Diets, peptides bought online, looksmaxxing. Three things people ask me about constantly, and three places where being vague would not serve anyone. Here is the position and the reasoning behind it.
What I hold positions on
This runs through everything below and it is worth stating first.
Positions on positive outcomes in best practices, never on people.
What I have a view about is what actually produces good outcomes — drawn from thirty-seven years of watching what helps people get well and what quietly costs them. Those views are firm, and they are about the approach.
They are never about you. If you are dieting, taking something you bought online, or three months into a routine built around how your face looks, you are welcome here exactly as you are and none of it will be held against you. There is no good and bad in this office, and no version of you that has to be presented at the door.
What you will get is what I actually think works, said plainly, with the reasoning attached, so you can weigh it for yourself.
Diets
Don’t.
That is the shortest position I hold and the one I am most confident in, so it is worth showing the reasoning rather than leaving it as an opinion.
Dieting is the single most consistent precursor to eating disorders. That relationship is one of the better-established findings in the field, and it matches what I have watched across thousands of people. Most eating disorders do not begin as an eating disorder — they begin as something that looked responsible, was praised by people who cared, and then stopped being possible to put down.
Beyond that:
- Restriction produces the behavior it is meant to prevent. Eating too little, for long enough, reliably generates preoccupation with food and eventual loss of control around it. That is physiology responding correctly to a deficit, not a personal failing, and it is why the cycle repeats.
- It teaches the wrong lesson permanently. That hunger is negotiable, that food needs justifying, that the body is a problem to be managed. Those beliefs outlast the diet by decades.
- The prescription is the same either way. Adequate, consistent, varied intake is what supports a body whatever its size and whatever your goals. There is no separate protocol I would swap in.
If you are dieting now, that is not a reason to stay away. It is a reason to come in.
Looksmaxxing
The newest of the three, and the one most likely to be missed by everyone around the person doing it.
It arrives looking like self-improvement. Skincare, training, jaw and posture work, sleep, grooming, sometimes extreme dietary rules in service of a specific appearance. Much of it is unremarkable in isolation, which is exactly why it goes unremarked on.
What I watch for is not the interest. It is the architecture underneath it.
- Intake decided by appearance rather than by need — cutting, bulking, dry fasting, dehydration for a look, eliminating foods to change how a face or body reads
- Rules that keep tightening, where meeting one produces another rather than satisfaction
- Time and money moving steadily toward it, and away from everything else
- Distress when the routine is interrupted — travel, illness, a meal out becoming genuinely hard
- Measurement replacing perception, where mirrors, photos and metrics decide how a day went
That is the same architecture as any other eating disorder, and it responds to the same treatment. What differs is that it is socially rewarded, framed as discipline, and largely happening to boys and young men — a group this field has been slow to recognize and slower to serve.
To any man or boy reading this: eating disorders are not a women’s illness, you are not an unusual case, and nothing about this practice is built only for someone else. If food, training or how your body looks has taken up more room than you want it to, that is enough of a reason to call.
What I do not take a position on
The list above is short deliberately, and it is worth being explicit about the other side of the line.
Prescribed medical treatment is not mine to have an opinion about. GLP-1 medications, psychiatric medication, hormone therapy, bariatric surgery — those decisions sit between you and the physician who knows your history. My job is to build the nutrition plan around whatever you and they decide, and to say plainly what I am seeing nutritionally so you both have the full picture.
The difference is accountability. A prescriber is licensed, is monitoring you, and answers for the outcome. A diet culture trend, an online supplier, and an anonymous account optimizing a jawline answer for nothing at all.
The through-line
Every position above comes from the same place, and it is an outcome claim rather than a moral one: approaches that narrow what you eat, or hand the decision to something other than what your body needs, reliably cost more than they return — and they cost the most in the people most drawn to them.
What produces good outcomes is unglamorous and it has held steady for thirty-seven years: enough food, consistently, in a form that fits your actual life, alongside someone who does not leave when it gets hard.
You are allowed to disagree with me about any of it. You will not be argued with, dropped, or thought less of for it. Disagreement is information the plan needs, and it stays a conversation.
