Graham Kingma, metabolic health coach

You have already read the ending up top: the bloodwork, the doctor's words. That is the view from the summit. This is the climb.

The two photos up top are the whole story in one frame. At the lake in 2018 I was happy, and carrying more than I wanted to. I had tried the usual routes and none of them held. What finally worked was slow, ordinary and mine: one food at a time, each chosen for the nutrition it gave me, kept until it was simply how I ate. That is what lasting change looks like. Not a diet you survive, a way of eating you keep. Yours will look like yours.

Where it started

This work did not start with food for me. It started in 2016 at a residential mindfulness intensive in the California desert, run by the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness. I came home with one idea that changed everything: how you handle a hard moment is not personality. It is a skill. You can train it.

The hard way

The food part I learned the hard way, like most of us do. For years I chased every plan going: start strong on Monday, white-knuckle two weeks, slip once, quit, repeat with whatever the next headline was selling. The advice was always the same: try harder. Nobody asked whether the plan was one a real person could actually live with.

The turn

So when the verdict came, I did not have a plan. I had a reason. The rabbit hole was not glamorous: evenings with research papers, hard questions at every appointment, and one change at a time tested on the only subject I could watch around the clock, me. Real food. Steady blood sugar. Movement I could keep. Habits built in stages instead of leaps. My research, and my own experience getting healthier, became the podcast I host, Lessons from the Ketoverse.

The podcast taught me something I did not expect: the science is the easy part. What people want is not more information. It is someone in their corner.

The fifty pounds got the headlines. The part that mattered: nothing had been prescribed. The hike had simply been one I could actually climb.

Same guide, cleaned up for town.

The job

So I made it my job. A Diploma in Health and Wellness Coaching from McMaster University, then Functional Therapeutic Diets Specialist training with the Primal Health Coach Institute, so the support I offer stands on behaviour-change science, not enthusiasm. Ascent is the guide I wish I'd had: a route mapped around your actual life, the skills before you need them, and someone on the rope at every switchback. No judgment. A plan.

And straight up: I am a coach, not a clinician. I do not diagnose or treat anything. If your goals need more than coaching, I will say so and help you build the right team.