Rooted Reset · The 12-Week Cycle Overlay Protocol
You cut gluten and it worked for three weeks and then it stopped. You paid for the panel and it handed you forty foods to be afraid of. Nothing was wrong with your discipline. The measurement was wrong.
Twelve weeks. Four triggers, not forty. You'll leave knowing what's actually yours.
Maya Chen, MS, RDN, LD — registered dietitian · certified monash fodmap practitioner · ifncp certificate. Eleven years as an RD, six of them in a hospital GI clinic.
The Cycle Overlay Chart
Daily symptom score against cycle day. Ninety seconds a day.
If this is your week
You keep two sizes in the closet and a safe dress for bad days. You read the menu online before you eat out and you map the bathrooms before you go anywhere, and you've stopped saying that out loud because you can hear how it sounds.
You have a spreadsheet called something like “gut stuff” and three abandoned food logs inside it. You can quote four dietitians and you still can't tell who's right. You are the competent one everywhere except inside your own body, and that is the part that actually stings.
7am to 4pm
Flat when you wake up, visibly distended by mid-afternoon, unbuttoned under the desk.
2pm to 5:30pm
The hard crash, then the coffee, then being short with the kids at exactly the wrong hour.
Four years in
You've cut so much that about fifteen foods are left — and you are still symptomatic.
Why nothing has worked yet
You have not failed four years of protocols because you lack discipline. You've been weighing food on a scale that was sitting on a moving deck.
The gluten cut
Three weeks is shorter than one cycle, so the window closed before a comparison could exist. That result was noise, not an answer — and the stopping felt like it meant something about you. It didn't.
The $400 panel
A sensitivity panel can hand you a long list of foods to be afraid of and no way to clear a single one of them. You followed it. It made your world smaller, not clearer.
The fibre advice
That explains nothing about what to eat on Tuesday. Your colonoscopy was clean, your celiac panel was negative, your labs were fine — and none of that told you why the same lunch reads differently in different weeks.
The Cycle Overlay Method
Every elimination diet on earth assumes one thing: that your baseline is stable, so if you remove a food and feel better, the food was the cause.
A lot of women notice symptoms cluster in the week before their period — so the same meal can produce a terrible day on cycle day 24 and nothing at all on cycle day 10. That is why your results kept contradicting each other. Every reading was real, and every reading was also wrong, because the deck was moving underneath you.
01
Ninety seconds a day. Symptom score against cycle day, for long enough that a pattern has room to appear.
02
We read your chart together and name the weeks where the reading can't be trusted, then take them out of the analysis.
03
Only now do foods get reintroduced, one at a time, with a dose, a timing and a cycle window that make the answer mean something.
This is pattern-spotting, not diagnosis. The overlay tells us when a food result can be trusted. It doesn't tell us anything about your hormones, and I won't pretend otherwise.
The sequence is the product
You cannot measure a food reaction on a baseline that moves, so the order is not negotiable and it is not a marketing device. Calm, then Reintroduce, then Root.
01 · WEEKS 1–4
A 60-minute 1:1 kickoff sets your protocol — a modified low-FODMAP baseline plus sleep and meal rhythm — and you start charting symptoms against cycle day.
Week 1 · 60-minute 1:1 kickoff
02 · WEEKS 5–10
Your chart is read aloud with you, and your reintroduction schedule is built around it, so foods are only tested in windows where the reading can be trusted.
Week 5 · 1:1 reintroduction checkpoint
03 · WEEKS 11–12
Everything you learned becomes a maintenance plan you can run without me, plus your one-page short list and your hormonal-week playbook.
Week 11 · 1:1 maintenance checkpoint
Weekly group calls run underneath all twelve weeks — Tuesdays, noon Pacific, capped at fifteen women, every one of them recorded.
What's included
Nothing here is a bonus module you'll never open. Every item is used inside the twelve weeks or handed to you at the end of them.
Session
Full history, and a review of every experiment you've already run. Your Calm-phase protocol is set live on the call.
Tracker
Used all twelve weeks. Daily symptom scoring against cycle day, reviewed at every checkpoint.
Protocol
A modified low-FODMAP baseline plus sleep and meal rhythm — deliberately modified, not a full elimination, and built to cook alongside a family dinner.
Sessions
Tuesdays, noon Pacific, capped at fifteen women. Live teaching and Q&A, every call recorded and posted.
Session
Your chart read aloud with you, the pattern named, and your personal reintroduction schedule built around it. This is the appointment the whole program exists to deliver.
Protocol
Food by food, with dose, timing, cycle-window placement and a clear pass or fail read for each.
Session
Your confirmed list, your hormonal-week playbook, and what to do when a new symptom turns up in eight months.
File
One page, delivered in weeks 11–12: confirmed triggers, cleared foods, thresholds where they matter, and the foods that were never the problem.
File
Plain-language script for what to ask your own doctor and how to describe your charted pattern in a twelve-minute appointment. Educational naming only — no ordering, no dosing, no diagnosis.
Support
Written support between sessions for protocol and reintroduction questions, so a mid-week reintroduction problem doesn't sit unanswered until the next call.
Files
Every group call, indexed by topic, available for the full program.
What you leave with
Not a diet you're still on. A page with your confirmed triggers, the amount each one takes before it turns, and the foods that were never the problem — which is most of them.
“I ate at a restaurant without googling the menu first for the first time in five years.”
That completion figure is the number I'd point at, and not because it flatters me. It's what a kickoff call, a fixed end date, two checkpoints and someone expecting you on Tuesday produce.
Delivered week 11
One page. Fridge-door sized. Shareable with your husband.
Also included
Each of these exists because of a specific moment where the twelve weeks otherwise falls apart — week three, the second dinner, the restaurant, the missed fortnight.
One page and one short video
The full argument for why a three-week trial can't return a trustworthy result — sent before week 1, because it also explains why fast, dirty answers have been failing you.
Written review, in the week 1 kickoff
Bring your IgG or sensitivity report. We read it together, map it against what's actually testable, and set it aside with a plain explanation of why it produced suspects and no method.
Swap file and a group-call module
Calm-phase and reintroduction meals cooked as one dinner for the household, with the swaps isolated to your plate. No second dinner.
Playbook, unlocked at week 5
How to order without reading the menu online first, and how to travel and chaperone without mapping the bathrooms in advance.
Included for the whole program
Every Tuesday call recorded and indexed, with a stated protocol for catching up if you miss two weeks.
The price, said plainly
Weigh it against what four years of fragments have already cost — the panel, the courses, the probiotics, the eliminations run without guidance — rather than against zero. This is the first purchase in the sequence with a defined exit.
Price is never the first thing I say on a call, and it shouldn't be the first thing you decide on.
Every enrollment starts with a free 20-minute fit call. If I don't think I can help you, I'll tell you honestly and I won't take your money.
Once you're in: finish the first two weeks and keep your log. If the process isn't for you, tell me by day 14 and I refund you in full.
I'm not guaranteeing your symptoms, because nobody honest can. I'm guaranteeing that you'll do two weeks of real charting, that a qualified RD will read it with you, and that what you leave with is written down and specific to you. If I don't deliver the process, you don't pay for it.
The only thing I ask is that you actually chart — that's the part that shows both of us whether this is going to work.
Who this isn't for
The fit call is mandatory for a reason: the completion rate depends on screening, and screening means turning people away.
What I don't do
IgG food-sensitivity panels
They hand you forty suspects and no method for clearing a single one.
Hair mineral tests
Not evidence-based, and clients keep arriving burned by them.
Ordering your labs
I'll give you the language to ask your own physician. I don't order, and I don't diagnose.
A longer list of foods to fear
Every protocol you've run added rules. This one subtracts them.
Questions women actually ask
These are the ten objections that come up on nearly every fit call, answered the way I'd answer them on the call.
That's the objection I take most seriously, so let me be precise about it. Four 1:1 hours with me across twelve weeks. One live group call a week, Tuesdays at noon Pacific, and every one is recorded — you can miss two in a row and be fine. The daily charting takes about ninety seconds.
If you can't find ninety seconds a day, this isn't the right season and I'd rather you came back in the spring.
The free version is the elimination phase on its own — the half that makes people miserable and teaches nothing. Reintroduction is the product. It's the phase that gives foods back, and it's the phase almost nobody gets to without someone reading the log with them.
The other difference is the order. Everyone else tests food first. I won't draw a conclusion about food until we've charted your cycle and subtracted the weeks where the reading can't be trusted.
Completely reasonable, and I'd say the same thing in your position — except you've already run it. It worked for three weeks and then it stopped, didn't it?
Three weeks is shorter than one cycle, so that result was always going to be noise. Run it again and you'll get the same ambiguous answer and lose another six months. If you want to test gluten, test it properly: chart first, then challenge it in a window where the reading means something. Either way, download the guide.
I don't run IgG food-sensitivity panels or hair mineral tests, and I don't order labs. A panel that produces forty suspects and no method for clearing a single one isn't thoroughness.
If you already have one, bring it. We read it together in your kickoff, map it against what's actually testable, and set it aside. And if there's a conventional panel worth asking your own physician about, I'll give you the plain-language script for that conversation — naming a marker educationally, never dosing and never diagnosing.
The Calm phase is a modified low-FODMAP baseline, deliberately not a full elimination, and it runs four weeks — not forever. Everything after week 5 is adding foods back, one at a time, in windows where the result can be trusted.
You leave with thresholds, not bans. How much, not never again.
The protocol is built from your actual grocery list, aiming at one dinner the table shares with the swaps isolated to your plate. There's a family-dinner bridge with the swaps written out, and a group-call module on it.
The second dinner is the single most reliable reason a woman quits in week three. Removing it isn't a nicety, it's structural.
Every group call is recorded and posted, indexed by topic, and available for the whole program. There's a stated catch-up path if you miss two in a row.
Your three 1:1 sessions are scheduled with you, not fixed to the group slot.
I won't promise you a symptom outcome, because nobody honest can. What I guarantee is the process: you'll do two weeks of real charting, a qualified RD will read it with you, and the protocol, reintroduction schedule and maintenance plan you leave with will be specific to you and written down.
Finish the first two weeks and keep your log. If the process isn't for you, tell me by day 14 and I refund you in full. The only thing I ask is that you actually chart, because that's the part that shows both of us whether this is going to work.
It's $1,800, or three payments of $650. I'd rather you weighed it against what you've already spent to get nowhere — the panel, the courses, the probiotics, four years of eliminations run without guidance — than against zero.
And I'd rather you didn't decide on it from a web page. Book the fit call. If I don't think I can help you, I'll say so and I won't take your money.
Maybe. That's genuinely what the twenty minutes is for, and I do say no — to women in California, to anyone managing an active eating disorder, to anyone who needs medical management first, and to anyone I don't believe I can help.
If your cycle is irregular, absent, or suppressed by an IUD or another method, bring that to the call specifically. It changes how the overlay is read and it's the first thing I'll want to talk about.
Twenty minutes on a call, and my only job is to work out whether this is right for you. If it isn't, I'll say so. If you'd rather not talk to anyone yet, chart two weeks first — that costs nothing and you'll know something real by the end of it.