Foundation Notes.

Sorel Field Notes came out of a practical frustration. After a decade of working with individual coaching clients on body composition, Eleanor Marsden found that the most consistent predictor of whether someone would maintain their progress was not the dietary framework they had followed, nor the exercise protocol — it was whether their sleep had stabilised. Clients with consistent sleep schedules continued. Those without them cycled.

The observation was not novel in the published research — the relationship between sleep and appetite regulation, between circadian rhythm and energy balance, is well-documented in nutritional science. What was missing, in her estimation, was a publication that covered this territory from a practitioner's perspective rather than a laboratory one: written from observation notes, not from study abstracts; written for people managing their lives, not for researchers managing variables.

The Field Notes format — dated, specific, grounded in observed case data — was the natural editorial form for that kind of writing. It made a virtue of the limitation: these are observations from a particular context, not universal prescriptions. They are offered as reference material for readers who are building their own frameworks, not as directives to be followed without thought.