Vi Hodges: How Food Became Medicine and a Way Back to Feeling Whole

Vi traces her love of cooking back to childhood, when she would park in front of the Food Network and watch chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay.

She was too young to be trusted at the stove, so she improvised. She would carry plastic bowls and cups into the bathtub, mix shampoo and conditioner, and pretend she was cooking. Her mother was not thrilled about it. Looking back, Vi finds it funny, and telling. The pull toward the kitchen was there long before she was allowed anywhere near a real one.

When she was old enough, Vi started making simple meals and cooking alongside her parents. Her mother kept a garden in the backyard, and the fresh vegetables and fruit from it went straight into family lunches and dinners. Her mom taught her a great deal, and that early hands-on learning is where Vi credits much of her foundation. The relationship continues today. She and her mother still text back and forth about recipes, and Vi will ask for advice on a particular dish. Because her mother does not cook gluten-free, Vi often rebuilds those family recipes from scratch to fit her own needs. She jokes that some of them come out even better that way.

As Vi moved into adulthood, cooking slipped down the list. Schoolwork, then the grind of working full time, pulled her attention away, and she felt a quiet guilt about it. What brought her back was not a recipe or a trip. It was her health. Vi was diagnosed with PCOS, an endocrine and metabolic condition, around the same time she and her husband were navigating infertility. She also learned she had several food sensitivities tied to autoimmune issues, including gluten, dairy, and egg yolks. Eating out became difficult, so cooking at home stopped being optional. She was, in her words, forced back into the kitchen. It did not feel like a gift at the time, but it taught her how to cook good meals at home, and her passion came back to life in the process.

Working with functional and integrative practitioners changed how Vi thought about food entirely.

"I realized that food really is medicine. And you have to be very disciplined to do it."

For her, that discipline meant letting go of the foods that were not right for her body and leaning into the ones that nourished it. The result was not subtle. She describes feeling better now than she has in years, calling it the best she has felt in a long time. That change is the engine behind everything she cooks.

Vi started Whole Belly as a way to keep track of her cooking and her healing, without much thought about where it would go. Then people began reaching out. They shared their own stories, and a sense of community formed around the page.

"It just feels like we weren't alone in the journey."

Going through infertility, Vi had often felt isolated, even with family and friends nearby, because the people around her were not living through the same thing. The friendships she built online, with people she had never met in person, gave her something she had been missing. Seeing that her story resonated with others is what convinced her she might have something worth continuing.

Cooking gluten-free, dairy-free, and mostly egg-free narrows the field of what Vi can make, and she has come to see that as a creative challenge rather than a restriction. The constraints tell her where to start. From there, she asks her husband what he is craving before a grocery run, pulls inspiration from the wide world of gluten-free and dairy-free recipes online, and adds her own spin. It has made her more inventive, not less.

Ask Vi for the one meal she would keep forever and she lands on her weekly go-to, an olive oil roasted chicken with vegetables and seasoning that goes into the oven and mostly takes care of itself. In about ninety minutes, she says, you have a complete meal, simple and good, and her husband loves it too. Her fondest food memory reaches further back.

Her parents would spend all of Saturday, at least eight hours, making pho, but the family never ate it that day. They waited until Sunday, after church, and Vi remembers sitting through the service thinking only about going home to eat. She calls herself a purist when it comes to Vietnamese food. She also has a soft spot for wholesome sweet treats that are not overly sweet, a small indulgence she is happy to allow herself.

The hardest part of content creation, for Vi, was learning to cook and film at the same time. She loves the process of cooking, but chasing the right angle, the right lighting, and the perfect shot could pull her out of it. With practice, it has gotten smoother. She has also made peace with the unpredictability of the algorithm, which can bury a good recipe for no clear reason.

"Even if I didn't get great views, I enjoyed making the meal and I'm happy that I was able to share it with people."

That reminder, that someone might save a recipe, share it, or cook it and love it, is what keeps her posting.

Even after food had done so much for her, Vi felt something was still missing.

"That's when I found my renewed relationship with God and I worked on my emotional and spiritual health."

That, she says, is when she started to feel whole, a word that gives her page its name and its meaning.

When asked what she would want readers to take away, Vi went back to the hardest stretch of her life, the diagnoses, the metabolic and cardiovascular issues, the infertility, and the low point it all led to. What she wanted to offer was not a recipe but reassurance.

"I just want to offer people hope. That you can still find joy and you can heal."

Whole Belly is the record of a cook who found her way back to the kitchen through necessity and stayed for everything cooking gave back. The recipes are shaped by real limits and real healing, and Vi shares every step of them openly, in the hope that they help someone else feel a little more whole.

Explore Vi Hodges's recipes on Chefadora at chefadora.com/@wholebelly, and follow her on Instagram at @whole.belly for gluten-free and dairy-free cooking grounded in whole foods.

Updated on 08 Jul 2026