The Complex Journey Behind the Food

Five starts. One that’s finally working for my book.
The others didn’t go anywhere—but they mattered.
Just like the hundreds of starts before I lost my weight.

This will take months of Saturdays.
But I’m writing the full story:
the complexity, the tension,
and the truth of what real change can take.

Noise to Clarity

I’ve moved away from photographing food lately.

These days, I’m more interested in the psychological journey—its layers, its tension—and the challenge of naming it in a world that craves simple answers.
How I made sense of food,
learned to listen to myself,
and started choosing differently
to center my health and lose half my weight.

Each week, I carve out a few hours to write.
It’s slow work, but it’s how I move forward—one layer at a time.

This weekend, I finished a passage that surprised me.
Not because I hadn’t lived it,
but because I liked the way I named my shadows.

From my draft:

I planned to eat clean. I meant it. And every day, I slipped—one bite unlocking a flood of noise I couldn’t quiet. Then one slip unraveled the rest of the day. I gave in to the agitation, the noise that drowned out the person I wanted to be: the imagined moderate who chose a fresh salad over a bag of chips, who could add a little cheese and move on, who didn’t reach for junk food to outrun the noise.

Living in a world where I could have
just one peanut butter cup,
one piece of pizza,
one handful of chips—
that was a romantic delusion.
A version of myself I wanted to believe in.
Someone who could eat just one.
Someone I had never actually been.

I didn’t know it yet, but this was a turning point—
not the solution,
but the truth that made one possible.

“I’ll start tomorrow” wasn’t laziness. It was all-or-nothing thinking in disguise—a perfectionist trap that said if I couldn’t do it all, I may as well wait. It was also a way to put off making hard changes.

This weekend, I kept writing through that truth—
the false promise of the perfect start,
the spiral that followed a single misstep,
and the years it took to see what was actually going on.

One more page done. One more piece of the real story on paper.

Transform Shadows and Eat When Hungry are still at the core of what I’m building—slowly and in spare moments. And yes, I’ll continue to share my free Eat When Hungry video series, too.

This isn’t the stuff of quick or magic answers—although I wish it were.
In my world, transformation is hard work.
And deeply empowering.

I’m sharing pieces of the journey here as I write.
Feel free to walk alongside.

This is what it looks like, for me, to transform shadows—again and again.

My Transform Shadows Framework

This is the framework that I use to explain my ongoing mental processes to build successes and handle failures in my health journey and my broader life.

Name the shadows.
Honesty is the starting point. For me, it began with naming binge eating.

Face the shadows.
Truth alone isn’t enough—I had to act on what I knew, not just carry it.

Understand the shadows.
Misinformation runs deep. Understanding what’s true for me helped me move forward.

Fight the shadows.
Instincts and pressures pulled hard. Fighting meant doing something different—on purpose.

Reframe the shadows.
Change took root when I saw food, hunger, and myself in new ways.

Transcend the shadows.
Some days feel effortless. Living well becomes its own rhythm—and something I want to return to.