If you had met me twenty years ago, you would never have predicted the life I live today.
Today, I spend my winters living in Mexico. I hike, dance, paddleboard, travel, and perform as a professional fire artist. Alongside my partner, I have performed at events across the United States and Mexico, sharing experiences that inspire awe, courage, and transformation. My life is vibrant, adventurous, deeply fulfilling, and filled with opportunities I never imagined possible.
What makes this remarkable is not that I lost weight.
It's that I became someone different.
Growing up in Idaho as one of five children, I was actually a healthy weight throughout my childhood and teenage years. Yet I believed I was fat. Despite being 5'5" and weighing only 123 pounds, I absorbed messages from family, coaches, diet culture, and society that I wasn't thin enough. I learned to view my body as a problem to solve.
Those beliefs became the lens through which I experienced myself.
As the years passed, the beliefs I carried about myself slowly became my reality. I gained weight steadily throughout adulthood and eventually found myself approaching 300 pounds. Like many people, I tried countless diets, weight-loss programs, and strategies. I even pursued bariatric surgery. In 2005 I had the lap-band surgery, a surgery that is no longer performed due to its 85% failure rate. While it helped temporarily, I eventually regained all of the weight I had lost and more. For years I had heard people in bariatric support groups say, "I got a band for my stomach. Now I need a band for my brain."
At the time, I believed I had failed.
What I didn't understand yet was that my brain was simply carrying out the instructions it had been given for decades.
Then everything changed.
While attending graduate school to become a counselor, I was introduced to neuroscience and the concept of neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to reorganize itself through repeated thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. I remember sitting in that classroom and having an immediate realization:
Neuroplasticity is the band for the brain.
Suddenly I understood what that meant.
I immersed myself in neuroscience research, studied behavior change, explored trauma treatment, and began experimenting on myself. I spent years in counseling, completed EMDR therapy, and developed a practical system for using neuroplasticity to reshape the beliefs and thought patterns that had quietly driven my behavior for most of my life.
Before pursuing revision bariatric surgery to the gastric sleeve, I focused on changing my brain.
I worked to replace the identity of "someone who will always struggle with weight" with the identity of someone who naturally lives in alignment with a healthy body.
The difference was profound.
When I eventually had revision surgery in 2017, it wasn't just my stomach that had changed. My thinking had changed. My coping skills had changed. My default responses had changed.
For the first time, healthy choices felt natural.
I wasn't constantly fighting cravings. I wasn't relying on willpower all day long. I wasn't forcing myself to stay on track.
Instead, I found myself automatically making decisions that supported my goals. When stress showed up, I had healthier ways to respond. When setbacks happened, I became curious instead of critical. When cravings increased, I learned to view them as information rather than evidence that I was failing.
The result wasn't perfection.
It was consistency.
Over time, that consistency led to extraordinary change.
Today I have maintained a weight loss of more than 165 pounds from my highest weight. More importantly, I have maintained it through stress, grief, life transitions, travel, relationship challenges, and all the realities of being human.
What I gained was far more valuable than what I lost.
I gained confidence.
I gained freedom.
I gained experiences I never thought my body would allow me to have.
Most of all, I gained a life that feels bigger than anything I imagined possible.
Because after years of personal experience, professional counseling, neuroscience study, and helping others create lasting change, I've become convinced of one thing:
Sustainable weight loss is not just about changing what you eat.
It's about changing the beliefs, identities, thought patterns, and automatic responses that drive your behavior every day.
When your brain and your body begin working together instead of against each other, everything changes.
And that is exactly what I help my clients do.
If you're exhausted from fighting your brain every day, I understand. I've lived both versions of that life. And I'd be honored to help you build a brain and body that support the life you want to live.