I've spent most of my adult life feeling like I was failing at something everyone else seemed to manage just fine.
Food. The thing that's supposed to be simple.
Except that's not how it went for me. For years, food was a battleground. Something to earn, something to atone for, something to negotiate with. Cook Myself Happy is what came out of the middle of that.
Not the other side, but the middle. I haven't arrived anywhere. This is an ongoing, sometimes messy, genuinely hopeful work in progress.
Hi, I'm Laura.
It's so lovely to meet you.
Food was the language of our family - meals every night, always something on the stove, the kitchen the centre of everything. And then things changed, the structure disappeared, and somewhere in growing up I started relating to food very differently. The women around me were navigating diet culture in their own way, and I absorbed it without ever being taught it. By the time I was a teenager the pattern was already set. I did it for a very long time.
I lost my dad when I was 20. Grief makes you look at things differently. He cooked with such joy - with the complete absence of guilt or anxiety. And somewhere in missing him, I started to want to find my way back to that.
And then last year, life gave me a partner who loves me without condition, and a small, chaotic, utterly devoted dog named Luna who reminds me daily that joy really can be found in the simplest things.
This January was the first January of my entire adult life where I didn't start a diet. I just cooked things I loved and ate them.
That's where Cook Myself Happy came from.
Where it all began.
My dad was a professional chef.
You'll find comforting, nourishing food that exists to be enjoyed, not analysed. No calorie counts, no macro breakdowns, no "guilt-free" swaps. And an incredibly honest conversation about building a different relationship with food. That lives in the Done With Mondays podcast - diet culture, food freedom, and all the places this stuff shows up that you'd never expect. Not a wellness podcast. Not a recovery podcast. Just honest conversation, recorded from the middle of it, hoping it helps someone feel a little less alone.
Because the difficulty I had around food wasn't a character flaw. It was the entirely predictable result of growing up inside a culture that makes most of us feel like our bodies and our appetites are problems to be solved.
They're not. You're not.
A kitchen without judgement.
Good food, good company, no guilt.
Food was never the enemy. It was just caught in the crossfire.
Cook Myself Happy is where I share comforting, nourishing recipes that reject diet culture and embrace satisfaction. No calorie counts. No macros. No "guilt-free" swaps. Just wholesome dishes that make you feel good; body and soul. Because food should bring happiness, not anxiety.
And when you're ready to go deeper than the recipes, Done With Mondays is my podcast.
A truthful conversation about diet culture, food freedom, and the ongoing, unglamorous
work of building a better relationship with food. No before and after transformations.
Just real talk.
I didn't fail every diet I ever tried. Every diet failed me. It just took me years to understand the difference.
