How I Ended Up Here
I didn’t arrive at this work by following trends, chasing optimisation, or picking a side in a nutrition debate.
I arrived here by living through the full spectrum, believing deeply in one approach, building a life and a career around it, and then being forced to confront the reality that it wasn’t working for my body.
This wasn’t a quick shift or a casual change of opinion. It unfolded over years of experimentation, study, conviction, doubt, resistance, and ultimately, honesty. I’ve been on both ends of the nutritional spectrum, from raw vegan to carnivore, and I’ve experienced firsthand what happens when belief and biology don’t align.
What you see now isn’t the result of ideology.
It’s the result of paying attention.
This work exists because I was willing to question my own certainty, strip things back to fundamentals, and listen to what my body was actually telling me, even when that meant letting go of an identity I had built around “doing the right thing.”
This is the path that led me to functional nutrition, functional fitness, and functional rest and recovery, not as concepts, but as lived experience.
And this is how it began.
2009–2012: The Search for Health Begins
My journey into health started in 2009.
Like many people, I wasn’t trying to become extreme. I was simply looking for more energy, better health, and a way of living that felt aligned and sustainable. At the time, plant-based nutrition made sense to me. It fit the narratives around health, ethics, and longevity that were widely accepted.
That path deepened quickly.
I became vegetarian, then vegan, and eventually fully raw vegan. I didn’t just adopt the lifestyle, I immersed myself in it. I studied nutrition formally and graduated as an Certified Holistic Health Coach from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in 2012.
I genuinely believed that plants were the answer and that “the greener, the better” was a universal truth.
2012–2014: Coaching, Teaching, and Certainty
After qualifying, I didn’t just change my own diet, I began coaching others.
I opened a health food café and juice bar in Thailand, offering green juices, detox programmes, and plant-based meals. I coached people to increase fibre, vegetables, and plant diversity. I taught what I believed was right.
And on the surface, it appeared to work.
But underneath that certainty, something didn’t sit quite right. Despite doing everything “by the book,” my own body wasn’t reflecting the health I believed I was cultivating.
At the time, I didn’t see this as a flaw in the approach. I saw it as something I needed to fix by doing the same thing better.
2014–2023: Belief, Compromise, and Cognitive Dissonance
From 2014 onward, I moved away from strict (raw) veganism, but not from the belief system behind it.
I became mostly vegetarian. I sometimes ate fish, eggs, and cheese. Very occasionally, I would eat meat, and when I did, it felt like a rare exception rather than a foundation. Years of conditioning had taught me that meat was harmful, inflammatory, or dangerous.
During this long period, I lived in a kind of nutritional compromise. Not fully plant-based, but never fully nourished either. I was functional, but not strong. Very skinny, and far from robust. Capable, but not resilient at all.
I carried on believing that if I just found the right balance, the right version of “clean eating”, things would eventually click.
They didn’t.
2023: The Photo That Changed Everything
In 2023, while I was in Thailand with my son, I saw a photo of myself that I couldn’t ignore.
I looked exactly like what I had been trying not to see for years.
Thin. Weak. Depleted. Old.
This wasn’t the image of someone in their late forties thriving. It was the image of someone still living off borrowed energy.
That moment stripped away the last layer of denial.
If decades of “healthy eating” had led me here, then something fundamental was wrong.
2023 – Now: Simplification and Alignment
That photo forced me to stop negotiating with my beliefs.
Introduced by a very good friend, I shifted fully toward an animal-based, and then largely carnivore, way of eating in May 2023.
The response from my body was unmistakable.
Strength returned.
Energy stabilised.
Mood improved.
Digestion calmed.
Recovery actually worked.
At the same time, my approach to fitness continued to evolve. I moved away from punishing Kickboxing training and toward functional strength, mobility, and recovery that supported my body rather than stressing it further.
In my fifties, I now feel stronger, clearer, and more capable than I did in my twenties. Not because I work harder, but because I finally work with my body instead of against it.
Why This Matters For You
This story isn’t here to convince you to copy my path.
It’s here to show how deeply held beliefs can persist long after they stop serving us, and how easy it is to confuse “doing the right thing” with actually getting results.
Good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes.
And the body gives feedback when something isn’t working.
What I do now isn’t about ideology, rules, or perfection.
It’s about functional nutrition, functional fitness, and functional rest and recovery, applied in a way that respects real midlife physiology and real life demands.
Where This Leads
If parts of this story resonate, it’s usually because something in your own experience doesn’t fully add up either.
That moment of questioning is often the starting point.
From there, the work becomes practical, grounded, and personal, not theoretical.
And that’s where we can talk.
Welcome to your upgrade.
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Reach Out – When You Want to Clarify Things
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Welcome to your upgrade.