Why He Cooks.

From disordered eating to cooking with purpose

This piece contains detailed reflections on eating disorders, including references to anorexia, purging, food restriction, compulsive exercise, and disordered eating behaviors. Please take care while reading. If you're currently struggling, consider whether this content is right for you.

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As long as I can remember, I loved cooking. Grocery store trips with my mom. Flipping through cookbooks. Sourcing ingredients and putting meals together for my family. It was creative. It was comforting. It was mine.

And then, it vanished.

For about 15 years, that part of me went dark, buried under an eating disorder that consumed everything in its path, including the thing that once brought me the most joy.

The thing I put the most effort into, frankly, the thing I was best at, was hiding an eating disorder.

Not healing it. Not managing it. Hiding it. Living with it.

For much of my young life, I lived in a cycle of silence, shame, and self-erasure. Not once. Not occasionally. Every single day.

My eating disorder didn’t look like one thing. It wore different faces; purging, restriction, clean eating turned compulsion, workouts that bordered on punishment. Some days I skipped meals. Other days I threw them up. Or, I’d shove food into a napkin in my pocket to make it disappear from the plate. Most days I lived in fear of food. And the scariest part wasn’t how it looked from the outside. It’s how normal it started to feel.

It wasn’t just a phase. It was my life. A private war I fought alone—quietly, relentlessly—over and over again. It felt sneaky. It felt shameful. And it hurt. The hardest part was not knowing how I got there, or how I’d ever find a way out. I was both the victim and the culprit, and that’s difficult to understand.

For a long time, I didn’t believe I’d ever win.

In my darkest moments, I didn’t think I’d survive it.

I mean that literally. It was so deep and felt so normal that I thought I’d be dead before I ever lived a day without it.

Eating disorders (most specifically, anorexia nervosa) are the deadliest mental health disorders. They don’t just eat away at your body. They erode your sense of self. They convince you that the silence is safer, that control is survival. And for a long time, I believed them.

But I’m still here.

And now, I cook.

Not as punishment. Not as control. But as creation. As expression. As a way of feeding the version of me who never believed he’d get this far.

He Cooks® isn’t just a brand. It’s a reclamation. A rebuilding. A reminder that food can be joyous. That your body can be home. That even the most broken-feeling stories can find their way forward.

The Beginning

It started in high school.

I was anxious in a way that didn’t feel like nerves. It felt like dread. Social anxiety gripped me like a chokehold. I was quiet, scared, and completely stuck in my own head. The only places I felt safe were at home with my family or on the soccer field. The field made sense. There were rules. A structure. A purpose.

Everywhere else—hallways, classrooms, lunch tables—felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.

Eventually, that fear turned inward. I started controlling what I could: food, exercise, my body. It started with “clean eating”—an obsession with eating healthily—then became skipping meals, overtraining, shrinking myself, literally.

And I shrunk all right… right out of the sport I loved most.

I couldn’t sprint. I couldn’t cut. I had no power. I couldn’t keep up. My youth soccer career didn’t get taken from me. I eroded it, one skipped meal and overworked session at a time. And ironically, part of what helped speed that process up was the thing I thought was saving me: running.

What started as cross-training became a fixation. I traded sprints for distance, skill for suffering. I’d run laps after practices, before games, during long solo sessions at home that left me depleted. Running gave me an illusion of control. It felt productive. Punishing. Clean.

So I turned to it completely. Not because I loved it, but because it was the only kind of suffering I could manage. It became my currency. My coping. At least running had a finish line.

A Cross Country Star?

And in chasing that control, I slowly ran myself out of the very thing I loved and into something I never asked for: a scholarship to run cross country at the University of Tampa.

That’s something most would, or rather should, celebrate. It looked like a win. But it felt like a trap.

I wasn’t drawn to running because I loved it. I was drawn to it because it hurt. It gave structure to the suffering. Every mile felt like penance, like a way to prove I was disciplined, that I could outpace the hunger, the shame, the noise in my head. It wasn’t about getting better. It was about disappearing.

And so, I ran. Into exhaustion. Into isolation. Into collapse.

I dropped to my lowest weight. I skipped classes. For the first time in my life, my grades sucked. I’d throw up coffee, water, and half-digested power bars behind the track like it was part of the warmup. It became routine. I didn’t want to be there, but I also didn’t want to quit. So, I did what I could to survive. No one knew.

What looks like a simple progression of college photos masks a much more complicated story.

That’s how shame works. It teaches you to perform your life so well that even those closest to you can’t see what’s underneath. I became a master of the mask. Even I bought into it sometimes. Until I was back on my knees in the bathroom, hating myself for being hungry in the first place.

I missed out on life. On friends. On joy. I skipped meals, skipped outings, skipped being a kid, a teenager, and now a college student. I didn’t drink—not for responsible reasons, but because I couldn’t bear the calories.

This wasn’t just an unhealthy relationship with food. It was my whole identity. A set of rituals I followed like religion. A cycle that felt inescapable. I didn’t feel alive. I felt managed. Maintained. Controlled.

There are moments I still think about, things that felt small at the time but hit differently in hindsight. Like how I used to steal pre-packaged frozen yogurt from a place in South Tampa. It was low-calorie, basically nothing, which in my disordered mind made it safe. A twisted kind of “treat.”

But I was broke. A college kid with no money. So I started taking them. I’m sure it was obvious. Still, I went back again and again, until I finally stopped. Not because I got better. But because I was scared I’d get caught.

It was never about the yogurt. It was about control. About shame. About feeding myself without having to admit that I wanted to.

And for a long time, I thought that was just going to be my life.

But here’s the complicated truth: not everything was dark. Some of the brightest parts of my life came from that exact time. I met my wife at the University of Tampa. Three of my groomsmen were teammates I ran with. It wasn’t all pain. There were good memories. That’s what makes it so hard to talk about. You can be surrounded by good people, building a life you’ll one day cherish, and still be quietly suffering. Both can be true. Both were.

Something Changed

It wasn’t a single moment. There was no dramatic shift. No rock-bottom epiphany. Just a quiet thought that started showing up more and more often:

Would I be proud of this person five years from now?

At first, it was a whisper I ignored. Then it followed me into workouts, skipped classes, purges, long runs on a calorie deficit, and so on. It was there when I considered dropping out. It was there when I thought about quitting the team. It was there when I realized I could keep going and still end up with a hollow, pathetic version of the athletic career I once dreamed of.

That question didn’t save me. But it cracked something open. It made me stop and look at the life I was building. I didn’t like what I saw. I never did. But for the first time, I saw a trail of breadcrumbs out.

I started making small changes. Not because I had answers. But because I couldn’t live with the ones I had.

I changed the way I looked at food. I was able to “trick” myself into thinking about food strictly as fuel for running, like I was a machine getting gassed up as opposed to a human eating a sandwich. I realize how backwards that sounds, but it worked.

I started to show up for workouts fueled instead of empty. I began to see small improvements in my running abilities. I began to stack those small improvements together. The thing about this disease is that it feels like a spiderweb, like quicksand, something inescapable. It took extreme mindfulness and intention to stay on the rails. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

I wasn’t a good runner up to this point. I couldn’t be. As I started to see improvements, I started to earn respect. And that felt good. That propelled me even further. Soon my social life, my academics, would take better shape.

Nobody knew what I had been through, what I had put myself through, and maybe it would stay that way. Right?

Wrong.

Still Not Free

I found myself with a new starting line, but that didn’t mean the game had changed.

I kept running after graduation. I felt I had something to prove to myself.

And I did just that.

I got faster. I started running marathons. I notched some impressive times. I finally felt equal to my former teammates, vindicated almost. But therein lies a problem. Who was I doing all this running for? Remember, I never really liked it in the first place.

After a 2:43 marathon in New Orleans. A personal best, a moment of pride, yet still quietly caught in the cycle I hadn’t learned to escape.

I was still purging. Still obsessing. Still controlling. Feeling sick with anxiety any time I didn’t run the prescribed pace or distance.

From the outside, things looked pretty fine during this time. I showed up. I partied. I smiled. I played the part.

But inside, it was still an act. I’d plan entire days around food avoidance. I’d eat beforehand so I could pretend I wasn’t hungry. I’d push food around a plate, hide bites in napkins, head to the bathroom to purge.

The better I got at running, the better I got at hiding my secrets. At curating a version of myself that looked normal. The disordered eating, the anxiety, it didn’t go away. It just changed. It was still a means of survival. I was just a better runner with a social life for once.

Why I Cook

I didn’t just start cooking again. I went back to the beginning.

To my first passion. My first love. The thing that once made me feel like me, before everything got so dark and complicated.

Cooking was the first place I ever felt free. As a kid, I’d get lost in cookbooks, grocery store aisles, dinner prep with my mom. I wasn’t performing. I wasn’t disappearing. I was just there. Present. Curious. Creating.

Back in the kitchen reclaiming something that once felt lost. Cooking not to disappear, but to exist fully, freely, and without apology.

And when I finally picked it back up again—after years of silence, after years of pain—it felt like I was stepping back into the skin of that 12-year-old boy. The one who hadn’t yet learned to hate himself. The one who didn’t feel like a burden. The one who still believed food was joy.

It was liberating. So I kept cooking.

And slowly, I began documenting it. Not as performance, but as proof. Proof that I was still here. Still trying. Still building something honest out of what nearly broke me.

Because even the smallest acts of self-respect—feeding yourself, showing up, choosing not to hide—can become a kind of foundation. A way forward.

And once you realize you can build something from that, everything begins to shift. You start to understand that healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about carrying it with compassion. It’s about reclaiming the pieces that were always yours.

The truth is, what ultimately saved me wasn't a program or a perfect plan. It was deciding I was worth saving. My will. My spirit. My stubborn refusal to let that be the end of my story. I've sought professional help since, yes. I've done the hard work of understanding. But none of that would've mattered if I hadn’t decided, quietly but fiercely, that I was worth saving. That I was worth feeding. Worth caring for. Worth fighting for.

That choice to believe I was worth it, that’s something I get to carry forever.

This isn't a story with a clean ending. I'm still living it.

But I'm no longer disappearing inside it.

And that's something. That's everything.