So perhaps it makes a certain kind of sense that I spent more than seven years working as a nutritional counselor — guiding brilliant, accomplished women through restrictive eating plans. I was good at it. I built a following. I had every reason to believe I had found my calling.

And the entire time — I was privately cycling through the same shame spiral I’d been living since I was a teenager. Guiding women toward freedom I had never actually found myself.

Then life intervened, as it does. I lost my husband of twenty-eight years to cancer. I was forty-nine years old. And in my grief, I returned to the only coping strategies I had ever known — the same patterns, because that is what we do when we haven’t yet learned to sit with pain.

There I was. A woman who counseled other women on their relationship with food, unable to make peace with my own. Giving advice I couldn’t take. Pointing toward a freedom I had never actually lived.

That was the moment everything cracked open. And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the crack is exactly where the light gets in.

I walked away from that practice. I went back to school at 55. I built something completely different — an approach rooted in both the science of functional nutrition and the psychology of what actually drives our relationship with food. Not because I studied the map. Because I walked the road.

I am now 70 years old. My life has never been richer or more meaningful.