Hi! I’m Angela, a lover of sunshine, palm trees, avocados, seafood, creativity, and the colour pink. I currently live in beautiful Los Angeles, California (west coast, best coast!) and am a proud plant mum to my 30+ house plants. I’m so excited that you’ve decided to stop by my little corner of the internet. While you’re here, my hope is that I can inspire you to get crafty, get creative, or simply just take a little time for yourself.
Got 3 minutes? Here’s the nutshell version of my About story:
If you’ve arrived here in search of healthy recipes and fitness inspo, you’re sure to find plenty. Back in 2010, this blog started as Eat-Spin-Run-Repeat.com (more about this below) where I wrote about my favourite new gluten-free and dairy-free recipes, my workouts, the races I was competing in, and a lot more. My passion for health and fitness led me to becoming a certified Health Coach in 2012, and a certified Culinary Nutrition Expert in 2016. While I no longer offer health coaching services, wellness is still a central pillar of my life.
In 2018, I moved from Vancouver to LA to pursue what is still today, my dream job. A few months in, I made the decision to take a breather from blogging. I’d let it become a huge, very consuming part of my life by that point, but I knew deep down that I needed to pursue other areas. I wanted to trade screen time for more real-life connection, exploring and adventure.
Since then, things have changed – a lot! Putting the blog on the back burner allowed me to discover so much about myself, meet some incredible people, and develop myself in areas beyond my digital talents. One thing I felt I was lacking, however, was a creative outlet. One of the pieces of advice I’d often give to women I coached who found themselves in ruts was to think back to the things they enjoyed as kids. I decided to take my own advice, and in doing so, rediscovered the love for creating that I’ve had ever since my parents bought me my first box of crayons.
Since then, I’ve fallen madly in love with crafting – specifically card making. Yes, I know that as adults, the only thing most of us get in the mail is bills. But believe it or not, there are a lot of incredibly talented paper crafters out there, and like me, they send handmade cards! While you’ll still be able to find plenty of my older food-related content here in the archives, lately I’ve been focusing on sharing more of my creative hobbies. (Fun fact: I’ve actually been doing this on my crafty Instagram account since 2019!)
Got a little more time to read?
Here’s the longer story.
The early days
I was born in chilly Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and spent my teenage years growing up on a small island in the Middle East called Bahrain. I attended a British International school, met loads of fabulous friends, and had some amazing once-in-a-lifetime experiences. At the time I was involved in a ton of activities – soccer, basketball, running, golf, swimming, hiking – I loved it all.
Unfortunately, all of this physical activity wasn’t enough to keep up with the way I was eating. The weight piled on and eventually, I hit a point where I was extremely unhappy and insecure. I decided to take control of the situation, become a student of clean eating, and get back to the healthy, confident girl I knew was inside.
In the process, I learned how to live a healthier lifestyle, taught myself how to cook, and developed a huge interest in whole food nutrition. I lost 70lbs by eating clean, whole foods and staying active, and gained learnings that will influence how I nourish myself for the rest of my life.
In 2006 I moved back to Canada to do my undergrad degree in Business Administration at Wilfrid Laurier University. I fell head over heels in love with running, joined my university’s varsity cross country team and began a love affair with endurance sports that would last into my mid-20s.
The first blog: Eat Spin Run Repeat
In September of 2008 with 2 years of my undergrad to go, I became a certified group cycling instructor and taught 3-4 classes per week at my gym. Just for fun, I’d create a new healthy recipe each week, print it out on small cards and give out copies to anyone in class who wanted them. Everyone seemed to love it, but printing got expensive for my student budget. I looked for alternatives and decided to start a blog, assuming nobody outside of my class members would want to read it.
After a few months, my audience had grown much larger than my spin class. I was having so much fun sharing my kitchen creations, workouts and random life happenings here on the blog, so I figured I’d continue a little longer. Lo and behold, 9 years later, I was still going at it!
In March of 2015, one of my biggest goals to date – moving to Vancouver, BC – came to life. It was a plan that had been in the works for 4 years and when the opportunity arose, it was a “well, duh” sort of decision. I packed my bags, headed west to the land of mountains, Luon, stand-up paddle boarding and flannel shirts, and never looked back.
After spending some time working at Hootsuite, my career took me to lululemon’s head office. With the lululemon Seawheeze Half Marathon having been the annual event that kept bringing me out to Vancouver summer after summer, it was truly amazing and somewhat surreal to be on the other side of it all. My gig as a Marketing Manager had me creating, laughing, sweating and savasana-ing next to hundreds of remarkably talented teammates, and I loved it all.
The beginning of My Fresh Perspective
With several big life changes in my 20s, I began to feel that I’d outgrown Eat Spin Run Repeat. As no stranger to fresh starts, it was time to make yet another. I re-launched as My Fresh Perspective, a holistic wellness blog featuring hundreds of healthy recipes, workouts, nutrition tips, self-development tools and inspiration for clean living. It wasn’t long after this decision that another big one occurred.
More ch-ch-ch-changes
In June 2018, I embraced an amazing career opportunity and made another big move – this time, south of the border and further down the west coast to Los Angeles, California. Though 2020 events meant having to move back to Vancouver for a while, I’ve since returned to LA and am so incredibly grateful that I still get to spend my days working amongst a team of rockstars at an amazing, fast-growing, mission-driven company. Even now, several years after starting as a total newbie, I still find myself waking up in the morning, wanting to give it my very best.
What now?
For several days, weeks and months of self-isolation during the time that will likely be looked back on as “the COVID era”, I contemplated coming back to writing the blog. Perhaps it was the desire to connect with other humans since real-life interaction wasn’t advised. As was the case for so many, 2020 was an exceptionally tough one for me in many ways, some of which I plan to share here. But one thing is for sure, and it’s that my creative pursuits helped – and continue to help – me get through some of the hardest times. I’ve become part of an amazing, uplifting, positive community of crafters, and in a world where so much of the news we receive is negative, this has been such a breath of fresh air. Though you won’t find me posting many new recipes or workouts, what you will find is a look into my crafty life, with some self-development and wellness commentary along the way.
However you’ve arrived on this page, I’m so grateful that you’re here. I hope you have fun exploring, and please bear with me while I do a little housekeeping to tidy up some older loose ends (aka broken links and other blog admin that needs tending to!)
New here and not sure where to start?
Some of the most popular posts on the blog are below.
