Growing up, I spent endless hours in my grandmother's kitchen, grinding Indian spices while she prepared fresh meals and recounted stories of growing up in Tanzania. Everything that she taught me about cooking, home remedies, and our culture played a large role in shaping how I have approached my own path to optimal health and wellness over the last twenty years. As a child I suffered from chronic digestive upset, which later turned into hormonal imbalance, an array of food sensitivities, and terrible acne in my teens and early twenties.  I took many rounds of antibiotics to get rid of my acne, which just aggravated my gut and made all of my symptoms worse. I was chronically constipated, and suffered from both anxiety and depression from a young age. After graduating college in 1999, I moved back to Seattle and began exploring alternative methods of healing my body, starting with acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine, which had a profoundly positive effect on my health. I also began paying attention to the little voice in my head that told me that soy, gluten, and dairy were part of the problem.

Over the years, I worked with numerous practitioners and experimented with different diets and healing methods.  I learned to honor my roots, prepare nourishing food, practice mindfulness, move my body, and to examine the uniqueness of what I need on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level.  I learned that factors such as body chemistry, constitution, ethics, age, ethnicity, and geographic location inform how each of us can optimize the way in which we eat, exercise, and manage stress. This idea is so important! It took me a while, but I figured out how to heal my acne naturally through diet and lifestyle changes, and this sparked the desire to train as an esthetician.  I graduated from The Euro Institute of Skin Care in Washington state in 2005, and dedicated my private practice to helping my clients achieve clear and healthy skin through healing facials, and a compassionate, holistic approach.

Eating properly has been paramount in improving my own health, and thanks to my mom and grandmother, I have always felt at home in the kitchen.  My love of the culinary arts has been a lifesaver in navigating the various food sensitivities that my children and I have, and cooking for a food-restricted household has been such a fun adventure that I felt compelled to start a recipe blog in early 2014. I wanted to share my passion for cooking wholesome, delicious, nutritious food, and to show my readers that having food allergies or dietary restrictions does not mean that you can’t eat well.

If you've struggled at all with your health and well being, then you've probably experienced what I have found to be true: The path to wellness is ongoing, ever-changing, and sometimes complex. This is what led me to pursue a certification in Nutrition Consulting through Bauman College. There is so much information out there when it comes to nutrition, and it can be confusing and overwhelming trying to navigate it all, something I am all too familiar with from two decades of trial and error. My hope is that I can take what I have learned over the past twenty + years, combine that with my formal education, and help others to feel their absolute best.