Hey, Cleanish Squad!

This week’s email is a personal one.

Now, let me tell you a story.

For most of my life, my confidence has been closely tied to how I felt in my body.

Even before I was ever technically “overweight,” I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. I assumed wanting to be thinner was just part of being a teenage girl and then a woman. I always hoped confidence would come later, once I looked a certain way.

When I started gaining weight in college, it didn’t immediately feel like an emergency. In fact, I kinda leaned into it.

I told myself this was just adulthood -- that I was free to eat whatever I wanted. Dustin and I were cooking big meals, enjoying food, and living our lives. I intentionally kept putting off thinking seriously about weight loss until after Dustin and I got engaged, and I even remember telling Dustin I wanted a longer engagement so I’d have time to lose the weight.

One day, about a month into our engagement and almost by accident, I stepped on the scale and realized I weighed nearly as much as Dustin (for reference, he is 6’4”, and I am 5’9”). I started to panic.

I frantically began looking into ways to lose weight fast. This led me into the world of diet pills, appetite suppressants, intense cardio, and rapid weight loss diets, like the Cabbage Soup Diet and other forms of extreme calorie restriction.

After some trial and error, I started counting calories. And, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had control again.

At first, it totally worked.

The weight came off quickly. I remember losing at least half a pound every single day. Over the course of about seven months, I went from 210 pounds to 160. And even then, I still didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin the way I thought I would.

But the praise followed.

So I kept going.

I restricted more. I tracked everything. EVERYTHING. I was completely obsessed. Hunger became something I ignored, and even felt proud of.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I hadn’t actually solved the problem. I had just swung to the opposite extreme.

Food stopped being food. It became numbers, rules, and negotiations. And no matter how much weight I lost, it never felt like enough.

That was the fight.

Fighting food didn’t always look dramatic, and I didn’t really talk about it with anyone else.

Sometimes, it looked like:

Even when my body changed, the mental noise didn’t -- it actually got louder.

As I moved through different stages of my life over the next several years, like marriage, pregnancy, and postpartum, a lot changed, but my relationship with food didn’t.

Food had too much power.

The shift didn’t happen overnight. And I didn’t stop caring or stop trying. I just stopped trying to starve my body into change.

As I learned more about whole foods versus heavily processed foods and began strength training, I remember one workout in particular where it finally clicked: My body didn’t need less food, it needed better fuel.

That’s how I stopped fighting food.

This is the heart of the Cleanish approach, and it came directly from living through all of this.

Cleanish isn’t about eating perfectly. It isn’t about cutting foods out forever. And it isn’t about proving discipline over all else.

It’s about eating in a way that:

For me, that meant shifting from restriction to nourishment, from thin to strong, and from rules to awareness.

After years of coaching -- and living this myself -- I’ve seen the same pattern over and over.

Most women don’t need just another meal plan. They already know what they “should” eat better and that they “should” exercise.

What keeps them stuck isn’t a lack of information. It’s the all-or-nothing thinking, the guilt, and the constant mental battle around food.

I know this because that’s exactly where I lived for years.

You can have the best plan in the world, but if food still feels like something you’re constantly managing or fighting, you’ll stay in the same cycle.

That’s why mindset work is such a big part of my 1:1 coaching -- not because mindset replaces structure, but because structure doesn’t work until you trust yourself.

If food decisions feel heavier than you’d like, if you find yourself overthinking meals, second-guessing choices, or feeling guilty afterward, this practice is for you.

Before you eat, pause and ask:

Sometimes, I’ll also pause and ask myself, “How am I likely to feel about this in 30 minutes?” That question alone can be really grounding.

Then make your choice intentionally.

No guilt. No punishment. Just awareness.

There is a middle ground where food takes up far less mental space.

That’s what I want for you.