Talk three: Twenty-five years of asking what food is actually for

I became a mother, and the question of food stopped being abstract. It became urgent. What do I feed my child? What do I eat while pregnant? I was confused, honestly. There was so much conflicting advice, and I wanted something better than guesswork.

So I went looking. I found the raw food movement, and still, it wasn't enough. I wanted to understand it properly, not just follow a trend. That search is still going, twenty-five years later. What is the best diet, the best lifestyle, for a human body and for the planet it lives on?

When superfoods became a hype, I didn't just read about them. I bought the bags. I had little money — we were poor, yes — but I saw it as an investment. I investigated each one myself and made a label for it, the way I later would for plants in the forest story. Spirulina, ashwagandha, amla, all of it. Tested, tasted, understood from the inside, not just from a package.

Later, I went to Thailand. I wanted to understand cleansing properly. The retreat program cost five hundred dollars, and I didn't have it. So I rented a small house on the beach instead. I never did the retreat. I was only a watcher.

Every day I sat in a hammock, watching the sea, and the people who walked along the beach — the ones doing the retreat. I started talking with them. As a physiotherapist, I was deeply curious about how they felt and how they improved. I asked what they did, how, and why.

From them, I came to understand something that stayed with me. That the body can hold on to things it doesn't easily let go of, and that gentle, regular cleansing seemed to help people feel lighter, clearer, more themselves.

When I came home, I tried to cleanse the way they did. It didn't work. I was cooking for my children every day, and fasting like the retreat simply wasn't possible inside a normal life. So I drew a conclusion — real cleansing has to fit into real life.

That is how my cleansing lifestyle was born. The idea is simple. While you eat, you cleanse. You work with hydration. You work with superfoods, green smoothies, and good snacks — all of them nourishing in a way that supports the body's own natural rhythms. Take pumpkin seed paste. It's strong protein, it's delicious, and you can blend it into a milkshake.

I chose the foods that felt best for us, and I put them all into the Oasis-Office menu. It's built on this everyday cleansing idea, food combining, and the full range of what a body needs — phytonutrients, omegas, vitamins, minerals. And it had to be fast. Easy. Delicious. 

That menu carries my signature because it carries twenty-five years of asking the same question, until I had an answer worth sharing.