About Diana Stobo
It’s not easy being a kid, especially if you grow up in a dual household with different values and cultures. Diana’s upbringing was challenging at best, but the one consistent value in both households was the love and appreciation of food. Food became the very essence of family for Diana, and she developed an intimate relationship with it at a very young age. Often reaching for a specific food to mend a specific mood, Diana turned to food as a way to comfort her emotional needs. Unfortunately, the very foods that were nurturing her whims were killing her spirit and destroying her body. So, like any child lacking the maturity and guidance to fully understand this dynamic, Diana’s quest and sometimes battle with food began. Like many young girls, she found herself struggling with self-esteem, locked up in confusion around body image and expectations. Like a ping-pong ball, bouncing up and down in weight and back and forth from healthy sprouts to old-fashioned comfort foods, Diana ultimately found herself trapped in a vicious cycle of toxicity and disease.
Growing up in a foodie environment, Diana was a natural talent in the kitchen. Her gift was apparent with food even as a child. The first time she attempted to create a delicious treat, it was such a hit that a local cafe picked up her gourmet fruit tarts, and she was instantly in business. During her college years she worked in the food industry, catering events and preparing foods for small functions. She even had an executive position at a small café for which she received great praise at just 19. Diana then enrolled in the culinary arts division of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. A rising star in her department, she quickly began assisting instructors and even teaching her own courses. After leaving Cornell, she briefly consulted and developed menus for large conventions where food and wine pairing events were prominent. With her new expertise, she started her own catering business.
While channeling her creative energy into her passion for food, Diana also started a family. Add a dash of marriage, a pinch of pregnancy, and twin babies, and the recipe was destined for the quintessential mother’s negotiation of running a business and managing a family. Through unavoidable starts and stops, Diana held fast to her culinary dreams and continued her Signature Catering business for a client list including John Hopkins Medical School and Alex Brown & Sons Investment Firms. Her catering business could not continue at full capacity with twin babies at home, but the Specialty cake, cookie, and truffle business was booming and ultimately led to a delicious line of Giant Cookies. These were a huge success even though marketed exclusively by word of mouth.
Often times it’s a tipping point, a moment of crisis, that causes us to create change in our lives. Diana experienced one such full-blown crisis in her late twenties when the years of struggle with food and lifestyle finally caught up with her. Pregnant with the twins, she weighed an alarming 247 pounds. All the built-up toxins from years of bad dietary and lifestyle choices, along with an overload of medications and fertility hormones, completely overwhelmed her system and she swelled up like a beach ball. What might have been a regular pregnancy turned into an ordeal of stored toxins, unusual weight gain, intense bloating, months of bed rest, and utter physical and emotional misery for an enthusiastic expectant new mother. Luckily, both she and her beautiful babies survived this trial of health, and it’s this “moment of truth” that became Diana’s catalyst and turning point toward the Naked Nourishment lifestyle.
Diana started out like most of us at a critical juncture in our lives, seeking positive transformation, but knowing very little about how exactly to make that happen. Fortunately, in the wonderful grace of life presenting just what you need when you need it, Diana was persuaded to try a new raw food diet she had heard about. Overnight, Diana took charge, derived a plan, and posted a list of NO’s on her refrigerator: No Sugar, No Wheat, No Diary, No Alcohol, No Caffeine, and No Meat. She adhered to this religiously, even as visitors and passersby were eager to comment, mock, and criticize the very list that stood ever present on her refrigerator. Almost immediately, Diana began to feel better, look younger, and have more energy and vitality than she did years earlier. The uncomfortable bloating, digestive pain, and skin irritations of her youth and early womanhood suddenly became a thing of the distant past. As Diana’s peers witnessed this transformation, their opinions quickly changed, and it’s rumored that they have that same list on their refrigerator to this day.
This new naked and nourishing relationship with food, which had transformed Diana’s life from desperation to utter bliss, became her culinary focus and message to share with the world. The culmination of her personal trials with food and lifestyle choices combined with her extensive background baking, catering, and designing food experiences for others provided the ideal launch pad for exploring new ways to make the raw diet interesting, delicious, and give it that special gourmet quality for Naked Nourishment. Now, after years of refining her raw food focus, Diana has created a snack line for the “tween” pangs of hunger, and the compliments still pour in even though she isn’t serving giant cookies anymore. Diana’s beneficial lifestyle change has improved the quality of her own life as well as that of her family. Diana’s kids now ask for coconut milk for an after school snack, and her husband replaced his hidden Saturday stash of Frito-Lays with Kale Chips. To this day, there is never enough of Diana’s homemade raw granola in the house to keep everyone satisfied.
Diana no longer looks at something as simple as a carrot and just thinks “carrot.” She now wonders, “How can I make this interesting, and add spark, flare, and flavor?” and she gains great satisfaction from sharing her knowledge with others who seek to start their path to Naked Nourishment.
