Hey I'm Arianne and it's been a wild ride

This page found its way into your hands at an interesting moment...

One year ago, I was afraid. I was broken. I was fighting for my life in a way most people will never have to imagine.

I had been paralyzed for 90 days.

I had been in a coma for 21 days, in the ICU for 60, in hospital for 125.

I was swollen with 60pounds of fluid and had lost almost every muscle in my body. I couldn’t sit, stand, walk, move, or hold my newborn son.

I had been on IV liquids for four months — no real food, nothing to taste or savour or cook or share.

I am one of 3 people to survive what I got.

WTF?

LETS REWIND

This page found its way into your hands at an interesting moment. Maybe you’ve been here a while and already know the broad strokes of my story – the sport, the setbacks, the year that changed everything. Or maybe this is the first time we’re meeting, and you’re reading these pages wondering who wrote the recipes, the posts and why any of it matters. So, before we get to the food I want to tell you about the parts you might have missed.

THE UNDERDOG OLYMPIC ERA

Just over a decade ago, I was training at the highest level of my sport for Team Canada. For those who aren’t familiar, my sport, Luge, is essentially Olympic high-speed tobogganing – which means I was training and competing by sliding down an ice track at around 140km/h, lying on a tiny sled with nothing between me and the cold, icy wall (save a very optimistic spandex suit). Every day.

I’ll be honest with you, I was not eating well during my athletic career. I fuelled myself on whatever was convenient, and somehow survived on sheer determination and a complete lack of nutritional awareness.

The journey was far from easy. I was told early on by coaches and leadership in the sport that I didn’t have what it takes. I was ‘too small’; I had the ‘wrong build’. I was told I would never make it onto the World Cup circuit, let alone the Winter Olympic Games.

I decided early on that it was not their call to make. It was my own. I trained relentlessly.

In 2014, I stood at the start line of the Sochi Olympic Games, the Team Canada maple leaf proudly stitched across my chest. What I carried out of that decade-long chapter wasn’t just a result, it was a mindset. The deep, unshakeable knowledge that you can be told ‘no’ by every single person in the room and still find a way through

THE BREAKING POINT, THE COMEBACK AND THE MYSTERY CHRONIC ILLNESS

Then, in 2015, one full season after my Olympic debut and a month after I won my first World Cup medal, I broke my back.

The sport identity I had built my whole life around was suddenly stripped back to simply relearning how to move my body without pain, so that I could maybe dream of returning to competition.

In that forced stillness, in the humbling work of rebuilding, I found solace in nutrition.

I learned to stop seeing food as calories, but rather as something the body understands at a cellular level, as potential medicine, as the very architecture of how we feel, function and heal.

I cut out refined sugar, I upped nutrient-dense foods, I researched and shifted my habits. What happened next was genuinely gamechanging.

The fog lifted, the inflammation that I had accepted as the price of ambition began to quiet. I got stronger, leaner, faster and clearer with less effort. Thanks to the knowledge I had gained around nutrition, the new mindset and the power of intentional daily rituals, I managed to recover from that injury in less time than anyone thought possible.

The following season, I won my first World Cup gold medal.

Eating with intention for the first time gave me back a sense of agency in my body when nothing else could. It taught me that nourishment is one of the most powerful levers available to us.

Just when I had finally summited one mountain, there was another one waiting for me over the horizon. Not long after my spinal injury, I got sick in a way that took four years and a great deal of self-advocating to finally diagnose – Chronic Lyme Disease.

A whole chapter of my life was spent in uncertainty; my mystery symptoms were dismissed more often than I was ever believed. But here is what I came to understand during those years: the nutrition, the food and the wellness foundation I had rebuilt during my injury recovery was what allowed my body to keep healing when we didn’t have concrete solutions. A solid foundation for health is what holds you up when everything else is shaking

THE EDUCATION

Nutrition had already changed my life twice over, so I decided that I wanted to understand it at its roots. I went back to school to become Certified in Holistic Nutrition (C.H.N), which gave me the science and the know-how I had been reaching for. It felt good to have the education to back up my passion, but now I wanted my hands quite literally in it.

I got an opportunity to train at the National Gourmet Institute in New York City, a culinary school built entirely around wholefood cooking. This is where I learned to translate everything I knew into gorgeous food that was genuinely, memorably delicious.

Nutrition school gave me the why, and culinary school gave me the how.

I then went on to intern at Saveur magazine, where I discovered something that quietly changed everything: I could make my own type of career in food. I could develop recipes, write about food, photograph it, share it in a voice that felt entirely like mine. I left knowing this was not just a side interest. This was it.

Thanks for reading.This post is public so feel free to share it with your healthy bestie.

COMING HOME

When I came home from my career-inspiring adventure in New York City, I went to my doctor to check on that old injury. I was told I needed spinal fusion surgery. And that recovery took the better part of a year – yet again slow, humbling, the kind that asks you to practise every single thing you preach, and more.

During the latter half of my recovery, I decided to get back to work. I took everything I had learned from school and folded it into my work with intention. I co-founded Send Bars, a superfood protein bar that proved to me, and everyone who tried one, that functional and delicious are not a compromise.

I also started sharing my life online.

Through social media, I started posting the recipes, the rituals and the honest and unglamorous reality of healing, with the intention of reaching a few people who might want to hear it. The community that found me there became one of the great privileges of my life. I was strong. I was building something real.

During all of this, I married the love of my life – someone who had walked through every single one of these chapters with me. We got pregnant and were overjoyed. For the first time in a long time, everything felt like it was finally, fully thriving.

THE FIGHT FOR MY LIFE

I had my baby. But, a few days later, I was in a coma fighting for my life.

In January 2025, four days after giving birth to my son, River, I was admitted to intensive care with what they eventually diagnosed as one of the rarest infections ever recorded in medical literature. What followed is almost impossible to put into words: a 21-day coma, septic shock, over a dozen risky surgeries in a very short period of time and complete paralysis when I woke up. I woke up without the ability to move or speak.

I had to slowly relearn everything. How to breathe on my own. How to swallow. How to use my voice. How to move a finger, a toe. How to hold something in my hands. How to stand. How to take a single step. I was in a coma for 21 days. I was in the ICU for 60 days. I was in the hospital for 125 days. I learned to walk on my own again at day 111.

The kitchen I had built my life around felt, for a long time, like it belonged to someone else – a version of me I had to fight my way back to.

Only three people have survived this infection in documented history. I am one of them.

If you made it this far — you’re my people. Join the list and keep reading ☀️

TODAY

Everything stopped for an entire year, while I survived. I eventually found my way back to my kitchen – tentative at first, then with growing certainty. It was these recipes & rituals that brought me back home to myself. Here I am today. Still healing. Still fighting. Still choosing, every single day, to show up for a body that has asked more of me than I ever imagined needing to give.

Still relying on the same feel-good wellness philosophy you will find in these posts.

Still cooking for myself, my family and friends, and for my son River now – which is, I think, all that matters.

And I’m ready to build something here with you.
My most personal offering yet.
The Sundaze Club.

I have rebuilt my life more than once.

Every single time, it wasn’t a perfect protocol or a massive overhaul that carried me through. It was the nourishing, intentional, one-good-day-at-a-time things.

So many of those moments happened on Sundays.

There’s something about a Sunday. That soft, golden, unhurried feeling before the week begins. The light through the kitchen window. The space to actually feel good, if you protect it.

That’s what Sundaze means to me. Not just a day — a feeling. A choice. A ritual.

A quiet act of coming back to yourself.

I’m doing it again. Right now. In real time. And this time, we’re doing it together.

Everything I know — every recipe, every ritual, every hard-won lesson, every brand I trust, every wellness hack, every story will live here - on Sundays.

So, Hi. I’m Arianne. Welcome to my table. It’s where the healthy besties share the tastiest snacks & the best conversations. Pull up a seat.

→ WTF is the Sundaze Club — click below.