The Missing Link

Why What You’ve Been Told About Weight Loss Isn’t Adding Up… and Why I’m Finally Saying It Out Loud

Iceland, November 2023… Where the Wind Told the Truth

The wind in Iceland doesn’t just move around you, it moves through you. It rattles your bones. It whispers things you weren’t expecting to hear.

In November 2023, I stood on rugged volcanic terrain, bundled in layers, a backpack strapped across my back, my Smokey-the-Bear “ONLY YOU” hat pulled low as Kim lifted her phone and captured a photo that now opens my website. I didn’t know why that image felt symbolic in the moment, but I know now.

Iceland, vast, rugged, unpredictable, and brutally honest, feels exactly like the journey I’ve been on during the first 60 days of my 365-day “Impossible Goal.” And, in many ways, it mirrors the journey millions of people take every morning when they step on the scale.

If that’s you, if that’s how you’ve been feeling, I want you to know this: me too.

What My First 60 Days Were Actually About

The first 60 days of this journey weren’t about losing weight. They weren’t about making visible progress or changing anything on the outside.

They were about maintaining, about holding steady in the exact place most people fear, avoid, or interpret as failure.

Maintenance wasn’t a pause; it was preparation. It was the moment my body told its truth without being pushed, pressured, or manipulated into giving me a different number.

If you skip this phase, you step into weight loss without a baseline or a compass. Without metabolic awareness. Without emotional stability when the inevitable fluctuations come. Maintenance isn’t the absence of movement. Maintenance is the runway. Transformation is the flight.

And in these 60 days, I discovered at a much deeper level just how profoundly I’ve mastered maintenance. Not because I was lucky or gifted. Not because I had some unspoken advantage. But because I’ve practiced it. Measured it. Lived inside it for years.

After losing -181 pounds on The Biggest Loser, I’ve maintained 80 to 90 percent of that loss for more than a decade. Not perfectly, but consistently enough to surf the waves of real life, stress, travel, holidays, aging, and everything in between.

So when I held steady for 60 days, this wasn’t a plateau. It was proof. Proof that maintenance is a skill. Proof that maintenance is a practice. Proof that before you can change your body, you have to understand how it behaves when the goal is not to change anything at all.

Why Weight Loss Feels Like Being Dropped Into a Wilderness Without a Map

Most weight-loss journeys start with a single rule: eat in a calorie deficit. That becomes the plan. The map. The unquestioned strategy.

But if I learned anything in Iceland, it’s that a map without an understanding of the land is useless. And the more I look back, at my story, at the thousands of conversations I’ve had, at the people who have walked into my office believing they were broken, the more I see the same pattern.

Most people aren’t entering one landscape. They’re entering many.

Keto, paleo, low-carb, low-fat, fasting, macros, points, detoxes, programs, each one a brand-new terrain with its own climate and its own challenges. And every time, people step into that terrain hopeful, but without a compass.

No guide. No understanding of the weather patterns. No sense of where the ground gets unstable.

So when the trail fades or the numbers shift or their body responds in ways they don’t recognize, they blame themselves. They call it lack of discipline. They call it weakness. They call it falling off the wagon.

But what we call lack of willpower is almost always lack of preparation. What we call falling off the wagon is simply being dropped into the wilderness barefoot and told to “try harder.”

You’ve never been the problem. You’ve never been broken. You were unprepared, because no one ever taught you how to read the terrain.

And in the world of weight loss, the terrain, the real landscape, is your metabolism.

Once you understand it, the fog lifts. The shame eases. The confusion dissolves. And what once felt like punishment begins to feel like clarity.

The Third M Finally Made Itself Known

For years I’ve taught the 3 M’s: Mind, Measurement, and Metabolism. I mastered the first two. I lived the first two. But metabolism lingered in the background like a character I kept referencing but never fully introduced.

Most people know of metabolism, but very few know what it actually is. They repeat the stories they’ve been told, “my metabolism is slow,” “mine is broken,” “it gets worse with age”, without understanding what they’re really describing.

And then we add layers of confusion with rings, watches, trackers, and sensors. Helpful, yes, but incomplete. Because the body isn’t static. It shifts with stress, hydration, recovery, sleep, hormones, timing, sodium, habits, environment, all the tiny variables that influence the machinery inside us.

And this morning, standing on the scale during my InBody check-in, I felt a moment of clarity.

I’ve mastered Mind.

I’ve mastered Measurement.

But I am still a student of Metabolism.

And if I’m still learning, after years of tracking and thousands of consultations, then you’re not behind, you’re right on time.

Confusion isn’t failure. Confusion is the beginning of clarity.

Where My Next 60 Days Begin

The next 60 days aren’t a sprint or a push toward a finish line.

They are an expansion.

A deeper dive into the machinery that has been quietly influencing everything.

I’m pursuing metabolic testing. Reviewing labs with intention. Exploring endocrinology. Seeking obesity-medicine perspectives from UCLA. Studying how hormones shift, how strength training affects water and muscle rhythms, how movement patterns influence energy burn, and how sleep, stress, sodium, sweeteners, routine, and recovery shape my physiology.

Not because I’m trying to become an expert. Not because I believe in shortcuts.

But because I want to understand my metabolism at the deepest level possible, one step, one pattern, one insight at a time.

And I want you with me. Not because I have all the answers. But because I’m willing to explore what most people avoid.

And quietly, something is emerging, a possibility I’m not ready to claim yet, but one I can feel forming:

The order might not be Mind → Measurement → Metabolism.
It might be Metabolism → Measurement → Mind.

I’m not declaring it. But I’m starting to see it. And it might change everything.

This Is Not Expertise. This Is an Expedition.

What’s different about these next 60 days is that I’m not just returning to the tools and strategies that have worked for me in the past, I’m learning my metabolism at the same time.

I’m losing weight and studying the body that’s losing it. I’m practicing what I already know while discovering what I’ve never fully understood.

And that matters, because when I say “my last 100 lbs,” I mean it.

I don’t just want to reach 185 pounds with 50% water, 110 pounds of muscle, and 15% body fat, I want to stay there.

And staying there requires inquiry, learning, practice, and eventually, mastery, not guessing. It means understanding my metabolism as intimately as I understand my mind and my measurements. It means learning its rhythms, its patterns, its reactions, and its truth, all the way to the final day of this 365-day journey.

This isn’t just a transformation.

This is an apprenticeship.

And I’m here for every lesson.

This isn’t the end.

This is the beginning.

Your world is waiting.

Are you ready to join me?