It was the summer of 1998. I was fourteen years old when my dad came to my two sisters and I and informed us that we would be moving from the only home we have ever known in suburban Michigan to a small town in Wisconsin. My dad worked as an administrator for a small health care agency which was experiencing layoffs, forcing him to find a new job. This kind of news would be shocking to any family, much less when you are a shy fourteen year old about to enter her first year of high school. My parents sat us down and told us that the move would be immediate, and that we would have just a few weeks to say good bye to the only friends we have ever known, and pack up our house.

Within just two weeks we packed our suitcases, our family of five, and our dog Calley into our minivan and began the eight hour car ride to the small rental home we would soon call home. We cried as a family from the moment we left our home in Troy Michigan, (population 70,000), until we pulled into our new home town, Shawano Wisconsin, (population 7,000). I will never forget the scene as we pulled into the drive way of our small unfurnished rental home. The surrounding area had a skate park, a gas station, and a small convenience store. This was a huge difference compared to being within walking distance to one of Michigan's largest malls, multiple grocery stores, and every chain store imaginable…Not to mention we had to spend the rest of the summer sleeping on air mattresses, and we didn’t know a single person in the town. As you can imagine, all of these changes led to a sudden culture shock for my teen sisters and I.

After what had seemed to be the longest summer of my life, the start of the new school year had finally approached. I remember walking into the high school for the first day of school. Palms sweaty, I walked across the endless hallway to find my locker and drop off my new backpack. I made my way to my first few classes, sitting quietly in the back. The day had gotten off to a pretty good start, that is, until it was time to break for lunch. Lunch period on the first day of school is nerve wracking for anyone, much less if you are a new kid. I remember walking through the noisy lunch room, slowly wandering past the first table, and the next, anxiously wondering where I could set down my lunch tray and eat my lunch. I hadn’t made any friends from the first few classes I attended, so I decided to sit at the first open table I saw.

As I was making my way to a table in the back of the room, a boy from one of my classes started to walk towards me. When he approached me, he handed me a folded piece of paper, saying, “Just in case you didn’t know, this is what you look like.” I nervously opened the folds, exposing a grotesque image of a largely overweight female, with disproportionate body parts. Immediately the boy started laughing, running back to the table with his friends. Just as soon as he left, I dropped the paper, set down my lunch tray, and went running to the bathroom where I cried for what seemed to be days.

It was at that moment that I went from being care free about my appearance, to a sense of hyper awareness of self and how my body looked. Although this was most likely intended to be nothing more than a coarse joke to these young men, I now perceive it as something much deeper. I can now see how this single event was set up by the enemy to steal my innocence and identity by planting a lie in my mind, (more on this later). This single lie, when fostered and meditated on, eventually took root in my life in the form of eating disorders.Following this event, I convinced myself that I had to lose weight, and fast, even though I was only about 110 pounds and five foot tall at the time. I started trying every diet and weight loss trick that I had heard about, from cutting out all carbohydrates, to cutting calories. Within a few weeks, I went from eating three healthy meals a day to a granola bar for breakfast, a plain turkey sandwich with mustard for lunch, and a few bites of food at dinner time so my mom wouldn’t catch on to my new eating habits. This went on for a few months, and I continued to cut back on the little food I was eating with each passing week. As my food consumption began to gradually decrease, so did my appetite and weight. As my clothes began to get looser, I felt empowered knowing that my plan was working. With the weight loss came a sense of control, as I believed that my changing body would protect me from ever experiencing the sense of rejection I had felt in the lunch room on that day.

I convinced myself that if I could be maintain a state of perfection in the way that I looked, that I would always be accepted and loved by those around me. One single lie that I had received led to a series of lies that I played over and over in my head. The problem was, I didn’t know I was believing lies, or that I was harming myself and my body. At that time I was completely and utterly deceived. It would have never crossed my mind that I was heading down the road of an eating disorder in the form of anorexia nervosa. After I had lost enough weight, I wasn’t the only one who began to notice. Despite the fact that I tried to hide my new ‘diet’ from my mom, it wasn’t long before she became aware that something was wrong. My mom recounts the day that she became suspicious of an eating disorder. It was an early winter day and we had decided to go clothing shopping for the coming season. My mom came in the dressing room with me to check how a pair of jeans fit, and as I lifted my shirt to show her the waist band, she recalls seeing my ribs and hip bones protruding from my dwindling frame.

Looking back, she remembers that she had noticed I was eating a little less at dinner, but I had convinced her that I was eating more at school, so I wasn’t as hungry in the evening. My mom had a hard realization of the truth when she saw my boney body in that dressing room. She walked out, silently shocked to see how much weight I had lost, and began to wonder how it happened without her knowing it. How had I gone from a healthy growing teenager to an insecure young woman who was hiding a terribly shameful secret!?! In the weeks to follow, I remember my mom bringing up my changing eating habits in slightly subtle ways. Her tactics didn’t get very far, because much like every teenager, I was aware that she was confronting me, and therefore became very defensive, almost immediately. After many repeatedly failed attempts, my mom eventually got my dad involved. At this point, my mom was done playing games, and I could tell that my parents were not going to mess around when they forced me to step on the scale. At that point I weighed a mere 85 pounds, and it was then that they decided that I needed professional help.

Days later I remember visiting our family physician, (who I’m sure was not well versed in eating disorders), and he told me I needed to gain some weight. He even joked about how I could stand to eat a few hamburgers, and sent me on my way. My parents next line of defense was to have me see a Christian counselor, (in which I kicked and screamed the entire way to go see). Once I was in the office, I remember being as quite as possible, thinking to myself, “I will not talk about my life to a stranger! She can’t make me talk if I don’t want to.” As you can imagine, these appointments didn’t last long, and eventually the counselor told my parents that I would have to come back when I was ready to share. My parents hesitantly brought me home from that last appointment and decided to start doing the one thing they knew to do, which was pray for me. As winter turned to spring, I started to take walks down a path near our Wisconsin home. Initially, these walks started off as an effort to burn extra calories, but something started to change as the trees began to bud and eventually blossom. It all started with one of my daily walks, I noticed a butterfly that seemed to follow me along the walking path. This wouldn’t have been such a big ordeal, however, the next day, that very same butterfly came and met me on my walk. It happened again and again, day after day, until suddenly I started to think, “What if this butterfly is a sign from God? What if He is using it to try and tell me something?!?”

If there was any chance at all that this butterfly could be a sign from God, I knew I couldn’t ignore it. So, I went home and began to do as much research as I could about butterflies. During my search, I also asked God to show me in His word if there was any reference to what He was trying to show me through these butterflies. As I began to flip through the pages of my bible, one scripture stood out to me that paired perfectly with my new found knowledge of butterflies. That verse was Romans 12:2, which says, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” (NKJV) As I read this passage, the words transformed and renewing seemed to jump off the page to me. I wrote this word down in my journal and tucked it away in my heart, not knowing exactly what it meant yet, but knowing that it was God’s promise to me.

Just a few months into that summer my dad got word that job in Michigan had opened up, just about an hour from where we grew up. He came to us as a family and asked if we were opened to moving back to Michigan. We were all so excited at the proposed thought of moving back home, so he didn’t waste any time and quickly took the job interview. Just a few days later we found out my dad had gotten the job, and we found ourselves packing boxes all over again, just two short years after our move to Wisconsin.

Our move back to Michigan brought us to a quaint town called Saline. This town was somewhere in-between the big city we grew up in and the rural farm lands of Wisconsin, so it didn’t take but a few weeks to feel like home! I knew things would be different in Saline when my first day of school brought a handful of new girlfriends, as well as an invitation to sit with some of them at lunch. Within a few short weeks I felt like I fit in, and that I had finally found friends for the first time in a few years! I remember feeling that it was such a relief to feel like I finally fit in, and it began to show in my health. Before you know it I had seemed to of forgotten all about the hurtful words that plunged me into an obsession with my weight, and I soon began to gain weight at a healthy rate. These changes were quite apparent to my parents as well, and they assumed that all was well with me and let the whole matter go.

In the fall of my junior year I was invited by a group of friends to attend the Saline High homecoming dance. Being that I was still one of the new girls at the school, I was ecstatic that I had friends to go with! I exclaimed, “yes” with a grin on my face, and a few weeks later we were dancing the night away. At that dance one of my friends introduced me to a boy named Sean, and we quickly hit it off! We hit it off so well in fact that I spent the rest of the night talking to Sean in a corner of the room, rather than dancing with my friends! At the end of the night Sean and I exchanged phone numbers. Sean called me the very next day and we spent close to three hours on the phone. Although we had just met, it felt like we had known each other forever! At the end of the conversation, Sean asked me if I would like to go on a date, and I replied that I would love to! Little did I know at the time that I was saying yes to going on a date with my future husband! Sean and I started officially dating when we were just 16 years old, and it didn’t take long for us to become best friends.

Everything seemed to be going right in my life at that time, and I truly felt that I was on cloud nine! I had a steady boyfriend, a great group of girlfriends, and I was doing well in school. My emotions were at an all time high, and my eating habits soon began to match my enjoyment. With no knowledge of food or nutrition, it didn’t take long for the pounds to creep on, and I knew it, my jeans began to get uncomfortably tight. It didn’t take long for my expanding waistline to bring back feelings of anxiety as I became increasingly aware of my body yet again. I began to feel a sense of panic build with each passing day, not knowing how I would loose the weight, but I was willing to do whatever it took. Looking back I now see how dangerous this mindset was…I have come to learn that when we do anything out of fear or panic, we often give the enemy an open door in our lives.

Just as quickly as I had been looking for a quick weight loss method, I had seemed to find one. I was alone one evening watching a Lifetime movie in my basement, (meaning it probably wasn’t a movie I should have been watching in the first place), when the quick fix ‘solution’ I was looking for seemed to fall into my lap. In the movie a bunch of girls had a sleepover filled with all kinds of junk food. During the sleepover, two of the girls were discussing their fear of getting fat, and the other replied that you can eat whatever you want without getting fat…all you had to do was throw up after eating, and she proceeded to explain how to do it! This one scene from the movie painted a somewhat glamours picture in my mind, but to be honest, I was still scared to actually try it. That is, until the fear of more gaining weight outweighed the fear that I had in relation to this grotesque self inflicted action.

I will never forget the first time I induced vomiting. I had just come home from school and found a pan of brownies sitting on the stove. I looked at the pan of brownies and decided, instead of eating just one brownie, why not enjoy the whole pan, and then get rid of it shortly after!? I called out for my mom and sisters to make sure I had the house to myself, and sure enough, no one else was home. As soon as I knew I was alone, I knew I was safe to follow through with my plan, so I went ahead and binge ate the entire pan of brownies, barely taking a moment to catch my breath, much less actually tasting them. Just as quickly as I had eaten the entire pan, I ran to the bathroom to get rid of them. I remember feeling mostly numb during the binge/purge cycle, and also a bit excited about how ‘easy’ it was to get rid of the calories I had just consumed . This was the first step that I took down the road to bulimia, which lasted a total of two years. In the years that I battled bulimia, my weight remained stable, (if anything there were times that I would gain weight as a result of my binges), and I would eat normal meals throughout the day, so it was easy to keep a secret, or so I thought. I celebrated my 18th birthday with dinner and an ice cream cake, as was the tradition in my family. After indulging in a large slice of cake, I and decided to sneak away to the bathroom and purge. When I opened the door to the bathroom my younger sister Emily was waiting for me, and she asked to talk to me in her bedroom. As I walked into Emily’s room I saw my older sister Sarah sitting on the bed, and I knew this would be a serious conversation.

As I sat on the bed, tears started running down my sisters faces, as they proceeded to share their hearts with me. “We know what you have been doing” Sarah said. “What do you mean?” I said, as the blood rushed to my face and my palms started to sweat. “We know what you have been doing in the bathroom. And we are scared you will hurt yourself if you keep doing it.” Emily replied. Just as quickly as she said those words, tears started streaming down my face as well. I was exposed, my secrets were revealed, and I felt incredibly ashamed.

My shame only lasted for a brief moment however, because my sisters next words were, “let’s pray.” With those words came one of the most powerful prayers ever prayed by my sisters, and I knew that I would never be the same. I could feel God breaking chains off of me that had had me bound for years. I felt the guilt and shame run off of me like I was taking a refreshing shower as God’s presence filled the room. Within an instant, I could perceive that I was supernaturally delivered from any and all desires to binge, purge, or restrict food from myself. That night I was shook to the core, not only emotionally (from seeing my sisters broken hearted), but also spiritually as I was redeemed from my sin by my savior Jesus Christ.

After this profound experience, I quickly learned that when we call out to Jesus to be set free, He instantly washes our sin away, however our minds still need to be restored, which can be a process. In my case, I had spent years entertaining destructive thoughts in relation to my body and food, and although I was freed of my outward actions, I still had healing to do on the inside. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about this but I knew that God was the one that started my healing, and He would be faithful to finish the work He had started in me. My search for inner healing began one day when I laid on my bed one morning and cried out the the Lord. I asked Him to show me how to change my way of thinking, and heal from the hurts that were in my heart. I grabbed my bible off my nightstand, hoping to find the answer I had been looking for, and it didn’t take long! God answered me instantly with His word! I opened my bible directly to Romans 12:2 which says, “Don’t be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

The word that seemed to leap off the page in this passage was “transformed”. I knew that I desperately needed to be transformed from the inside out, and this scripture provided a roadmap on how to get there. If I wanted lasting change, I would have to make the choice to be different from the rest of this world, and dig into God’s word like never before. The discovery of this verse was so simple, yet it was profound enough to change the course of my destiny. I got serious about reading God’s word, and started reading it every chance I got. I began nursing school a few months later at a nearby campus, and I would listen to the word of God on my iPod during my commute. I would also bring my bible to school, reading it in between classes and in my car during my lunch break. As I would pray and spend time in God’s word, light entered in where there was darkness, and truth began to expose the lies.

As I progressed through nursing school I developed a whole new appreciation for our bodies. As my eyes were opened to what a gift our bodies are, I realized how vital it is that we care for them properly. In doing so, we are not only thinking about ourselves, but we are thanking God for this precious temple He has given us! This revelation in combination with Gods word brought forth a total renewal of my mind and heart. It was at this time that I can truly say that I was transformed on the inside. In addition to being changed on the inside, God started to do a powerful transformation on the outside as well. This change began when I got in the kitchen and started experimenting. I started to take recipes that I had once enjoyed and made healthier versions of them! Unlike many people who learn to cook from their mom or someone close to them, I like to think that God was the one that taught me how to cook! I believe that He inspired me to get into the kitchen and gave me the wisdom and ability to create recipes. Looking back now I see that this was an essential part of my healing as I formed a new healthy relationship with food. Within a few months of spending time in the kitchen, God exchanged my fears and control concerning food for a sense of freedom and balance.

Little by little I started seeing change emerge in my heart, and it was then that God brought back the image of the butterfly to my mind. I remember reading about caterpillars and how they make their transformation inside of the cocoon. After the process is complete, a beautiful butterfly emerges. God brought the revelation of the butterfly full circle as my own transformation took place, and He revealed to me that much like the caterpillar, it was in the secret place that my transformation had taken place. Before I knew it, I went from an earth bound caterpillar to a butterfly that could soar above the cares and the troubles of this world…and it all happened because of the time that I spent in God’s presence, which was able to renew and restore me from the inside out.

I went on to graduate from nursing school, and marry my high school sweetheart Sean when I was 24 years old. After graduating from Eastern Michigan University, I got my first job as a labor and delivery nurse, which has been a dream of mine since I was a little girl! One of my favorite things about being about being an L&D nurse was that I had the opportunity to work with women in one of the most intimate settings. This allowed me to get to know my patients personally and which opened the door for many teaching opportunities. I quickly found that one of my favorite things to teach women was how nutrition would impact their recovery after having a baby!

After one year of working as a nurse, Sean (a full time graphic designer) told me that I should start a website where I could share my nutrition tips, recipes, and also what God had taught me over the years on how to care for our bodies. I thought that sounded like a great idea, and just as quickly as I agreed, he was off to create a website! I will never forget the day that my sister, my husband, and myself were talking about what to name the website, and collectively we came up with the name Dashing Dish! Within just six months of launching the website, I was getting more feedback than I could have imagined about how Dashing Dish was changing peoples lives! I started to realize the great responsibility that God had given me with this website and that it was meant to share much more than recipes. I felt the Lord prompting me to share about the freedom and joy that can only be found in Him and to teach women how to find their true beauty in exchange for the ashes of their life. Eventually I came to a place where I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was my calling me to step into Dashing Dish as a full time ministry and business, and it was confirmed to me many times over.

Despite knowing my destiny was awaiting me, I started to have doubts. How could I have spent five long years in nursing school and have the job of my dreams and give it all up for something that wasn’t yet even established as a business or ministry? I began to wrestle with what my heart was telling me and I second-guessed myself every time I would listen to my head. Although it didn’t make sense to me at the time, the Lord began to calm my thoughts with His Word. I began to think back on the years that I had struggled with an unhealthy relationship with my body and food, and how God had set me free. I knew if He did it for me, that He wanted to do it for so many others, and I could be a vehicle He could use! I decided to listen to my heart and trust His plan. I spent many months thinking over my decision, talking to my husband, my parents, and many Godly mentors that I respect. God used every single person to confirm that this was indeed God’s call on my life. It was then that I knew it was time to leave the security of my nursing job and to jump full-time into the ministry that He was calling me to. On August 9, 2011, I decided to step out in obedience. I made the decision to listen to God. It certainly felt like I was stepping out of the boat. However, I have found that every time I make the decision to step out in faith, God never lets me sink, as long as I keep my eyes on Him.

On the day that I left my nursing job, God led me to the passage of scripture in 2 Timothy 4:5-6. It reads, “But you should keep a clear mind in every situation. Don’t be afraid of suffering for the Lord. Work at bringing others to Christ. Complete the ministry God has given you. As for me, my life has already been poured out as an offering to God.” I knew that by making that decision, I had taken the first step in pursuing the ministry that God has called me to. I made the decision to pour out my life as an offering to God, and how could I not after Jesus gave His life for me!

During the transitional phase of switching over to Dashing Dish full-time, God began to flood my mind with ideas and ways that I could minister to people. Little did I know at the time that God was leading me to a ministry that was far beyond myself! He has since used Dashing Dish to bring freedom and joy to countless women, and to further His Kingdom in ways that I couldn’t have imagined! In addition to starting a ministry, God has restored everything that the enemy tried to steal from me in the years of disordered eating. One powerful example of His restoration is that my husband Sean and I now have a daughter named Madeline Joy. When I got pregnant, doctors were shocked, as it was something that I was told may never happen after the abuse that I put my body through for so many years!

I could write an entire book on how faithful God has been to redeem all that was lost in my mind, body, and personal life! He has taken the my ashes of my life, and turned them into something beautiful.

I share my story with you to not only bring God glory, but to encourage you. No matter where you may find yourself today, or what you are going through, I believe the answer can be found in Jesus! Perhaps as you read my story you can relate to having an unhealthy relationship with your body or food, or you simply want to start eating healthier. If you can relate to either of these, I believe God has an answer for nourishing our bodies!

{This is an excerpt from my book Nourish. In Nourish I share encouragement and practical knowledge for living a healthy lifestyle in addition to providing a balance of spiritual and physical nourishment. To learn more go to www.NourishBook.com}