The early years

I was allergic to everything as a kid. I daydreamed through school. Couldn't focus. Couldn't retain what I read — I'd go over the same page a thousand times and nothing would stick. People stared at me like I was stupid. By my teenage years, I had zero confidence.

My mom knew first

In the late 70s, I remember one day — my mom must have seen something going on with me — she went through every cupboard in the house. Literally pulled out the Cocoa Puffs, the Pop-Tarts, all the crap foods of the 70s, and threw every bit of it in the garbage. Then she switched us to a whole health food-based diet. All of us.

It was hard. You go to school in first, second grade, and kids are trading lunches — King Dons, Twinkies. Nobody wanted to trade with me. I had that cardboard bread with whatever was in the middle of it, an orange, and a bag of almonds. The almonds were the only thing anyone would trade for. But they made me feel better.

In my teenage years, the anxiety got bad. Fight or flight, constantly. I remember my mom gave me celery and peanut butter. Simple. And it worked. It actually calmed me down. I didn't know why at the time — I didn't know about magnesium or blood sugar or any of it. But she did something, intuitively, that was exactly right.

At my stepmom's house, same thing — different table, same instinct. I'd sit down at dinner and all I wanted was spinach. Pounds of it. They'd kind of laugh, thought it was funny. But I'd eat it and say, I don't know why, but I feel good. I didn't know about B2, or magnesium, or folate, or what any of those things did for MAO-A or MTHFR. My body knew before I did.

She put up with a lot from me. And she figured out the food piece before I did, before anyone around us did, before there was a word for what we now call nutrigenomics. I didn't understand what she'd given me until decades later.

The bubble

I started working out, which helped. Then I started taking supplements — because that's what you do when you're searching for answers. But the more supplements I took, the worse I felt. Maybe it was the synthetic vitamins, I don't know — but they made me worse, not better.

By my early 20s, I was in bad shape. Couldn't focus on anything. Felt like I was living in a bubble — nothing could get in, nothing could get out. No excitement, no new thoughts. Nothing changed. I was stuck in time. Numb. You could put me on a beautiful beach in the middle of Florida and it wouldn't matter, because I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel anything.

So all I did was work. I'm in the finished trades — I just worked. Built my business. There was nothing else to do, because I couldn't enjoy anything in life anyway. I may as well just work.

Doctors put me on SSRIs — Zoloft, things like that. I'd try to explain what was happening and they'd say "you're depressed." But that wasn't it. I wasn't sad. I wasn't depressed. I was not here. I was in a bubble. Nothing comes in, nothing changes. I don't feel anything. I'm numb. That's not depression — that's something else entirely. But they didn't have a word for it, and I didn't have the genetics to explain it yet.

Jim Hoke

Around 1990, I found Jim Hoke. He became my best friend and mentor — and he changed the trajectory of my life.

Jim was a world-renowned certified licensed hypnotherapist, motivational speaker, and author — known as the "Pep Talk Man." Born August 19, 1941 in Pontiac, Michigan, he built his practice in Troy, Michigan, and spent over 40 years performing nationally. He appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, The Dennis Wholey Show, Kelly and Company, PM Magazine, and the Wil Shriner Show alongside Ellen DeGeneres, Robert Hayes, Ben Vereen, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and many others. He wrote two books: I Would If I Could And I Can and Pep Talks.

But to me, Jim wasn't famous. He was the person who gave me the other piece of the puzzle: the mental state. Through his techniques, I learned how to interrupt the thought loops, how to shift out of the rumination, how to quiet the mind that wouldn't stop running. His approach wasn't about fixing what was wrong with you. It was about working with how your brain actually operates and using that to your advantage. For someone with my wiring, that distinction made all the difference.

Jim performed seminars, hypnosis shows, and private sessions for celebrities and athletes across the country — but he also sat with a kid in his twenties who was stuck in a bubble and couldn't feel anything, and he helped him find his way out. That was me.

See Jim in action: Who Wrote the Test? · Hypnosis News Story — 1984 San Francisco · Wholeness of Self

The turning point

I had nothing to lose. I said, I'm going to try something completely different.

I went out and bought a Champion juicer. I stopped every supplement. Went strict whole foods and exercise. No pills, no powders, no synthetic anything. Real food — nuts, seeds, raw fruits and vegetables, salmon steaks in the morning, chicken and baked potato at night. And running. I ran to cleanse whatever was in my system.

It took a long time. A full year before I started seeing the light — and by "light" I mean just the faintest sense that something was working. That the fog was thinning. That I could make a connection I couldn't make before. And once I could feel that, I knew — this is going to work.

By 1995, 1996, I felt in control again. Life had come back to me. I wasn't detached anymore. The insomnia started to break. I felt awake during the day for the first time I could remember.

By 1996, I owned my own business. I was functioning. I was present. The symptoms that had defined my entire life — the inability to focus, the irritability, the insomnia, the feeling of being trapped behind glass — were manageable. Not gone, but manageable. And the answer had been food and movement all along.

The DNA moment

I had my DNA from AncestryDNA sitting there. I'd done it years ago. So I pulled it up and started looking at the gene variants people were connecting to focus problems, to mood instability — MTHFR, COMT, MAO-A.

And there they were. In my results.

I needed to understand what these genes actually do. Not the hype, not the supplement sales pitch — the actual biochemistry. What enzymes are affected. What cofactors they need. What foods provide those cofactors. And whether the science actually supports it.

The same foods that had been helping me for years — the ones my mom figured out in the late seventies — mapped directly to the cofactors these enzymes need. It wasn't a coincidence. It was biochemistry.

Building foodZipper

I built foodZipper because this tool didn't exist. There was no place where you could upload a raw DNA file and get a clear, honest, food-first protocol based on peer-reviewed biochemistry — without being sold supplements, without your data leaving your device, and without the hype.

foodZipper reads the genetic variants in your raw data file and matches them against nutrients and whole foods based on published enzyme biochemistry. It tells you what you might be feeling and why. It gives you a daily protocol — morning to night — with actual meal ideas, exercise guidance, and mind practices, all connected back to your specific gene variants.

It does not sell supplements. It does not collect your data. It does not diagnose anything. Your file never leaves your device.

What I know to be true

I know that food changed my life. I lived it. I went from being unable to read a paragraph, unable to sleep, unable to feel present in my own life — to owning a business, raising a family, and building this.

I know that exercise isn't optional for people with our wiring. It's an important part of the whole.

I know that supplements made me worse, not better — and that real food, prepared simply, did what the pills couldn't.

I know that the mental game matters. Jim Hoke taught me that. The food gives the brain the raw materials. The exercise clears the system. The mind practices give you the ability to direct it.

And I know that functional medicine and nutrigenomics are catching up to what some of us figured out by living it. The science is confirming what our bodies already told us.

What's next

foodZipper is free and it will stay free. The next thing we're building is a community — a place where people can share what they're experiencing, what foods are helping, what changes they're noticing. Because the most powerful data isn't in a research paper. It's in someone saying "I changed what I eat and I felt it within a week."

If you're here because you're searching for answers — I understand. Let's find them together.

— B+