You're the climber.
I'm your coach.

You have already read the ending up top: the bloodwork, the doctor's words, no medication needed. That is the view from the summit. This is the climb.

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 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.

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. I recorded what I was learning as I went, and that notebook became my podcast, 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.

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.

The Functional Therapeutic Diets certification goes past general nutrition into the approaches that help when standard advice has not: keto and low carb, primal and paleo, carnivore, Low FODMAP, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, GAPS, the Autoimmune Protocol, and sensitivity work for things like histamine and oxalates. One idea runs through all of them: food is information, used to calm inflammation and steady blood sugar.

An elimination diet is simpler than it sounds: set the likely troublemakers aside for a defined window, let your system settle, then bring them back one at a time and watch what happens. Not a forever diet. Not restriction for its own sake. Evidence from your own body instead of guesswork.

On your climb, that means we stop guessing at what is behind the afternoon crash, the stubborn weight or the aching joints. We test it, then build your everyday eating around what actually works for you. Anything that looks medical, I flag so you can take it to the right professional. The goal is never a stricter rule. It is a clearer route up the mountain.