Recovery Began When I Stopped Fighting Myself
Theme: HealingBy Dr. Quỳnh-Hương Nguyễn (She/They/Chi/Chanh)
Community Mental Health Coach, Founder of Patterns PivotIf you had met me a few years ago, you might have thought I was looking for a better workout plan. I certainly believed that was what I needed. I spent years searching for the perfect routine.
The right foods. The right meal plan. The right exercise program. The right body.
Like many people, I thought recovery would begin once I finally figured out how to control myself. Instead, recovery began the moment I stopped treating myself like someone who needed to be controlled.
Looking for Something That Felt Familiar
After ending an unhealthy relationship in 2022, I knew something had to change. Not because I hated my body. Because I was exhausted from fighting it. I had spent years trying to fit into health advice that rarely reflected my culture, my lived experience, or the realities of my life.
Most nutrition conversations centered Western foods. Most fitness advice assumed everyone's relationship with food looked the same. Very little acknowledged what it meant to grow up navigating immigrant family expectations, trauma, emotional eating, or cultural identity.
I wasn't looking for another diet. I was looking for someone who understood where I came from.
Finding Someone Who Understood
Eventually, I found a Vietnamese wellness coach. That mattered more than I expected. For the first time, I wasn't asked to give up the foods that connected me to my family. No one told me Vietnamese food was the problem.
Instead, we talked about balance. Consistency. Movement. Strength. Sustainability. The goal wasn't perfection. The goal was building a life I could actually maintain.
Over the next three and a half years, I strength trained three days each week. I continued working full-time. I completed my doctorate. I moved from Austin to Houston. My coach moved to Boston.
We continued meeting virtually. Life kept changing. But the work continued. Not because life became easier. Because I had begun relating to myself differently.
The Biggest Surprise
People sometimes assume the workouts changed everything. Strength training absolutely became an important part of my life. It helped me feel stronger.
More connected to my body. More capable.
But if I'm honest, it wasn't the workouts that transformed my relationship with myself. It was realizing that every time life became overwhelming...I still wanted to reach for food.
Not because I lacked discipline. Because my nervous system remembered. That realization changed everything. For years, I had been trying to change the behavior. Now I understood I needed to understand the pattern.
Food Was Never the Whole Story
Whenever stress increased...I snacked.
Whenever I felt overwhelmed...I snacked.
Whenever life became emotionally heavy...I found myself returning to familiar habits.
At first, I interpreted those moments as failure. Now I see them differently.
Those moments weren't proof that recovery wasn't working. They were invitations to become curious.
Instead of asking, "Why am I doing this again?"
I began asking, "What's happening inside me right now?"
That shift sounds simple. It wasn't. Curiosity asks us to stay present with ourselves. Shame asks us to run. Healing often begins when we choose curiosity.
Recovery Is Not Linear
I wish I could tell you there was one moment when everything suddenly clicked. There wasn't.
Recovery has looked like thousands of ordinary decisions. Choosing to eat consistently.
Returning to movement after difficult weeks. Learning when my body needed rest instead of punishment. Practicing self-compassion when old patterns resurfaced. Allowing myself to begin again. Again. And again.
Recovery isn't a straight line. It's a relationship. And like every relationship, it requires attention, honesty, patience, and grace.
What My Body Was Trying to Teach Me
One of the greatest lessons recovery has given me is this: My body was never my enemy.
For years, I believed it was betraying me. Now I understand it was communicating with me.
My anxiety wasn't trying to ruin my life. My emotional eating wasn't trying to sabotage me. My exhaustion wasn't a weakness.
Each one was information. Each one was asking me to pay attention. My body wasn't working against me. It was doing everything it could to keep me alive using the tools it had learned over decades. That realization completely changed how I think about healing.
This Is What Patterns Pivot Grew Out Of
As I continued healing, I noticed something surprising. The same questions that transformed my own recovery kept showing up in every part of my life.
Not just with food. With burnout. With relationships. With boundaries. With perfectionism. With people-pleasing. With identity. With work. With belonging.
Different situations. The same underlying patterns. That's where Patterns Pivot was born. Not from having all the answers. But from learning that most behaviors make sense once we understand the context that created them.
We don't have to erase our past. We don't have to shame ourselves for surviving. We can honor the wisdom our patterns once carried while deciding whether they're still serving the life we're building today.
That's the pivot.
Recovery Looks Different Now
Today, I still strength train. I still enjoy Vietnamese food. I still have stressful days. I still notice old patterns trying to reappear. The difference is that I don't interpret those moments as proof that I've failed.
I see them as opportunities to check in with myself. To ask what I need. To respond instead of react. Recovery hasn't made me perfect.
It's made me more compassionate. And in many ways, that's been the greatest transformation of all.
Pattern Reflection
Before you leave, I'd invite you to spend a few moments with these questions:
What behaviors do I criticize that may have once helped me survive?
What happens in my body when I feel stressed, lonely, or overwhelmed?
If I responded with curiosity instead of judgment, what might I discover?
What would it look like to build a relationship with myself instead of trying to control myself?
What is one small pivot I can practice this week?
Healing rarely happens through one dramatic breakthrough.
More often, it grows through small moments of awareness repeated over time.
When Food Became My Translator: What Emotional Eating Was Really Trying to Say
Theme: SurvivalBy Dr. Quỳnh-Hương Nguyễn (She/They/Chi/Chanh)
Mental Health Coach, Founder of Patterns Pivot People often ask me when my eating disorder started.
The truth is, I don't know.
I know when I first noticed my relationship with food felt different. I know when I started skipping meals. I know when I started eating in secret. I know when I began believing my body was something that needed to be fixed.
But if I'm honest, I think the story began much earlier.
Long before I ever understood calories. Long before I cared about weight. Long before anyone would have looked at me and thought, "She has an eating disorder."
I think it began the first time I realized I didn't have words for what I was feeling.
Growing Up Between Childhood and Adulthood
I grew up in a Vietnamese immigrant family on the north side of Chicago.
Like many children of immigrants, I learned early that families survive because everyone contributes.
My parents worked incredibly hard to build a life after the Vietnam War. My mother works as a nail technician and my father was a wedding photographer. They were learning to navigate a country, a language, and systems that often weren't designed with immigrant families in mind.
As the oldest daughter and oldest grandchild, I quietly stepped into responsibilities I didn't recognize as responsibilities. I translated paperwork before I understood what the documents meant. I made phone calls before I understood the systems I was calling. I listened to conversations about bills, housing, work, immigration, and family conflict long before I knew what any of those things actually meant.
Looking back now, I often describe myself as the family's unofficial case manager.
At the time, I simply thought I was helping. No one sat me down and said, "You are responsible for fixing this." But children are incredibly observant.
We notice what eases tension. We notice what earns praise. We notice when adults are overwhelmed. And many of us quietly decide, "Maybe I can carry some of this."
When Home Didn't Feel Predictable
One of my earliest memories isn't about food. It's about listening.
Listening to my parents argue about money. Listening to conversations I wasn't supposed to fully understand but somehow did. Listening to worry.
Then came 2008. My grandfather passed away. The recession hit. Like so many immigrant families, ours wasn't only grieving. We were trying to survive.
Language barriers made everything harder. Resources existed, but accessing them wasn't always straightforward. Adults were carrying enormous burdens. Children notice those things. Even when adults believe they're protecting us.
I didn't have the language to describe anxiety. I didn't know what a nervous system was. I couldn't explain why my stomach always felt tight. I only knew that life often felt uncertain. And uncertainty is exhausting for a child.
Food Never Asked Me Questions
When people hear the phrase emotional eating, they often imagine someone reaching for food because they're sad.
For me, it wasn't that simple. Food became predictable. Food didn't expect anything from me. Food didn't ask me to solve problems. Food didn't need me to translate. Food didn't ask me to choose sides. Food didn't care if I had the right answer.
For a few moments, eating quieted everything else. Not forever. Just long enough. At seven years old, I couldn't have explained any of that. All I knew was that when life felt overwhelming, eating made it feel quieter.
Looking back, I don't see weakness. I see a child whose nervous system found one of the few things that reliably brought comfort.
The Pattern Was Never Really About Food
Years later, I would spend enormous amounts of energy trying to stop eating emotionally. I'd promise myself tomorrow would be different. I'd tell myself I needed more discipline. More motivation. More self-control.
But every time life became overwhelming again...the same behavior returned.
Why? Because I wasn't addressing the pattern. I was only trying to eliminate the symptom.
Food wasn't the pattern. Food was the strategy.
The pattern looked more like this: Life feels overwhelming. My body searches for safety. Food provides temporary comfort. I feel guilty. I criticize myself. Stress increases.
The cycle begins again. Nothing about that pattern suggests laziness. Nothing about it suggests a lack of willpower.
It suggests a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do years earlier. That realization changed everything for me.
Compassion Changed the Questions I Asked
For years I kept asking, "Why can't I stop?"
Today, I ask something different. "What was this behavior trying to protect?"
That single question completely changed how I understood myself. Instead of fighting my behaviors, I became curious about them. Instead of assuming I was broken, I wondered what younger version of me had learned that food represented.
Comfort. Predictability. Relief. Safety.
Those weren't irrational needs. They're deeply human ones. The behavior simply outlived the circumstances that created it.
Many of the patterns we carry begin that way. They develop because they work. Until one day...they don't.
What This Looks Like in Coaching
One of the biggest misconceptions about coaching is that it's about accountability. People imagine someone telling them to work harder. Build better habits. Stay motivated. My coaching looks very different.
When someone tells me, "I keep doing the same thing over and over." I'm usually less interested in the behavior than I am in the story underneath it.
What happens right before the behavior? What emotion shows up? What need isn't being met? When did this response first become useful?
Because most of the time, our behaviors aren't random. They're organized. They're protective. They're adaptive.
The goal isn't to shame them into disappearing. It's to understand them well enough that we can choose something different.
That's what I mean by a Pattern Pivot. Not becoming a different person. Becoming aware enough to choose a different response.
A Different Way of Thinking About Emotional Eating
What if emotional eating isn't evidence that you're failing? What if it's evidence that your nervous system learned an incredibly effective survival strategy?
That doesn't mean it still serves you. It doesn't mean it can't change. But I think change becomes much more sustainable when it's rooted in understanding rather than punishment. I've spent years trying to fix myself. Ironically, real healing didn't begin until I stopped treating myself like a problem to solve.
Pattern Reflection
Before you continue your day, I'd invite you to pause for a moment.
Ask yourself:
When do I find myself reaching for food even when I'm not physically hungry?
What usually happens right before that moment?
What emotion feels hardest for me to sit with?
If my eating could speak, what would it be trying to tell me?
What might this behavior have been protecting me from?
You don't need to have all the answers today. Sometimes awareness is the beginning of change.
About Patterns Pivot
Patterns Pivot is a community-centered mental health coaching practice rooted in the belief that our behaviors make more sense when we understand the stories behind them.
Through evidence-informed coaching that honors both research and lived experience, I work alongside first-generation adults, LGBTQIA+ communities, neurodivergent adults, caregivers, and people rebuilding after burnout to better understand the patterns shaping their lives.
Because lasting change rarely begins with asking, "What's wrong with me?" It often begins with asking, "What happened and what was my mind and body trying to do to help me survive?"
If this reflection resonated with you, I'd be honored to walk alongside you as you explore your own patterns.
Recognize the Pattern. Understand the Pattern. Choose the Pivot.
What Happens When We Stop Treating the Body as the Problem?
A conversation about food, mental health, identity, inherited patterns, and the stories we've been told about ourselves.
Before I became a dietitian, I was a kid growing up between cultures, languages, expectations, and identities. Long before I learned about protein, fiber, blood sugar, or metabolism, or any science thing for that matter I learned something many of us learn early: That our bodies are constantly being watched.
Measured.
Compared.
Judged.
Praised.
Corrected.
I learned that some bodies are celebrated while others are treated like problems to solve.
And if I'm being honest, I don't think most of us learned that lesson from nutrition.
We learned it from family members who were trying to protect us.
From doctors.
From schools.
From magazines.
From wellness culture.
From racism.
From colonialism.
From capitalism.
From systems that have spent generations deciding which bodies deserve belonging and which bodies need to be fixed.
As a dietitian, people often come to me wanting help with food.
But food is rarely just about food.
It's about grief.
Identity.
Family.
Culture.
Safety.
Control.
Belonging.
And sometimes yes food is just food.
It's about the stories we've inherited and the ones we're still carrying.
And that's why I was so excited to sit down with Dr. Quỳnh-Hương Nguyễn (She/They/Chi/Chanh), mental health life coach and founder of Pattern Pivot.
Because both of us spend our days helping people untangle something deeper than behavior.
We help people get curious about patterns.
Not because people are broken.
But because patterns tell stories.
Stories about what we've survived.
Stories about what we've learned.
Stories about who we had to become to make it through.
And sometimes those stories are much bigger than us.
Maybe you learned that being smaller would make your life easier.
Maybe you learned that success and thinness were interchangeable.
Maybe you learned that food was love.
Or scarcity.
Or comfort.
Or survival.
Maybe your body has been scrutinized because you're fat, queer, disabled, neurodivergent, Indigenous, Latine, Black, Asian, trans, racialized, or living at the intersections of several identities at once.
Maybe you've spent years trying to become someone who would finally be acceptable to the world around you.
And maybe you're tired. No, not tired, exhausted.
If that resonates, you're not alone.
One of the things Dr. Nguyễn and I discuss is what becomes possible when we stop asking:
"What's wrong with me?"
And start asking:
"What happened?"
What messages did I inherit?
What systems shaped my beliefs?
What expectations am I carrying that were never mine to begin with?
What patterns made sense when they were created?
And what might be possible now?
Because when we widen the lens, something important happens.
We begin to understand that many struggles we experience as personal failures are actually deeply connected to the environments we live in.
The healthcare system.
Diet culture.
White supremacy.
Patriarchy.
Ableism.
Capitalism.
The family stories we inherited.
The cultural stories we inherited.
The survival strategies we inherited.
None of this means personal responsibility disappears.
It means context matters.
And context changes everything.
Over the coming months, Dr. Nguyễn and I will be exploring the intersections of nutrition, mental health, body image, identity, fatphobia, healing, and liberation.
We'll talk about the people who are often missing from these conversations.
Fat people.
Queer and trans people.
Disabled and neurodivergent people.
Immigrants and children of immigrants.
People of color.
Caregivers.
Helpers.
People whose lives don't fit neatly into the boxes traditional healthcare was built around. Must I go on?
Most importantly though, we'll keep returning to a question that feels increasingly urgent:
What happens when we stop treating bodies as problems to solve and start understanding them in context?
I hope you'll join us.
Because healing doesn't begin with fixing yourself.
Sometimes it begins with questioning the story you've been told about yourself in the first place…so on that note stay tuned for the upcoming blogs from a great coach to a great amazing friend, Dr. Quỳnh-Hương Nguyễn.
Andrea Hinojosa on the left (that’s me) & Dr. Nguyễn on the right :D
— Andrea Hinojosa (she/her/ella)
The 7 Best High-Protein Foods to Eat as Snacks, According to Dietitians
Snacks are a great opportunity to sneak in more protein. The benefits? Better blood sugar regulation, increased fullness and long-lasting energy.
Photo: Ali Redmond
By Victoria Whittington, RDN with contributions by Andrea Hinojosa, Reviewed by Emily Lachtrupp, M.S., RD
Eating a protein-rich diet can have several health benefits. If you struggle to get enough protein to meet your body’s needs, incorporating high-protein foods into snacks can help you reach your protein goal. We spoke with registered dietitians to find out why protein is so important—plus, which high-protein foods should make it into your snack rotation.
Benefits of Eating Protein-Rich Snacks
Protein is an essential macronutrient that is important for health and well-being. “Protein plays a key role in the body’s ability to build muscle, repair tissue, regulate hormones and perform other cellular functions like metabolism,” says Cayleigh McKenna, RD, nutrition consultant at Houston Family Nutrition.
Because protein is essential for building and maintaining muscle, physically active people should emphasize protein in their meals and snacks.
Adding protein to snacks can offer several benefits, including long-lasting energy and increased satiety. “Protein-rich snacks can help you feel fuller for longer, promoting a sense of nourishment and satisfaction,” says Andrea Hinojosa, M.S., RD, founder of Honest Health & Wellness. “Many high-protein snacks are also rich in other essential nutrients, contributing to overall health and well-being,” she adds. Eating protein with snacks may also balance blood sugar, improve heart health and reduce cravings later in the day.
The Best High-Protein Foods to Eat as Snacks
1. Greek Yogurt
Creamy and refreshing, “Greek yogurt is high in protein and can be easily paired with honey and nuts for added flavor and texture,” says Hinojosa. Depending on the brand, you’ll snag about 20 grams of protein per 7-ounce serving.
You can also use Greek yogurt in place of sour cream and mayonnaise in dip recipes for a high-protein swap that’s lower in saturated fat. Strained Greek-style yogurt is also a great way to add protein to fruit smoothies.
2. Hard-Boiled Eggs
One egg provides a satisfying 6 grams of protein. “They’re portable, easy to prepare and packed with high-quality protein,” says Hinojosa. Enjoy hard-boiled eggs with a handful of nuts or top with hot sauce. Hinojosa also recommends pairing eggs with kimchi to add digestive-friendly probiotics and a spicy kick.
3. Canned Tuna or Salmon
Canned fish is a quick high-protein option for snacks. You can even purchase “canned” fish in travel-friendly pouches, making them the perfect protein-rich snack when you’re on the go. Canned salmon has about 18 grams of protein per 3-ounce serving, while canned tuna has about 22 grams per serving. “They also provide omega-3 fatty acids, beneficial for heart health and brain function,” adds Hinojosa.
Try our Tuna Salad Spread, which combines canned tuna and Greek yogurt for a protein-packed snack. Spread it on whole-grain crackers or toast, or use raw veggies for dipping.
4. String Cheese
Another portable and easy option for snacking is string cheese. One stick has about 8 grams of protein. “For high-protein snacks, I love a turkey and cheese roll-up. I use a cheese stick and two slices of deli turkey or chicken and roll it up together. It’s really satisfying,” says Katie Drakeford, M.A., RD, owner of Drakeford Consulting. You can also enjoy string cheese with fresh fruit or a side of nuts.
5. Jerky
Jerky is a great high-protein snack option—and it’s especially handy if you can’t keep things cold. One serving of beef jerky (about 1 ounce) provides about 10 grams of protein, while turkey jerky has 11 grams per serving. Enjoy jerky with fresh fruit like an apple or banana, or with a handful of trail mix for an added boost of healthy fats.
6. Deli Turkey
Deli turkey is another high-protein snack option. Just one slice of deli turkey has 6 grams of protein. Enjoy a couple of slices on crackers, layer a few slices with cheese on top of cucumber slices or make a grown-up snack box with turkey, cheese, grapes and crackers.
7. Cottage Cheese
Until it became a social media darling, who knew there were so many ways to incorporate cottage cheese into meals and snacks? And it’s worth it to do so: 1 cup of low-fat cottage cheese has about 24 grams of protein. “A cup of cottage cheese with berries or pineapple is another go-to when looking to up protein intake,” says Drakeford. If you prefer a savory snack, try our Cottage Cheese Snack Jar.
The Bottom Line
Protein is an important part of a healthy diet. Including these dietitian-approved protein-rich snacks in your routine can provide long-lasting energy, increase feelings of fullness and balance blood sugar. Eating protein consistently throughout the day may also help regulate your appetite and reduce cravings.