The Green Door Life

Hi Green Door Fam!

When the numbers say you're doing everything right, but your body has something else to say.

It's 8:43 PM on a Tuesday.

You open your food-tracking app one last time.

Protein: nailed it.
Carbs: within three grams.
Fat: basically perfect.
Calories: right on target.

You did it.

Screenshot-worthy macros.

Except...

You're hungry.

Your energy crashed around 3 PM.

Your workout felt unusually hard.

You haven't had a bowel movement in two days.

You slept poorly last night.

And you're currently thinking about the snack you're apparently not supposed to need because you already hit your numbers.

So naturally, you start wondering:

What am I doing wrong?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe you're just looking at one part of the information.

Macros Give Us Structure. Your Body Gives Us Context.

I love macronutrients.

We use them inside Awaken Your Nutrition because they give us an incredibly useful starting point.

Protein.

Carbohydrates.

Fat.

Calories.

These numbers hel...

Hi Green Door Fam!

I want to tell you a little origin story about how we all arrived here inside the Green Door Life…

About 12 years ago, one of my personal-training clients asked if I would coach her for a bikini competition.

There was one small problem:

I had absolutely no idea how to coach someone for a bikini competition.

So I did what any responsible coach would do and told her I'd help her find someone who did.

I called a friend who had coached competitors for years.

His response surprised me.

"I'll coach you. Then you can coach her."

Well...

That sounded like a pretty incredible education.

So I said yes.

At the time, I was 30. I had a successful personal-training practice in Pacific Heights in San Francisco and was helping certify personal trainers through NPTI and NAMS.

I had studied nutrition.

I understood exercise physiology.

I knew a lot about the human body.

And apparently, I knew just enough about nutrition to be dangerous to myself.

During the week, I was ...

We Found $400 at HomeGoods

Hi Green Door Life Fam

It started with a stack of hundred-dollar bills in the middle of HomeGoods.

Rafa and I were walking through the aisles in Brentwood, Tennessee, on one of those Saturday mornings where you're wandering around looking at lamps and pillows without really knowing what you're looking for.

And then I saw something that definitely didn't belong with the pillows.

A stack of $100 bills.

Four hundred dollars, just sitting there.

I walked over and looked around.

Did someone drop this?

Was someone looking for it?

Was this some kind of prank?

Was there a camera somewhere watching to see what we would do?

Rafa and I started inspecting the bills, trying to figure out what was happening. Then he flipped one over.

On the back were the words:

FOR MOTION PICTURE PURPOSES.

Fake.

And just like that, $400 became worth essentially nothing.

Except something interesting happened.

The moment its monetary value disappeared, another kind of valu...

Over the last twenty years, I've developed a deep appreciation for the human body. But if I'm honest...

It's only been recently that I've developed the same deep reverence for the mind.

For years, I approached the mind as something to improve. Something to discipline. Something to quiet.  Meditation, numbing with a show, shopping, food.. Anything to quiet the noise inside.

Now I see something entirely different.

I see the mind as an incredible protector.
I see the mind loops as a doorway into a conversation that I have been avoiding. 

I see a brilliant strategist. 

I see a storyteller.

A part of me that has spent my entire life trying to keep me safe.

And it is remarkably good at its job.

My appreciation for my mind is still unfolding.

For so many years, I believed my mind needed to be quieter. Now I find myself simply saying, "Thank you."Thank you for trying so hard to protect me. And thank you for being willing to learn a new story alongside me.

The Stories That Feel Li...

It's wild being a human... and being a human with a body that needs care, and check-ups, and maintenance can feel like a full time job.

Every week I take discovery calls with men and women who are looking to be relived from the health noise and to have some of the health responsibilities taken off their plates so that they can live their lives with greater vitality.

On a discovery call this week, a woman arrived already exhausted.

Not from the cardiologist appointment she'd had at 7am.
Or from the meal she skipped at breakfast and replaced with a protein shake she'd grabbed in the parking lot.
Or from the gym session before that.

She was exhausted from the carrying.

She had a cardiologist for one part of her body. A personal trainer for another. A nutritionist for something else. A functional medicine doctor for the things the others couldn't see. A naturopath she'd added in the spring. A pelvic floor PT she'd added in the fall.

And in the middle of all of them — her.

Translating....

I had the chance to sit down with one of our graduate clients, Ed Howey, this past week and learn about his experience after his graduation from theAwaken Your Nutrition 12-Week program. It got me thinking about so many people who might quit too soon on their goals.

I got a recent late night message from a current client..

She messaged me at 9:14pm on a Thursday.

"I don't think I can do this." 

Week three.

A week earlier she had been radiant on the call. Clear. Decided. I'm done  — she'd said it three times. Done eating in a way that betrayed her body. Done outsourcing her health. Done.

And then her husband picked a fight about money. Her boss reorganized her team. Her daughter started skipping breakfast. Her scale went up 1.2 pounds. The doctors appointment she'd been putting off for nine months came due. Everything in her life that had been quietly off — suddenly screaming.

She wrote: I think this program is making my life worse. 

I knew what she meant.
I also knew she had it ...

Hi Green Door Life Community!

For the last several months, many of our newsletters have explored the principles that guide our work at The Green Door Life—nutrition, movement, metabolism, nervous system regulation, relationships, and the lifelong process of becoming more fully ourselves.

But today, I want to introduce you to one of the people who helps bring those principles to life every single day.

Because while frameworks matter, inside the Green Door...people matter more.

One of the greatest privileges of my work is having a front-row seat to the remarkable humans who make up our coaching team.

This week on the Elevated Frequency Podcast, I sat down with one of our newest Green Door Life coaches,   —a certified personal trainer, nutrition coach, graduate of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN), NASM Certified Nutrition Coach, and someone whose own journey of transformation continues to shape the way she supports others today.

And what unfolded was one of those conve...

Hi GDL Fam,

I want to get into some real talk, because I have been doing this a long time and I think many women have been sold a lie about what creates results.

They believe the answer is more intensity.

More cardio.

More sweat.

More discipline.

And more exhaustion.

And they have been led to believe that it will happen in 6 weeks, 12 weeks or even 6 months.

And then they wonder why they're inflamed, frustrated, overwhelmed, and still not seeing the body they want.

Over the last five years inside the Training Tree virtual movement community, I've noticed something surprising.

The women in our community who have built the leanest, strongest, most athletic physiques aren't the women who train the hardest.

They're the women who never stopped.

The Difference Between Intensity and Consistency

Since 2020, I've been designing and teaching progressive strength training programs for our community inside The Green Door Life and the Training Tree. 
And after watching over a thousand ...

Hi Fam!

We had   on the Elevated Frequency podcast for the first time this week, and we ended up in one of those conversations that doesn't really end — it just gets paused when the recording stops. (If you watch until the end, you'll know what I mean.)

The thing we kept circling back to, and the thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about since, is how almost none of what's changed between us over the years of navigating our "relationscape" came from a book.

I have the somatics training. We've both done the embodiment work, the nervous system education, the attachment-style deep dives. All of it has mattered. But the actual transformation in our partnership — the part where we stopped arguing the way we used to argue — didn't come from a chapter, a course, or a framework.

It came from the community we've attracted in Brentwood, Tennessee, and now from sitting in this room — The Belonging Circle — every Tuesday and Thursday. We get to have a dedicated space to explore the wo...

I want to tell you about a vacation.

I was thirteen. My parents took my brother and me to Club Med — the last family trip we would take together. None of us knew it at the time. The seven-year quiet unraveling of their marriage had already started, somewhere underneath the surface, in the way only children can feel and not yet name.

But the week itself — that I remember clearly.

What I remember is a place where people who had nothing in common except that they had all arrived in the same room learned, very quickly, how to be together. People from countries I had never been to. People who spoke languages I had never heard. People with bodies and ages and stories that did not match mine. And every day, we made things together. Played together. Ate together. Learned each other's names and then each other's laughs and then, by the end of the week, each other.

I did not have language for it then. I have language for it now.

That week, in the middle of a family that was slowly, gently...