After 40+ years of her own struggle with binge eating and disordered eating, Julie brings something rare to this space: the lived experience of someone who found her way out, combined with the pedagogical precision of a master teacher who knows exactly how to bring others with her.

Julie offers a framing that cuts through the noise of recovery culture: the problem was never willpower, and the solution was never restriction. It’s about coming back online — calming the nervous system first, so the thinking brain can actually show up.

We dive into ideas like:

✨ Why binge eating costs you 98% of your mental bandwidth — and what becomes possible when you finally stop spending it there.

✨ Julie’s turning point: losing her husband to cancer at 42, becoming a single mom overnight, and how profound grief cracked open a decade-long journey into mindfulness, neuroplasticity, and real healing.

✨ The hourly phone timer that started it all — a simple “breathe” reminder that became the foundation of everything she now teaches.

✨ How she brought mindfulness into NYC public school classrooms for immigrant students — and why teaching it to others accelerated her own recovery.

✨ Why your nervous system has to come first — if you’re offline, all bets are off, and no coping tool in the world will reach you.

✨ The difference between destructive discomfort (bingeing, scrolling, numbing) and productive discomfort — and why everything you want is on the other side of an urge.

✨ Why urges are opportunities, not emergencies — and how to greet them with curiosity instead of dread.✨ “Tools, not rules” — why a flexible menu of strategies beats a rigid protocol every time, and how Julie’s Rewire and Rise community puts that into practice.

✨ The lessons she has practiced in launching her own business, and the parallels she has noticed between this and the journey of binge eating recovery.

Julie speaks with the warmth and clarity of someone who has spent three decades in a classroom and just as long doing her own inner work — not offering shortcuts, but offering a genuinely different relationship with the brain, the body, and the habits that once felt unbreakable. Her conviction that change is always possible, at any age or stage, is both grounded in neuroscience and deeply personal.

If you’ve ever felt like your brain was working against you, wondered why insight alone never changed anything, or sensed that the missing piece wasn’t more discipline — this conversation is for you.