My Story...

I've been on my own recovery path for over 25 years. Like many of my clients, I spent years trapped in cycles of dieting, restriction, and bingeing on ultra-processed foods. Today, I gratefully eat whole foods (rare exceptions aside). I have maintained a 40+lb weight loss for more than three decades. And I have reversed a long list of health conditions, including migraines, rosacea, depression, bladder infections, skin cancer, cystic acne, and more.

My freedom didn't come quickly or easily. It came through decades of trial and error.

I tried therapy, books, supplements, retreats, 12-step meetings, and countless diets. I could stay abstinent for stretches — but it required intense vigilance. Eventually, the pull back to sugar would overpower my best efforts.

Everything changed when I discovered Rational Recovery and Jack Trimpey's work. For the first time, I could observe urges without acting on them. Abstinence felt natural. I sustained it effortlessly for nearly five years and believed I was fully recovered.

But I wasn't.

One winter night, in a moment of deep fear, I relapsed. I returned to meetings, to sponsors, to every strategy I knew — but nothing restored sustained abstinence.

That season broke something open in me.

I began to see that abstinence alone is not recovery. Food was never the whole issue. The deeper work — the nervous system work, the trauma work, the chronic fear and overwhelm that had always been running beneath the surface — was now impossible to ignore. It was making it impossible to stay abstinent. It was demanding my full attention.

My relapse pushed me to do the trauma recovery work I later became certified in. Today I understand that abstinence can be a powerful tool. Harm reduction can work too. But food, for many of us, is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Today, my recovery is NOT sustained by a fear of relapse or a fear of food, but in a felt sense of safety, possibility, and love for my body. My life is now getting better and better. And yours can too.