*Please note: this blog post uses a series of stock images to reimagine the farm due to the fact that most photos of the farm were taken on film in 2001 and are not currently accessible. All food and photos in the block below are my own.

I ate for love. I ate to feel loved. I ate so I didn’t feel lonely. And I’ve now taken those feelings and transformed meals and old habits into art. A deep love for food was born inside of me, as my mom told me that on the day I was born I went to reach for her nurse's pizza. I totally believe it. My mom also recently shared that while I was in utero she ate a lot of blueberry pie, coffee ice cream and chocolate milk shakes. Mom also reminds me that my first word was happy. It’s all true.

Growing up I lived in one big house with 11 people and it was beautiful insanity. Italian immigrants, mainly men - my mother, grandma and I were the only women. When I was born my oldest brother was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. Tommy was in and out of the hospital, leaving me in my grandparents' care - or with aunts, uncles and friends of the family. Food was the way in which I was shown love. Lunch at school was often followed by leftover mozzarella and eggplant “sangwiches” with grandma at 3pm. Dinner at 5pm with the neighbors was followed by pasta patate (that’s pasta with potatoes) dinner at 9pm with grandma. Every opportunity I had, I said yes to food. A history of double meals, particularly double dinners. They were delicious and I don’t regret taste testing each one even if they brought me pain along the way; what they taught me was a gift.

We were weighed weekly in our pre-k class and my mom was instructed to help me lose weight. From that point on I dieted. It was 1985 - the boom of packaged food - and I learned to request apples, fat free hot dogs and Quaker granola bars for meals. From Weight Watchers to South Beach, Fit America, Blood Type, Paleo, Food Combining Diets and Personal Trainers - I spent the majority of my life dieting and continuing to eat my feelings. When I turned 16 I was 320 pounds, and I knew why. My weight was about so much more than double meals and moving my body.

I went off to college and adapted to living in a bigger body in front of new people. I navigated my college campus via bus and left extra early to be sure I could remove any excess sweat from my face and sit in the back of the classroom before anyone arrived and entered. I harbored a never ending fear that whomever sat behind me would not be able to see and I would undoubtedly cover their view of the board. I learned how to live at my size. Well, maybe not live, but I learned how to exist and make as little fuss in being noticed as possible.

At 20 years old a close college friend asked if I would live with her in an old farm house over the summer. I didn’t have the heart to say no, but I do remember telling Carolyn that I wouldn’t be much help because of my size. She insisted that I “not to worry about it.” The adventure and the company would be everything. I took a job on my college campus, where I worked during the year, at the Center for Students with Disabilities, and I left my home in Brooklyn. Moving to a small working farm in Connecticut for 3 months in the Summer of 2001 was my first leap of faith. I arrived in my dad’s 1991 Plymouth Voyager. I was sweating. It was hot. I was excited, but not really. The sentiment, I am sure, of most 20 year olds doing something new for the first time - like temporarily moving to a farm.

Goodbye Booklyn summers of illegal drinking, working in the mall, staying up to watch Arsenio, city bus rides, icies and my concrete jungle. Hello farm, quiet and peaceful moments. I wondered, what I might be getting myself into.

When I close my eyes, I can still see the farm and the mailbox. That mailbox, a tease, slightly visible across the long stretch of grass from the Grant's little blue door where I used to stand staring out into the gaping field of green. Without moving, I could feel the tingle of chafing thighs as I thought about what it would take for me to approach that mailbox at 289 lbs. In many moments throughout the early part of my life; I thought of steps as miles and miles as impossibilities. But everyday of that hot, thigh sticking summer, I walked. My thighs rubbed with accomplishment.

23 years ago today, I began teaching myself how to grocery shop and cook. Life on the farm allowed me to experience a series of many firsts that would become a set of lifelong habits. After hot days, and during the cooler nights, I cooked from taste memory the food of my childhood. The food my grandmother made us for dinner. The food I overate when alone or in secret. I made piping hot pots of lentils until I could replicate my grandmother's recipe, then I would move on to something new.

What I didn’t know was that cooking, during that very summer, and living outside of my home and a college dorm, would change my life and transform my relationship to food - forever. I learned to write about how I was feeling and I learned to appreciate silence. The quiet nights and sleepy weekends; the sounds of sheep humming early in the morning. By summer’s end, on my own, I lost nearly 80 lbs and continued to lose another 80 lbs over the course of 2 years.

As time went on, food and I would struggle. Like any meaningful relationship, we had to work on things, but we would always reconcile and fall back in love. Maintaining a 160 lb weight loss over the last 23 years has been rewarding and, most days, has proven to be my life’s work. My life’s work has been a never ending journey in awareness, unraveling emotions, my place in life and in love. Recognizing that the weight was a by-product of emotions and past trauma; and not the actual problem, was life changing for me during the summer of 2001. But, again, there would be more work to do on myself as I approached a world of leaving college, dating, getting my first job and understanding how I related to others. It took another 20 years to begin untangling many of my thoughts, habits, and desires for validation afterwards. The same validation I wanted as a child stayed with me, I hadn’t ever lost that. Sure, I lost the weight, physically, but continued to carry the weight in other ways. But one thing always remained true, even on the days where I worked late, dated for approval and didn’t like myself very much; cooking gave me curiosity and the gift of reimagining meals. The gift of reimagining my life.

Cooking has been my love story.

And, frankly, some days of my life I have hated the truth of cooking for myself, for one person. And other days I am happy to eat alone. The latter is more frequent, softer and kinder now. Cooking and writing is the way in which I’ve recreated my past and fallen in love with myself in the present. Every time I sit down to eat I reassign a new memory to food, particularly over the last two years as I let go of my life in New York and took a wild chance to change, again. I looked for the farm at work and relentlessly looked for it in dating and relationships. I looked for the farm in helping others; sometimes to the point of abandoning my own needs and to resentment. I looked for the farm in reconstructive surgery on my skin. I looked for the farm in career changes. Until one day, I was so tired that I stopped looking. The farm was inside of me all along. It was in finding quiet, leaving the past behind and moving forward - even if it meant disappointing others, risking a well paying job and staying in Mexico. I never stopped looking inside and I probably won’t. Writing and cooking is the work of my heart, a hurricane of emotions, new traditions, old traditions, my mental health and life on a plate. Or in a bowl. The life I now live out on a yoga mat as I discover what’s next - without a plan and with an open book, table and heart.

A 23 Year Anniversary