I was the token fat kid in a family of lean, fit people.
My mom was pregnant with me and really sick, and what we know now is that in order for me to thrive in utero, my metabolism slowed down. As a kid, I ate the same way as my sister. She was skinny. I wasn't. My mom didn't like that. She felt like it was a reflection on her as a parent.
So from the time I was four or five, my mom wanted me to lose weight. Talked about it. Encouraged it. Restricted my food. My sister ate the things I wanted, and I didn't get to, and so I learned to sneak.
My mom was a teacher. We'd hang around her school before and after hours. There was another teacher who kept candy in her desk drawer, and I would slip into her classroom, crawl under the desk, and eat it. I'd hide the wrappers. My dad had a coffee can full of quarters in our RV, and I'd sneak in and steal handfuls of them so I could buy things from the teachers' lounge vending machine.
I was five.
My mom had been on Weight Watchers before I was even out of elementary school. I joke now that my weight loss pursuits started before I knew what a weight loss pursuit was.
It got worse.
Middle school through my teenage years, she weighed me almost every morning. I would cut my hair before stepping on the scale. I'd spit into a cup thinking it might drop me an ounce. I'd turn the shower on hot and stand in the bathroom hoping I'd sweat something off before she got to me.
Before my semi-formal, she wrapped me in duct tape to make me fit into the dress. When it came off, it took my skin with it.
It was a wild time. My weight was the centerpoint of my entire life. And it was going to stay that way for a lot of years.
(I wrote about all of this — the parts I've kept out of this chapter, and the parts I couldn't fit — in Chasing Cupcakes.)
I was convinced that if I just knew more, everything would change.
I was on full scholarship in college studying Latin and Greek, and I walked away from it. Transferred schools. Started over. Got a degree in nutrition, then went on to a master's in nutrition — because I was certain that if I just understood food better, I could crack this.
It never had anything to do with food.
I went on to work in the health and wellness industry. My first job was as an anti-obesity educator in the school system — as an extremely obese woman. The irony was not lost on me. From there I moved into supplements — marketing, product development, consumer education — and every time I got in front of a room to talk about health, I felt like a fraud. I was the least healthy person in the building.
What drove me crazy wasn't that I lacked motivation. I had plenty. I was at the office early. I worked weekends. I did whatever the job required. My career had all the discipline in the world.
Just not the part of my life I actually cared about.
How can I show up like this for work I care about a fraction as much, and not show up at all for my own body?
Somewhere in my twenties, I got so tired of the endless loop — what diet, what start date, what restart, when I'd fallen off, when I'd get back on — that I gave up on it. Not on my weight. Just on making it the thing I focused on. Instead, for the first time in my life, I decided to focus on something else entirely: I was going to get out of debt.
Not a single week went according to plan.
And I still did it.
Unexpected things came up. I didn't beat myself up and go buy shoes. I didn't decide I'd blown it and give up until Monday. I just went back to work. Something would derail me, and I would come back. That was the whole system.
When the debt was gone, I sat with what had just happened. I'd solved something enormous — the kind of thing I'd been failing to solve with food and weight for two decades — and it hadn't required perfection. It hadn't required willpower. It hadn't required a plan I could stick to no matter what.
It had required something I'd never once brought to my weight.
I just kept coming back.
And that was when I started to suspect the problem had never been the food.
I realized that if I thought about my job the way I thought about food, I would have been fired.
I don't feel like it today. I'll start tomorrow. This one thing won't hurt. It doesn't matter.
I never said those things at work. I said them constantly about food.
If I'd thought about getting out of debt the way I thought about my weight, I never would have gotten out of debt.
So the problem wasn't the food. It wasn't which plan I was following. It was how I was thinking as I was choosing. The food was a symptom. The thinking was the disease.
Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.
I swore off diets. I swore off fresh starts. I swore off big behavioral transformations — the kind that always begin on a Monday and never make it to a Friday.
Instead, I did something small.
At the time, I was going to Chick-fil-A every morning for breakfast. A chicken biscuit and a side of chicken minis. Every day. I didn't stop going. I didn't pledge to eat egg whites. I didn't fast. I just ordered the chicken biscuit or the chicken minis. Not both.
That was it. That was the whole change.
It sounds absurdly small. It was absurdly small. But that's the point. For the first time in my life, I wasn't trying to overhaul myself. I was just practicing a slightly better thought than the one that had been running my life.
I did that for weeks before I changed anything else.
The changes stayed small for a long time. The thinking is what kept shifting.
And in the two years that followed, I lost over 130 pounds. No GLP-1s. No weight loss surgery. Just a slow, steady, quiet rewiring of how I thought about the choice in front of me.
I didn't become a different person. I just stopped losing to the old one.
The transformation started to get noticed at work.
I was still in product development in the supplement industry, and one of my jobs was training our field on new products — some of which were weight loss products. There was pressure for me to represent that I'd used the products to lose the weight.
I hadn't.
I couldn't bring myself to say I had. But the job itself was toxic in a lot of other ways too, and now that I was out of debt, I finally had the freedom to leave.
I didn't have a plan. I didn't have a business idea. I told my husband, I'm just going to start a blog.
So I did.
Two weeks in, I realized I hated blogging.
So I said, I'll start a podcast instead. I Googled how to start a podcast — this was long before podcasts were cool — and I had one up and running in a week.
The whole thesis was simple: I had struggled for decades, and nobody had ever had the conversations with me that I'd eventually had with myself. The ones that actually worked. I wanted to say those things out loud, on the off chance someone else needed to hear them.
The podcast took off like a rocket ship.
A few years in, the book was a natural extension. I had stories to tell and tools to unpack, and I wanted them somewhere people could hold onto.
Chasing Cupcakes came out in January 2019.
That was the beginning of what became Primal Potential — the podcast, the books, the coaching, the twelve years of conversation that's followed. I never had a business plan. I still don't, honestly. I've just kept saying the things I wish someone had said to me, and it turns out a lot of people needed to hear them too.
After the business took off, a lot of other things shifted too.
I ended up moving back to New England after almost twenty years away. New chapter. New relationship. I thought — naively — that the hard part of my life was behind me. That I could just live from here, healthy and confident and steady.
Life had other plans.
In 2019, at the height of everything going right in my business, I found out I was pregnant with my first child. I could not have been more excited. My daughter Dagny was born in March of 2020 — which, depending on who you are, means something different. For me, it meant coming home from the hospital with a newborn as the world shut down.
She died unexpectedly at 14 days old.
I had no maternity leave. No bereavement leave. I was a solopreneur. Funerals were classified as non-essential. I did the bare minimum to keep food on the table, and got through one heartbreaking hour at a time. I didn't think I was going to survive it.
Out of that grief came The Dagny Foundation — a 501(c)(3) my family and I built in her memory to support other families navigating infant crisis and infant loss.
Less than six months after Dagny died, I found out I was pregnant with my son Roman. He was born in 2021. It was in that in-between — pregnant again, still gutted, trying to find footing — that I wrote Tools for the Trenches. Not because I had it figured out. Because I was chronicling how I was getting through, in real time, and I thought maybe someone else in a trench of their own could use it.
Before Roman was nine months old, I spontaneously conceived identical twin girls.
It felt like the most generous gift from God. Until I almost lost them too.
At 21 weeks pregnant, we drove through the night to Johns Hopkins with our baby boy in the backseat so I could have emergency surgery on the girls in utero. I made it to 26 weeks before a placental abruption. The girls were on life support. We were told they hadn't made it.
They had.
After 93 days in the NICU, they came home.
I was in survival mode for a long stretch after that. Loss, trauma, three tiny children, still the sole provider — and FMLA is not a thing for a solopreneur. A lot of my own life went to the back seat, including, honestly, my health. The wake-up call came when the twins were two and severe postpartum anxiety took me by surprise.
The twins are four now. Roman is five.
Every day we're finding our way — prioritizing God, health, and each other.
And when we're not, my kids and I are writing a children's book series together. Coming soon.
Today we live on a small hobby farm on Cape Cod.
We have chickens and goats and guinea hens. A vegetable garden. Fruit trees. Bees. A small orchard. A roadside stand where we sell eggs and flowers. We raise our chickens for eggs and for meat. We grow as much of our own food as we can, and we homeschool our kids.
We are, in short, exactly those annoying people who make sourdough discard crackers and document their crazy antics on Substack.
It is a verifiable zoo around here. There is almost always somebody from Natural Resources or the fire department in the driveway.
We also have a lot of fun.
We live close to my mom and my husband's parents. We're building the kind of life that stays simple and humble but tries to make a real difference in the world. I still run the business. I still love my clients. But first and foremost, I'm raising little people to love God, take care of their neighbors, take care of each other, and know how to grow their own food.
Because I think knowing how to provide for yourself matters more than knowing how to make money.
And that's about the whole story.
The story's still being written.
I'm working on my third book. My kids and I are finishing our first children's book series. If you want to keep going with me, here's how.
The podcast — Consistent by Primal Potential — is on Apple and Spotify. The archive goes back to 2014. There's plenty there to keep you busy.
I write and record more personal, less-produced essays and episodes on Substack. Free to read. Member-exclusive podcasts for paid subscribers.
If you're ready for something more hands-on — coaching, the DEFENSE Build, private workshops — everything I currently offer lives here.
That's the menu.
Thanks for coming this far. Truly.
— Elizabeth