My father gave me the gift of reframing when I was six years old. I was having a terrible asthma attack — struggling to breathe, scared, small. And he said, “You know, Sonja, you’re sophisticated. Your system is more sophisticated than most. It recognizes minute threats and attempts to repel them.”
That moment lit up my six-year-old brain. He didn’t make the asthma go away. He changed how I saw it. And that gift — the ability to reframe — became the foundation for everything I do now.
But it took me decades to apply it to food. I lived through an abusive marriage, years of hiding food under my bed and stuffing wrappers in the outside dumpster, isolation so deep that my only joy came from eating, and a body that carried the weight of everything I couldn’t process.
I found structure through a program that gave me the rules I needed to release 170 pounds. But the rules weren’t the whole story. When I started asking why — why I turned to food, why moderation didn’t work, why the noise in my head never stopped — I found answers in neuroscience, in Sarah Peyton’s work on resonance and alarmed aloneness, in attachment theory, in the gut-brain research, in IFS. Dots that nobody was connecting.
I’m not a researcher. I’m someone who connected disparate dots out of desperation — and discovered that food dysfunction isn’t a character flaw. It’s an intelligent adaptation. Four biological systems working exactly as designed, responding to a world that was never designed for us.
I wrote the book I wish someone had handed me twenty years ago. And I built the community I needed but couldn’t find — a place where resonance, not reassurance, is the medicine. Where your patterns are honored as intelligence, not attacked as weakness. Where healing happens in spirals, not straight lines.
What I Do Now
- Author of “Thinking Outside the Box: A Revolutionary Approach to Food Dysfunction”
- Creator and facilitator of the Advanced Recovery Project and the Magic Membership community
Individual and small group coaching - Over five years of daily community connection calls
- Nine years maintaining a 170-pound transformation
I live with my micro vegan sanctuary (yes, that’s a thing), I still practice everything I teach, and I learn something new every single week from the remarkable humans in this community.
The Science I Draw From
My work integrates research and frameworks from:
- Sarah Peyton — resonance, alarmed aloneness, unconscious contracts
- Jaak Panksepp — affective neuroscience and the SEEKING system
- Andrew Huberman — neuroplasticity, stress, and nervous system regulation
- Kristin Neff — self-compassion as neurobiological intervention
- Richard Schwartz — Internal Family Systems (there are no bad parts)
- Gabor Maté — the attachment-authenticity split
- James Coan — social baseline theory
- Stephen Porges — polyvagal theory
- Kelly McGonigal — the willpower instinct
I’m not an expert in any one of these fields. I’m a dot-connector who sees how they all point to the same truth: you were never broken. You were biological.
Want to Talk?
The best way to find out if this work is right for you is a conversation. Book a free Discovery Session — no obligation, no sales pitch. We’ll talk about what’s going on for you and whether any of this feels like the right fit.
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