A few weeks ago I wrote about the year I logged everything I ate and didn’t gain an ounce of muscle.

That left me with a question I couldn’t shake. If tracking everything didn’t get me what I was after, what is it actually for?

So I asked someone who would know.

Melissa Jaeger is a registered dietitian and the head of nutrition at MyFitnessPal, the app I used for that whole year. She grew up in a house where people cooked, with a garden she could raid for fresh raspberries, and sports coaches who kept telling her food was fuel. She started her career as a dietitian inside grocery stores, helping people work out what to buy right there in the aisle. Now she helps shape the science behind an app millions of people use.

A quick note on transparency: this isn’t a sponsored episode. MyFitnessPal didn’t pay for it. I just wanted to have this conversation.

The idea I keep coming back to

Most of us approach eating well by subtraction. Cut sugar. Cut carbs. Cut whatever the internet is angry about this month.

Melissa would rather we flip that. Instead of asking what to take out, ask what you could add.

It sounds like a small shift. I don’t think it is. A diet built on removal turns into a list of rules, and rules are easy to break and hard to enjoy. Adding something gives you a thing to do rather than a thing to resist.

Her go-to example is fiber. She points out that the typical American diet is generally low in it, so for most of us there’s room to add some, somewhere.

The cholesterol mix-up

Melissa told me she’s passionate about heart health, and she thinks a lot of outdated cholesterol advice has hung around long after the science moved on.

Her main point is that the cholesterol listed on a food label isn’t the same as the cholesterol number on your blood test. In her view, saturated fat is the more important lever for blood cholesterol. So she’s less concerned about someone eating foods that contain cholesterol, as long as their overall diet is lower in saturated fat.

True to form, her suggestions lean toward adding rather than cutting:

* Oats, beans and legumes, for soluble fiber

* Plant proteins in place of some animal proteins

* A second look at which cooking oils you use

If you’re actively managing your cholesterol, that’s a conversation for your doctor or a dietitian, not a newsletter. But I found it a useful reframe.

You don’t have to be perfect

I asked Melissa which nutrition myth her team worked hardest to keep out of MyFitnessPal’s new AI Coach. Her answer was the idea that you have to eat perfectly to see results.

“I don’t believe in that,” she said.

Some days food is part of a celebration. You miss your fiber goal, go over on sugar, and the next day you carry on. For her, progress comes from finding balance over time, not from getting every day right.

She mentioned research MyFitnessPal commissioned with UCLA, so I looked it up. It’s an observational study of 1,359 users who set weight-loss goals and used the app consistently over 120 days, and it found that users who were more engaged with the app were more likely to reach clinically significant weight loss. Two things are worth knowing. Two of the researchers received funding from MyFitnessPal, though the paper says the company had no role in the design or analysis. And an observational study shows a link, not proof. Still, it points the same way Melissa does: showing up regularly seems to matter more than being flawless.

This part landed for me. During my year of logging I was rigid. No sugar, no exceptions, and looking back it was quite unhealthy. These days my baseline is pretty good, and if I want the ice cream, I have the ice cream.

“We’re not going to lose 20 pounds overnight,” Melissa said. “If we can give ourselves grace in the process, I think we’re going to really end up enjoying it a lot more.”

What’s changed since I was scanning barcodes

When I was logging, I scanned barcodes and searched for every meal by hand. Now you can photograph your plate, or just talk to the app and it sorts your day into meals and snacks.

The newer feature is AI Coach. Melissa explained how it differs from asking a general chatbot: it already knows your history. Ask a generic AI for a high-protein meal and you get a generic list. A tool that knows your protein goal, whether you’re vegetarian, your budget and what you’ve actually been eating should give you something that fits, without you having to explain all of that every time.

She says it tries to connect the dots in your food log and suggest a realistic next step, rather than ten changes at once. She also described some guardrails I was glad to hear about. If someone asks for an extremely low calorie target, it’s designed to steer them toward a safer, more sustainable one with a realistic timeline. If a question goes beyond what your log can tell it, it’s meant to point you to a registered dietitian or healthcare provider.

I haven’t tried AI Coach fully yet, I’ve tinkered around on it briefly. I’m planning to, and I’ll tell you honestly how it goes. (Voice logging, Meal Scan and AI Coach are part of MyFitnessPal’s premium subscription.)

Between helpful and obsessive

That year of tracking taught me an enormous amount about fats, carbs and what my body actually runs on. In a lot of ways it changed my life. It also tipped into obsession at times.

Melissa sees logging as a way to build awareness, not a scorecard. When she worked with clients one-on-one, the focus would change week to week: hydration one week, a particular nutrient the next, cooking more at home after that.

She also made a point I think everyone should hear. Nutrition is personal. Just because something worked for your friend or your neighbor doesn’t mean it’ll work the same way for you. She’d rather you pay attention to how food makes you feel: your energy, your sleep, how you’re doing over time.

One note from me: tracking isn’t for everyone. If logging makes food feel stressful, or you have a history of disordered eating, it may not be the right tool, or it may be one to use with a professional’s support.

Where it’s heading

Looking five years out, Melissa expects nutrition tools to become more predictive, flagging a nutrient gap before it shows up rather than just reporting what you ate yesterday.

What she hopes never changes is where we started: addition, not subtraction.

That’s what I’m taking into this week. Not what I should cut, but what I could add.

What’s one thing you could add to your plate this week? Hit reply and tell me.

You can find Melissa on LinkedIn and Instagram, and read her team’s nutrition articles on the MyFitnessPal blog. MyFitnessPal is on the App Store and Google Play.

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Last Tuesday, an email showed up that made my jaw tighten before I’d finished reading the subject line. My fingers were already on the keys, ready to fire back. Then I remembered the rule I’ve read a dozen times and ignored just as often: never respond to an email that triggered you. Give it a few hours. So I closed the laptop, made tea, and let it sit.

Two hours later, I still sent a response. Same problem, same person, same hurt — a completely different version of me wrote it.

That gap between the jaw-tightening moment and the two-hours-later moment is basically this week’s whole podcast episode.

My guest, Bernadette McCadden, is a writer and health coach who’s spent the last decade helping women work through anxiety, body image, and nervous system dysregulation. Early in our conversation, she said something that stuck: most of us are regulating our nervous system without knowing that’s what we’re doing. Sometimes in healthy ways. Often not. For years, Bern overthought, overate, undereated, drank, spent — not from a lack of willpower, but because her nervous system was so dysregulated that those behaviors were the only relief valve she had.

“Nervous system regulation” gets thrown around so often in wellness content that it’s started to mean nothing. So I asked her directly: what do people get wrong about it? Her answer surprised me. Regulation isn’t about staying calm. It doesn’t erase anger, sadness, or panic — those are just part of being human.

What it gives you is capacity. Bern described it as the difference between rough seas and manageable ones. Dysregulated, a small trigger could send her from zero to a hundred in seconds. Regulated, the same trigger: zero to twenty-five. The feeling still shows up. She just has room to feel it before she has to do anything about it.

That room is the whole game. It’s the difference between firing off the email and sitting with it for two hours.

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The tools Bern uses to build that room are almost insultingly simple, which is probably why most of us skip them. Breath first — not a twenty-minute meditation, just noticing you’re breathing, in a meeting, in traffic, mid-tantrum (yours or your kid’s). Water second. She told me hydration is one of the fastest ways she can tell she’s slipping into dysregulation, and one of the fastest ways back out.

Then there’s the one that stopped me mid-note: she doesn’t drink caffeine until after she’s eaten breakfast. For years she ran the opposite way — cold brew at 5am, a HIIT class, nothing else until noon. It worked, until it didn’t. Coffee on an empty stomach turned her, in her words, into “an anxious crying mess.” Breaking that habit was one of the hardest and most life-changing things she’s done. Now it’s thirty grams of protein first, matcha second.

It shows up in relationships too. Bern told me she’s a recovering people-pleaser, someone who spent years looking outside herself for validation. She still catches it happening — a post that doesn’t get the reaction she hoped for, a guy who goes quiet. But when she’s regulated, none of it lands the same way. “That’s not actually truth,” she told me. “That’s dysregulation.”

None of this is about eliminating stress or becoming someone who never overthinks again. Bern calls the spiral itself “the overs” — overthinking, overworking, overeating, oversleeping, whatever your flavor is. The goal isn’t to shame the pattern. It’s to notice it fast enough to ask a better question: what am I actually feeling, and what do I need right now?

She talked about self-love the same way — not as a finish line where you eat perfectly and never crave wine, but as curiosity instead of punishment. Reach for the chips, pause, ask what’s underneath it. Some weeks the answer is ordering the margarita anyway. The point was never the food.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the reaction you have isn’t the truth about who you are. It’s a readout of your nervous system in that moment. The anxious reply, the phone scroll at 6am, the third coffee before you’ve eaten anything — none of it is a character flaw. It’s data. And data you can work with is a lot less scary than a personality you’re stuck with.

I’m not asking you to overhaul your mornings this week. Just try the version Bern gave me: before you reach for your phone, breathe. Before you reach for the coffee, eat something. Small enough that you’ll actually do it — which is the only kind of change that sticks.

Find Bern on Instagram, Substack, and her website — all under her name, Bernadette McCadden.

From a wheelchair and feeding tube to reclaiming his health — Dane Johnson’s Crohn’s & colitis story, plus the mindset shift behind it.

I have a confession: I don’t have Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis myself, but I know it up close — my best friend has UC, my cousin has Crohn’s, and watching what they go through has always stuck with me. So when I got the chance to sit down with Dane Johnson, founder of Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle, for this week’s episode, I knew it was one I needed to share here too.

Dane’s story is genuinely wild. Diagnosed at 19, he spent his 20s in and out of hospitals — at his lowest, 122 pounds, in a wheelchair, on a feeding tube, fighting for his life. Today he’s 191 pounds, medication-free, running a company, and raising three kids. That’s not a small turnaround, and on the podcast he walks through exactly how it happened — slowly, imperfectly, over about a decade.

A few things from our conversation that stuck with me:

* “CEO of your health,” not a passenger in it. Dane’s biggest mindset shift wasn’t a supplement or a diet — it was refusing to hand full authority over his healing to any one doctor, book, or protocol. He still worked with practitioners, but he made the calls.

* Build your plan, not “the” plan. Instead of rigidly following one diet camp (paleo, carnivore, SCD), he described cherry-picking pieces from different approaches that made sense for his own body and tracking what actually helped.

* He didn’t skip conventional medicine — he used it as a bridge. Steroids, biologics, even an antiviral treatment for a hidden viral infection were part of what stabilized him before he made further changes. His view: it’s not “natural vs. Western,” it’s using every tool available.

* Consistency and tracking mattered more than any single tweak. He talked about daily journaling and rating his own symptoms as the thing that let him actually notice what was working.

I want to be upfront about something: Dane shares a lot of specific detail in this episode — supplements, gut-healing approaches, his own theories about root causes — based entirely on his personal experience and research, not clinical studies. Crohn’s and colitis are serious, individual conditions, and what worked for one person’s body isn’t a protocol to copy without your own care team involved. Listen for the mindset and the questions to ask, not a checklist to follow blind.

🎧 Full episode: The conversation goes much deeper — into his hospitalization, the specific turning points in his recovery, and how he thinks about “incurable” as a label. Well worth the full listen if this resonated at all.

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Website: crohnscolitislifestyle.com

We spend years building ourselves. The career, the reputation, the personality — the references and the in-jokes and the way we walk into a room. Then some of us pick it all up and move it somewhere else. And discover, sometimes painfully, that none of it travels.

I recently spoke with Brooke Black — American music publicist, podcast host, and what she describes as a reluctant Dane. She accidentally moved to Denmark with her Danish husband and two small children during COVID, and has been figuring out who she is ever since. She hosts What Are You Doing in Denmark?, the biggest podcast for internationals in the country, and she came on with a kind of clear-eyed honesty about expat life that I don’t often hear.

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The self you built doesn’t pack well

Brooke spent her twenties in New York, her thirties in LA. She was the breadwinner, the career woman, the loud, enthusiastic, culturally-fluent person in every room. And then:

“All of the things that I’ve cultivated, my career, my personality, all these little details that I have painstakingly created as part of me that I thought were the great things about me — don’t matter. Because you’re in a brand new country.”

That landed for me. We often talk about moving abroad as an adventure, a fresh start. And it is. But it’s also a kind of quiet dismantling. Your wit relies on shared references. Your confidence relies on being understood. Strip those away and you’re left asking a harder question: what’s actually there?

The invisible weight

One thing Brooke described that I hadn’t heard articulated quite like this before is the sheer cognitive cost of living somewhere not built for you. After five years in Denmark, she still catches herself doing things wrong without realising. Every interaction — the train, the grocery store, the school gate — requires a little extra processing.

“You are void of personality because you’re just trying to follow what’s happening.”

And that drain compounds. What’s left over for your relationships, your kids, your work? She put it simply: you can never expect another place to rise to the expectations you built somewhere else. The adjustment isn’t lowering your standards — it’s recalibrating what matters.

What Denmark gets right (and what the PR leaves out)

Brooke is thoughtful about not selling Denmark as a dream. Yes, the trust is real — laptops left open on trains, babies sleeping outside cafés, an eight-year-old biking herself to school through a gate with no security. Yes, the five weeks of annual leave, the stress leave that carries no stigma, the kids who get to play with real knives and take real risks.

But the winters are dark. The seasonal depression is real. Danes are warm, but slowly — and they will absolutely reach across you in a supermarket rather than say excuse me. It took Brooke two years in Copenhagen to build friendships where she felt she could be herself.

“Loneliness is one of the toughest things to try and solve anytime you move to a new place and try to find your place within it.”

That’s not a Denmark problem. That’s the expat condition. And it’s worth naming honestly.

What the glass-half-full thing is actually about

Near the end of our conversation, we got onto something I’ve felt myself — the American enthusiasm, the pointing at things and going wow, the willingness to talk to strangers. Brooke said she’s started cringing at it after years of toning herself down for Danish sensibilities. But she doesn’t want to lose it entirely.

The happiest countries, she thinks, aren’t happier because they’ve lowered their expectations. It’s more like they’ve adjusted them — to what they actually have, not what they think they should have. There’s something worth sitting with in that.

You can find Brooke on Instagram and TikTok at @brookblackjust and her podcast What Are You Doing in Denmark? is on all platforms. If you’re thinking about moving to Denmark, she genuinely welcomes the DMs.

Now press play. The full conversation is worth your time.

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We live in a culture that treats busyness as a badge of honour. The more you do, the more you’re worth.

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Lorena Bernal — author, speaker, and the founder of LiveLoveBetter — and within the first few minutes she said something that stopped me in my tracks. When I asked her who she really is, beneath the career and the roles and the accolades, she didn’t hesitate:

“A soul with a little girl kind of vibe. Very happy and grateful to be living a human experience on earth.”

That answer struck a chord.

The storm in your head

Lorena’s take on burnout cuts through the noise. It’s not simply about working too hard — it’s about living too far from the present moment. She describes it as getting lost in a storm of worries, future plans, and the nagging fear of not doing enough.

“If you go back to the present and do what you’re doing at this moment, suddenly it loosens that weight you have.”

It sounds almost too simple. But the more I think about it, the more I believe simplicity is the point. We’ve overcomplicated rest, wellness, even parenting — turning each of them into another performance to optimise.

Achievement without foundation

One of the most honest moments in our conversation came when Lorena described being at the peak of her Hollywood career and experiencing a profound loss at the same time. No amount of professional success could touch the emptiness she felt.

“I feel so empty and it’s going so well. What I thought would give me what I wanted in life is not even close to fulfilling the emptiness I feel inside.”

That’s a hard thing to admit. Harder still to use it as a turning point. But she did. And I think a lot of high performers will recognise that feeling — the gnawing sense that something vital is missing even when everything looks perfect on paper.

The one thing worth doing

When I asked Lorena for a single daily practice that’s genuinely shifted her mental health, she didn’t sell me a morning routine or a supplement stack. She said: stop, breathe, and feel grateful — not as a concept, but as a felt experience in your body.

“Thank you for my heart beating. Thank you for my breathing. Just that, a few seconds, regulates your whole nervous system.”

There’s something quietly radical about that. In a world that’s monetised mindfulness and turned self-care into a productivity tool, she’s pointing back to something far older and simpler.

Lorena’s book It Starts With You is a good place to begin if any of this resonated. You can also find her at livelovebetter.co.uk.

Now press play. The full conversation is worth your time.Instagram: @jamieliveswellTikTok: @jamieliveswellSubstack: JamieLivesWellYouTube: @jamieliveswellLinkedIn: Jamie MacDonaldWebsite: jamieliveswell.com

One thing that stayed with me from this week’s podcast with Remnant MD was this idea that the body often knows before the mind does.

We talked a lot about the gut — not just digestion, but the growing understanding that gut health may influence mood, energy, intuition, and overall wellbeing more than we realize.

I’ve noticed this in my own life too.

Usually when I feel anxious, foggy, exhausted, or just “off,” my body has been trying to tell me something long before my brain catches up.

JamieLivesWell is presented by Just Thrive:https://justthrivehealth.com/JAMIELIVESWELL

I’ve been paying more attention to gut health recently, and one brand I’ve liked is Just Thrive. Their probiotics are designed to survive digestion and actually reach the gut effectively — which is a surprisingly important detail.

🧠 The Gut Does More Than Digest Food

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was discussing how disconnected many of us have become from our bodies.

Modern life teaches us to override signals constantly:

* push through exhaustion

* scroll instead of resting

* ignore stress

* numb discomfort

But the body keeps communicating anyway.

And increasingly, research around the gut-brain connection suggests the gut may play a much bigger role in mental and emotional wellbeing than we once thought.

Lately I’ve become more aware of how differently I feel depending on:

* what I eat

* sleep

* stress

* sunlight

* time in nature

You can feel the difference.

Sometimes wellness starts with paying attention again.

Not obsessing.Not optimizing everything.

Just noticing what actually makes you feel good.

The full podcast with Remnant MD is above if you’d like to listen.

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A line from a recent podcast conversation has stayed with me all week:

“All words are magic spells. Be very conscious of how you use them to describe yourself.”

I recently sat down with artist Adam Henry to talk about burnout, creativity, meditation, and self-talk.

And what struck me most was this:

A lot of us are exhausted not just because of what we’re doing — but because of the way we speak to ourselves while we do it.

I should be doing more.I’m behind.I haven’t done enough.

That kind of thinking quietly shapes how we experience life.

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Burnout Isn’t Always About Work

Adam described burnout not as overwork, but as becoming exhausted by the story he was telling himself.

That felt very real to me.

At one point he said:

“The best performers aren’t always ‘on.’ They’re just better at turning it on and off.”

Toward the end of the conversation, I asked him what he would tell his younger self.

His answer:

“Believe in yourself and quiet all the chatter.”

Honestly, I think a lot of us need that reminder right now.

Further Reading:

🧠 Episode Description

In this launch episode, I sit down with mental performance coach Grant Chasson to explore resilience, mindset, sleep, and the daily habits that shape how we feel.

We break down why mental toughness today isn’t about pushing through or suppressing emotion—but about discipline, consistency, and the ability to reframe challenges in real time.

From cold exposure and journaling to sleep optimization and supplements, this conversation is a practical look at how to build a stronger, calmer, more resilient mind—one habit at a time.

🔑 Key Takeaways

Mental toughness today = consistent behavior, not “tough guy” energy

Stress is often the result of too much comfort + distraction

Sleep is the foundation of mental performance (not the reward)

Physical health directly impacts anxiety, mood, and clarity

Cognitive reframing is one of the most powerful mindset tools you can build

Cold exposure trains your ability to stay calm under stress

Journaling helps clear mental clutter and improve decision-making

Gratitude shifts your emotional baseline and reaction patterns

A simple “reset” (like breathwork or a walk) can stop negative spirals

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction01:00 – Grant’s background + mental health journey03:30 – Morning routine + cold plunge06:20 – What mental toughness actually means in 202608:50 – Stress vs comfort vs distraction11:30 – Social pressure + teenagers today13:30 – Cognitive reframing as a “superpower”15:45 – Sleep, hormones, and mental health21:20 – Parenting, sleep, and perspective26:30 – Cold exposure + contrast therapy31:30 – Supplements for performance + recovery34:30 – Bulletproof coffee + caffeine habits35:00 – Daily habits that changed everything38:30 – Journaling + productivity41:50 – Building a reset system43:50 – Book recommendations

🧩 Resources & Mentions

Whoop Band

Fitbit

AG1

Magnesium Glycinate

Creatine

L-Theanine

“The Way of Excellence” – Brad Stulberg

“Relentless” – Tim Grover

“Greatness” – Dr. David Cook

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