MY EARLY YEARS
My mom was one of the finest cooks I have
ever met, and I was always hanging in the
kitchen with her. I couldn’t reach the counter,
so for my fourth birthday my dad made a
stool, and my mom gave me this little tiny
paring knife, and I got started. My mom was
always so happy in the kitchen. It was the
place where the whole family gathered, and
it was a place I knew great joy came from.
My mother was Italian. So we ate a lot of
standard Italian food, peasant food, a lot
of stews, a lot of grains -- a lot more grain, as
I look back now, than maybe your average
family now would eat, a lot of pasta, of course,
typical Italian food, lots of dairy, and, of
course, meat just about every day because
my dad was a butcher. [We had a] great,
spacious kitchen. My mother baked every
day. I grew up in a house where cooking
wasn’t a chore that you had to get through. It
was just part of the day. My mom wasn’t
always at home, so cooking had to be worked
into the day; it was a priority. Nourishment was
a place where you were happy. Food wasn’t
the enemy. In our culture, food’s the enemy a
lot of the time, what with preservatives,
pesticides, and genetic modification. Then
there’s cooking -- you get in from work at
seven o’clock and it’s hard. Life is harder
now than when I was growing up. We’re not
at home cooking like we once were. I became
very comfortable in the kitchen at an early
age, so for me it’s not a foreign room.


LEUKEMIA DIAGNOSIS
It’s really interesting, in hindsight. I was told
I had delicate skin when I was young, because
if someone would so much as take my arm to
cross the street, I would have bruises the next
day. I’d hear from my mother, “You’re a girl,
where do you get these bruises?” And I’d be
thinking, “I don’t know.” I remember, as an
athlete in high school on the swim team, I
would come home from practice complaining
that my bones hurt, and you know, typical
Italian family, they’d say, “What do you mean
your bones hurt; go do your homework.” Life
was different then. We didn’t rush off for blood
tests so quickly. When the doctors diagnosed
me, I had thought I was tired because my
mother had passed away, with the whole
grieving process; but the doctors said that the
leukemia had been there for many years,
never diagnosed. So the condition was pretty
acute by the time it was diagnosed, but they
said that it had been undetected for so long.


MY REACTION TO THE DIAGNOSIS
I felt like I was living in a bad TV movie. I
moved into this period of denial for a short time.
I left the doctor’s office and sat on the sofa in
my apartment thinking, “I’m 26, this is
impossible.” Finally, I went back to work and
was going to quit my job and go back and live
in Tuscany, where I had lived for a while, and
simply die. As I packed my office, a friend of
mine came in and said, “So you’re giving up
without a fight?” I thought, “Give me a break…”
He said, “You have to meet this guy,” and I’m
thinking, “Great, just what I need, a date.” And
he said, “No, no, he eats weird food and he
says it cures cancer.” I’m having visions of
jetting off to Barcelona to have my blood boiled
or something. And he said, “No, no, he eats
grains and beans.” I’m thinking, “I sort of eat
that way and I already have cancer.” But of
course, I wasn’t eating anywhere near healthy.
So I met Robert Pirello, who introduced me to
macrobiotics. He gave me a book by Michio
Kushi called The Cancer Prevention Diet and
said, “Don’t make any decisions; go home and
read this book.” I read it in about 36 hours
because I couldn’t put it down, and I thought it
was either the biggest crock I’d ever read or
the best-kept secret on the planet.


GETTING STARTED WITH WHOLE FOODS
I remember asking, “Is there anything we can
do that will cure this?” and they [the doctors]
said, “No.” This was 16 years ago, and
[since then] we’ve made quite a few advances.
Do I recommend this kind of course? Not for everybody. I really did it the hard way, which
is how I do most everything. But at the time,
they couldn’t offer me much. Even a bone
marrow transplant would be iffy. So one of the
five doctors agreed to monitor me, and the
minute I would deteriorate they could intervene.
And I agreed to that because I didn’t think this
[diet] was going to work either. So Robert and
I went shopping at a co-op, and he’s loading
all this unfamiliar food into my basket. Now I’m
a cook, and I’m thinking, “I’m dead, I don’t
know what to do with this…” We emptied my
cupboards and loaded them up with new foods;
he gave me a few quick lessons, and it may
sound simple, but that’s how it started.


MY RECOVERY
It took a year and a half to regain my health
and there were lots and lots and LOTS of ups
and downs. I guess it was maybe 2 months
before they saw a big difference in my blood.
They didn’t know what I was doing, and I said,
“Well, I’m doing this diet thing. I’m eating
whole grains, beans and vegetables.” They
said, “That’s very nice honey, but what are
you doing?” They called it spontaneous
regression and had no answer for it. They
said, “Whatever you’re doing, do it, because
something’s changing.” And off I went; it was
a long year and a half, but after that period,
my blood tests showed no sign of cancer and
haven’t since. And what I’ve discovered since
then about the power of food in the body is
what drives me in my passion every day. If
people understand the energy of food and how
it affects our health, they can make choices
best suited to them.

Do you have a story of prevailing over
seemingly insurmountable odds?

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While I believe in a marriage between alternative
and conventional therapies, you should never
stop taking prescribed medications or begin an
alternative approach without first consulting your
medical professional. No information on this site
is meant to replace sound medical advice.
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