Transforming Health Through Nutrition, Empathy, and Research

I used to wonder what it would be like when I was all grown up. When our friends had kids and all the little ones could play together. I used to wonder if I could pull it off. When I fell in love with @miracleworkher I knew the vision was coming to fruition. I knew we were going to raise some angels 😇

We’ve got some lifelong friends and the kids are growing up together. We celebrated Davina’s 4th birthday camping in the paradise of SoCal 🌴

Nature is the medicine. There’s something about cooking outside that was just meant to be. There’s something about raising kids that was just meant to be. Love life ❤️

🌱 #camping

After 12 years of work, it’s here 🎉

Today I’m sharing something that represents more than a decade of work, and more than a decade of papers circling the same question.

“A Unified Theory of Restrictive and Addictive Eating” is now published, open access, in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

For years, two camps have talked past each other. One sees dietary restraint as the engine of loss-of-control eating. The other sees the modern food environment and chronic stress as the driver of addiction-like consumption. Patients living in the gray area between them have too often been handed conflicting advice and have fallen through the cracks.

This paper proposes a life course model that holds both truths at once. Two developmental pathways, a restrictive one and an addictive one, that often begin in the same place (generational trauma and adverse childhood experiences), diverge along different neurodevelopmental lines, and can converge or even trade places across a lifetime. It’s a framework for treating the whole person rather than forcing them into a single philosophy.

If you’ve ever been told your eating problem was one thing when it always felt like two, this is for you.

I won’t pretend this was easy. I’ve poured myself into this question for a long time, and for the first time, it feels like the pieces actually fit together into something that makes sense, and that I hope is genuinely useful in the clinic.

To everyone who has been rooting for me along the way, mentors, collaborators, colleagues, and the patients who taught me what the textbooks couldn’t: thank you. This is yours too.

Comment “Unified Theory” for a link to the full article.

IFM AIC 2026 in San Diego was truly incredible 🙌🏼

Picture hundreds of functional practitioners, ages 25 to 80, dancing together under a full moon, celebrating the next wave of changing patients’ lives. Had a blast on the dance floor with @drluigivilchis and @doctor.funmed — and don’t forget the dancing during the presentations!

One unexpected joy was meeting and chatting with Jeffrey Bland, PhD — the founder of functional medicine himself. Thanks for leading the way @drjeffreybland. Excited to see @instituteforfxmed integrate more mental health, and to share the content made with @zoniahealth.

I presented my Unified Theory of Restrictive and Addictive Eating and led a roundtable on disordered eating and addiction. I also joined a panel on research in private practice — sharing what it took to collect data from 300 patients in 2021–2022, publish three papers, and navigate peer review and plenty of rejection 👨🏻‍💻

Two talks captured exactly why @fxmedmentalhealth exists:

Dr. William Clearfield (“The Endocrinology of Psychiatric Dysfunction”) argued that treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and brain fog are often downstream of an overlooked trio: neuroinflammation, a dysregulated stress axis, and depleted neurosteroids. A “normal” TSH and serotonin-only treatment can miss the real drivers. Sometimes you’re not treatment-resistant — you’re undertested.

Dr. Robert Hedaya (“The Awakened Clinician”) tackled AI in medicine. AI is a brilliant pattern-matcher, but it’s built to agree with you — and that pull toward easy confirmation is seductive. The safeguard isn’t the software; it’s a conscious clinician who leads the thinking and cross-checks every conclusion. That’s how we use powerful tools to interpret complex labs without outsourcing judgment about your care.
The thread through both: complex mental health deserves real investigation and a real clinician behind it.

The real highlight? Sitting on a bench in Seaport Village, watching a man drop to his knee and propose. I got choked up — reminded how lucky I am to have found the best love with @miracleworkher, and how excited I am to grow our family with a third girl on the way 🥰

With love, DW

53% of Americans say their neighbors have bad morals. In 25 countries surveyed, we are the only one where that’s the majority view.

Every other country surveyed — Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, India included — had a majority who said their fellow citizens were morally good. We came out the other way. By a comfortable margin.

The interesting layer is generational. 57% of adults under 40 say other Americans are morally bad, compared with 50% of older adults. The pattern holds even after controlling for political party. Something else is going on with the under-40 cohort that the data hasn’t yet explained.

Here’s the part that matters clinically: the body doesn’t process abstract social distrust differently from physical threat. Chronic perceived danger drives sustained cortisol elevation, suppresses vagal tone, and pushes inflammatory markers upward. The literature has a name for the accumulated cost — allostatic load. Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analyses on social connection pegged the mortality effect at roughly the equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

You can’t fix the national mood. But the biology is yours. It’s measurable. And it responds to intervention.

The work is personal.

#FunctionalMedicine #AllostaticLoad #NervousSystemRegulation

Spirituality just got a JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis. The effect sizes are not subtle.

55 longitudinal studies. 540,712 participants. Twelve countries. Follow-up windows ranging from six months to over twenty years. Across alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and illicit drugs, spiritual engagement predicted a 13% reduction in hazardous use overall — 18% for people engaged more than weekly. The senior author, Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard, called it “a once-in-a-decade advance.”

Here’s what made the data so clean: the researchers defined spirituality broadly. Religious service attendance counted, yes. But so did private meditation, contemplative practice, 12-step participation, and community-based ritual. The active ingredient wasn’t doctrine. It was sustained meaningful connection.

Which is why the dismissive response — “spirituality is just placebo” — falls apart on contact with the mechanism. The neural circuits being modulated are stress regulation, reward processing, and interpersonal bonding. The body reads sustained belonging the same way it reads physical safety. That isn’t metaphor. It’s becoming measurable.

For anyone working in mental health or addiction recovery, this is the field catching up to what AA has been arguing since 1935. Recovery capital is not a soft variable. It’s clinical data.

#FunctionalMedicine #AddictionRecovery #IntegrativePsychiatry

And thus we grow! Baby number 3 is under development 🎉

It’s a girl!! It looks like I was meant to be surrounded by the feminine force ❤️

I was built to be a girl dad. I was built to be a husband. My wifey was built to be a mommy!

We’re doing what we were built to do. And we couldn’t be more excited about it 🥰

#consciousparenting

HHS now lists nutrition alongside psychotherapy and physical activity as a legitimate nonmedication approach to mental health. Read that again.

The May 5 “Dear Colleague” letter is the kind of federal acknowledgment that quietly changes what insurance considers reasonable, what prescribers feel permitted to discuss, and what patients feel allowed to ask for. That part is real progress.

The part the letter doesn’t address: when nutrition shows up in a primary care visit, it usually becomes “more vegetables, less sugar.” Helpful for general wellness. Almost never enough for depression that hasn’t responded to two or three medication trials.

What actually moves treatment-resistant depression is biochemistry — methylation status, gut barrier integrity, mineral cofactors, mitochondrial function, inflammatory food sensitivities. The kind of data that only shows up if someone goes looking.

And even that isn’t the whole picture. The food environment is engineered to exploit a nervous system already primed by trauma and chronic stress. Real recovery has to work at the biochemical, relational, and somatic level at the same time.

If your depression has been called treatment-resistant, the more accurate word is probably undertested.

#FunctionalMedicine #NutritionalPsychiatry #TreatmentResistantDepression

Two of the most talked-about approaches in mental health right now are Internal Family Systems therapy and Functional Medicine. One works with the mind. One works with the body. But underneath, they’re asking the same question: what is this trying to protect, and what does it need?

What doesn’t get discussed enough is how directly your biological state shapes your psychological experience. Chronic inflammation primes your nervous system for threat detection. Dysregulated cortisol keeps your system in survival mode. When the body is under siege, protective parts get louder — and harder to work with.

This isn’t a reason to choose one approach over the other. It’s a reason to use both.

#IFS #FunctionalMedicine #MentalHealth