Reading · The Comeback Letter & Show

For one year of my life, I worked at the headquarters of a famous Seattle donut company. You would know the name if you live there. Every single morning, the smell of fresh donuts filled the building. There was a plate of them on someone’s desk by nine. In staff meetings, the chef would bring in trays of new flavors and we would all taste-test them and give notes, like it was a job, because it was.

I gained ten pounds that year. Honestly, who wouldn’t.

It is an easy story to laugh about, and I do. But it is also a tidy little picture of something that took me decades to understand. For most of my adult life, I believed my problem with food was a problem of willpower. That if I were just more disciplined, if I wanted it badly enough, I would be able to muscle my way to the body and the health I wanted. I heard the advice for years. Eat better. Move more. Manage your stress. And I ignored all of it, because some part of me did not believe it applied to me. I thought I was the exception.

What finally stopped me was not a diet. It was a cardiologist telling me that decades of unrelenting stress and poor nutrition had started to damage my heart. My body had been keeping score the whole time, quietly, while I was busy calling myself weak. And somewhere in that doctor’s office, it landed on me that the thing I had spent thirty years treating as a character flaw was never a character flaw at all.

That is exactly why I wanted Laura Banks on the show.

Laura is a nutrition health coach who helps women get rid of their sugar cravings and quiet what she calls food noise, that constant inner monologue about what you should and should not eat. She is a former third-grade teacher, and she told me something on this episode I have not stopped thinking about. For years, she would wait until the final bell, close the blinds, turn off the lights, lock her classroom door, and binge on the candy meant for her students. Five days a week. What I love about Laura is that she refuses to shame anyone for any of it, because she has lived every bit of it herself.

She also brings the science, which my nerdy heart adores. She explained the blood sugar rollercoaster so clearly I finally understood my own afternoons: you eat something sugary on an empty stomach, your blood sugar spikes, your dopamine spikes, you feel great, and then it all crashes below where it started. That crash is when the whispers begin. Eat more sugar. We need to feel good again. It is not a lack of discipline. It is a body doing exactly what it was set up to do.

The part that reframed everything for me was this: when your body screams for sugar, it is usually asking for something else entirely. Protein. Fiber. Movement. A nap. A glass of water. The craving is real, but it is a messenger pointing at the wrong door. And when you are stressed, depleted, and running on empty, which describes most of the women I know in midlife, your executive function takes a hit and your impulse control wears thin, so of course you reach for the fastest fix in the cabinet. That is biology, not failure.

We also got into the part nobody likes to talk about, which is what happens when you try to get healthy inside a home full of people who are not on the same page. I said it plainly on the episode: I live in one of those houses, and for a long time I let it stop me, partly because I did not believe I was worth the inconvenience I might cause. Laura and I both landed in the same place. The most selfish thing you can do is refuse to take care of yourself, because you are quietly setting the people you love up to take care of you later.

So here is my invitation for your week. The next time the food noise gets loud, before you white-knuckle through it or give in and feel bad, pause and ask what your body might actually be asking for. Protein. Water. A walk. Ten quiet minutes that belong to you. You are allowed to be on your own list.

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Listen to the full conversation:

The Comeback Show on Substack | Watch on YouTube

And hear the other half of our swap: my guest episode on Laura’s show, Isn’t She Powerful, where I go deep on stress, boundaries, and burnout.