Hi, I'm Megan.
Physician Assistant, Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner,
Glucose Revolution PRO, and the person who finally figured out why nothing
was working — then rebuilt everything from the ground up.
Let me guess.
You've been told your labs look fine. You've tried the diets — the ones that worked for a while, then didn't. You're tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. The weight keeps creeping up no matter what you do, your brain feels like it's running on dial-up, and somewhere along the way you started wondering if this is just what getting older feels like.
I know, because that was me.
My story starts at 14.
That's when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's hypothyroid disease. The treatment plan was simple: here's a pill, take it forever, come back in a year. No one explained what Hashimoto's actually was, what was driving it, or what I could do beyond swallowing a tablet each morning. I was 14. I didn't know to ask.
So I did what I was told. And I did everything else "right" too. I was a three-sport athlete. I ate the Snackwells, the 100-calorie packs, the Lean Cuisines and Slim-Fasts that the world told me were healthy. I counted, tracked, and restricted my way through my teens and twenties.
My weight kept climbing anyway.
I tried everything. I mean everything.
Weight Watchers. Noom. MyFitnessPal. Macro tracking with a nutritionist. They all worked — temporarily. And the ones that worked best came with a cost I didn't recognize at the time: disordered eating. I weighed every bite. I avoided restaurants, birthday parties, anything centered around food. I couldn't enjoy an ice cream cone with my kids without the mental math running in the background.
And every time I stopped — because no one can live like that forever — the weight came back. More of it than before. The cycle would start again. I'd get hungrier, more fatigued, short-tempered, depressed. Then I'd white-knuckle my way through another round of restriction.
Nobody told me that the problem wasn't my willpower. Nobody told me what was actually happening inside my body.
Then came pregnancies and motherhood — and things got harder before they got better.
My pregnancies pushed my metabolic health further than I realized at the time. Postpartum, the weight kept climbing. So did my blood pressure, my A1C, my triglycerides. The brain fog was relentless. I had neurological symptoms alarming enough that MS landed on my own differential. But it was the small moments that broke through the clinical armor. Getting down on the floor to play with my youngest son and realizing I was dreading it — not because I didn't want to, but because I wasn't sure I could get back up comfortably. Jogging alongside my daughter to teach her to ride her bike, knowing I couldn't keep up the way I wanted to. Pausing at an amusement park entrance and quietly calculating whether the harness would close. These weren't dramatic rock-bottom moments. They were quiet ones. The kind that accumulate until you can't look away anymore.
Then I became the clinician on the other side of the conversation.
While working in cardiothoracic surgery and critical care, I was the one giving pre-operative counseling. Sitting across from patients with high cholesterol, hypertension, metabolic syndrome — walking them through surgical risk, lifestyle modifications, the road ahead. I gave that speech hundreds of times. And slowly, quietly, I started to recognize myself in it. I knew what a BMI cutoff meant for ECMO candidacy. I knew the thresholds that would disqualify someone from a total knee replacement. I had watched patients get turned away from life-saving procedures because of metabolic factors that — had anyone caught them earlier — were addressable. I was counseling patients on exactly the path I was heading down myself. That awareness didn't fix anything immediately. But it planted something I couldn't ignore.
I went looking for different answers.
I'll be honest — pivoting toward functional medicine felt uncomfortable at first. I was trained in traditional medicine. I believe in evidence. I had real questions: Is this legitimate? What would my colleagues think? Was I about to become someone who buys supplements from an Instagram ad?
But I knew something had to change. So I found a practice that specializes in thyroid, metabolic, and hormonal health — providers who actually looked at the full picture. A deeper dive into my labs revealed what years of "everything looks fine" had missed: I had insulin resistance.
My medications were optimized. I was prescribed a continuous glucose monitor and handed a copy of The Glucose Revolution. And then — this is the part that changed everything — I started actually wearing the CGM and watching what happened in real time.
The "healthy" breakfast I'd been eating for years? It was spiking my blood sugar before 9am. The foods I'd been avoiding because they sounded indulgent? Barely a blip. My whole framework for food — built over decades of diet culture and calorie counting — was wrong. Not a little wrong. Fundamentally wrong.
I lost 50 pounds. But that's not the best part.
The brain fog lifted. The joint pain I'd normalized as just part of getting older — gone. My energy came back. The neurological symptoms that had terrified me resolved. My A1C is no longer pre-diabetic. My fasting insulin level is optimal. And for the first time in my adult life, I don't feel like I'm on a diet.
I feel like I finally understand my body. And I built Imperfectly Optimal so you don't have to spend fifteen years figuring out what I figured out too late."
A little more about me, beyond the health journey.
I live in Buffalo, NY — yes, I know what you're thinking about the winters — with my husband Matt, who is a mental health therapist and runs his own local practice. Together we have a beautifully blended family: a 20-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 3-year-old, which means our house operates at approximately three different energy levels simultaneously at all times.
After completing training as a Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner (CFMP) and becoming a certified Glucose Revolution PRO, I created Imperfectly Optimal to teach other women what I wish someone had taught me years ago. Not another diet. Not another set of rules. Just real education about how your body actually works — and the tools to see it for yourself.
You don't have to keep guessing.
Join the Imperfectly Optimal email list and get the education your missing — delivered straight to your inbox, in plain English, with zero diet-culture nonsense.
No spam. No pressure. Just the information you've been waiting for.