Our Story

From Surviving to Thriving

When I told a close friend that my mom (Cathy) and I (Melanie) were going to try entrepreneurship for the first time by becoming Independent Consultants for freeze-dried food (for more on that backstory check out our Thrive Secret Peas post), my friend said: “that makes sense because you know everything about food”. Well, we certainly do not claim to know everything about food - or to be experts of anything really. Yet we do know that eating nutritiously and appropriately for your body and lifestyle can be a joyful journey, as well as the key to greater health and wellness. That was - and still is - our starting point.

Although we continue to learn every day - to this day - by that time we had already learned a lot about food. At the age of nine I was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis for stiffness, pain and swelling in my joints, but my mom was hesitant to start me on a harsh course of drugs – probably because my maternal grandmother suffered from Rheumatoid Arthritis and there were a lot of escalations and difficult side effects of medication as time went on. My mom wanted to investigate some other alternatives, figuring if research did not suggest any better courses of action the pharmaceutical route would still be there as an option. At our first visit to a naturopathic doctor, they suggested trying a diet that eliminated wheat, dairy and red meat. We tried it, and in two weeks my symptoms were about 90% improved. A mother’s intuition for the win! We had to quickly figure out the confusing world of food labelling, hidden ingredients, wheat-free baking, dairy alternatives… I say “We”, but it was really my mom – because I was only nine years old at the time!

Fast forward to when I was a teenager, I had learned how to manage my own diet and allergies and advocate for myself regarding food. It makes sense why a friend – without lived experience of all those challenges that had forced us to learn – would think we “knew everything”. In those days whole foods, gluten-free, and other allergy-specific diets were not nearly as well-known or accepted as they are now. So that was the first big food-related change to our life, and it hugely improved the daily wellness of myself, my mother, and my grandmother.

But it was still a tough road. Cathy has Fibromyalgia, a pain disorder related to chronic fatigue syndrome, and it took a lot out of her to have to make two types of meals most nights. Two types because the non-allergic males in our family often refused to eat the same foods, and because it was expensive to feed everyone the specialty foods if they did not need them. The stress of dinner-time was only multiplied when her parents began to need more care and we all moved in together. Unfortunately, it was not until much later, after my grandparents died, that we were introduced to freeze-dried food – and we still had no idea how much it would save us.

Having a home store of freeze-dried food has seen us through a lot of lean times. It helped us when my father went through a period of being out of work four times in five years. It helped us when the house we were building burned down (without insurance - don’t judge, it’s a long story…) and when the rental we were in had mold in the kitchen… and then the rental we were in had no kitchen as the mold was remediated. It helped keep me going as we lived four different places in my first five years of university; and as I found out I was misdiagnosed with JRA as a child and was given a new diagnosis of Fibromyalgia. It helped us to endure, even up to the present day which means through a global pandemic and multiple car accidents. To say the least, there has been a lot to survive.

However, we want more for ourselves than to be survivors of our life; we want to thrive in our life, despite all the challenges. Our wish to share that with you resonates so strongly that we have named our business Thriving Life with Cathy and Melanie. It is no secret that the world has become a very uncertain and fearful place. Maybe fear of the future is even what drew you our website, because you want to feel prepared for emergencies both acute and chronic; like the struggles we have been through (we listed a few above), and probably many more yet to come. Preparedness is a worthy goal, and we are all for any preparation that gives peace of mind – but the things out there to be afraid of are not going to be our focus here at ThrivingLife.ca. Our consulting business has always been about sharing the joy of food – because we love food and we love to eat, and we love it even more when we feel strong and healthy from the food we are eating. Now we also get a lot of joy from helping others start thriving in their own lives.

You are welcome to share in our journey if you want to work towards your own thriving life, whatever that looks like for you. Hopefully, with this blog you can enjoy learning about natural nutrition and wellness. You can enjoy discovering how good it feels to feel good! You can enjoy creating, curating, and cultivating a Thriving Life along with us – Cathy and Melanie.