It’s always fun to quickly look back at my most popular posts! Have you tried any of these? Did you find me through one of these posts? I’d love to know!
Most Popular Posts of 2023
Key moments for HH!
Hungry Hobby saw huge growth this year, with an additional half a million views, bringing the total to over 2.7 million views for the year. That’s impressive, given for two months, I got zero traffic from Pinterest (which usually sends about half my traffic to me) due to being in the spam block. Throughout this year, despite having another baby, I published 96 new posts. Only 8 new recipes, but I also updated and brought back to life 20 old recipes, which are now seeing some decent traffic. I’m definitely itching to get back into the kitchen this year!
I’d love to get 75 new recipes up, but a more realistic goal is 52, at least one per week. Right now, for the spring semester, I’m planning one new recipe and one new video for an old recipe.
On the nutrition client side, I completed two more intense functional nutrition trainings this year, including an Institute of Functional Medicine BootCamp and one on interpreting and running the GI MAP test. I’ve got my eye on beginning the IFM certification in May of 2024, and I have a nutrigenomics course I need to finish. I’m now regularly running the DUTCH Test, leaky gut testing, and GI MAP stool analysis regularly. Not only has this grown my private practice, but I’m seeing huge improvements in my client’s health and results that were much more difficult to obtain before. It may be extreme to say, but I feel like I was meant to do what I’m doing now. Functional testing requires a strong knowledge of biochemistry to understand the correct pathways and the downstream effects of interventions you can choose to implement. While I never wanted to be a biochem major, my biochem classes were always my favorite and one of the reasons I got into nutrition in the first place. I love to look at the details like that!
2023 Word In Review: Appreciate
Last year, I wrote:
“Appreciate means to accept AND find the beauty behind what you’re accepting. Accepting pregnancy issues is one thing. Appreciating my body is another. Same thing, but with different connotations. And appreciation in every facet of my life is something I will need to rely heavily on this year if I’m going to do more than survive a newborn, a toddler, and a preschooler while attempting to work full-time.
- Appreciate this space that brings me so much joy, even if I can’t spend as much time in it as I would like.
- Appreciate my clients and my students for the opportunity to teach them and walk their journey with them.
- Appreciate my clinical skills and training opportunities, even if it takes me longer to get through the training than I want.
- Appreciate my kids for the age they are right now. They will never be this age again.
- Appreciate my body for what it can do instead of focusing on what I wish I could do or what I did in my last pregnancies.
- Appreciate our new house, despite any of its shortcomings. Every house has them.
- Etc.
I’m not saying that everything has to have a positive spin so that we can’t ever complain because I don’t believe that to be healthy. A good girls’ night out with lots of bitching and complaining and laughing and tequila is good for the soul. But, appreciation for the little and big things in the midst of this really busy stage of our family and career lives is something I’m striving for this year.”
It’s no secret this last pregnancy was a difficult pregnancy for me emotionally and physically. I did much better appreciating my body, my work, our life stage, etc after the baby came. After the baby came, I felt a sense of relief and appreciation, I felt like everything from then on there was a process of building back up. I live for the feeling of moving forward, and I do pretty well not comparing myself to previous postpartum periods.
I felt like I did a great job appreciating:
- my body for the pregnancy, delivery, and subsequent postpartum recovery, even if it didn’t all go the exact way I would have wanted
- my workspace and the ability to work a little this summer and have extra child care on hand, I feel like I nailed that balance this time around
- my clients who trust me with their health, and I’ve really enjoyed implementing new functional nutrition strategies with
- my kids for the age they are and how well we all fit as a family
- the temporary yet crazy life stage we are in
- our house, the more we’ve set it up, the more we are settling in
I did not do a great job appreciating anything while I was pregnant. It was more like my eye was on the prize, and the light at the end of the tunnel was the end of the pregnancy. I’ll admit I don’t do pregnancy well, but I am proud of myself for putting one foot in front of the other, holding my head high, and making it through. And for the grace and love I gave myself after the baby got here.
2024 Word: Flexibility
The initial word I thought of was trust. Trusting everything will be okay. I’ve been blogging for over ten years now, and there have been a lot of ups and downs. Things inevitably break on the website, and when that happens, I typically lose my mind. I spin into panic, which does no good because I usually can’t fix it. I just have to find the right person to fix it. (And try to afford the fix.) And that requires patience and waiting to find the right person and for them to respond. This past summer, the month the baby was born, my Pinterest traffic plummeted to almost zero. Eventually, I figured out that my VA was breaking some Pinterest rules and pinning the same image from other bloggers multiple times, which looked spammy. Once I stopped pinning, the block was removed, and my traffic started to bounce back. But in the moment, it was super scary. I ended up hiring a professional Pinterest management company to help manage my Pinterest account.
This upcoming year, starting in just a couple of days, something big is happening in the blog world. Google is deprecating (getting rid of) third-party ads. What does that mean? It means instead of getting ads on websites for things you’ve just searched for. You’ll get content-specific ads. As you can imagine, content-specific ads don’t perform as well as user-specific ads. Therefore, advertisers are likely to pay far less for the ads on websites. Because of this, many websites are turning to subscription models, requiring you to have a subscription or consent to signing in to view certain content. These strategies will offset the significant revenue offset. There isn’t much I can do for Hungry Hobby when it comes to this except encourage readers to utilize Grow saving on the site. This allows me to collect first-party data vs cookies. I couldn’t explain the technicality of this if I tried, but it’s a way to offset some of the revenue loss while allowing users to save recipes and posts across all sites that run grow. Of course, users consent to the release of certain data and are provided an explanation.
This is going to be a big deal. And I think in my life stage, adjusting to three kids, I have to be ready to be flexible. Will I be able to keep up with these changes? How flexible will I be when I learn what changes are needed of myself, Hungry Hobby, etc, to keep up? This year, when I see things changing or not going the way I thought, I want to bend, not break. I want to accept, research, and act with less anger and emotion and mostly fear. I want to be flexible when it comes to what is needed from me to make HH work and my family function. Three kids will make you flexible, but it’s the emotion that comes along with flexibility. For me, I’m often flexible but angry and afraid. I want to be flexible with grace and trust. So, that’s my word of the year or I guess, phrase of the year. Flexibility without fear.
Past Words of the Year
- 2023: Appreciate
- 2022: Growth
- 2021: Strength
- 2020: Relationships –> Yes, my first word of the year was relationships in 2020, the year of intense pandemic lockdowns.
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