About

The Basics
My name is Ashley and I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I graduated from Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, in May 2007 with a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in English and managed to find a job that combined both my degrees a few months later. I love science fiction and fantasy novels, although I don’t read nearly as much as I should. I watch House, The Biggest Loser, Top Chef, and not much else. I like to watch movies and have over 200+ in my NetFlix queue. I’m a fan of post-grunge alternative rock music.

The Story
I started running in Spring 2009 with the Couch to 5K program, and it’s taken me the rest of the year to complete it, but I’ll be running my first 5K on January 1, 2010. The major reasons I started running were to lose weight and to get fit. I was a scrawny kid until puberty hit, and after that? Not so much. At my highest weight during the first half of college, I was about 170 lbs. At a small-framed 5′3″, that pushed me into the obese category. I lost weight during my junior and senior years of college as a result of starting medication and the stress of being an overloaded upperclassman–I was probably around 135 or 140 lbs–and then switched medications and got a desk job and got back up to 165 lbs. My workplace ran a “Turkey Challenge” during November 2008 to see who could exercise the most and I decided to give it a go and lost a few pounds. More than that, I discovered that it was actually easier than I thought to work exercise into my schedule–and it was fun. I’ve been working on losing weight by exercising and changing my diet over the past year, and while I’ve had some setbacks due to a major lack of willpower, I’ve managed to get back down to around 152 lbs and maintain the loss for several months. I’m still overweight but I’m fitter than I’ve ever been and I know that if I keep at it, those remaining pounds will slowly come off.

The Blog
I’ve been building websites since the early days of Geocities, when dinosaurs roamed the Internet and Windows 3.1 was in style. My biggest and most popular website was based on Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels; it ran from 1999-2004, but unfortunately I realized during my first year of college that I just couldn’t keep up with it. During college I started StarlightFading.net as a book review site, which I updated very slowly because I didn’t have time to read for leisure, and if I did have leisure time I wanted to do something mindless. After graduation I wanted to put more effort into the site, but I found that it was still a slow process to read a book and review it, and getting a job as an editor had put me back into reading all day and not wanting to read much at night.

I have always loved to post about what I’m cooking and eating in my online journals, and I always felt bad about it. Posting what you ate for breakfast has always been considered one of the major no-nos of creating an interesting journal, so I didn’t do it very often. Then one day I discovered that there was an entire community of food bloggers online that posted everything they ate, and I was hooked. I knew I wanted to start a food blog. Food is integral to the Southern culture in which I grew up and continue to live, and it’s literally in my face every day. And so I decided to change StarlightFading.net into a blog that focuses largely on food–a blog that chronicles my journey to lose weight, get fit and healthy, and continue improving my eating habits and the quality of the food I eat.

The Dog
I love dogs–when I moved out of my parents’ house (and away from my family’s three dogs), I knew my apartment wasn’t going to be a home until it had a dog in it. In January 2008 I drove to the Orange County Animal Shelter and found out that the dog I’d driven an hour to see had just been adopted (although later I found out that he hadn’t–was it fate?). The shelter asked me to look at the puppy that was in the same pen as the dog I’d just missed. As soon as I saw him, I knew he was mine, and after a few minutes of playing with him in the observation room I was experiencing a major episode of puppy love. I signed the paperwork that day and by the time I came back to pick him up a few days later, I’d decided to name him Heathcliff, after the recently deceased Heath Ledger.

He is a scruffy terrier mutt who with a huge underbite and hip displaysia, so ugly that he’s come back around to being cute again, and after almost two years of coming home every day to him sitting patiently behind the front door, I can’t imagine life without him there. He is an incredible dog.