Food as a Conversation: How Two Years in Dietary Wilderness Changed Everything

The Wake-Up Call

There wasn’t a single dramatic moment — no collapse, no diagnosis that arrived like a thunderclap. There was instead a slow accumulation: fatigue that sleep didn’t fix, inflammation that flared without obvious cause, a body that felt increasingly opaque to me, sending signals I didn’t know how to read. When my Crohn’s disease made clear that ignoring these signals was no longer an option, I finally listened. Extensive food sensitivity testing pointed toward an answer that was both simple and bewildering: the foods I was eating every day were quietly working against me.

What followed was two years I can only describe as a dietary wilderness.

The list of what I removed was longer than I expected: gluten in all its forms, nightshades, cane sugar, yeast, eggs, beans larger than a black bean, pineapple — among others. For the first year especially, the restriction was real and at times genuinely hard. I was learning to cook differently, shop differently, eat differently. I was also, without fully realizing it at first, learning to taste differently.

Here is the paradox at the heart of those two years: the privation was also a liberation.

Eating a limited range of unprocessed whole foods gave my sensory system a rest from what I can only describe now as chronic overstimulation. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, something shifted. The natural sweetness in a ripe peach became vivid in a way it hadn’t been before. The mineral earthiness of kale, the slight bitterness of a well-sautéed dandelion green with garlic and olive oil — these became not just tolerable but genuinely satisfying, even deeply pleasurable. It was as if I were tasting things for the first time, at a much higher resolution.

I was practicing Soto Zen during this period, attending day-long retreats where I would sit in stillness for hours with little sensory stimulation. Afterward, stepping outside into the world — even the ordinary world of downtown Sacramento — I would be stopped in my tracks by the smell of a flowering tree, the way light dappled through leaves, the sound of the wind moving through them. Small things hit with force. I began to understand something in my body, not just my mind: that simplicity doesn’t reduce richness. It increases it. Strip away the noise, and what’s left becomes luminous.

That realization became real in food as it did in practice. I remember the moment I titrated a square of 100% dark chocolate with the smallest amount of raw honey — not to sweeten it, but to find its optimal point. What struck me was how much darker my sweet spot was than anything sold as “dark chocolate” in a conventional grocery store. Most of what passes for intensity in our food culture is actually just a different form of numbness.

Sautéed dandelion greens became a personal favorite that year. A weed, technically. Bitter, mineral-rich, grounding. There was something almost amusing about it — a kind of "who have I become?" that felt entirely like a compliment. The Taoist sensibility I was developing alongside my Zen practice found it fitting: the humblest and most overlooked thing on the plate turned out to be the most fulfilling and nourishing.

Before all of this, my relationship with food had been primarily functional and secondarily indulgent. In college and the years just after, it was cheap staples to avoid hunger on a limited budget, interspersed with processed and highly convenient splurge foods. I had read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I understood the problem intellectually. I felt guilty about the gap between what I knew and how I actually ate. But knowledge alone didn’t close that gap. It took my body making the cost of that gap undeniable.

The greatest gift from those two years wasn’t the disappearance of symptoms, though that came. It was the development of something more durable: an intuitive knowing, in real time, of whether what I was eating was helping my body or quietly working against it. Food had become, finally, legible.

What I Now Believe About Food

Food is the most direct conversation you have with your body every single day. Not fuel. Not calories. Information. Every bite gives your cells clear instructions — to repair, to energize, to stay resilient — or it quietly generates confusion, inflammation, and slowdown.

My approach is built on two moves, in sequence.

First: stop sending the confusing messages. Remove the foods that reliably create interference for most people — gluten (including the “healthy” whole-wheat versions), refined sugars, and industrial seed oils. These aren’t villains because they’re fashionable to avoid. They’re worth removing because of what happens in their absence: energy stabilizes, sleep deepens, the low-grade background noise in the system quiets. The body, given a chance to hear itself, almost always knows what to do.

Then: flood the system with the clearest, richest messages possible. This is where the real nourishment lives. Slow-simmered bone broth with a splash of apple cider vinegar, pulling minerals straight from the bones into something deeply restorative. Sautéed dandelion greens with garlic and olive oil — bitter, mineral-rich, and grounding after years of processed blandness. Hand-formed grass-fed beef patties mixed with fresh herbs. Wild-caught salmon grilled simply, skin crisp. Colorful roots and seasonal greens. Fermented sauerkraut for the gut. Pastured eggs with those deep orange yolks that tell you the chicken lived well. And yes — a square of dark chocolate with a touch of raw honey, because once inflammation quiets and the palate heals, sweetness can return as a quiet reward rather than a trigger.

These aren’t superfoods in the hype sense. They’re simply real, nutrient-dense foods that the human body evolved to recognize and use efficiently — before processing stripped the life out of what we eat. When the body gets what it actually needs, it runs its own repair shop: hormones balance, immunity sharpens, the mind clears.

The single most important thing I want you to understand: your food either supports your body’s built-in healing machinery, or it quietly interferes with it. Everything else — macros, timing, supplements — is secondary. Get the information right, and the body does most of the heavy lifting.

What the Other Side Looks Like

On a six week trip through Spain with my partner Lateefah, midway through our itinerary, I found myself alone in the Prado Museum in Madrid while she rested back at the Airbnb. A grueling travel schedule had caught up with her. But I had something in reserve. I spent the day moving slowly through one of the world’s great collections, unhurried, genuinely present, with enough in the tank to let Picasso, Hieronymus Bosch, and Francisco de Goya land the way they deserve to. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme. But it’s the kind of thing that accumulates into a life. That extra capacity — that margin — was something I had built, one meal at a time.

The transformation I experienced wasn’t dramatic weight loss or a sudden physical reinvention. It was quieter than that, and in many ways more profound. Waking up feeling like myself. The afternoon crash disappearing. Joints moving freely. The mind clearing enough to pursue the work and the life I actually wanted to live: adventuring with Lateefah, focusing on meaningful work helping humans and rivers coexist, building a family life closer to nature and community than I had ever managed before. Health, it turned out, was the foundation that made everything else possible — not the destination, but the precondition.

The 21-Day Reset

Change can be gradual or sudden. Both are workable. But if you genuinely want to develop your own intuition about how food affects the way you feel — if you want to experience that shift rather than simply read about it — there’s real value in a focused reset.

The 21-Day Reset I offer coaching clients is built on exactly the principles above. We begin by removing the foods most likely to be creating interference in your system. Not forever, and not all at once without support — but clearly enough, and long enough, to let the noise subside and the signal come through. In parallel, we replace what’s been removed with high-density nutrition: real food, thoughtfully prepared, designed to saturate your cells with what they actually need.

What most people notice in the first week is the absence of something they didn’t realize was there — a kind of low-grade static they’d simply come to accept as normal. By week two, the clearer energy begins to arrive. By week three, the intuition starts to develop: a direct, embodied knowledge of what is and isn’t working for you, that no book or article can fully substitute for.

This is the foundation on which everything else — movement, mindfulness, performance — gets built. We’ll talk about those layers in the posts ahead.

Corvus Gluten Free Bakery, and What Comes Next

A word about Corvus, because some of you will already know it or will be curious about where it fits.

Lateefah and I are the new owners Corvus Gluten Free Bakery in Grass Valley, California. We've made this move as part of a larger vision — one that has become, in a real sense, our livelihood and our life’s work. It is not the strict elimination protocol I use with coaching clients. It is something else: proof that real, wholesome, beautifully made food can also be joyful. That celebration and nourishment don’t have to be at odds. The loaves and pastries we make are for shared tables, farm gatherings, and the particular pleasure of handing someone something delicious that also happens to be genuinely good for them.

“Gluten-free” for us is not a dietary restriction retrofitted onto a lesser version of something better. It’s a starting point for rethinking what food can be when you refuse to compromise on ingredients, sourcing, or intention.

Corvus is the celebration. The daily coaching work is the foundation. And underneath both of them is a vision we are only beginning to build toward: Nightingale Farms, and a farm-to-fork model in which the food we grow contributes to the health of the soil and the natural world it comes from, where wholesome choices that help people look and feel their best are easy and accessible, and where it is possible to make one’s own growth — in genuine combination with service to the land and the community — one’s actual calling.

Our family has put our livelihood on the line to pursue that vision. Not because it’s the safe or obvious path, but because we believe it matters, and because we’ve seen in our own lives what becomes possible when food is treated not as a commodity, but as a conversation.

That conversation, for me, started in a dietary wilderness, with a plate of sautéed dandelion greens and the quiet realization that I’d only just learned to truly listen.

*If any of this resonates — if you recognize yourself in the gap between knowing and doing, or in the low-grade static of a life that looks good but doesn’t quite feel that way — I’d love to talk. The reset is one place to start. But the conversation can begin anywhere.