You can know exactly what to do and still find yourself repeating the same behavior. You make the plan, feel motivated, and get going, only to hit that point where the novelty wears off and the old pattern comes right back. Then the question becomes whether you need more discipline, a better tool, or someone else to finally tell you what you’re missing.

That confusion is the messy middle of change, and it’s where both clients and coaches can start to lose the plot. What gets you started isn’t always what gets you through this part, especially when shame, identity, and old protective patterns get involved. It’s also where coaches can start wondering if they don’t know enough, if the client isn’t ready, or if they should be doing more to fix what’s happening.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I sit down with Christen Conly, a yoga teacher, holistic health and embodiment coach, and graduate of my Truce Coaching Certification, to talk about what changed when she stopped relying on more tips and tools. We get into why falling off track can make sense, how the urge to fix clients creates its own problems, and what becomes possible when change is treated as a process to navigate rather than something to eradicate.

6:34 – What led Christen Conly to Truce Coaching Certification

12:48 – Why starting and stopping behaviors require different coaching skills

16:17 – The client Christen wishes she could support with what she knows now

17:58 – When helping clients becomes entangled with approval

20:20 – Reframing self-sabotage as a protective response

23:10 – Shame-based motivation versus sustainable motivation

27:12 – Letting go of the responsibility to fix clients

32:21 – How Truce Coaching Certification helped Christen coach with more confidence

37:04 – The difference between mindset, identity, and story

39:26 – Technical versus adaptive change and creating safety to experiment

41:41 – How Christen’s coaching changed after certification

44:45 – Using the emotional immune system with clients

Mentioned In When Tips and Tools Aren’t Enough to Create Lasting Change with Christen Conly

Christen Conly | Instagram

Get Clients Unstuck and Why Another Tool Isn’t the Answer

Truce Coaching Certification

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

You find yourself standing in front of the kitchen counter, not knowing why you’re there. Or you’re out at a work event already thinking about when you’ll be able to get home and be alone with food. You’re not actually hungry, but you feel pulled there anyway. It’s urgent, buzzy, and hard to talk yourself out of, even when some part of you knows this isn’t really about the food.

What we often call emotional eating is usually a message from your nervous system. Food can soothe. It can give you the almost-feeling of being comforted, supported, and cared for. But as Dr. Deborah MacNamara says, “There’s nothing as addictive as something that almost works.” When the deeper need is safety or belonging, managing the behavior without understanding what it’s protecting only keeps you stuck in the same loop.

In this episode of the Truce with Food podcast, I’m sharing my conversation with dietitian Tara Schmidt from Mayo Clinic’s On Nutrition podcast to walk through the first step of my Truce with Food framework and what it reveals about emotional eating. We talk about why food noise can feel so urgent, the patterns that keep people from getting their needs met, what our food memories reveal about belonging, and how to begin breaking the cycle without turning it into another perfectionist project.

4:00 – How Ali’s interview on Tara’s podcast came together, and why I wanted to re-air it on Truce with Food

10:07 – The next best step you can take after listening to this episode

14:03 – What inspired Ali to specialize in helping people heal their relationship with food

17:15 – Four main triggers (and the unmet needs within) behind emotional eating

22:11 – How your physiology and psychology can influence each other due to the tiredness trigger

23:41 – The types of food emotional eaters go to, and the relationship between food noise and emotional eating

30:02 – Three behavioral patterns of comfort eating and how they serve as protection strategies

35:25 – Those who don’t eat based on their emotions, and why some people mindlessly overeat

37:36 – How to support someone who you think struggles with emotional eating without making them feel uncomfortable

39:28 – How to pause the reflex of emotional eating (and the one time you shouldn’t)

42:37 – How one client went from decades on medication to selling her business and feeling at home in her own body by ending her emotional eating cycle

Mentioned In Mayo Clinic on Nutrition: The Four Triggers Behind Emotional Eating

A Holistic Approach to GLP-1s with Mayo Clinic Dietitian Tara Schmidt

Mayo Clinic on Nutrition Podcast with Tara Schmidt, RDN

Institute for Integrative Nutrition | Dr. Mark Hyman

Dr. Deborah MacNamara | Nourished: Connection, Food, and Caring for Our Kids (And Everyone Else We Love) by Dr. Deborah MacNamara

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

Women are hearing a lot right now about eating more, building muscle, healing their metabolism, and using GLP-1s for weight loss. But so much of the conversation still skips over what actually matters for women’s bodies, especially in perimenopause and menopause. If you’ve ever tried to nourish yourself more and immediately watched the scale go up, it can feel like your body is broken. It’s not, but your metabolism may need repair before it’s ready for fat loss.

That’s why I wanted to talk with Ashley Fillmore, founder and president of Metabolic Fix. Ashley is a leading expert in sustainable weight and fat loss with over 20 years of experience helping women heal their metabolism, balance their hormones, and change their body composition without staying stuck in chronic dieting. She also brings something I always appreciate, real client data, real lived experience, and a clear-eyed take on the online muscle-building and GLP-1 claims that don’t match what actually happens in women’s bodies.

In this episode of the Truce with Food podcast, I sit down with Ashley to talk about how to use GLP-1s without losing the muscle you need, and why they can support weight loss but can’t replace metabolic repair. We get into her Repair, Rebuild, Results framework, why eating more can feel so scary when your body has adapted to under-eating, and what sustainable fat loss actually requires if you want results that last.

6:27 – Defining metabolism, what the repair phase does, and the impact of hormones on your metabolic health

12:57 – Why you might be stuck even if you’re doing many of the right things

17:25 – How the reverse diet in the repair phase helps your metabolism safely adapt to more calories

25:28 – How long the repair phase lasts, and why Ashley’s took longer than average

32:03 – What happens during the rebuild stage, and why it’s crucial before entering fat loss

36:19 – Debunking media claims and setting realistic expectations about muscle gain

47:02 – Why lean muscle is the body’s currency for longevity, not just an aesthetic bodily upgrade

50:06 – Why GLP-1s should be a supplement, not your primary weight loss strategy

53:22 – The importance of careful GLP-1 microdosing usage and greater metabolic health knowledge among doctors

1:03:19 – Why not all weight loss is a good thing, and the problem with overfocusing on protein alone in your diet

1:06:25 – Ashley’s free tool for estimating a healthy calorie target based on your weight loss goals

Mentioned In How to Use GLP-1s Without Losing the Muscle You Need with Ashley Fillmore

Dr. Stacy Sims

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

Metabolic Fix | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter/X | YouTube

Metabolic Fix Weight Loss Calculator

Cheers to Your Success Podcast

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

"What's wrong with me?" You've probably asked yourself this after another night of eating when you weren't hungry, scrolling when you meant to go to bed, or saying yes to something you had no energy for. The late-night sugar, the people-pleasing, the crashing after weeks of overdoing everything. You're not lazy and you're not broken, but you are asking the wrong question.

The real question is what's happening in your body because so much of what we chalk up to bad habits or weak willpower is actually driven by biology. Your nervous system is keeping you in familiar patterns because familiar feels safe, even when it's not working. Your cortisol is spiking your hunger and blunting your fullness signals, and if you're in perimenopause, all of it hits harder because the hormonal buffer you used to have is disappearing.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I sit down with Amber Romaniuk, an expert in emotional eating, digestive health, and hormonal balance with over 12 years of clinical and lived experience, to discuss the biology behind the behaviors we call self-sabotage. We get into how chronic stress and cortisol reshape your hunger and cravings, why everything from sugar to people-pleasing hits differently in perimenopause, and what it actually looks like to stop fighting your body and start understanding what it's telling you.

7:16 – Why mindset work fails when you ignore your body's role in behavior

9:27 – Why your nervous system keeps you stuck in familiar patterns even when you want to change

15:22 – How cortisol changes your hunger, cravings, and capacity to handle stress

21:55 – Why everything from sugar to stress hits differently in perimenopause and menopause

28:34 – How low progesterone drives people-pleasing, overworking, and chasing the next accomplishment

34:19 – Getting off the addiction to intensity and what to do instead of chasing cheap dopamine

41:17 – Amber's cortisol test recommendations and what to actually do with the results

48:19 – What guilt does to your amygdala and why it keeps you from prioritizing yourself

Mentioned In Your Sugar Cravings Make Sense When You Understand Your Hormones with Amber Romaniuk

Amber Approved | TikTok | YouTube | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn

Book a Body Freedom Consultation with Amber

Hormone Imbalance Quiz

No Sugarcoating Podcast

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

For many of us, the body has long felt like an inconvenient, separate entity. Our intellect does the heavy lifting while our physical selves get relegated to the background. You know how to think your way through problems, build a career, figure things out. But when it comes to looking down and asking your body what it actually needs, there's a tight ball of feelings most of us would rather not touch.

My dear friend and developmental coach Sas Petherick used to live that way. Over the past year, through a process she describes as one of the most vulnerable experiences of her life, Sas has gone through a complete identity shift in how she relates to her body, her marriage, and herself. She's lost 52 pounds and built her most developed muscle mass as an adult. But what surprised her most wasn't the physical change. It was that figuring out her body stuff required more growing up than changing careers, getting sober, or losing a parent.

Sas returns to close out a year-long conversation about what it actually takes to change your relationship with your body. We get into why body image lives in the brain and not the mirror, how the padding she carried was protection against vulnerability she wasn't ready to feel, and what it means when your insides finally match your outsides. This is what it looks like to move from self-monitoring to true self-awareness and become more fully yourself.

7:21 – Why Sas ranks this body journey alongside sobriety, grief, and career change as one of the most identity-altering experiences of her life

13:00 – Difficulties of the journey and how much Sas’s relationship with her body has impacted her nearly 20-year-old relationship with her partner

19:08 – Highlights of the journey and what Sas noticed while watching a stranger at dinner that revealed just how far she's come

32:50 – Why maintenance (which everyone says is the hardest part of this journey) has actually become easier for Sas

46:23 – Why Sas’s relationship with food is more difficult than her relationship with exercise, and how she’s learning to work through it

50:11 – Why body dysmorphia might have a root emotion that doesn't get talked about enough

1:00:07 – Defining body image, embracing the body positivity movement, and why grief isn’t just about loss

1:02:37 – Sas's honest take on GLP-1s: what’s missing from the conversation, what she'd do if she were taking them, and what everyone should be asking before they decide

1:09:12 – How exploring her relationships with food, movement, and her body are no longer tied to the scale for Sas

How to Lose Weight and Love Yourself (because you can do both!)

“We’re the Brave Ones” – Discipline vs Devotion, Macros & Being Sporty

Emotions & Embodiment for Sustainable Weight Loss

How to Hold Your Weight Loss Goals Loosely (for better results)

How to Finally Stop White-Knuckling Your Weight-Loss Journey

Sas Petherick

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

The world is a lot right now. Globally, personally, often both. And when things are this intense, it can be easy to feel like your relationship with food is a first world problem, or that nothing matters, you're just going to eat. To dismiss the battle as something to deal with later, when things calm down.

But this is exactly when it matters most. We can't all collapse at the same time. If you're hungry, depleted, or consumed by overriding your cravings, you don't have the energy for your own life, let alone for showing up with the values you want to see ripple out into the world. And the conditioning that tells you investing in yourself takes from others, that you should be able to power through, that your needs are too much, is the same conditioning that keeps the cycle going.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I walk through three reasons your food battle matters more in hard times, not less. I cover why you need to be physically nourished to show up for what you care about, why the all-or-nothing thinking that says investing in yourself takes from others is the same conditioning we need to change, and why most weight and food struggles are really about a complicated relationship with power. Healing your relationship with food isn't a distraction from the work of this moment. It's part of it.

5:47 – Why overriding your hunger actually robs you of the rebelliousness and energy needed for your life

11:17 – Why learning to connect how you eat to how your body works is revolutionary

13:52 – The cultural conditioning that makes you believe investing in your own health must come at the expense of your family or work

17:23 – How this zero-sum cultural conditioning trap exists on every level

19:55 – How a client learned the emotional work of tending to her needs, instead of trying to fix issues for her daughter

21:13 – Your food battle as a doorway to examine where you’re still sacrificing yourself to unsustainable norms

24:01 – How that guilty feeling you get for overeating or not working out is often a symptom of internalized capitalist productivity

26:42 – Backlash as a sign of actual progress and how “slow and steady” keeps you in the game

31:41 – How stubborn weight issues are often linked to an unconscious resistance to dominative power, and the need to redefine power as collaborative

36:03 – The yin archetype’s association with food and body issues (including eating disorders)

Mentioned In Healing Your Relationship With Food Is a Rebellious Act

Why Intuitive Functional Medicine Works When Protocols Don’t with Erin Holt

What Your Food Stage Reveals About Why Nothing Has Worked Long Term

Freedom from Cravings course

Truce with Food

Food Stage Finder Assessment

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

Twenty years ago, functional medicine changed everything for me. My IBS cleared. My skin cleared. My depression lifted. And for the first time, I understood food as medicine instead of just calories. But somewhere in the last five years, functional medicine started looking a lot like what it was railing against. A supplement for every lab marker. A protocol for every person. A business model that profits from making you feel more broken than when you walked in.

So I stopped talking about it much here. But I still believe in root cause resolution. And I wanted to bring on someone who practices it the way it was meant to be practiced. That's why I brought Erin Holt on the show. Erin is a seasoned clinician, clinic founder, and trainer of other practitioners who has been vocal about what's gone wrong in this industry while still believing fiercely in what it can be. She practices what she calls intuitive functional medicine, a framework that starts with the physical body and refuses to stop there.

In this episode of Truce with Food, Erin and I get into what's actually broken in functional medicine right now, why data can never replace discernment or lived experience, and how her five-phase formula bridges the physical, mental, emotional, and energetic aspects of healing. We also talk about why you can't rewire an inflamed brain with mindset work, and what it really means to self-source your health instead of outsourcing it to someone in a white coat.

2:48 – Introduction to Erin and how she and her trainees help one-on-one clients

7:56 – The shift in functional medicine over the last five years that’s recreating the exact problem it was designed to solve

11:25 – Defining functional medicine and comparing it to more conventional medicine

16:46 – What intuitive functional medicine is and what it looks like in Erin’s practice (and her training of other practitioners)

24:08 – Self-sourcing vs. outsourcing your health and the long, underexamined history of the loss of self-trust in so many people

34:09 – A basic example of how Erin helps her clients rebuild their self-trust (without forcing it)

39:55 – Why too many choices in the name of empowerment can actually cause someone to freeze in response (and what skilled practitioners do differently)

44:11 – The real point of fear-based marketing and how to spot it before it sells you something you don't need

47:00 – Why the nocebo effect, medical hexing, and the labels a practitioner puts on you can quietly become the ceiling on your healing

49:15 – Functional labs that are actually worth it and the very contextual, individualized way Erin administers them as a practitioner

51:43 – Erin’s framework for whole-person healing, why the starting point doesn’t matter, and what needs to happen before you can rewire your brain using mindset work

1:00:42 – The importance and meaning of self-compassion and why you must only work with those who see your potential to heal

Mentioned In Why Intuitive Functional Medicine Works When Protocols Don't with Erin Holt

Manifest Your Health™

The Funk’tional Nutrition | Instagram | Facebook | Pinterest

Funk’tional Nutrition Academy (FNA)

Funk’tional Nutrition: How Belonging, Not Willpower, Shapes Your Eating

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.

You've tried the plans. The protocols. Maybe therapy, journaling, intuitive eating. And food still feels like a battle. The problem isn't that you haven't tried hard enough. It's that no one has ever shown you where you actually are.

I've spent 19 years working with women who've tried everything and nothing's worked long term. What I keep finding is that the approach mismatches the stage. And you can't know what to do next until you know where you're starting from.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I walk through I walk through the four developmental stages of resolving your food battle and introduce my free Food Stage Finder Assessment. If you've ever wondered why you're still struggling despite everything you've done, this is where to start.

1:40 – How women's healthcare concerns get dismissed and what led Ali to this work
3:59 – Why food struggles fall into two extremes and why both miss the point
6:26 – What the Food Stage Finder Assessment is and why Ali created it
7:34 – Why more information stopped being the problem for Ali's clients
9:03 – Women's health span post-menopause and why midlife is the time to get this right
11:56 – Taking responsibility for your own body literacy without burning out
13:11 – Why intuitive eating is hard when you've never had healthy eating patterns
14:06 – How adolescent culture shapes our food culture and why quick fixes dominate
19:50 – Why maturity, not more learning, is what actually creates food freedom
22:38 – The four developmental stages of resolving your food battle
25:53 – Stage one: Gathering Evidence
27:04 – Stage two: Breakthrough Ready
29:37 – Stage three: Practicing Freedom
32:48 – Stage four: Trusting in Satisfaction
36:19 – Why most people are surprised by their Food Stage Finder results
36:32 – How to take the free Food Stage Finder Assessment

Mentioned In What Your Food Stage Reveals About Why Nothing Has Worked Long Term

Truce with Food

Food Stage Finder Assessment

Get Clients Unstuck, Another Tool Isn’t the Answer is a free training for health coaches, nutritional therapy practitioners, fitness instructors, and other change agents.

Learn why clients fall back into old patterns, where traditional coaching can fall short, and what supports lasting change.

Available through August 31st at trucewithfood.com/certification.