What Hunger Taught Me About Nourishment

I want to begin this pillar with my own story. Not because I need attention, and not because my experience is more important than anyone else’s, but because I believe that sharing honestly is one of the ways we give each other permission to look more closely at our own lives. My hope is that in telling you where my relationship with food began, I might inspire some of us toward the kind of introspection that helps us make sense of our own existence, so that we can move through life, relationships, and the systems we live within more organically, and perhaps leave something better for the next generation of humans on this planet.

Because here is what I have come to understand, and what I think we must grasp before we can talk meaningfully about nutrition: eating is almost never a simple matter of individual choice.

What shapes the way we eat

Our food behaviors are deeply rooted in things far larger than willpower or preference. They are shaped by biology, by culture, by geography, by family dynamics, by socioeconomic background, and by generational tradition. The foods we eat, the way we prepare them, even our emotional relationship with meals, are often the product of years of repeated patterns, absorbed from the households we grew up in, the culinary traditions of our ancestral heritage, and the abundance or scarcity of certain ingredients in the regions that shaped us.

To understand our eating is to understand our history. And to understand our history is to give ourselves the chance, finally, to make sense of our habits, rather than judging ourselves for them. So let me tell you mine.

Where I come from

I was born in Cape Verde, an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa. The islands were uninhabited until the Portuguese arrived and began to settle them in the fifteenth century, and from the beginning, Cape Verde’s purpose in the eyes of the empire was singular and brutal. Its strategic position, roughly midway between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, made it not an agricultural or resource-rich colony, but a marketplace for the trade of human beings stolen from the African continent and sold into slavery. For centuries, the people of Cape Verde lived at the intersection of forces and cultures that were not entirely their own.

I will not, in this piece, focus on the immense suffering of the millions of enslaved people who passed through that history; that deserves its own telling. What I want to illuminate here is something quieter: the long consequences of the choices made by a dominant power over a people, and how those consequences rippled into the lived experience of generations to come, including the experience of food.

Over time, on these islands, something remarkable happened. As interracial relationships emerged, not only did African and European bloodlines mix, but so did the cultures, the music, the languages, and the foods. The Africans who had been brought there came from many different places, speaking entirely different languages, and out of that meeting a new language was born Creole, a blend of Portuguese and African dialects. The gastronomy mixed in the same way. But the land itself imposed its own harsh limit. Cape Verde is dry. Rain is scarce. Both food and water have always been in short supply. And so, the cuisine that emerged was shaped, above all, by scarcity: limited, not varied, and famine was never far away.

I was born in 1985, a decade after independence, into a young country trying to reframe itself, to build its own identity with almost no resources. For most of my early childhood, I did not eat enough. Water itself was a luxury. This was the ground on which my body, and my relationship with nourishment, first formed.

The road through Portugal

At the age of five, I came to Portugal, and I had to learn an entirely new way of eating. We lived in a deeply marginalized neighborhood where we lacked nearly everything. On a good day, there were three meals. On a bad day, perhaps one.

And in that household, food became something it should never be. It was used against me, as a form of punishment. When I failed to meet expectations, I could be denied access to food for days. I cannot tell you how many nights I lay awake with stomach cramps from hunger. And when I did eat, my body, unaccustomed and overwhelmed by poor-quality meals made from leftovers, would often reject the food entirely. I vomited frequently. My body had been shaped by scarcity, and it did not know what to do with what little it was given.

At ten, I moved to another household, a Portuguese family with different habits and a different culture around food. The father came from the south of Portugal, where pork was eaten abundantly. But I had rarely eaten meat in my childhood; it had been far too expensive. My body, adapted to scarcity and unfamiliar with these foods, struggled. I developed strong allergies and intolerances, unable to properly digest what I was now being given. The deprivation continued, simply in a different form. My organism had been built for scarcity, for low quality, for small quantities, and above all for uncertainty about whether food would come at all.

It was around this age that my body, in response to all of this, began to change. I became chubby, and I struggled with a range of food intolerances that made me acutely, painfully aware of how much nutrition matters. Having grown up in extreme poverty, where food scarcity was a daily reality, I developed an unusually conscious relationship with nourishment, far earlier than most people ever do.

Today, that hard-won awareness has become one of the foundations of how I live. I prioritize nutrition as a fundamental pillar of my functioning, following a predominantly plant-based, Mediterranean-inspired way of eating that I have chosen deliberately, and that holds deep personal meaning for me. The body that was once shaped by hunger is now, by conscious choice, nourished with care. That, to me, is its own quiet form of healing.

What the science tells us about why these matters

My story is extreme in some ways, but the underlying truth it reveals is universal: what we eat shapes who we are, at the deepest physical and even emotional level. And the science here is both clear and genuinely sobering.

Nutrition is among the most powerful determinants of human health. The food we consume becomes, quite literally, the raw material from which our bodies are built and maintained, the fuel for every cell, every system, every process. And the research of recent decades has established, beyond reasonable doubt, that dietary patterns are among the leading drivers of chronic disease worldwide. Poor nutrition is strongly linked to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, many cancers, and a host of other conditions that together account for a vast proportion of human suffering and premature death. The way we eat is, in a real sense, a matter of life and death, played out slowly across the years.

But the influence of nutrition extends far beyond the prevention of physical disease. A rapidly growing body of research, in the emerging field sometimes called nutritional psychiatry, has revealed the profound connection between what we eat and how we feel. This brings us back to something I touched on at the very start of this section: the central nervous system, and the remarkable communication between the brain and the gut. We now understand that the gut and the brain are in constant dialogue, connected through what scientists call the gut-brain axis, and that the trillions of microorganisms living in our digestive system, our microbiome, play a significant role in our mood, our stress response, and our mental wellbeing. What we eat does not only build our bodies. It shapes our minds and our emotions.

This is why nutrition cannot be separated from the rest of our humanity, and why it sits as the first pillar of Lifestyle Medicine. It touches everything: our physical health, our emotional regulation, our energy, our cognition, our long-term vitality. To nourish ourselves well is to lay a foundation beneath every other aspect of a flourishing life.

Beyond restriction: nutrition as nourishment

Here I want to make an important distinction, one that my own history has taught me to hold carefully.

In our culture, nutrition has been largely reduced to the language of restriction, of dieting, of weight, of bodies to be controlled and shrunk. But this framing misses the deeper truth entirely. Nutrition, in the sense that matters, is not about restriction. It is about nourishment. It is about giving our bodies what they genuinely need to thrive, with care, with attention, and with respect for the remarkable living systems that we are.

This matters especially for those of us whose relationship with food has been complicated by difficulty, scarcity, or pain. The goal is not to wage war on our bodies or to impose rigid control, which so often simply recreates, in a new form, the deprivation and the lack of safety that may have shaped us in the first place. The goal is to move toward a relationship with food rooted in nourishment, balance, and genuine care for us. To return, as nature always does, toward equilibrium.

And there is something else, which I have written about elsewhere and which lives at the heart of how I understand food now. Nutrition is not only biochemistry. It is one of the most ancient expressions of human love and connection there is. The sharing of a meal, the preparation of food for the people we care about, the gathering around a table, these are among the oldest and most nourishing of human acts, feeding not only the body but the spirit. To reclaim our relationship with food is to reclaim something profoundly human.

Honoring where you come from

If there is one thing I most want to offer you from my own story, it is this: be gentle with yourself about your relationship with food, because it was shaped by forces far larger than you.

Your eating patterns carry your history, your family, your culture, your geography, the abundance or scarcity that shaped the generations before you. They are not simply a matter of discipline or its absence. They are inheritance. And understanding this is not an excuse to remain where we are, but rather the most compassionate and effective starting point for change. When we understand where our patterns come from, we can begin to meet them with curiosity and care rather than shame, and from that place, genuine and sustainable change becomes possible.

Nature moves toward balance. And so can we, gently, consciously, and with respect for the long road that brought each of us to our own table.

A reflection to carry with you

Consider, with compassion, the story of your own relationship with food. Where did it begin? What did food mean in the household you grew up in? What patterns did you inherit, from your family, your culture, the abundance or scarcity that shaped you?

Not to judge any of it, but simply to understand. Because understanding is where a more nourishing relationship begins.

You do not need to transform everything at once. You need only to begin to see your eating with new eyes, as something shaped by a long and human history, and as something you can, gradually and gently, guide back toward balance and genuine nourishment.

That return is one of the most caring things you can do for yourself. And we would be honored to walk it with you.

This is the nutrition pillar of our Lifestyle and Wellness series at ReHuman Lab, grounded in the six pillars of Lifestyle Medicine. In the articles to come, we will explore each of the remaining pillars in depth. If something here resonated, we would be honored to support you on your own road toward nourishment and balance.