Stephanie Simmons
I am Stephanie Simmons. I am the founder of Holy Nourished. It’s been a long journey to get to this point but I am so incredibly excited to be doing my life’s calling with Holy Nourished. I have had many different jobs in my life and a couple of degrees, but one thing that I have always been passionate and called to is using my experiences and struggles to walk with others through those things because we are not meant to do life alone.
I took a few different paths to get here, I moved to Nashville from Arizona in 2004 to attend Belmont University and to be the next Reba. I may have earned a degree in Entertainment Industry Studies, but alas my call was to something else. I graduated in December 2008 right as the recession hit, and I decided (like many other Millennials) to attend grad school. I moved from Nashville to Portland, OR where I started at Portland Seminary.
It was in seminary where I was really able to hone in on my desire to walk alongside people who have been on the journey to holistic relationships with food and body. It is where I did a lot of my academic research and initially incubated the idea of what is now Holy Nourished.
Seminary also brought me another really amazing thing…my husband. I met Evan there and in 2015 I graduated with a Master of Arts in Ministry Leadership and three months later got married. And six months after that…
SURPRISE! I was pregnant! I was pregnant with our daughter Lizzie only six months after we got married. She was born in 2016 and (SURPRISE AGAIN!) her brother, Levi was born 13 months later. I went through several early pregnancy losses in the couple of years after Levi was born, but in July 2021 we had our third child, Ezra. He is a chaos-monster-preschooler who we all love very much.
Being a Mama definitely changed me. It opened up a whole new aspect to my idea of holistic relationships and it had me questioning how I wanted to live out my progressive Christianity as a mom. I struggled with Postpartum Depression and Anxiety and I struggled with my new identity as a mom and what that meant for who I was. It also gave me a new relationship with my body. I was both in awe and at war with it throughout my motherhood process. It also made me think of the example I was setting for my kids and the relationship I wanted them to have with food and their bodies.
Holy Nourished exists from all these experiences and the experiences I’ve been lucky enough to hear from the many many other people who have walked alongside me over the years. I feel lucky that my life and experiences (both good and bad) have led to something that can benefit other people.