Hello there lovely person reading this! I'm Grisel, and as you can surmise by the title above, I care a lot about health. I spend hours reading the latest research on coronary heart disease and correlations between cancer and dietary factors. I love health so much that I even went to school for it, I graduated from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition as a Health Coach and am currently working on getting board certified. The one thing that I wish to do the most with my degree (and my life) is to help people. I want to help those who feel helpless, who have relied on a system and that system has failed them. I want to give hope to those that think they are a lost cause, because I know that feeling.

But there is an issue. My health is crap. Mind you, it's not nearly as bad as it once was, but I m definitely not the picture of health and vitality that I want to model for those who I may help in the future. How did someone so obsessed with health let themselves get so unhealthy in the first place? Well, I'm Cuban. Latin mothers have passive-aggressive competitions on whose baby is chubbier and whose toddler cleans their plate every time (my mom always won those competitions, by the way). I grew up on meat, eggs, dairy and everything fried. By the time I was one year old I weighted 33 pounds and my feet had twisted inward because of the weight they were forced to carry. Things did not get better from there, I went through life as a rotund little blimp, every milestone picture marred by fat rolls and dimples. I had high cholesterol by the time I was 9 years old.

When I was 15 the health problems started to pile one on top of another, and when I was 16 I decided to go vegetarian for ethical reasons, but also hopping that this might be the secret cure to my issues. I let my parents know that I would not be partaking in the nightly feasts of chicken and beef, nor participating in the eating of an entire roasted pig on the holidays and they categorically regarded me as insane. My father questioned my choices and the impact on my health that the lack of meat would have while he was popping blood pressure pills like candy. While my health improved slightly after becoming a vegetarian, I was still addicted to highly processed, fatty, salty foods.

Years later, when I was 22 I went vegan, I found the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and decided to leave behind nursing school and go for a more holistic route. As I studied I fell more and more in love with holistic health practices and feeding the body consciously with foods from the earth that hundreds of civilizations have thrived on for thousands of years. But despite all this new found knowledge, I had a hard time implementing it on myself. It's hard when you have a lot going on in your life, when everything is marred by the constant threat of change, when you're tired and work went on forever and all you want is some boxed vegan mac and cheese and Gardein chick'n tenders. I get it. Trust me, I do. I'm 24 years old and I don't think there has ever been a time where I haven't been overweight, fatigued, and dealing with mental health issues. But there has to be a way to beat this, a way to go about becoming healthy that can be doable, easy, and accessible. So I guess that's what this blog is. A self-experiment into holistic vegan health and weight-loss. My biggest hope in my making this journey public, is that someone, somewhere will be able to help themselves achieve a better life. And maybe a cool little community of like minded souls forms, where we can build each other up and support one another in this rough little cosmic blink that is life. Thank you for reading! Talk to you all (whoever you all may be) soon!