Bridget Foliaki-Davis | Bridget's Healthy Kitchen | 28-Day Boost Camp

She Knew How to Cook. She Had No Idea How to Eat Bridget Foliaki-Davis and the Meals That Started Everything. There's a bedroom door in Sydney that stayed locked for longer than anyone in that house wants to remember. . .

and on the other side of it was one of the best chefs this part of the world has produced a woman who had cooked in world-class restaurants since she was fourteen, hiding from her own children because she didn't want them to see what their mother had become.

Amber and I have known Bridget Foliaki-Davis since our events days, back when all three of us were, as she put it this week, "still doing the do." So when she joined us on a cold, rainy Melbourne Thursday beaming in from Sydney with a cookbook in arm's reach, because of course there was a cookbook in arm's reach it felt like catching up with an old friend who happens to have quietly built one of the most impressive health businesses in the country since we saw her last.

But the story she told us doesn't start with the business. It starts at rock bottom. In her early forties, after a miscarriage she blamed herself for, Bridget was self-medicating with food and alcohol half a bottle of vodka a day, a proper full-size bottle, chronically depressed, hibernating from the world. Then came the diagnosis: fatty liver disease, pre-diabetic, and a doctor telling her the next course of action would be medication, potentially for the rest of her life. She was in her early forties. And she said no way there has to be something I can do.

WATCH THE LIVE INTERVIEW ON YOU TUBE

What she did next is the part I haven't stopped thinking about. She didn't join a gym. She didn't buy a program. She looked at the whole overwhelming mountain of it she describes it as staring up at Everest having never even seen snow and decided to do exactly one thing: make the next meal a healthy one. That's it. Not next week, not New Year's. The next thing that went into her mouth. She was a chef, after all "you know how to make things taste delicious, just take some healthy ingredients and make one healthy meal." So she did. And it was actually good. So she made another.

Thirty-five kilos came off in five months. No gym. No exercise at all, in the beginning and this is where Bridget the nutritionist takes over from Bridget the chef, because the science behind that floored us. Exercise alone, she told us, delivers less than one percent body-weight loss over six months. Nutrition alone: around ten percent. Combine the two and you can reach twenty. We've been training for Hyrox and eating whatever we like because "we're working hard at the gym" and sitting there hearing that, Amber and I looked at each other like two kids caught with the biscuit tin.

Nearly a decade on, Bridget is almost 52, sober since January, and says knowing exactly how it sounds — that she feels like she's aging in reverse. What began as one healthy meal photographed for the fun of it became Bridget's Healthy Kitchen, then fifty meal plans, seven cookbooks, 1,700 recipes, and the 28-Day Boost Camp a community she deliberately built to feel like a marae. Somewhere you show up, follow the protocols, get looked after, and look after others. She's from the far north of the North Island; her husband is Tongan; and the sense of whānau she misses from home is the thing she's rebuilt online for thousands of people around the world.

And that's really why this conversation matters beyond the weight loss numbers. Bridget keeps doing this work because of what she sees in her own extended whānau because the Pacific has some of the highest rates of diet-related disease in the world, and because type 2 diabetes, the condition cutting so many of our people down in their fifties, is almost entirely caused by food. Not genetics. Food. She told us up to ninety percent of Polynesians are born lactose intolerant and most of us have never been told. The foods filling our tables today are nothing like the kai our grandparents ate, and her mission is to close that gap with meals a one-income family can actually afford, because she built all of this while feeding five teenagers on one income.

She left us with cheat codes the jammy eggs always waiting in her fridge, the $3.20 tin of mackerel that's a perfect portion of protein, the roast chicken dripping over a tray of rescued crisper-drawer vegetables and one line that I suspect will end up on our wall: choose your hard. Change now, or let the hospital choose for you later. Her single most powerful piece of advice costs nothing: cook your own food. Because when you take control of the food you eat, you take control of your life.

Bridget is gifting our community her free 3-Day Quick Boost meal plan nine healthy meals, one supermarket shop, and for one single mum in the UK, five kilos gone in three days. We're doing it ourselves and reporting back. Knowing us, it'll become a competition.

Kia ora, Bridget. Sydney soon and yes, we're taking you up on dinner.

— Kebrasca

Find Bridget at 28dayboostcamp.com and bridgets.shop, and grab her latest cookbook, Bridget's Healthy Delicious. Get her free 3-Day Quick Boost via our list at kingcreativetalkpodcast.com. Book a reading with Amber at glowbyamber.com or explore Kebrasca's healing work at kebrascaking.com. #creativetalk is live every Thursday at 5PM AEST — where consciousness meets commerce.