My business exists to empower women and couples to live their healthiest lives and grow up families who flourish. Families that are well nourished, dipped in love and full of joy.
Without all the obsessing, the worry, uncertainty and down right frustration. With less stress and guilt, creating more time to focus on the things you love most in life.
I believe in real food. Tasty, pretty, nourishing and life-giving whole foods and their ability to transform your health from the inside out, giving your body the building blocks to thrive and highlighting it's innate ability to heal. No matter your age (yes, I'm talking to your picky 3 year old!) or health goals.
Cliche? No way. I've seen it change lives over and over and over (and over) again. Simple, yet profound.
I believe that knowledge is power so I've created an education-based company rooted in preventative wellness.
Know better, do better. That's my motto. And I strive to educate my community on the power of real food and healthy living and its ability to shift our current paradigm toward a more vibrant version.
One where families celebrate good health and fertility, strong pregnancies and healthy little humans with adventurous palettes.
For as long as I can remember, I have been absolutely obsessed with all things health.
I used to read books on nutrition from the library, buy every health magazine I could afford on a high school salary and I was always trying out the latest diet fad. But this is where my story turned sour (I know, it's so early!). This obsession led me to a struggle that I'd battle for years, the struggle around food, the joy stolen from the whole experience and extra exercise to back it up. I'd miss meals hoping to drop a few pounds. I'd binge because I was so hungry. I'd cry because I was miserable.
Enter college where I chose to study nutrition, an obvious path given my interest, but I'd never imagine how that decision would change my health forever.
After becoming a Registered Dietitian in 2009, I moved on to study holistic nutrition, inspired by my best friend who'd taken a similar path before me. My idea of what was healthy (enter the food pyramid, butter-less, calorie counting, taste-less low-cal diet) was flipped upside down and inside out. And as I practiced what I learned through the Nutritional Therapy Association during my training to become a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, inserting the power of whole, real, nutrient-dense foods, my body began to change in a way I would have never imagined.
But it wasn't just my body that began shifting to a healthier place, my mind followed suit and I began to experience a freedom I hadn't felt in years.
A freedom from obsession, restriction and frustration. A freedom that allowed me to love food again, to enjoy the process of learning how to heal the damage I'd caused from all the dieting and crazy exercise I'd done and cultivate a movement within my own heart toward a healthier take on food and nutrition that I wanted to share with the world.
I started a little business called Alo Wellness back in 2013 and worked with many different types of clients. I shared my passion for all aspects of health and wellness, but I couldn't wait to find my niche–that thing that really lit my heart on fire and kept me up at night studying and learning so that I could share it with all those who needed to hear the life-giving info.
It took time. It took working with a lot of different people on a whole gamut of health issues and focuses, but in 2015 my heart found what made it skip a nerdy nutrition beat.
From hardship and loss, I found my deepest passion and life's work...
Let me take you back to a warm summer morning in 2014 when I hopped out of bed with a hunch I was pregnant –low and behold that little pregnancy test was positive as could be.
This was a total surprise to my husband and I as we weren’t planning to grow our family for another year or more, but our surprise turned to joy as the news sank in and I quickly began to feel all the pregnancy feels.
There was so much excitement, planning, dreaming, napping, and we shared the news with so many of our family and friends.
Fast forward a few weeks as we sat in our first appointment with the OBGYN, listening to the silence of our first ultrasound–no heartbeats coming from the two little babes housed in a single sac. We were absolutely devastated.
How could this be happening? To us? Aren’t we healthy? What did we do wrong? Will I ever be able to conceive and stay pregnant? Was it my fault?
As the news sank in and the aftermath of miscarriage settled down, I went back to the drawing board. I had heard that nutrition and lifestyle could play a role in fertility health and the ability to get and stay pregnant, but I had never really taken this to heart. We were already pretty healthy, I mean, I was a Dietitian. I’ve got to be ahead of the game, right?
As I dug into the topic of preconception prep, I realized that there were very specific things that I could be doing within my diet, supplements to take and ways to better nurture my lifestyle and marriage to optimize my fertility.
And my husband, he mattered too. In fact, way more than I’d ever realized. He was offering up half the pie (or DNA, depending on how technical you want to get here) so his health could make a huge difference in our conception story.
And so it began, our focus on getting our bodies all baby-makin’ ready–cleaning up our diets, detoxing, choosing our health and sanity over running ourselves ragged, cleaning up the products we used on and around our bodies and honing in on our relationship and emotional health. It was a beautiful journey and 6 months later we conceived in our first month of trying, I rocked out a 41 week pregnancy and birthed our precious baby girl in the comfort of our home on Christmas Day 2015.
It was a beautiful journey and worth every second of preparation. And we’re still reaping the benefits of our prep as our little girl is flourishing in life–ahead of the curve and without any of the common childhood illnesses so many families are having to deal with today.
Our journey, with the heartache and all, led me to this incredible world of fertility health and has given me the opportunity to help couples create a more mindful preconception journey, getting their bodies healthy not only to conceive, but also to show up better in life.
Because a healthy body is a fertile body and a fertile body is a healthy body. Get it?
So girl, I feel your pain, your uncertainty, your fear and your hope to conceive. I’m here for you and I’d love to help you heal, conquer that fear and conceive with ease.
I’d also like to raise you one–a baby who not only has ten fingers and ten toes, but flourishes, without the common illnesses plaguing our little ones today.
