Reedy Creek Wellness

09/12/2026

If I could get you to track one number at home, it would be your waist measurement.
Your waist is a reasonable window into visceral fat, the fat wrapped around your organs. It costs nothing and takes 30 seconds.
How to do it correctly:
• First thing in the morning, after the bathroom, before eating
• Stand up, relax your belly, do not suck it in
• Breathe out
• Wrap the tape at the level of your belly button, snug without compressing
• Write it down
A useful target is keeping your waist under half your height. The standard guidance of under 35 inches for women and under 40 inches for men is generous.
Here is the part people miss. Your waist can shrink while the scale sits still. That usually means you are trading visceral fat for muscle, which is exactly what you want. The scale is blind to it.
One note for women: fluid shifts in the week before your period can add an inch. Compare the same point in your cycle and watch the trend over months.

08/18/2026

Not all fat behaves the same way
The fat you can pinch is not the one to worry about.
The fat that drives disease sits deeper, wrapped around your liver, pancreas, and intestines. Visceral fat behaves like an organ that has gone rogue, releasing inflammatory signals such as IL-6 and TNF-alpha into circulation.
When fat accumulates in the liver, the liver starts converting excess sugar into more fat through a process called de novo lipogenesis. Fatty liver is now the most common liver condition in the world, and most people who have it have no idea.
This is why someone can be thin on the outside and metabolically sick on the inside. Normal weight, normal BMI, fatty liver, and cells that have stopped responding to insulin. It also runs the other direction. A larger person can carry solid muscle, low visceral fat, and healthy labs.
The mirror tells you very little about what is happening internally.

08/12/2026

Muscle is an organ

Muscle is not decoration. It is one of the most protective organs you have, and most adults are letting it quietly disappear.

Here is why it matters. When you eat carbohydrate, your blood sugar rises and most of that glucose gets pulled out of your bloodstream and stored in muscle tissue. More muscle means more storage capacity, which means a meal does not send your blood sugar and insulin through the roof.

Strength training increases the glucose transporters (GLUT4) on your muscle cells and moves them to the cell surface, so sugar exits the blood with less insulin required. That is why a single training session can lower blood sugar for a day or two afterward.

Muscle loss begins in your thirties. Less muscle means less storage, more insulin resistance, more fat gain, and at the far end, frailty and lost independence.

Strength training is preventive medicine. It is the most important thing you can do for your metabolic health.

08/11/2026

The scale measures the wrong thing

You can lose 20 pounds and be less healthy than when you started.
The scale measures how hard gravity is pulling on your body. That is all it knows. It cannot tell you whether you lost fat, water, muscle, or bone, and rapid weight loss usually takes all three.
When the weight comes back, and it usually does, it returns as fat. Now you weigh what you did before with less muscle and more fat.
Two women, same height, same weight, same BMI. One has good muscle mass, very little fat around her organs, and stable blood sugar. The other has almost no muscle, fat packed around her liver, and cells that have stopped responding to insulin. On paper, they look identical.
The better question is not how much do I weigh. It is what am I made of, and how well is my metabolism working.
I have a new cohort beginning for my Healthy Weight Loss program in Midlothian, VA. Message me for details.

08/05/2026

A study published this month in Diabetes is worth your attention if you have ever done everything right whaile trying to lose weight and watched the scale barely move.

Researchers followed people through a long-term lifestyle intervention and looked at how different metabolic risk groups responded. The groups did not respond the same way. People carrying insulin resistance and fatty liver got less protection from the same intervention that worked well for lower-risk participants.

I see this in practice constantly. Two women start the same program. One drops twenty pounds and her energy comes back by week six. The other holds steady at four pounds and starts to believe something is wrong with her discipline.

Nothing is wrong with her discipline. Her physiology needed a different starting point.

If you are in that second group, the numbers that tell the story are fasting insulin, HOMA-IR, triglyceride to HDL ratio, ALT, and waist circumference. Most standard panels skip all five.

Ask for them at your next appointment.

07/27/2026

We rode bicycles from Ventura to Carpinteria yesterday, Pacific coast beside us the entire way up the Rincon. We stopped for fruit smoothies at Carp Moon and wandered the waterfront park before turning around. Beautiful day, easy miles. Fresh air.

People ask me how to stay consistent with movement. This is how…Find the version you’d do on a day off.

Photos of the trail heading back toward Ventura and chalk drawing on sidewalk.

06/24/2026

Sunday morning at the farmers market, and this is the most honest grocery shopping I do all week.
Look at what is for sale here. Tomatoes, Squash, Strawberries. Greens. Eggs. A bunch of carrots with the dirt still on them. None of it has an ingredient label, because none of it needs one. The food is the ingredient.
That is the whole idea behind eating real food, and it is simpler than the wellness industry wants you to believe. You do not need a cereal engineered to hit 30 grams of protein or a snack bar with a paragraph of ingredients you cannot pronounce. You need food that came from a plant or an animal and got to you without a factory in between.
Here is what 20+ years in clinical nursing taught me about metabolic health: the people who do well long-term are not chasing the supplement of the month. They are eating in a way their grandparents would recognize. Protein, fiber, color.
The farmers' market makes that easy because the marketing is gone. No health halo, no front-of-box claims, no "supports immunity" printed over a bag of sugar. Just food, in season, picked recently.
You do not have to shop here every week to eat this way. Ask one question in any aisle: how close is this to the way it grew? Build the cart around the answer.

06/23/2026

Wellness peptides are everywhere right now. BPC-157, GHK-Cu, the injectable "recovery" stacks people are buying from compounding sites and gray-market sellers.
Here is what the marketing skips: most of these peptides have little to no human safety data. A few have early research in narrow medical settings. I am not saying they do not work. We shall see. What I am saying is there is not enough evidence yet to know.
And here is the part that gets lost. Peptides are one more thing people add on top of a foundation that is still cracked. The basics come first, and the basics are not optional. Vitamins and the nutrients your body actually needs. Sleep. Real nutrition. It all starts there. No peptide stack outperforms fixing the sleep you are not getting or the protein you are not eating.
So the question I keep coming back to: why put your money into something unproven before you put it into the interventions we already know work? Strength training. Adequate protein. Sleep. Correcting the deficiencies your lab work actually shows. Those have decades of evidence behind them. They are not exciting, but they deliver.
A compound being "natural" or "something your body already makes" does not mean it is safe to inject in unregulated doses. Purity and sterility are not verified when a product ships from a gray-market seller, and dosing is often a guess.
If you are curious about peptides, ask before you spend a dollar. What human studies exist, and in whom? Where is this sourced, and is it third-party tested? And have you covered the basics first?
Curiosity is good. So is asking for the data before the testimonial.

06/17/2026

Interesting read on things to avoid to lower dementia risk. Many people take diphenhydramine to sleep. You may want to rethink this. If you're female, progesterone works better and does not contribute to dementia..

I often get asked what people should avoid taking if they want to lower their risk of dementia.

06/01/2026

We finally started talking about women and hormones. Estrogen, perimenopause, the decades of women being told their symptoms were in their heads. Good. It was overdue.
Now let's have the other half of the conversation.
Men lose testosterone slowly, about 1% a year after 40, and most never connect the dots. The fatigue that coffee stopped fixing. Strength that won't come back no matter how consistent the training. Brain fog, low drive, a mood that flattened out somewhere along the way. Libido is the symptom everyone names first, and it's the least of it.
What testosterone actually does in a man who's deficient: holds onto muscle, keeps bone dense, supports insulin sensitivity, drives red blood cell production, steadies mood and energy. These aren't vanity outcomes. Low bone density and lost muscle are what put a 70-year-old man in a hospital after a fall he doesn't walk away from.
Here's the part I want you to hear. When you get tested and your doctor says "you're in the normal range," ask what that range actually is. It's a statistical band built from thousands of men across a 60-year age span, some of them sick, most of them never asked how they felt. Normal is a dryer setting. It is not the same as optimal, and it is definitely not the same as you, at your age, with your symptoms.
Ask for total AND free testosterone. Ask about SHBG. Ask why your number sits where it does. A single line on a printout is not an evaluation.
And the old fear that testosterone wrecks your heart? Large trials have walked that back. It's not the cardiac red flag it was made out to be, though it's not a free pass either, which is exactly why it belongs in the hands of someone who monitors you properly.
Men deserve the same conversation women are finally getting. Not the gym-bro version. The clinical one.
If your levels and your life don't match the story you've been told, push for a real answer.