About Me and My Blog

Thanks for stopping by PB and oatmeal! My name is Alyssa, and I’m a 21 year old college student studying dietetics. I’m an aspiring dietitian with a passion for health and wellness.

I love to eat healthy, and I also like to eat not-so-healthy. I’ve had my share of bad relationships with food, but as I have grown, I have learned that food is not the enemy.

Food makes up such a large part of our lives, and if you see food as a negative aspect, you will never be happy. Just like there is no such thing as the perfect person, there is no such thing as a perfect diet or a perfect body. Food is meant to fuel our body, and keep us happy and healthy. My hope for PB and oatmeal is for readers to see that! I also want this blog to be both personal and educational. Sometimes I will post about my day and how I contributed to my health, both physically and mentally. Other days I will post educational articles about nutrition. If you have a particular nutritional topic you would like to know more about, let me know and I will write about it!

Where I’ve Been

As I said before, I’ve had my share of bad relationships with food. When I was younger, I was extremely active in sports that kept me running around year long. I skied in the winter, I ran track in the Spring, and I played soccer and hiked mountains in the Summer and Fall. Sometimes, my only break from sports came on holidays!

I quit sports my sophomore year of high school, and for the first time in my life, I found myself weighing more than I should. I was always underweight when I was active, and there were years where I never even knew what I weighed simply because it didn’t matter. Once I started gaining weight, I went on my first diet. I read my mom’s Prevention magazine to learn about healthy ways to lose weight, and it worked until I reached my goal weight.

I didn’t know how to maintain my new weight, and the weight came right back on as quickly as I lost it. I began to engage in dangerous restrictive and binging habits that followed me until my senior year, and then simply turned to binging habits and I ballooned up 15 pounds. Since then, I have lost and gained back that 15 pounds at least three times. This binging habit continued on and off through my first three years of college and is something I am still dealing with every day.

Where I’m Going

Every day I have to work to make sure I don’t binge. Sometimes it works and occasionally it doesn’t, but I deal with it the best I can. I treat my body right as much as possible, and when I slip up I do my best to get right back on track. I’m determined to leave this part of me behind, especially when I graduate college next year! That’s where the blog comes in. Because food will alway be such a big part of my life, I can’t avoid it and I can’t avoid thinking about it, so I need to have a healthy relationship with it. I’ll be using this blog to track my progress as I slowly heal myself emotionally and the fun I have doing it!

Contact

If you have any questions, you can contact me at pbandoats@gmail.com, or follow me on twitter @pbandoats. If you enjoy health articles I also write for my blog www.factsandflax.wordpress.com!