Food is medicine! We have forgotten that!

I wanted to lose 30 pounds healthfully and still be able to enjoy my college experience. Having succeeded in doing just that, I wanted to share my experiences with others who could benefit from my direct knowledge of the difficulty of trying to balance college life with being healthy. It became a journey about healthy lifestyle choices, including tips and tricks for creating a new relationship with food where I was in control and could learn to love food healthfully again.

Standards are what you hold for yourself, too. If I don't hold those standards with friends, colleagues, and lovers, I can't hold them to their relationships.

I love to look at my life and look at what I can do better, how I can contribute more and where I can push myself.

Figuring out how to eat healthfully on your own without your parents' guidance is one of the hardest lessons you must learn when you leave home for college.

If you have expectations, you try to put your standards on someone else's behavior. The fact is you can't control anyone but yourself, so creating standards, as opposed to expectations, keeps the ball in your court.

Having been to culinary school, the single greatest asset I learned there was how to cut and chop properly. It's an investment of money that will save you hours of time down the road, and hopefully some cut fingers.