A warm welcome to Vanille Verte! So glad you are here.

I care a lot about food and health. Why?

Because if I didn’t, my life today would most likely be pretty dreadful.

My passion for both stemmed from a very unhealthy adolescence.

I was born and raised in Madagascar, where I ate mostly local, organic and in-season foods. Nothing else was available, so that’s what we knew. But when I moved to the US as a teenager, everything changed: I discovered the world of easy, processed foods, and I ate a junk food diet well into my twenties.

After eating so poorly for such a long period of time, my health began to fail. I carried around an extra 40 pounds, and suffered from chronic anxiety and mood swings.

Looking for health in all the wrong places, I got on the yo-yo diet train, counting calories and grams of fat, and depriving myself of true nourishment. That was no life. I was controlling my weight, but with great effort and constant deprivation, and my moods were getting worse.

When I became pregnant with my son, I also started having migraines. They got so bad that there were weeks when I had 4-5 migraines days.

I was on a downward spiral towards worsening health. Something needed to change.

Really wanting to address the cause of my pain, instead of its symptoms, I shunned pharmaceuticals and looked elsewhere for help. In my quest for answers, I found the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN), and started learning about real food and holistic healing.

I gave up gluten, and within 3 days, my anxiety magically lifted. No more rapid heartbeat, or that constant feeling of impending doom. Gone, just like that.

This immediate result taught me just how much food and mood are intimately connected. And if food was connected to mood, then maybe it was also connected to migraines.

That’s when I knew that if I wanted to get well for good, and keep my family healthy, I needed to radically change the way we ate and lived.

Little by little, I completely revamped our diet (eating a lot more vegetables, less and less processed foods, clean sources of fat, natural sugars, etc), and gave up all the foods that were helping to make me sick, my so-called “migraine triggers”: gluten, alcohol, chocolate, soy, caffeine, MSG and many others, mostly artificial ingredients.

After years of thinking that a large bowl of pasta with olive oil and cheese was an adequate meal, I needed to learn how to cook healthier foods.

That’s when I attended the Natural Chef and Nutrition Educator programs at Bauman College in Berkeley, CA. I wanted to learn more about the science of nutrition, and also needed a boost in confidence when cooking natural foods.

Because it is one thing to tell people to eat more kale, but quite another to help them prepare it in a way that is delicious and crave-inducing.

Gradually, it all clicked, and my health came back. I no longer had issues managing my weight, the migraines lifted (and only return when I ignore my triggers), and the anxiety was gone.

No great mystery, really: when you eat well, you feel well.

Food really does change everything.