It’s taken me a long time to find my “thing.”

If you’re like me and obsessively read vegan/health/fitness blogs, you’ll know what I mean. Katie has her chocolate, Angela has her glo[w], and Susan has her remarkable talent for inventing delicious fat-free recipes. I started a food blog over at Blogspot a while ago, but I just wasn’t feeling it – there was nothing special about it, and eventually I got bored just posting about food. So I started this blog with vague notions that it’d be more holistic, that I’d talk about my path to healthiness and how that path is not centered around food alone. But I still wasn’t feeling it, and after a couple of lackluster posts I sort of ignored my newborn blog, feeling guilty yet not quite guilty enough to post.

And then I read At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (a surreal and hilarious book, by the by, that I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys Irish fiction and thinks that Joyce is overrated) and suddenly I knew what my “thing” would be. It’s stupid, really, that it took my reading a completely random book to figure it out, because it’s not like “mens sana in corpore sano” is a saying that’s unknown or anything; it’s pretty common! But, hey, I’ll take it. As soon as I read the bit of dialogue where one character quotes that aphorism, I literally got all wide-eyed and excited – “a healthy mind in a healthy body” is an absolutely perfect way to describe what I’d like to achieve.

See, I think I’ve got the healthy mind part down. I just graduated from Carleton College, a fairly unknown yet highly selective, challenging and utterly fantastic small liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, the town of “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” I now have my BA in English, various honors, and 16 years of institutional learning behind me. I think I’ve got the healthy mind covered.

But it’s the healthy body part that’s stopping me up. I’ve made great strides towards healthiness recently, but I’m not there yet. I’ve been vegetarian for four years, but basically eat vegan these days, and I’ll make the “official” switch soon. I took yoga during my last term at college and fell in love, and I’m trying to add strength training and cardio workouts to my daily life. I want that healthy body to match my healthy mind, gosh darn it, and this blog will chronicle my path to holistic healthiness.

Before I wrap up this little introductory post, though, I’d just like to add one more thing, and I’ll elaborate on it further in another post if need be. This is not a weight loss blog. There will be no calorie-counting, pounds-lost-recording, or fat-complaining here. I want to get fit, not to lose weight. Thanks to genetics, I have been skinny all my life, and now I’d like to become toned and truly fit. I hope this doesn’t alienate anyone reading my blog – everyone’s journey to healthiness is different; some of us need to lose weight, and others need to gain it to be truly healthy. I recognize that, and I hope that those who are on trying to lose weight can recognize and respect those of us on the other end of the spectrum. Weight is such a touchy, controversial issue, and it really shouldn’t be. If I ever do count calories or quantify my weight, it will be for a very specific purpose which I will make clear in my post.

So I guess that’s it – I’ve made the trek from Blogspot to WordPress, expanded my horizons, am about to embark on a quest to become wholly healthy, and I couldn’t be happier!

Ciao for now!
Kelly