50: We All Start Somewhere (3 Lessons To Start)

Get ready! We're celebrating a major milestone: the 50th episode of The Family Fork podcast!

To mark the occasion, Ashley gets vulnerable, sharing her personal journey—from healing after an abusive marriage to navigating cancer—to reveal the three most important lessons she's learned about health and life.

Whether you're just beginning or starting over for the tenth time, this episode is a powerful reminder that we all begin somewhere. Get ready to be inspired and equipped with the foundational tools to create the life you know you deserve.

Your Roadmap to a Healthier Life: 3 Foundational Lessons

📍 Food is Your Foundation: Food is the easiest, fastest place to start. Learn why an anti-inflammatory diet and understanding how food makes you feel is the most impactful way to improve your physical and mental health.

📍 Family is Your Co-Pilot: Any health strategy that doesn't work with your family is not sustainable. Discover how to prioritize your health while making it easy and appealing for your family to get on board.

📍 Mindset is Everything: Beyond being positive, learn to identify and rewire the quiet stories you tell yourself that sabotage your progress. Your self-talk is the ultimate key to achieving your goals and building a life of resilience and joy.

You have the strength to begin today, no matter what your past has held. These three lessons will help you get ahead faster!

More Support For You

✅ Take the survey for a chance to win a $250 Amazon gift card and help shape the future of this podcast! (Hurry! Survey closes 8/17/25)
✅ Download the 7-Day Anti-Inflammatory Meal Plan that works for you AND your family!

Transcript

I am so excited to share this episode with you today because it is the 50th episode of the Family Fork podcast. And honestly, that is a huge milestone, especially considering that most people who start a podcast usually stop around episode seven. So I'm really excited about today's episode and I have something really juicy and valuable to dig into with you today. It's this notion that we all

start somewhere. So whether you're starting or restarting, I want to share some lessons with you around health and life that I have learned over the last 15 or 20 years in hopes that it will guide you on your journey.

If you're listening to this episode live, I want to know what you want to see in the next 50 episodes of the Family Fork. So I have an easy survey for you to complete. And honestly, it will take you less than three minutes. When you complete the survey, you'll be entered for a chance to win a $250 gift card to Amazon. But it's your answers that I'm really after. I want to know.

what you're curious about, what you wanna hear more of on the Family Fork podcast. So click the link in the show notes to take that survey. It closes on August 17th. And as soon as I have a winner of the $250 Amazon gift card, I will let that person know.

All right, now let's get into it. So the reason I started the Family Fork podcast is because I just had more that I wanted to share. It was not cutting it to just send out an email or post on Instagram. There wasn't enough space or enough opportunity for me to share information and stories and learnings with you. And...

And in that time, in the last 50 episodes, which has been almost a year, I have had a lot of revelations.

I have learned so much from you, what you really need and want and what truly resonates with you. And with more than 13,000 downloads in the past year, you and I, we've become friends. I hope you feel that too. I've really loved getting to know you behind the scenes and hearing more about how this podcast has impacted your life.

One of the biggest realizations that I've had is that as I've shared my stories and the things that I've learned, I've also recognized that there are a lot of things that I just take for granted. Things like, I don't know, the way that I cook or, you know, the fact that I just put protein powder in hot water and I call that coffee. Those are these simple things that I realized very quickly that that was what you really needed from me. Some basic information. You needed a place to start.

when it came to your health and wellness journey. So for today's episode, I want you to take a minute and recognize that we all, we all start somewhere. And that's me included. In case you don't know my full journey of how I got here, I'm gonna take you back a little bit. But then I wanna share three lessons that I have learned in the last 15 or 20 years and show you that I have started.

and restarted more times than I can count.

And that's not actually a bad thing, but I want to remind you that we all start somewhere and there's actually benefit to be had in having those starts and stops.

Now, maybe you've been with me since the very beginning, since episode one, and I'm really grateful to you for that. So if so, you've probably heard a little bit about my journey. But if you are newer to the Family Fork podcast and you're just coming into my world, I want to give you a quick history lesson so that you can understand where I'm coming from in not only creating content for this podcast, but in also being incredibly qualified to coach and teach and encourage you

to learn some of these fundamental lessons.

My journey started back in 2009 when at that point in time I had decided to leave an abusive marriage. My husband at that time was a gambling addict and an alcoholic and his choices had more than decimated our family. At the time I just had my son Jack and I knew that the life that I was living was not

good for me or my son, was not even safe. So I decided to leave that marriage and finalized my divorce in 2009, knowing that we needed to build a very different life for ourselves.

I'm really open about sharing that story and you'll hear elements of it sort of pop up in various episodes. But after leaving that marriage, I quickly had to pivot into single motherhood and I was fine to do that. I was prepared to do that, but I didn't have a lot of time to heal or repair myself. There was a lot of trauma that I endured that my son endured.

And I didn't really have a chance to address some of those issues and some of those feelings that I had until my body physically forced me to do so. In 2012, I was in a situation where I was gaining so much weight. I would try everything, but everything that I did, I just gained more and more weight. I had intense brain fog. I had severely aching joints and

Like it was even difficult for me to get out of bed. It would take me a couple of minutes to just kind of roll over and put my feet on the floor and get myself to the bathroom in the morning. I was really in a lot of pain.

It was impacting my daily life. was definitely impacting my professional life. And at the time I was sure that it was menopause. For a couple of years, I saw doctor after doctor, I wasn't getting any answers. So I finally met with a functional practitioner who I think she took like 13 vials of blood and she asked me hundreds of questions. And at the end of all of that in

In I was finally diagnosed with Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism and severe nutrient deficiencies.

That diagnosis was a tremendous wake up call for me that the trauma and the stress that I had endured for so many years in that abusive marriage had definitely taken a massive toll on my body.

I needed to immediately begin healing my body. And I decided to do that with food because with a little bit of research, it became really clear that food was going to be the easiest, fastest way for me to start healing my body from the inside out. But in making some of those major pivots to my nutrition, I also had to quickly learn how to make my food family friendly. It was just the two of us, me and my son, Jack, and he was

growing quickly. He was really busy playing lacrosse and snowboarding all winter long. He and I had very different nutritional needs and he just needed a ton of food and me, I needed really clean food. So together we slowly began sort of this like rebuilding phase in our lives where we redefined what it meant to be healthy for each of us. I started looking at where my priorities were, where I could set boundaries.

And during this time, I even started dating a little bit and I had to decide what it was like to find new love in my life.

Thankfully, in that season, I found the man who I am now married to and is the dad of my 6 year old, Saraya.

But before all of that good stuff happened, I was really grateful for the effort that I had put in towards making good choices for my own health and for my family's health. Because around 2021, I started struggling with all of the symptoms of perimenopause. And again, it just felt like the same thing. I had gained a ton of weight and no matter what I would try, I could not lose the weight. was so frustrating. I had

dry skin, dry hair, a lot of trouble sleeping, and I really sunk into a deep depression that was really difficult for me to manage.

So as I was struggling through all of this, I realized that I needed to do the same thing that I had done back when I got my diagnosis for my thyroid disorders. I had to go back to the basics. Food, again, became the easiest way to start tackling the health challenges that I was up against. And even more than the food was the way that I thought about the food and the situation that I was in. I started recognizing that thinking, know,

for me, gosh, you know, this sucks. This is terrible. There's nothing I can do about it. I started to recognize that I needed to think differently if I was going to keep going and keep getting myself healthy. So by this time in my journey, we're up to like 2023, which was an incredibly difficult year for me. In January of that year, I was laid off from my full-time job.

And then just a few months later in April, I found out that I needed to have a hysterectomy because there were very big growing concerns about cervical cancer. So I had multiple surgeries between April and October and ended up with a full hysterectomy.

And in the rest of my life at that time, my dad, he fell. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. We had to get him through physical rehab and gosh, I don't know. You can probably relate to this, but like this new stage of life where I fully entered that sandwich generation in raising my daughter who was born in 2019 and taking care of my family and also taking care of my aging parents. During that phase of life, I

kept making smart choices around the food that I was eating because I knew if I had the right food, the healthy food, it would help me to feel better. So that brings us all the way to today, 2025. And if you have been following along the last couple of episodes or I don't know, maybe you're new, but I was diagnosed with breast cancer in May. I had surgery in July.

and I will be in treatment until the end of this year, which includes additional surgeries.

And so when I tell you that everybody starts somewhere and that I personally have started and restarted more times than I can count, this is what I mean. I left an abusive marriage. I rebuilt my life, but with my health in mind, I got remarried. I had a baby at 44 years old. mean, who does that? I had a hysterectomy and now here I am today surviving breast cancer.

I truly hope that you don't have as many challenging life situations in your past life But if you do, I really need you to know that you are not alone. We all start somewhere and we all have to decide how we're going to pick up the pieces and restart when life gets difficult, when things get challenging and when we don't hit our goals.

With that in mind, I want you to listen to these three lessons that I have learned along my journey and hear these areas where I want you to put your focus because no matter where you are in your journey, if you're just starting or you're trying to restart, these three lessons are areas that you can focus on that I promise will move the needle for you in your health and wellness and in life.

Your first area of focus without a doubt, hands down, needs to be your food. Every day, every single day you eat multiple times. Food is a constant. And what I learned when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's, when I was in perimenopause, and even now as I'm surviving breast cancer, food is the best and easiest place for you to start to improve your health and your overall life.

You'll hear me talk on this podcast. I only talk about anti-inflammatory diet because when you reduce inflammation, it is so much easier to deal with anything that comes your way, whether it's a stressful situation or a health situation, making those small tweaks to your nutrition just a little bit every day, every week, and getting closer to having a fully aligned anti-inflammatory way of eating. It's going to make you feel so much better.

I want you to try tracking your food to understand how food makes you feel. This was definitely something I did in the early days when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's because I couldn't figure out like do hot peppers make me feel good or worse or does gluten make me feel bad or does it even bother me at all? Does dairy have any impact? When you can track how food makes you feel,

You know, like, do you feel more energetic when you eat a meal that you've cooked at home or when you eat Chick-fil-A? Or do you have better digestion when you eat more plants in your diet? Knowing this information will help you to make better choices. And the better food choices that you make, the better you are going to feel both physically and mentally.

Trust me on this one. I have had years, over a decade of experience and I can tell you that the fastest, easiest way to getting started on any journey to feeling better physically or mentally is going to be with the food choices that you make.

Your second area of focus has got to be your family. If the food that you're trying to eat, the recipes that you're printing off and pinning, the workouts that you're trying, that gym membership that you have, or your priorities, if it doesn't work with your family, you will never stick with any of it. It just won't work. That's why everything that I teach, everything that I share with you, it's designed with your family in mind.

You know, when I entered that era of single motherhood, that's when I developed my system that I call component cooking because I didn't have a lot of extra time. I was working these 60 hour weeks and commuting two hours a day. There was no time to meal prep on the weekends. But also I just didn't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen because my time with Jack was really limited. So I created a method of cooking that supported our family's needs at that time.

And what's great is that it works so well for my family that I continue to use it today. You know, just the name of this podcast, The Family Fork, I came up with that name because you have to start strategizing in a way that you can eat and prioritize your health, but also that will allow your family to get on board with what you're cooking.

If your approach that you're currently using to health or wellness doesn't take into account your family or what your family needs, you will definitely struggle to make that a sustainable lifestyle. So that's the goal here at the Family Fork to show you that yes, food is the most important place you can start. But if it doesn't work with your family and you don't have easy accommodations to work with what your family needs and wants,

you're not going to be able to make it a sustainable lifestyle.

All right, the third thing that you need to focus on is something that truly took me a long time to learn. It's this idea of self-talk and the stories we tell ourselves and conquering your mindset. And I get it, like those are kind of big concepts, they aren't super clear, but let me give you this example to see if it helps. So my entire life and definitely through my abusive marriage, through health issues, through breast cancer,

I have always thought that I'm a pretty positive and optimistic person.

And I think if you know me, especially if you know me in person, you would probably agree with that. and so for a long time, I thought, you know what? This is enough, right? This is enough to be able to keep me healthy and help me crush my life. If I can think positively like, yeah, I can do it. I can get up tomorrow and do a workout. I can get up tomorrow and make really healthy choices around my eating. I just thought that that was enough.

But what I came to recognize in the last five or six years is that I actually had these quiet stories in the back of my mind that were sabotaging my progress and my goals all the time. So let me give you an example of what I mean by that. One of the big stories that I've held for a really long time, and to be honest, what I still struggle with today is this idea of no matter what I try, nothing

ever works out for me and nothing ever goes my way. Look back to what I told you at the beginning of this episode. Maybe you could actually agree with that. Like, yeah, an abusive marriage, major health challenges. I struggled with being a single mom and raising a strong willed son. I had a scare with cervical cancer. I had breast cancer.

So you might even look at my life and say, yeah, no matter what she does, like no matter how healthy she eats, something always comes up for her. And interestingly, this was something like when I told people that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer, that was the prevailing comment. my gosh, but you already do everything. You're so healthy. You eat so well. How is it possible that you have breast cancer? So as I continued to heal myself and work on being my own person,

I began to recognize that you have to teach your brain to look for what you want versus what you don't have. And I know this sounds super basic. hear, you know, help, help. You hear self help leaders and gurus say this all the time, but it really struck a different chord with me. And the bigger revelation was figuring out tangible tools.

to put that into practice

Because what this did is it took me from being in victim mode to being in this mode where I actually feel grateful and forward thinking. I'm really grateful that I have two amazing kids and the marriage I've always dreamed of. I'm grateful for time and resources to focus on my health and the tenacity to beat breast cancer. Most days I don't think anymore like, ⁓ it's just never going to work out for me.

So it's not enough to just be positive or to be an achiever and kind of check things off your to-do list. You have to learn how to completely rewire your brain so that you are telling yourself better stories. Because when you do that, you will get more of what you deserve when it comes to your health and when it comes to your life overall.

So instead of me constantly saying, know, no matter what I try, nothing ever goes my way. I've been able to change my mindset. If you can do that too, you are going to find the things that you want, the goals that you want to achieve. You will be in the right mindset. You will have the correct self-talk, the right stories to actually allow you to achieve what it is that you're after. Pretty cool, right?

So as we close up this momentous 50th episode of the Family Fork podcast, I wanna remind you that everybody start somewhere and you can start today, this very second. No matter where you've been or the challenges that you faced, I see you, I get you, promise I get you. I understand how hard life just in general can be.

But when you can focus on these three things, the food you eat, how you incorporate your family into your health and your nutrition goals, and learning how to rewire your brain to have better self-talk and a better mindset, you will be amazed at how much you can start to achieve in your life, how much easier it is to set boundaries and to build priorities that really allow you to live the life that you know you deserve.

So thank you, thank you for joining me for this amazing milestone episode. I am beyond grateful to have you here and I'm grateful to learn from you. I really encourage you to please help me continue to bring you content that makes sense to you and that serves you best. Make sure and take that survey, that link that I told you about is in the show notes.

And I really want you to share your thoughts with me. I promise it'll take you less than three minutes. You'll have a choice to win a $250 Amazon gift card and the survey closes on August 17th. So go do it right now. Thank you. Thank you for being here. I hope these lessons have really helped you today and I cannot wait to see you back here next week and for the next 50 episodes.