My name is Kelsey and the way I approach & eat food is always evolving. I grew up absolutely loving to bake and had the biggest sweet tooth ever. I had dreams of becoming a pastry chef, but 2 summers working in a bakery in college made me realize that wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The thing I love most about food is making it for friends and family. Food just makes people happy!
As I grew up and graduated college, I moved back in with my parents for a bit and started to get more into cooking. So in May of 2012 I started this blog. I started it as a way to document the meals & treats I made as well as the DIY projects I would do around the house. Cut to 5 years later>>> Married, homeowner, dog owner. A lot can happen in 5 years! Especially the way I look at health and what I eat. I really started trying to lose a few pounds in the summer of 2014, to get into wedding shape. After taking a couple years off of working out and enjoying one to many fun dinners out, I was starting to feel quite puffy… all the time. So I started working out again and began tracking what I ate in My Fitness Pal. This was a great way to start out because I had to come to terms with the fact that I should be eating way less than what I was eating. And it totally worked! I lost about 10 pounds in 6 months which was healthy and started to feel great, but I still felt pretty deprived. I also found myself feeling like I couldn’t eat things like nuts because of the calorie content, but would wolf down 2 protein bars a day as snacks. I knew it wasn’t very sustainable but didn’t know what the happy medium would be!
Then I saw the movie Fed Up. WOW! Eye opening. If you haven’t seen it, the documentary talks about the food industry today and how they pump sugar into everything we eat. Most processed food has added sugars in order to make it taste better and get us even more addicted to it. Now this wasn’t something that was completely shocking. I know that “low-fat” usually just means more sugar and chemicals, but I never took the time to actually read the labels of most things I was consuming. Those protein bars I thought were so healthy contained about 20 chemicals I couldn’t pronounce and just because it had protein and fiber I thought it was great. The movie also talks about how hard those foods are on our bodies to break down and that is why that belly fat hangs on for dear life.
It all seemed to just make sense that I should stop putting those chemicals in my body. So I thought, why not give it a try for a week? In just one week I started to feel SO GREAT! I didn’t feel deprived because I didn’t want the bad stuff anymore and I could eat a tasty steak covered in ghee and caramelized onions! It also gave me tons of inspiration for new recipes and therefore completely changed this blog over night.
THEN! After cutting out most processed foods for a few months I did my first Whole30 in January of 2016. I had heard about it before and wanted to completely cut some things out to see how it effected me and the way I felt. The first half of it was ROUGH and I had terrible sugar dragon headaches, but by the end of those 30 days I felt better than I had in years. I found that eating most meals based around vegetables and meat helped me stay on track and feel great. I ate pretty clean for all of 2016 and decided to do another Whole30 in January of 2017. What a difference a year makes! I had a totally different experience the second time around with no headaches – my bodies way of thanking me for eating pretty clean all year. And now I live my food freedom. That looks different for everyone but for me it is a paleo based diet with wine, chocolate and dinners out where sometimes I order the salad and sometimes the burger (and always the sweet potato fries).
If you look back in the archives you will find lots of tasty cake and cookie recipes and trust me they are good – I just save those treats for special occasions now!
