I’m 23, based in Sacramento, CA, and I founded FitLex Coaching to help women build food freedom while losing weight, without going back to control to get there.
I’m a NASM Certified Personal Trainer, DotFit Certified Nutrition Coach, and I have my Bachelor’s in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Arizona.
But long before I knew the science behind any of this, I knew what it felt like to have food and my body take up way too much of my fucking life.
Ballet gave me eight hours a day to pick apart every part of my body and figure out how I could “fix” it. And in professional ballet, your body really is your currency. If you don't do what they want you to do with it, they can find another dancer who will.
So I learned really early that changing my body could earn me something. I learned that being hungry could make me feel accomplished. That losing weight could get me praised. That the answer to not liking what I saw in the mirror was always finding another way to control it.
And eventually, that followed me way beyond the studio. I went through anorexia, bulimia, years of restriction, binge eating, and seven years of believing that if I could just become disciplined enough, eventually food and my body would stop being such a problem.
Except even when the behaviors changed, my brain didn't always change with them.
I could stop bingeing and still think about food constantly. Lose weight and immediately become terrified of gaining it back. Eat “normally” and still need to know whether I'd eaten too much. Walk past a mirror and automatically check my stomach.
Getting better at controlling myself wasn't giving me the freedom I thought it would. So I stopped making control the goal.
And over time, I learned how to eat when I was hungry without checking whether I should be. How to want something and eat it without needing more and more of it. How to walk past my reflection without needing information from it. How to change my body without turning my entire life into an attempt to manage it.
That's the work The Food Freedom Intensive was eventually built from.
You don’t need someone who will tell you what to eat; you already know a lot about food.
That your protein should be over 130g, that processed food makes you gain weight, and none of it feels dramatic. Because you still go to work, plan dates with your partner, go to Italy on vacation, and tackle every to-do list item planned…
But food is this constant tab open in the background.
Because you can make it Monday through Thursday feeling completely in control, and then one dinner out turns into I'll start again tomorrow.
You order what sounds healthiest instead of what you actually want, then spend the rest of the night looking for something that will finally hit the spot.
You can tell yourself exactly why you aren't hungry enough for a snack while simultaneously thinking about that snack for the next two hours.
And you deserve to find out who you are around food when you don’t spend your entire life organized around controlling it.