About Me

My name is Jan, and I'm 39, married to a great guy, and have 5 kids.  I keep busy being mom, and working from home part-time. 

I fell in love with health in 7th grade, having an amazing, award winning health teacher.  I didn't have great eating habits as a kid, but always maintained a pretty healthy weight because I was so active.  I love sports & competition, and played volleyball, basketball, and softball, and ran track.  I always knew that I wanted to be a teacher, and in college majored in secondary Physical Education and minored in Health Ed.

I taught health ed for 5 years, and then took a break from teaching to raise my kids.  I was also the wellness coordinator for our local school district for 4 years, creating and managing wellness programs for the employees.  My schedule got too busy, so I quit the wellness job a little over a year ago.

One of my passions right now is running.  I LOVE it.  I ran my first marathon in May, 2011.  I was all geared up to run another one in September, 2011, but had an emergency appendectomy in July and had to take nearly a month off of running.  I worked back into it easily, but then ended up having to adjust my plans.

I had an appointment with a naturalistic doctor that had me do some blood work.  When the results were back he told me I had incredibly high levels of candida.  He said it was causing a few of my liver enzymes to be elevated because my liver was overworking to eliminate the toxins produced by the candida.  He also said that candida sufferers tend to have food allergies, which I do (gluten & dairy).   He gave me a few prescriptions, recommended a bunch of supplements, and then told me how my diet needed to change to clear myself of the candida (and hopefully get rid of the allergies).

I decided that now is the time to tackle this issue, full force!  My appendectomy opened my eyes to how precious our health is, and I need to do everything I can to be as healthy as I can.  I'm going to keep running, keeping a base of about 18 miles a week (a bit tricky to have energy to run while cutting out so many carbs!).

This blog is a journal of my journey into the new world of holistic health.  I thought before that if I exercised a lot I was pretty healthy.  I'm learning that isn't the case.  I'm LOVING learning about this whole world of naturalistic healthy living out there I didn't even know existed!  (Or chose to ignore).