If you have ever decided to make a big change in your life, chances are you remember the EXACT moment you knew you needed to do it.  My moment came one day at work.  I’ve worked in pharmacy for almost 16 years now, and I’ve met and worked with people from all walks of life.  I was filling prescriptions one morning and saw prescriptions for newly diagnosed diabetic, with a date of birth one year older than my own.  As a member of the medical team, I knew that people were being diagnosed with diabetes at younger and younger ages.  That fact has even been picked up by the mainstream media.  Americans are getting sicker, much younger.  As I went through the rest of my morning, I couldn’t forget that patient.  If he was diagnosed so young, could that happen to me?  Diabetes and it’s sister, metabolic syndrome, are common in my family and weight is always something I have struggled with.  I walked away from work that day with the seed planted, it was time to take a hard look at how we were living.

When I started my research, I thought my husband and I were eating healthy enough.  Healthy if you consider I was a big fan of diet coke for breakfast, and frozen “healthy” lunches (you know, the ones with lean and watchers in the title).  We had already started tackling our soda habit, and weren’t eating out too much because we had two small children at the time.  If you have ever tried to navigate a restaurant with two kids under the age of four, you know what I mean.

I’ve always been a researcher, that’s part of what drew me to pharmacy.  I want to know WHY something happens, simply telling me that’s how it is is hard for me to take.  I started looking into weight loss programs because that would be the answer to my problem , right?  So much of the information is calories in, calories out.  I started tracking everything I ate, desperately trying to keep my calories each day less than 1100.  I signed up for a running group in my community, and committed to a 5K a month that summer.  Between all the tracking, running three times a week, and cooking and caring for my family, my tank was running on empty.  I kept going though, because that is what the research said to do.  Calories in, calories out.  Guess what, outside of a few pounds and some endorphins from the running, nothing changed.  It took a few years of dabbling in this or that before it started to sink in that something else may be going on in my body, and that is what led me to functional medicine.  I started surrounding myself with some amazing people, and they opened my eyes to a whole new world of eating.