Where am I now?

I started my blog and recipes cautiously in 2021 with the aim to help other people feel better in their bodies from cooking from scratch - as it had done for me. Four years on, married and with two little children, a lot has changed about my life. So what does that mean for TFSB? Where am I now?

Part 1

Physically? I am on the south coast of the UK, in a small town in Kent. I moved here with my husband in April 2023 and was hospitalised about a week later, and I didn’t leave the hospital until I came home with my very early arrival, a tiny little baby boy. We were still living in boxes. I think we’ve been trying to catch up ever since, to be honest with you. In May 2025, almost exactly two years later, we had a little baby girl join us to complete our family. Yes, I am very much done with being pregnant and giving birth, thank you very much! But these two gorgeous children have changed everything for me, and given me an even stronger sense of purpose when it comes to home cooking and being conscious about food. More on that later.

When I started The From Scratch Body, however, I was living a very different life. In a cool, quirky flat in South East London with my husband who was my fiancee back then, we both worked equally, earned equally, came and went as we pleased and focused on our relatively easy life together with hikes, friends and our careers (both of which have changed since then).

Me starting The From Scratch Body was born out of this amazing revelation that I could actually cook. Because… it’s not hard. Anyone can. And it became a bit of a passion for me - and a mission: “this food/condiment/sauce/baked good that I’ve always bought at the shops… can I actually just… make it?” And the answer was almost always YES. With no one relying on me, no one to answer to but myself, I could spend the whole day in the kitchen. I could follow my own tastes and flavourites, not worrying about whether it would feed somebody else. If an experiment went wrong, no big deal. Most meals could be salvaged anyway. I had already learned that eating homemade significantly improved my endometriosis symptoms, which saved my sanity after feeling out of control with that pain for so long. And it just made me feel better - in general. Of course it did! I was eating less ultra-processed food, and being mindful about my food intake.

Becoming a mum turned my whole world upside down. There was suddenly no time for… anything. When you have to find a small window to shower, you definitely don’t spend any time making your own mayonnaise from scratch, even if you know very well how. I constantly had to negotiate with myself whether making something was worth the hassle of the clear up, or if a certain meal could still be salvaged if I had to stop in the middle of making it because my baby screamed for a feed/toddler screamed because he wasn’t allowed to lick the scissors.

For a long time I tried to keep The From Scratch Body going in exactly the same way as I had, but it was taking all the fun out of it - because no matter how much you love doing something, if there is zero time in the day to do it, it just becomes a stressful chore. Keeping up with a weekly blog topic, recipe, podcast episode and newsletter was suddenly super stressful and weighing on my mind.

I won’t lie to you: shelving the whole thing altogether has been on my mind many a time, and it still is occasionally. TFSB is not my main job (I am a voice over artist), and although I surprisingly got a great opportunity to work with a fantastic brand in my first year of doing this and have earned some money through affiliate links as well as website and YouTube ads, that income goes down significantly when I don’t spend enough time on the content. It’s a very straight forward “you get out what you put in” kind of situation. And as much as I’d love to just be doing this for the love of it, that wouldn’t be sustainable, and I need to look at what makes it worth the time I’m putting in.

But just as I am so close to pulling the plug and just focus on my main job and my kids, a little message comes in on Instagram. Someone tells me their husband literally made a Youtube channel simply so that they could save and engage with my videos. Or someone replies to a newsletter of mine and tells me that they are saving their favourite recipes of mine in a “Liv’s Cooking” folder. Or - a little affiliate bonus trickles in at the right time and tells me to keep going.

So for now - I am going to keep going. But I am taking really brutal stock of what is worth my time and what isn’t. For example; the podcast will be put on pause for now. It’s really sad, because a podcast is obviously one of the easiest things to do for me (being a VO artist), and I enjoy doing them too! But there is no money in it for me at this point and definitely the part of TFSB that has the least engagement, the website and YouTube channel being the highest. Everything else, website, YouTube, Instagram (Facebook and TikTok will possibly go a bit quieter as Facebook is weird now and TikTok just doesn’t vibe with me) and newsletter will continue as before.

Now, this is Part 1 of “where am I now” because in the next part I really want to focus on sharing what I will be doing, and what I will be doing more of. Because when that started becoming clear in my mind, I got excited about creating food content for you all again. And the why (which I have touched on here, of course) is also important. So stay tuned!

Have you tried one of my recipes? Post on Instagram and tag me @TheFromScratchBody, use the hashtag #TheFromScratchBody so I don’t miss it!