WellCommons

Originally from Nebraska, I moved to Lawrence with my wife Amelia when she was accepted to the School Psychology program at KU. We've now been here for 4 years and we grow to love it more and more everyday.

By day I'm an IT Technician for Sunflower Broadband, but that job is going to end soon due to the buy-out by Knology, so in some sense I'm in between jobs at the moment. By night I'm a husband, dad, and full-time student in the Graduate Licensure Program at KU in the School of Education. I'm studying to be a high school Spanish and ESL teacher and hope to be student teaching this fall and full-time teaching in January of 2012. I also substitute teach yoga classes at the Lawrence Athletic Club and hope to offer my own classes once I'm student teaching later this year.

As far as wellness and health is concerned, I hang around this site because I've really had strong focus on my health and wellness in the last 5 years. Not to say I wasn't concerned about my health before then, but after I got married I stepped on the scale and decided that something needed to change. That was December of 2006. By May of 2008 I celebrated the loss of 60lbs from my overall body weight. I accomplished this through simple diet change (portion control) and regular exercise (3-4 gym workouts per week plus walking with my dogs).

In June of 2008 my wife and I made the transition to a vegetarian diet. We do eat eggs and dairy but do not eat any other form of animal protein or product. This change definitely helped me to maintain my weight after losing those 60 pounds but after 2 years of really hard work I celebrated a little too hard by taking a break from going to the gym. Unfortunately that break resulted in a 20 pound weight gain over the last 3 years. Oops. And then I enrolled in full-time grad school. And had a baby 3 months ago. Needless to say, today my visits to the gym are slim to none but I'm still practicing yoga when I can. I'm excited to see what 2011 brings for my overall health and wellness and look forward to seeing what it brings for others in this community as well.