My journey- Part One

Hi! I wanted to take the time to introduce myself and share more about my health journey. I'm Gabriella, born & raised in New York, Italian & Greek, a Virgo, love all things wellness, and my favorite cuisine is Greek. I have a burning passion for health and wellness, but that wasn’t always the case.

For most of my life, my approach to health consisted of dieting, restricting, and disordered eating. I struggled with being unhealthy and overweight throughout my adolescence, teenage years, and into adulthood. Growing up in an Italian household, food was everywhere and everything. I had no sense of healthy eating. My breakfast would be a Pop Tart, my lunch would be a bagel or sandwich, my snacks would be chips or candy, and dinner would be either home cooked or fast food. It was getting out of hand; I was experiencing hypoglycemia constantly due to my unbalanced and poor diet and on the verge of diabetes.

I’ll never forget the day when I was 17 years old, I had hit rock bottom. One morning I woke up and said to myself “I want to be skinny for when I go away to college.” Looking back at that version of myself, there are so many things I wish I could say to myself. My mindset was changing, and I was willingly to put in the work, but I was so determined to be “skinny.” That was my goal. Although this would result in losing weight and getting healthier, I didn’t approach it that way. Unknowingly, my mental state needed work too.

Today, I’ve lost over 100 pounds and it was never easy to keep off up until I changed my lifestyle and mindset. This 100 pounds of weight loss started from a very strict diet where I would eat less than 1000 calories a day. I would obsess over my weight and what the scale was reading. I was not focusing on my wellbeing and I was severely undereating. I would try the fad diets in the media that were popular at the time. I ate very “low carb” for YEARS because I thought carbs are “bad” and make you gain weight. This lifestyle was never fulfilling, unsustainable, and toxic. The weight would come off, but slowly and surely some of it would come back on. I started exercising to try and lose more weight, doing mostly cardio, and not fueling my body properly. I was burning myself out.

This occurred for years. Constant fluctuations in my weight. I really wanted to find a sustainable way to live, eat, and feel. I took matters into my own hands, educated myself, and discovered a passion for nutrition and learning more about what foods make me feel energized and my best self. I adopted a holistic approach to health without even realizing it.

This journey has been an amazing one so far and I'm looking forward to sharing more in Part Two!

Come back for part two to read about what I did to break this pattern!