About Me

hello! i’m aya

Welcome to The Kitchen Division! I’m so glad you stopped by. If you’ve made it this far, you may be feeling like you’re at a crossroads in your own life when it comes to your health. My goal is simple: to help people reclaim their life through metabolic cooking and wellness.

I have been cooking since I was five years old.

It’s true! I was born into a small family that relied on mealtime as the main way to connect and build strong relationships with each other. Food was our way of coming together at the end of a long day and sharing our stories, discoveries, feelings, and ideas. My parents were avid gardeners and foragers, and our table was always filled with fresh, seasonal foods.

As I grew older, my cookbook collection grew larger. I lived on reruns of Good Eats and No Reservations. I even once tried filming my own cooking show on a thrifted camcorder in our home kitchen. Cooking was my passion.

Naturally, my love for cooking went hand in hand with a love for eating well. I had a creator’s curse: everything I made had to be the best looking, the best tasting. All the while, my body was ringing alarm bells that I brushed off as stress and age : hair loss, insomnia, inflammation in my joints, heartburn, nausea, chronic migraines, adult acne. It got to the point where my body began rejecting my cooking – and my lifestyle.

What I thought I was doing out of creativity and love, was actually hurting me in the long run. It was the hardest pill to swallow – not only was my body broken, but my habits were too.

That is where this blog comes in.

I was finally diagnosed with adrenal-PCOS when I was 27, over 10 years after I initially began having symptoms. Five years later, I was diagnosed with severe MAFLD. For many women struggling with PCOS, my story is not unique. Comorbidities such as diabetes, heart disease and MAFLD are common among us. We wait years, sometimes decades before we are diagnosed. A lot of the time, we are simply told by our doctors that we are too fat, and that’s the end of the discussion.

While many factors outside our control determine our likelihood to get these conditions (genetic mutations, ethnicity, and chronic exposure to endocrine disruptors during childhood for example), diet and lifestyle are two major factors that we can control.

I invite you to walk with me as I reclaim my own health. You can check out my lean liver recipes that I’ve been making (with scientifically backed evidence), the research library I am curating specifically for MAFLD and PCOS, and my shop that include tools and resources that I actually use myself to help achieve my wellness goals.