June 25, 2024
By Jen Stanbro
Here’s a strange thing.
Yesterday night, my Facebook account was reinstated.
It literally read, “After reviewing your appeal, your Page has been published.”
Funny thing though. I never got a chance to appeal. Facebook blocked me from doing anything, directing me to appeal through my IG account, and IG was 50 versions of dead ends. I stated my problem in the “feedback” windows on a couple random help-link pages, but that’s about it. I was literally never given the chance or opportunity to appeal to anyone, human or bot.
But here we are.
My Facebook account is back, fully intact with no evidence of tampering.
And while I won’t be looking any gift-horses in the mouth today, as you can imagine, my trust is not so easily recovered.
This space. This little blog on my site is where I think I’ll invest my time, energy, and effort moving forward. Yesterday’s optimism is still going strong.
And without further ado, I think I shall dive right in…
My neighbor recently reached out wanting to pick my brain about the moves I’ve been making with regard to my health. For context, I’ve lost about 30 pounds since she met me a couple years ago. Just a couple weekends ago, a close friend was eager to hear what I’ve been learning as well.
I thought here might be a good, central place to gather my thoughts, organize the jumbled mess of information in my head, simplify it, and share.
For a good long while now, I’ve been on a journey toward learning all that I could about healthy habits, my body, and aging awesomely. When I first began, it sometimes felt like drinking from a fire hydrant, the shifts seemed huge and the number of areas needing to shift was overwhelming. My habits quite honestly sucked in most of the areas. Except maybe sleep and stress. There’s not much in this world capable of stressing me out and I sleep like a baby. Not because stressors don’t exist or the anguish of the world isn’t fully capable of keeping me up at night. But because controlling my thoughts is a strength of mine, a skill honed in the fire. A strength among many, many weaknesses.
Over the years and across many books from a variety of doctors and authors in related fields, I’ve finally reached the point where the information I come across is predominantly corroborating with things I’ve already learned, or revealing further benefits of the things I’m already doing. Phew.
These days, I’m doing life a lot differently than I did twenty years ago. It’s honestly been incredibly eye-opening.
One of the first experts I encountered on this path, was Dr. Don Colbert. The two books I’ve read of his are Let Food Be Your Medicine and The Hormone Health Zone. Both were reader-friendly stories of his own journey. The catalyst for his huge shift was a quest to find a cure for a disease that was torturing his days. He found his cure, along with a whole host of incredible and incredibly simple solutions to many physical and mental ailments. The next book I read once again began with a problem he encountered, and once again, with humility and dogged determination, he went after answers. Yet again he found them and shared them in an actionable book.
I begin with Dr. Colbert because he wrote another book (which ironically, I never read, but if often referenced in his other books) that blueprints a foundation. This foundation has been built upon by every other author I’ve read. That book was called The Seven Pillars of Health, and in The Hormone Health Zone, he actually adds an eighth pillar: Hormone Optimization. I appreciate his willingness to see his work as incomplete, always willing to learn and adapt.
It’s the eight pillars of health that my own choices are now based upon and it feels really right, both logically, and in the results in my body.
The pillars are essentially: Nutrition, Water, Exercise & Mobility, Hormone Optimization (which is different from hormone balance), Sleep, Stress Management, Supplementation, and Detoxification.
Kids are up now and homeschool needs to get underway, but in the coming posts, I’d love to lay out some basic focuses in each area, and I’ll include the primary resources that have helped inform and shape my habits.
Thanks for reading!
Jen