Hi, I’m Kayla.

Food was never just food.

I, too, grew up with the “clean your plate” rule. When you were as poor as we were, it was understandable. So yes, I sat at the table for hours, pushing peas around my plate and gagging on salty fish. We’ve all heard it all, the “starving kids in China” who’d be grateful to choke down that tuna casserole. For the record, whoever decided tuna belongs in a casserole to begin with has clearly never explored the delight of an actual casserole, or a well-made tuna salad, for that matter! It’s deplorable, at best!

I heard comments about my body early on in life. Diet culture got to me before I even knew what a calorie was. I was told I needed to call 1-800-Jenny-Craig when I was in middle school. I wasn’t even fat back then, but I was bigger than the 90-lb popular girls who were not short on backhanded compliments. So I starved myself all day, then gorged myself at dinner. It was a space where I wasn’t forced to eat in front of a crowd. That’s when dinner became comfort, reward, relief, celebration... and that’s when I began overeating.

Then I blamed myself for needing it.

I convinced myself I was lazy, lacked self-control when it came to portion sizes, and figured everyone else had been handed a secret manual on how to be normal around food, and mine had gotten lost in the mail.

I was 200 lbs. by the time I graduated high school. But the jabs never stopped there. I was mocked by family members, including my own mother, because my belly showed when I wore low-rise jeans. It was a fad back then, and if I was going to be fat, then I at least had to do it in really cool jeans. But it didn’t stop there. I was the brunt of every fat joke that came out of the mouth of my generationally inappropriate grandfather, who you’d be lucky to catch me in public with. Even then, my own brother would tell my friends that all I had to do was look at food, and I’d gain 10 lbs.

And then came the PCOS. I’d go six months without a period and then—WHAM! Six months of straight-up bleeding. I’m fairly certain I birthed a demon at one point. It was apparently just a truly alarming amount of uterine tissue, but I’d never experienced pain like that in my life. I’d say it was the equivalent of a man passing a kidney stone. Which is super dramatic, obviously.

Before I knew it, habits turned to patterns, and patterns turned to a long line of unhealthy choices. When you think so little of yourself, you also think you deserve the things that happen to you. And thus, the cycle repeats.

I kept trying to fix myself.

I counted calories. Started diets. Made rules, broke them, and promised myself Monday would be different. Then I’d focus on anything but inward, because who would want to look at that?

I have a strong scientific background. I can understand the science. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that vegetables are healthier than cookies. Knowing that didn’t explain why I reached for food when I was stressed, exhausted, hurt, lonely, overwhelmed, or just done making decisions. “Oh my gosh, I have to prep for depositions tomorrow, and I haven’t even started yet. Guess I’ll have a salad,” said no one ever.

Then I learned about cortisol, a hormone involved in the body’s stress response. In human studies, cortisol treatment temporarily affected verbal recall and working memory (Newcomer et al., 1999; Vaz et al., 2011). That made me wonder whether stress was part of why I struggled with memory and focus after six years in an abusive marriage. It was a clue, not a complete explanation of what I was experiencing or of my patterns.

I didn’t need another rule. I needed to understand what was going on.

Things started to click.

The more I learned about stress and cortisol, the more I started noticing my own patterns. Fight or flight? Food. Work stress? Food. Financial stress? Food. Emotional stress? Food.

STRESS = FOOD.

And then it clicked. I did a deep dive, full-on rabbit hole style, into stress, eating, and weight. Research suggests the relationship is real but complicated: stress and cortisol reactivity can be related to eating patterns for some people, and stressful life events have been associated with changes in weight in some groups (Newman et al., 2007; Siddiqui et al., 2022). That doesn’t mean cortisol alone caused my patterns—or that stress affects everyone the same way.

I learned how protein helps with fullness, why food volume matters, and how sleep affects hunger. I learned that stress isn’t a magic fat-making villain, but it can affect appetite, cravings, sleep, and the choices I have the energy to make.

I learned how habits continue to get repeated because there’s a payoff. And once you learn what you gain from the payoff, YOU get to decide where that payoff comes from. That’s when I finally freed myself from my food prison.

Some of my habits were rooted in childhood, shame, scarcity, trauma, and a nervous system that had spent a lifetime just trying to survive the day. Understanding that didn’t erase my responsibility. It helped me stop treating myself like a failure and start figuring out what to do next.

That’s why I built Breakthrough Health.

I didn’t want to hand people a calorie number and say, “Good luck.” I wanted to explain the things I had to figure out for myself: why some meals keep you full, why stress changes what sounds good, why you might keep eating when you’re already full, and why one off-plan meal doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself or start over Monday.

I want the information to be useful in real life, and I want our claims grounded in actual research—not something an influencer said confidently into a ring light.

Breakthrough Health offers education, structure, and tools to help you understand your patterns and decide what to try next. It isn’t therapy, medical care, or a replacement for a registered dietitian. When the work calls for a licensed professional, we’ll say so.

So, can we start there?

Not with punishment. Not with pretending this is easy. Not with another Monday promise.

Start with curiosity. Learn what your body is doing. Be honest about what food has meant in your life. Build meals that satisfy you. Track your intake and get support when you need it.

Then make a plan for your week. That’s where you’re going to see your patterns are reshaped, and new, healthier habits are born.

That’s the breakthrough I want for you.

— Kayla