided I was finished. I was a slave to a timeline of supplements, I was a slave to what I could and couldn’t eat, and the growing concern of my then boyfriend now husband that I wasn’t eating enough was wearing on my last nerve and part of me even started to think maybe he was right. Sure, I kind of felt better but I still didn’t feel normal. After that long of a period WITHOUT certain foods, I began to reintroduce all the things I “couldn’t” eat, with very little regard for how it might affect my system. Let’s just say reintroducing foods after long periods of fasting from them is rough, part of the reason Whole 30 gives you a guide to do it, and why is only lasts 30 days…
Although I wasn’t feeling better, I did start to feel some scope of normal again, minus the runs to the bathroom. I was learning in school about what the body needs and what it can handle and the amount of coping the body does to deal with stress, sickness, and in some cases, the inevitable shut down of some organs when it can no longer cope. The more I learned, the more I began to think, if the body was created to function at a certain level, but can function at an unhealthier level, why do we keep allowing it to stay at the lower and not promote the higher? I recognized this even more when I started working. I realized I never felt well, was exhausted constantly, coffee was a necessity and was constantly told this was going to be as good as it gets.
It was around this time that I started watching a friend of mine go through a radical lifestyle change. This friend was a Bojangles eating-48oz coke drinking- calories don’t count around me-friend who knows me better than I know myself. She started sharing with me about nutritional rebalancing and how that lower level body function, where you just don’t feel that great but you make it along to just make it along, that it wasn’t her normal anymore. That she was sleeping better than she ever had, she was keeping up with her newly adopted 4 year olds twins, that she was running again, but she couldn’t figure out if the weight she lost was from having the energy to keep up with the boys for the first time or her body functioning closer to the level its supposed to be at brought it off naturally. We later realized it was a mix of the two.
While that sounded great I was super hesitant. I researched and researched and researched some more until I realized I didn’t really see anything blatantly wrong. The program promoted long term lifelong health, used countless herbs, enzymes, plant sources from all natural sources, the most incredible protein source and was backed up with TONS of research describing how it supports the body’s natural detox process to function how it should be.
When I finally started the program I realized I wasn’t missing out on food. I was getting the richest nutrients and watched as my body positively responded to it. I had so much energy! I don’t remember having energy like this any other time in my adult life. I noticed my body retaining muscle whether I was working out super heavily or not and my stress levels decreased. I didn’t just feel normal, I felt free and that included the times that I’d eat those old trigger foods that used to effect me so severely.
So why are you reading this on a photographers blog? Because these friends of mine are sweet enough to believe in me and trust me. Also, because I want to help you. Because I don’t believe this is a product with a singular function. I’ve seen people use this because of tensions in their lives, for weight loss, for endurance in physical activities. I’ve seen mental clarity for myself and countless others, I’ve seen individuals age gracefully because so many stressors have eased. One of my favorite quotes is from C.S. Lewis “Friendship is born at the moment one says to another, WHAT, you too? I thought that no one but myself”. And I’m here to tell you there’s a community of people who have been through the stress and tension of life and planning a wedding and the junk that comes with it and I’m here to help. I don’t want to fix you, I don’t think you need that. I’d love to walk with you and share this amazing adventure I’ve been on and walk you through it too. Nutritional cleansing is a commitment to treating yourself well and enjoying yourself in return.
So here’s to being kind! Be well, friends.
Samantha
To contact Samantha and hear more about the program that helped her get her health, well being, and stress levels under control, you can email her at snsiviglia@gmail.com or feel free to call her at 407.719.6304 !
