My Weight Loss & Health Journey

How I Lost Over 70lbs, Got In The Best Shape of My Life, Started a Nutrition Business & Became Inspired to Help Others

This was my original Facebook post when I launched the page one year ago, and I thought it would be a good first blog post.  I've learned a lot over the last year continuing to coach clients 1 on 1 and launching my first groups as well as building my Nutrition Fundamentals Online Course launching in 2024. I continue to feel great & motivated to help as many people as I can achieve their health & weight loss goals through nutrition & root cause resolution.

I think my story mirrors many of my family, friends & contemporaries’; which is why I feel like sharing it and creating Chef Theory Health could be valuable to many people out there.

My mission is to share what I have learned to inspire and empower others to take control of their health and lives. We as a society are only getting sicker with more disease and the system is broken. Healthcare professionals are overworked and limited with their hands tied by the healthcare system. Resulting in a system of sickcare as opposed to healthcare, treating symptoms with medications, instead of root cause resolution. Big business of global food companies influence government policy and dollars to increase profits, not protect your health.

I'm here to disrupt the system, be the change I want to see and provide nutrition and lifestyle based services for those who need it and are ready to take control of their health and change their lives.

Like many of you I grew up a very active kid playing sports year round, but also eating the Standard American Diet, as most people still do, which is full of highly processed foods.
However, I was in shape through high school & into college I gained the typical 10 lbs, not quite as active as I was in grade school, but still biking & skiing. After I graduated college and started a family life got busier & I got less active, gaining another 10-20lbs. Going through phases of going to the gym, losing 10lbs, falling off the wagon, gaining 15 back. Starting up a restaurant business, having a second kid and getting even busier led to more weight gain and inconsistent exercise. One day I got on the scale for the first time in years & was almost 300lbs.

At 35 yrs old I had gained over 80lbs since graduating high school. It still took me a few years to get properly motivated to “get in shape”. I spent a year getting back into the gym a few days per week, trying to be conscious of what I was eating, tried calorie counting, tried Weight Watchers, got into juicing & even did a 5-day juice fast. I was seeing progress, but felt that it wasn’t equal to the effort I was putting in. I heard about keto & gave that a try. I had some more progress & I liked it, but had a hard time maintaining it consistently over months.

Now 2 years into my journey I decided to give Keto another try as a New Year’s resolution, but I wanted to understand how it worked. As I started to watch some YouTube videos I stumbled across one that described the basic hormonal & biochemical reaction in the body to different nutrients, such as carbohydrates. I was instantly fascinated with the intricate physiology of the body & how food acted as information in the body. I quickly became obsessed with consuming as many videos, podcasts & books as possible to understand nutrition, diet theories, metabolism & physiology over the following year. Topics such as keto, plant based, calorie counting, fasting, longevity, metabolism, exercise physiology, disease prevention, food systems & nutrition policy making & more.

The more I learned, the more empowered I felt and the healthier I got; I feel younger every day. At 40 years old I am stronger, can run further & have more energy and endurance than I ever could. But also I became angry about what I felt was a system setup for failure, full of misinformation and mistreatment. I became inspired and felt like I had to do something positive with everything I had learned. Despite all the knowledge I gained through self-research however, I wanted a nutrition education to bring it all together. I enrolled in the Functional Nutrition Alliance Fully Body Systems program & became a Certified Nutrition Counselor. It provided me the exact in depth education I was looking for and set me up to launch Chef Theory Health in 2022.

I considered waiting to launch this until I had perfect abs and had mastered everything there is to know about nutrition based physiology and health. But along my journey I realized that success is not a destination, it's a process and system - success is my journey. I think that inviting you to join my journey is the most beneficial way to go about it. I'm not perfect, I don't have it all figured out and I am not looking to portray an Instagram filtered image that's just not real. I'm here to be real, hopefully provide something beneficial to society and thank you if you actually read this far!!

This post is not to get likes or compliments, but to invite you to like my page and provide some inspiration for you to be the change you want to see!!