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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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🦋The Parts I Quietly Struggled With🦋
There are parts of a Trim Healthy Lifestyle that photograph beautifully.
And then there are the parts you live quietly—many times without language, without applause, without certainty that you’re doing it “right.”
Those were the parts I struggled with most, once I started living it out for myself as well as my family.
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In the beginning, the hardest thing wasn’t willpower.
It was restriction.
We were already completely gluten-free and dairy-free, not as a preference but as a necessity to keep our kids free from their autoimmune trigger. Then I realized I couldn’t tolerate stevia either. What had once felt like a helpful swap began to show its cost for me—congestion, itchy and watery eyes, migraines I’d never had before. I was the winner of the symptoms associated with this plant’s cousin…ragweed.
When I stopped consuming it, the symptoms stopped too. Suddenly, the list of “can’t have” felt very long. I hadn’t learned how to see the possibilities, yet.
I’ve always struggled with food rules that feel claustrophobic. And now there were so many of them—stacked not because I was failing, but because my body and my childrens’ bodies were asking for clarity and protection. Boundaries that I didn’t know how to redefine as beneficial, yet.
That’s when I stopped calling them restrictions and started calling them food boundaries. This changed my relationship with them drastically. Not just in my head, but in my heart.
Language matters.
One feels punishing.
The other feels protective, and I could live within the boundaries if that was the purpose.
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Perfectionism showed up early—but not in the way people assumed. There was a lot of assuming going on.
From the outside, it might look like extreme rigidity. Unnecessary even. If there was a picture of a “helicopter mom” in the urban dictionary, it was me. But, from the inside, it was survival.
My children’s health depends on staying gluten-free, because it triggers their autoimmune response at a cellular level within their intestines. It destroys those cells faster than their bodies can replace them. The cascade of conditions that is rooted in that destruction can result in many catastrophic health conditions, and even death.
That isn’t aesthetic discipline. That’s vigilance, and conscious parenting in action. One mistake can ripple into days or weeks of discomfort, inflammation, or regression. Then, months of silent repercussions as their body works it out of their system, creating more damage every second it remains. So yes, I had to get it right as often as humanly possible.
That level of precision changes you. It makes you reactive, and misunderstood by those who don’t know what you do.
And my personal Trim Healthy plan foods?
It didn’t carry the same weight, though I am mostly gluten free especially within my home. I didn’t have to be as vigilant with mine, and I knew it.
Sometimes that became my quiet rebellion—my unofficial middle finger to the genetics that shaped my children’s condition, as if it could understand that I was angry at it somehow for its effects that were so damaging to my children for so long.
Never recklessly. Never in a way that would harm my children. But enough to feel a sliver of autonomy in a life that required constant carefulness, and unending vigilance around food. This looks like the occasional low carb tortilla, a label I choose not to read very completely, a “franken-food” I indulge in because I can(but my kids can’t), and some on plan sourdough or whole grain bread if I can come across it.
It wasn’t about sabotage.
It was about preserving selfhood.
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There were many seasons where I was technically “on plan” and deeply depleted in so many ways. Many I probably still don’t even realize.
I’ve lived this lifestyle through more versions of life than I can count. I tell people I’ve lived a thousand different days of Trim Healthy since 2014.
🦋Working outside the home, mostly overnight shifts.
🦋Obtained an Associate Degree in Allied Health in 18 months. Doing most of it in the evenings; sometimes before my overnight shifts for work.
🦋Staying home, and now working from home, as my husband’s caregiver.
🦋Seven Pregnancies.
🦋Seven Postpartum seasons.
🦋Four Nurslings.
🦋Three months & three days exclusively pumping for my 2018 baby. Yes, I counted every single day it took for me to encourage my promise baby that came at 35 weeks and spent twelve days in the NICU, to exclusively breast feed.
🦋Major surgery. Three cesarean sections, and two shoulder surgeries.
🦋One miscarriage resulting in hemorrhage in 2022.
🦋My stillbirth in 2017.
🦋Travel around our state for medical appointments, and one cross-country trip.
🦋Blizzards that kept us homebound, at least yearly.
🦋Raising and Homeschooling my Exceptional Needs kids.
🦋A three, almost four year battle for justice for our children resulting in a criminal trial…they won in 2025, but I lost some things along the way again.
I didn’t quit during those seasons. I stayed—because this way of eating helped my children thrive. It gave me enough structure to hold us steady, somewhere, when everything else felt uncertain.
But staying didn’t always mean flourishing.
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Stress, trauma, and caregiving change how hunger shows up. Ranging from disordered eating to extended windows of no hunger cues. I’ve experienced it all.
They change digestion, cravings and capacity.
Pregnancy tested every assumption I had about my body, in good and challenging ways. Adapting this lifestyle for my children tested it again, by literally asking me to think outside the bread box.
I had to become a “Drive-thru-purist.” Which, if you know anything about the women who created Trim Healthy, leaves me somewhere between Pearl and Serene in how I cook and my thoughts about food “purity.” My children have always been my motivation—not for perfection, but for possibility within our boundaries. But, I take shortcuts to save my sanity. Never at their expense.
🦋What could work here?
🦋What could be sustained now?
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The part I think most people hide, or are ignorant of, is this:
Once you have language for it, you realize some of us are living with addiction—not always to food itself, but to control, to certainty, to not falling apart again. I won’t even pretend to diagnose anyone, but not all self-control issues are rooted in a character problem. Not all food noise is rooted in physical hunger. Sometimes, it’s more than that.
🦋The fear of losing control returns quietly, but it’s always present.
🦋So does the shame of being a begin-againer, again.
🦋So does the self-hatred for patterns you didn’t yet have tools to interrupt, and maybe you don’t even know who can help you identify the patterns, or that they might be a problem? I know I didn’t.
Willpower is not sustainable forever. I’ve been called a “super mom” but I only play that role when I am forced to, and it’s exhausting.
🦋Not when you can’t rest. I don’t just mean sleep.
🦋Not when your nervous system is always braced for fight or hypervigilance.
🦋Not when food becomes the last place you feel competent as you navigate abstaining from gluten in all its forms, and a huge threat to your childrens’ health.
This is the part of Trim Healthy that doesn’t get enough compassion. Not because nobody wants to be compassionate, but because it’s not their life.
And it’s the part that changed everything for me—when I finally stopped trying to power through it and started listening to what my life was actually asking for.
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Sweetness, Pleasure & Permission — why wanting sweet was never the problem, and how food morality keeps us stuck.
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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!
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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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