My Story

Hi everyone – I’m Andrea! Many of my close friends call me Dre, hence the name Eats by Dre! I want to dive a little deeper into my life so far to give you a glimpse into myself and what brought me to start this community. 

To start with the basics – I am a 90s baby (yay millennials!) and have lived in Minnesota my whole life. I have a sister who is two years younger than me and our birthdays are exactly a week apart so growing up we always celebrated them together and have always been close. I grew up in a very traditional home, my mom was a stay at home mom with my sister and I and my parents are still together to this day. I’m going to skip going into my early years as it really wasn’t until high school that my story took a turn from what most teenagers experience and was that pivotal moment that shaped who I am today.

At 16 years old, a junior in high school, I found out I was pregnant. I had been dating my high school boyfriend for a couple of years at that point but I knew we were not equipped to be parents or support a child considering we didn’t have actual jobs yet and hadn’t even finished high school. He really wanted to keep her and raise her but I knew in my heart that there was no way we could give her what she deserved so I stuck by that and we started the adoption process.

After reading through probably around a hundred different family profiles that were looking to adopt a child, we picked three families to meet and talk to about the adoption. I can honestly barely even remember the other two couples we met because I remember absolutely knowing right after meeting them that we had found the most amazing family to adopt our daughter. They already had two daughters that were both adopted and were more than willing to have an open adoption with us so that we would get to know her and see her grow up. 

As far as school, I was so fortunate to have an amazing guidance counselor at my high school that helped with the transition to finish out my junior year online while I was pregnant. While the actual transition was made easy for me, it was very difficult to go from seeing peers in person everyday to doing just about everything at home by myself, especially at that age.

The transition from going to school in person to online was a very pivotal moment for a lot of my food and exercise habits. Growing up I was always fairly active. I played community ed soccer in grade school and ran track starting in middle school and into high school. My first encounters with the gym started because online school didn’t require me to sit “in school” for specific hours so I started to tag along with my mom to the gym during the day. As for nutrition, my OB at the time had talked to me about nutrition for pregnancy so I started to think about what I was putting into my body for what felt like the first time in my life. It was made so much simpler by not having to choose from the foods in a school cafeteria and being able to make fresh lunches at home.

On May 18th 2011, I gave birth to my first daughter. It was such a surreal moment to bring a new life into this world and after nine months of it being her and I and then leaving the hospital with only giant pads and adult diapers. I can still remember that it was raining the day we left the hospital and me looking through the back window of the car (straight from a movie), leaving empty handed. It was truly one of the hardest experiences I have ever gone through.

The following school year, I went back to my high school but only took AP Calculus there (yes, I’m sort of a math nerd). I took the rest of my classes at a local community college which fulfilled high school requirements as well as receiving college credits for those classes. I hadn’t given a ton of thought to where I wanted to go to college like many of my other classmates were at the time. I went and toured one other college but knew I wanted to go to Minnesota State University, Mankato because my daughter and her adoptive family lived just outside of Mankato and I wanted to be close to her. 

In the summer of 2012, I packed up my things and moved to Mankato to start my freshman year of college. One of the other reasons I wanted to go to Mankato, aside from being close to my daughter, is because they didn’t require you to live in the dorms your freshman year as many other colleges do. My best friend and I had talked about living together but she was going to the community college in Mankato and didn’t have the option of dorms so it worked out perfectly and she and I got an apartment together. I was also extremely fortunate because I had started working at Red Lobster in high school after having my first daughter and Mankato also had a Red Lobster so I just transferred there and had a job right off the bat. 

Going into college I had no clue what I wanted to major in so I started out taking a bunch of general classes that I wasn’t really interested in plus I had this new sense of freedom so I did not do well in the first couple of years of college. I was still struggling with the emotions of giving up my daughter even though I had been able to visit her a couple of times, was partying and drinking all the time as most college students do, and was even on academic probation at one point from such poor grades. 

I was still with my high school boyfriend and he was visiting me a lot. You could say he basically lived with my friend and I without ever being on the lease or paying rent. He had no job and wasn’t going to school. I was buying all the groceries and basically supporting him with the money I was making and honestly I was making pretty good money for being a college student but it was still causing a lot of issues for us. Him constantly being around started to cause a big rift in the relationship between my friend and I and she eventually couldn’t take it anymore and moved out. We had been best friends for five or six years at this point and went to barely speaking to each other.

After she had moved out, it was only a couple months until the lease was up and my boyfriend and I had decided to sign a lease with a group of guys from high school. Yep, I lived with six guys in a college house…1000% do not recommend. Since we had a giant house, away from campus cops, we were a party house. There were constant parties and drinking, the house was completely disgusting. It was awful. This was really the lowest point for me.

Fast forward to early 2014 when I met my (now) husband, Adam! I became good friends with a couple of my coworkers who happened to be Adam’s roommates so we ended up meeting through them. At this point I was STILL with my high school boyfriend and still living with him but our relationship was not good and it wasn’t unusual for me to stay with friends most nights just to be away from it all. Meeting Adam really gave me the wake up call that I needed to get out of that relationship and with someone that truly cared about me. Adam and I clicked instantly. Only 2 weeks had passed from the very first time we met to when we were dating. It was a very quick flip from one relationship to the next but I had been so checked out of my prior relationship for so long. I think I just had this notion in my head that I needed to be with him because he was the father of my child. The day after I met Adam, I officially broke it off with him and it was this insane weight off of my shoulders to finally be out from under that toxicity.

When Adam and I started dating, I was in my second year of college and still undecided on what I am going to major in but my personal life issues were improving, I had my best friend back, I was doing a little bit better academically, and I really started to think about what it was that I wanted to do. Then going into my third year of college, I knew I needed to declare something to major in as I was still taking general credits and spending money on no end goal. I finally sat down and really thought about what I was passionate about and finally one day it hit me that food and health in general was the thing I love. Finally, I declared my major in Foods and Nutrition!

This was really a huge turning point for me. As soon as I got to start taking classes that I actually enjoyed and was interested in, I was consistently pulling 4.0 GPAs and making the Dean’s List every semester which was very needed with my rough start. I had joined a student organization for nutrition and dietetic students and became the social media manager for that group, was doing a lot of volunteer work, I also had to complete an undergrad internship in order to graduate and I had one that was right on campus and actually PAID which was rare for internships. Everything was going amazing once I finally realized what it was I wanted to do.

I graduated with my Bachelors degree in May 2018 and Adam and I moved up to the Twin Cities after our lease was up in Mankato that summer. Adam had started his job before we moved so he was driving over an hour each way up until we moved. But hey, that worked out as he’s still at the same company to this day! I initially got a bartending job while I looked for other jobs related to nutrition and ended up getting a job at Lifetime Fitness. I thought this would be a good step into a well known fitness brand but I was opening the gym at 4am, so my sleep hours were completely whack and I wasn’t doing what I truly wanted to do so I ended up working with a recruiter and got a job in healthcare and I moved up pretty quickly in that company. Currently, I am now with a different company but still within the healthcare space and working for the same boss as my first company!

To quickly highlight other life updates since college – In July 2018, Adam and I got engaged and got married in July 2019. Thank goodness we got this out of the way prior to the pandemic!

The last week of February 2020, we went on our honeymoon to Mexico. This was when the pandemic and shut downs were still sort of in the rumor mill and luckily we made it back home without being quarantined there. I think we both went back to work for a week before we were told to start working from home. It was pretty great initially but after a little while of two people working from home in a one bedroom apartment, we decided it was time to find our first home.

June 2020 – We bought our house and finally had the room to each have our own offices and a place to make ours. Thank you to early pandemic interest rates! We truly bought at the perfect time.

March 2021 – We adopted our dog, Koda.

February 2022- We went to Hawaii as a bucket list vacation knowing we wanted to start trying for a baby when we got back. It was such an amazing trip and I would absolutely go back in a heartbeat!

May 2022 – It didn’t take long, I was pregnant! This was kind of a full circle moment because as I mentioned before, starting in high school and all throughout college, I worked at Red Lobster and Mother’s Day is one of the biggest days in the restaurant industry so I worked every Mother’s Day and it always SUCKED. It was such a struggle seeing other moms with their kids when I was never able to spend the day with my daughter. SO finding out I was pregnant with my husband and I’s daughter on Mother’s Day weekend was such a bittersweet moment. 

On January 15, 2023 our daughter Ava was born! Now Ava is growing up so insanely fast, it’s crazy to see in front of my eyes, and we have now officially entered the toddler stage with her. It has been amazing to watch my oldest daughter grow up and become her own personality and now watching her and seeing how much she loves her half sister has been some of the best moments as a mom.

Like I said before, I think getting pregnant at a young age happened for a reason. If not for that happening in the first place and going through with the adoption, I wouldn’t have gone to school where I did, I don’t think I would have realized my passion for nutrition and a healthy lifestyle, I wouldn’t have met my husband, and Ava wouldn’t be here with us now. Nothing would have been the same so I am eternally grateful for everything I have gone through.

Of course there are so many other things along the way but I think everything I mentioned was really the defining moments to get me here. If you ever want to know more or chat about anything, always feel free to reach out! And if you stuck around to read all of this, THANK YOU…and thank you for being here to support me and the community I am hoping to create.

Stay hungry my friends!