Life Had Plans. I Engineered Anyway.

“You have such a pretty face.” Supposed to be a compliment. Felt like a verdict.

On Friday nights I was the overweight girl on the sofa while other kids went to the dances. I was also a plus-size model. That contradiction is where my entire career was born.

I desperately wanted to lose weight. I tried every diet there was. And gained in “preparation” of each one. Of course I had to eat EVERYTHING I might miss! Then one summer, when I was supposed to be doing my reading list, I ended up in the recipe section of the library. My dyslexia made that much more appealing. Somewhere between the orange creamsicle protein blocks and the spicy low-fat meatballs, a theory formed that became a career: you don’t have to give up the food you love. You just have to learn how to rebuild them.

The boyfriend I’d met junior year abroad had flown over to propose to me on my 21st birthday. He was supposed to be my date to senior formal. It turned out he had a new, local girlfriend. I found out the night before. It was tempting to pull the curtains and befriend a half-gallon of ice cream. I got strategic instead.

I found out the producer of the George Wendt Show was a local college alum. I wrote him a pitch (in the form of a script, between a pencil and a piece of paper) about how much everyone was going to miss me when I got to Hollywood. Days later, my dorm room phone rang. “This is the most creative submission I’ve ever received. If my pilot gets picked up, you have a job as a writer’s assistant.”

As a contingency, because I always had contingencies, I’d also applied for the Television Academy Apprenticeship Program. The people who put on the Emmys run it every year. I landed it. That’s what actually got me to Los Angeles days after college graduation.

Meredith Vieira’s segment featured a 13-year-old girl on a nationally televised diet, “sentenced” to eating a chicken breast, baked potato, and broccoli. The girl said: “I don’t want to eat this. I want to eat what my friends eat.”

I called the show from that kitchen in Pennsylvania: my Italian grandmother’s kitchen, the one where I’d first learned to love food, and said I could turn that chicken breast and baked potato into chicken strips and french fries for just 50 more calories: food she’d actually want to eat. I never made it past the receptionist. They already had a dietician. But in that moment, sitting in that kitchen, something had shifted permanently. This was what I was put here to do.

After the lightning bolt moment at my grandmother’s house, I knew I had to figure out the industry. I was looking for a job in media when I saw a posting for an assistant position at Muscle & Fitness. It seemed old. I called anyway. They’d stopped taking applications: 500 people had already applied.

So I put my resume in a basket with a lunch I made, wrote a cover letter that I knew would get attention, and dropped it off in person. I landed the job. I learned the media landscape fast: the language, the players, and the rules I’d eventually learn to bend.

Classic catch-22. This was long before anyone could just shoot a video on their phone: back then, a real demo reel meant real cameras, real lighting, and real favors. I solved it anyway. I called in favors from a DP friend, a lighting friend, and a group of actor friends who each got their own tape in exchange. We shot a fake straight-to-video cooking series called A Slice of Devin. Problem solved.

The View

At my first book launch meeting, I revealed that a dream was to be on The View. The publicity team from my publisher responded: “We couldn’t even get Martina Navratilova on The View.” I still remember that moment like it was yesterday. My internal response: watch me.

I started doing desk-side Big Mac tastings to introduce the book: walking into media offices with a portable burner and everything needed to assemble a healthier version right there in the room. The wafting smell created crowds. I started bringing 15 burgers instead of 4. A couple of months after that meeting lit a fire under me, I was standing next to Joy Behar and Star Jones on The View, two of the toughest hosts in daytime television. Star Jones tasted the Big Mac and called it better than McDonald’s. On national television.

The Biggest Loser

When The Biggest Loser premiered in 2003, I watched it and said it out loud. I dropped off brownies. Sent postcards. Made noise. I volunteered for a week at the NATPE (National Association of Television Producers and Executives) office in exchange for a free pass to their $1,000 conference, where the Biggest Loser producers would be. I showed up with my reel. It worked.

At the height of my career I had a restaurant on Royal Caribbean, a Devinly Delites™ brownie line about to launch on QVC, a new TV show in the works, and a brand that sent a town car to pick me up for a celebrity event. On the way, we were struck on the 110 Freeway. I was taken from the scene in an ambulance. I had a traumatic brain injury.

Back on stage

Seven months after the accident, I still had a migraine every hour of every day. A neurologist handed me four prescriptions and told me to sit in a dark room and shut my brain down. I asked what would happen if I didn’t. She said I’d sink into a depression. I told her this was the most depressing conversation I’d ever had in my life.

I tried to find the right doctors and couldn’t. Then I learned there were specialists helping professional athletes recover from concussions. But they only worked with athletes. They turned me down. I convinced them I was an athlete. My sport just happened to be in a kitchen. They healed me.

Morning after

During that time, as I watched my future flash before me, the one regret I had was never having become a mom. When I healed, that was going to be the first thing I did.

I applied the same methodology to foster care that I’d applied to everything else. I researched. Networked. Interviewed 50 families to understand exactly what led to the child they got to keep. I showed up to a class that wasn’t open to me and asked to sit outside in case someone didn’t show. When the social worker told me it typically took 6–9 months to get certified, I sent her intermittent, enthusiastic texts that required no response, just to stay top of mind. I decorated a nursery pink. I called a gathering of 21 friends for happy hour at my home (Happy Baby Hours) to paint messages under the paint I’d be painting the nursery, then help me baby-proof. Field of Dreams style: I built the room and trusted the baby would come.

I started the certification process on June 4th. My daughter was in my arms November 22nd of the same year. On Thanksgiving Eve, my social worker overheard a colleague grumbling that she didn’t want to spend her own Thanksgiving trying to track down a last-minute placement for a newborn. My social worker turned to her: “I know exactly who will take that baby.” The diaper bag was already packed. The nanny was already hired. All that was missing was the baby, and suddenly I was walking around in awe saying, “They gave me a person.” Turns out she was a perfect-for-me person who well exceeded my expectations.

Our life

I stepped back from the relentless pace, not because the ambition was gone, but because my daughter needed a present mom. In that quiet, I saw the whole arc for the first time: the food career, the television, the foster youth I’d mentored into their dream lives, the friends I’d helped get jobs, the clients I’d watched transform. A few years in, I was asked to speak on my “Bliss” on a huge stage alongside extraordinary experts (one of the only women in the room) what it is, how you find it, how you build it. I said it out loud for the first time, and once I said it, I couldn’t unsay it.

My why is to help people have it all. Not the curated version. The real version. The food and the body and the career and the life. All of it, at the same time, without choosing. Twenty years of proof it’s possible. I’m just getting started.