I struggled with emotional eating for a decade. What helped me was the decision to stopp following rules around food and start playing with ingredients instead.

That shift became Foodie Boulevard: a popular food platform, cookbook, 500+ original recipes, brand partnerships with companies like Philips and Alpro, nearly 30,000 followers, and workshops in the most prestigious schools and innovative companies in Bulgaria. Then the pandemic wiped out everything overnight.

What followed was an unexpected reinvention. I fell into a deep depression and began to make art as Octophina. I quickly became an internationally collected artist with 200+ works exhibited in New York and across Europe. I made a name for myself as an artist in the same way I had done it in the food space - through creative play.

After a decade on the global creative scene and a necessary season of silence, I retreated to the Bulgarian wilderness to deconstruct everything I knew about food.

That's when I realized that creative play is a transferable operating system that can revolutionize multiple activities, including preparing food and making art. As a certified Mind-Body Eating Coach, TEDx speaker, and Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, I created this playbook to share everything I've learned about food since I taught myself to cook in 2012.