Ballet, Bodybuilding & Bread

My big Bs in my life.

Here is a little personal reflection on how life sometimes prepares you for the unexpected:

I am German so bread has always been a big part of my life. It makes up most of the German diet or at least how I know it. My teenage years, I spent all my free time dancing and doing ballet. This also involved watching what you eat and my mother was very clever: she taught me that if I eat the right things in balance they will make me strong, fit and healthy. When I started university, there was less ballet available although I was very lucky in finding a fantastic teacher but I also got very enthusiastic about body building. To be honest, I absolutely love it! However, to get natural body building and your physique right, it is crucial to know your nutrition, when and what to eat. Otherwise, all your hard work in the gym will not pay off. I learnt everything I could about the most optimum foods and what works best for me because it is different for everyone.

Ballet and Body Building are my personal passions, I did not do any of them professionally nor claiming I have done but they are my sanity, my strength and my zen. …after my family but we all need some Me Time, don’t we.

So, when Calvin came along, our bundle of joy, obviously dancing and lifting weights fell a bit to the side but little did I know how much they had actually prepared me for what was to come. At 3 months, Calvin showed first signs of having allergies, although back then we did not know nor the doctors. To be honest, I did not know much about allergies in general. He was exclusively breastfed until 6 months and then he ended up in Intensive Care when we introduced cows milk to him on doctor’s recommendation.

With the help of fantastic nutritionists, allergy specialist and a herbalist, I had to relearn what health and nutrition meant but fortunately, I already had an existing understanding of healthy eating to build on and how to make a diet work best for oneself and especially for Calvin. In short, our limited range of foods had to do the ultimate best for us and our health. Since then, it has been a constant search to continuously finding new great ones. However, one of the things we could not find was any commercially available bread that was allergen-free, yeast-free and grain-free. I also wanted something that would help improve Calvin’s health and immune system, so I started working with what we could have, even though it meant standing in my kitchen at 5am making teeny tiny slices so we could have bread for breakfast and for sandwiches whilst being out and about. Calvin usually enjoyed resting on my back whilst I baked.

So, there are actually quite a few cool Bs in our lives: Our Bundle of Joy Calvin, a lot of Bread and even my old buddies Ballet and Body Building have sneaked back in.

I would always recommend whether it is for fitness, life style or health seek professional advice if you want to or have to make dramatic changes to your diet and training. From my own personal experience, there is always so much more to learn.