I really don't know what I'm thinking, starting a whole new section of my blog, when I don't even update the other portion of my blog nearly enough!! However, I am trying to get organized in every area of life, so why not my blog too? I'd like to keep my more personal stuff organized away from the more 'professional' side of things, and I also want a place where, if I see a cool recipe or read an interesting fact, I can quickly share it without having to make sure to tag it differently from my other posts. And I don't really want my personal blog to become another sterile, impersonal health journal or cookbook. But I do like sharing what I've learned and praying it helps convict others to live their lives to the fullest through health. And I think sometimes it helps to distinguish between what is helping emotionally and spiritually, and then what is helping physically. They all interlap quite a bit, hence the fact that this is still the same blog, just a different page on the blog. So here I go, organizing between personal and professional and experimenting with how they can overlap.
This post probably is just going to be more introductory, and then we'll see what happens in the future!
I guess a good way to introduce this portion of the blog would be to share my bio from my school website. Hopefully you've read my 'green and gross' post, but this also gives a good quick summary.
This post probably is just going to be more introductory, and then we'll see what happens in the future!
I guess a good way to introduce this portion of the blog would be to share my bio from my school website. Hopefully you've read my 'green and gross' post, but this also gives a good quick summary.
Hello! My name is Rachel Hester. I am 29 (yiikes!!) and if you sang the Johnny Cash song, 'I've been everywhere" that basically answers the question 'where are you from?' I was born in Connecticut, moved to California, Ohio, New Mexico, South Dakota, lived in Romania for about a year doing mission work with orphans and Gypsies (yes they are a real people group) and then moved to Kentucky for College. I have a Bachelor of Science in International Missions and Church growth, which basically means I know how to talk to people from all different cultures, get them organized to cooperate for a few mintes, and quote applicable Bible verses while doing so. Nutrition really wasn't a passion of mine until while in college I had the Swine Flu that went around. After that my health really wasn't all that great if I ate anything processessed, so I used the cooking skills I learned in Romania to whip up stuff from scratch on a reeeeeally tight college budget. Some of those first concoctions were... scary. I also was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and the thought of taking pills the rest of my life really wasn't my favorite. But life went on, I married my husband of now 2 1/2 years, and we started the end of our Fairy Tale. That is until he started having major digestion issues. He'd always worked in Emergency Services and had struggled with GI challenges but just figured they were no big deal and moved on with life until they got so bad he couldn't hide them anymore. We went to our family doctor who referred us to a specialist, who said they would screen for colon cancer and if it wasn't that they didn't know what it was. IBS - Doctor speech for "I'm Basically Stumped!" I had a very good friend who had struggled with Lupus for years, but was now able to fulfill all her duties as the Director of the ministry that ran the orphanage I volunteered at, live overseas 6 months of the year, run events and travel around the country. So I figured whatever diet changes she'd been making were probably working. I gave her a phone call and she told me she'd learned about the changes through her mom getting a certification through NTP. Within a few weeks, my husband and I had driven to Indianapolis to get assessments, were scouring the countryside for raw milk and haunting farmer's markets looking for grass fed, free range meat products. I read anything our NTP friend suggested and searched for more besides. I learned about essential oils, herbs, how stress can effect the body, etc. Now I work for a massage therapist, have a cabinet full of essential oils and herbal infused oils, make my own salves, have a cabinet full of herbs and various flours of low or no gluten, and feel so much better! Obviously this was a huge learning curve, and as you can tell I'm a bit of a talker/storyteller, so when I would gab my head off about the latest evils of soda when eating out with friends, they'd say something like, 'hey while you're researching stuff for you and Kyle, would you mind looking up this issue I've struggled with for years? I'd love to hear how you can fix it.' Eventually it dawned on me that health and nutrition is a topic I'm very passionate about, can explain easily, love teaching people, is an excellent platform to offer help and healing to people on so many other levels, AND I could get PAID to do it! So I talked to my husband and we agreed that this would be a good way to spend 2016. So here I am, so excited to learn and grow and meet new friends!
So there you have a descent introduction to my interest in Nutritional Therapy! Sorry about the color change halfway through the post.... not sure what is going on with the javascript but it won't let me change the color halfway through the post... grrr!!!