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This post reflects aspects of long-term marriage, neurodivergence, PTSD, caregiving ,trauma, faith and recovery after infidelity. Find a gentle guide on engaging with this type of post in greater detail in my content notice.
Please engage gently — for yourself and others.
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🦋My Origin Story🦋
I didn’t fall apart all at once.
I had been dabbling for years in the Trim Healthy Lifestyle for myself, but I had already been completely committed to my children eating this way—I was doing just enough to keep myself afloat, but not enough to truly heal.
It was 2018, and I was pregnant with my promise baby—our rainbow after a stillbirth in January of 2017. That year between loss and life changed me in ways I didn’t have language for yet. I was functioning.
🦋I was caring for my five children
🦋I was showing up for my husband
…But inside, I had numbed out, and I wouldn’t realize it until many years later.
Food became a way to soothe my heart. I went through the motions. I would go to my overnight job and mindlessly snack to stay awake.
Every month, I expected to see two pink lines. Every month they didn’t come. And quietly—almost imperceptibly—a question began to form:
“What if my body is broken?“…”Am I going through menopause at the age of 30?“
I had never stopped making Trim Healthy food for my kids. That structure stayed. But my husband and I? We wandered. Had frequent off-plan adventures. Grief disguised as flexibility was my default. Comfort dressed up as normalcy was my distraction from the real issues.
And then something shifted.
I realized I couldn’t afford to pine away my health.
🦋Not emotionally.
🦋Not physically.
🦋Not spiritually.
I couldn’t sit in longing forever while my body carried the weight of grief over my loss, and hope at the same time that I would have another living child. I had to start living again, and that meant I had to be on my own list.
So I recommitted to one facet of our life that made me feel better; Trim Healthy plan foods and living refined sugar free.
🦋Not harshly.
🦋Not desperately.
But deliberately.
I went fully refined sugar-free. I stopped bargaining with myself to do what made me feel my best, even if it added extra effort to my day. I stopped numbing with food. I chose to care for myself again—not because I was chasing a result, but because I needed my body to be a place life could still happen, even if it never meant I would have another baby.
And then, literally, one day before our son’s first still-birthday—I found out I was pregnant with our youngest son. In a grocery store bathroom, after working my 10pm to 6am job and we were on our way to church. I couldn’t have planned that moment if I tried. We didn’t use any barrier methods, or attempt to prevent pregnancy, and hadn’t since our son had passed and been born.
I stayed sugar-free for most of that pregnancy because I believed the same foods that helped my body rebalance enough to conceive after nearly a year were exactly what it needed to sustain that life. I leaned heavily on Crossovers—partly out of practicality, partly because I didn’t have the capacity to constantly separate fuel sources. I ate to support my body, not control it. Loss had made it clear what was within my sphere of influence, and it was myself. I carried him for 35 weeks in a body I was learning to trust again, stewarding that pregnancy as the gift it was. It was the first time I chose food from a place of nourishment rather than cravings during a pregnancy.
I wasn’t perfect. I was purposeful and that was enough.
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Before Trim Healthy, health meant “good” numbers.
🦋A scale reading that wasn’t excessive according to some parameter that measured your gravitation pull versus the components that made it up. Bones, muscle, and more specifically how much fat they believed you were made of.
🦋A clothing size without the word extra. I have been a little extra since 7th grade.
🦋A body shape that didn’t condemn me to the “obese” side of the BMI chart.
Anything outside of that felt like a burden—a genetic or metabolic lottery I had lost without even knowing I was playing a game. If you knew my family, you could probably pick out the women in my bloodline from behind. Same appearance of bone structure. Similar shape in how flesh and fat cells are placed within our skin. Same quiet, and sometimes loud, shame passed down to the next generation. If a family name can carry a genetic feature and translate it into a “failure” or a “curse” I had it and it was strong. I felt doomed to be the same shape; forever.
Trim Healthy didn’t magically erase that story—but it interrupted it, and gave me the tools I needed to begin addressing my own nourishment, and eventually how that affected my shape and gravitational pull.
Health stopped being something I had to achieve to be worthy, because I refused to allow anyone to tell me what my body was doing without facts to support it. It started becoming a practice of nourishment—one that adapted to pregnancy, grief, caregiving, and real life instead of demanding I shrink myself to fit an ideal, for anyone except myself.
That realization fully landed after our children’s diagnoses of Celiac Disease.
Food could not become another demand on a system already under strain. I couldn’t adopt a lifestyle that couldn’t adapt to their needs, and mine.
What I was most afraid of losing wasn’t sugar or bread. It was ease, brain space, and the perception of convenience.
I knew if I could do that for myself it would be sustainable. I was already resigned to the fact that food would never be that simple again when it came to my children, but I needed some easy buttons to make room for myself within that.
But what surprised me most was this:
My body was never broken.
It was responding—intelligently, exactly the way humans are designed—to loss, stress, genetics, pregnancy, and love. When I stopped fighting it and started fueling it, my body responded with steadiness instead of resistance. I began to honor my body as an intelligent design instead of a cursed vessel.
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This is where my personal Trim Healthy lifestyle truly began. I joke with people who come to me for coaching that my children are the real Trim Healthy MVPs, because they’ve lived this lifestyle almost perfectly since 2014 because I was in control of their food and knew what would happen if I made a mistake. Serene Allison would be proud.
I didn’t start this, for myself, for the reason that most people believe.
Not as a plan.
Not as a fix.
But as a way to stay alive inside my life. A life that could only bend so far to meet me, without me beginning to do the work of finding myself again.
Everything I share from here forward grows from that truth.
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The Parts I Quietly Struggled With — where being “on plan” wasn’t enough, and survival demanded more than willpower.
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WELLNESS THAT WITHSTANDS
Rooted. Resilient. Restored.
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Nicole Burch is a CertifiedTrim Healthy Lifestyle Coach, author, and holistic family life mentor who helps women and families rebuild from the inside out. Through her work, she guides others toward resilience, restoration, and peace—teaching that true healing begins at home. As the owner of Life in the Treehouse, Nicole helps women and families overcome burnout, find food freedom, and create sustainable wellness that lasts. Her work weaves together the practical and the profound—showing that peace is possible even in the busiest, most complicated seasons of life.
Whether she’s helping clients balance blood sugar, restore energy, or reconnect with joy, Nicole’s mission remains the same:
to help women and families live Rooted in Rhythm—anchored in peace, balanced in body, and guided by grace.
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If you’re seeking nourishment for body and soul—gluten-free living, Trim Healthy knowledge and support, or peace amid the chaos—welcome home.
This is where resilience takes root.
Disclosure, Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, Content Notice & Trauma Informed Reading Guide, and my Affiliate Disclosures Below
I am celebrating five years of being a Certified Trim Healthy Lifestyle Coach. I have lived an abundance of seasons within just these five years. I was a nursing mom, pregnant multiple times, survived a traumatic pregnancy loss in 2022, lived in survival mode from 2022-2025 while being an ambassador for survivors of sexual assault and facilitating the legal aspects of a criminal trail against the perpetrator for those assaults, almost died due to pulmonary embolism after my eighth child was born in 2023, and somewhere in there lost and gained 80 pounds after identifying binge-eating disorder as a new challenge. I KNOW too well that life slows down for nobody and no situation, and every meal is a new opportunity to be a begin-againer!
Join my FREE Trim Healthy Facebook group: Trim in the Treehouse for mentorship, and support.
Nicole Burch is a Certified Trim Healthy Mama Lifestyle Coach, independently offering services based on the THM plan. This coach is not an employee or agent of Trim Healthy Mama, LLC. Coaching services are independently managed, and THM is not responsible for results, business practices, or claims made by this coach.
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Affiliate Disclosures
As an Amazon Associate, I may link to specific products that I believe in and trust. This is an affiliate link, and I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
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Designed with love to support families in building lives that are anchored in peace, balanced in body, and guided by grace. by: Nicole Burch
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