HEY. I'M MARIAH, BUT MY FRIENDS CALL ME MARIA
IT ALL STARTED
WITH A TRIP TO MEXICO
But really, it started in 2011 when I was diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease.
Hey, I'm Mariah, but my friends like to call me María.
In 2011 I was diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease. This would change the trajectory of my life and guide me towards new passions and career paths that I otherwise might not have discovered.
Since Lyme is an inflammatory disease, and I was definitely not the poster child of 'health' at the time, my naturopathic doctor had me immediately cut out everything that my 20-year-old-stoner-college-student-that-goes-out-five-days-a-week self knew in my diet: Most animal products including all dairy and most meats, gluten, wheat, soy, alcohol, of course all junk food and of course... sugar.
But not just processed sugars... ALL sugars, including fruit! I went 8 months without consuming sugar in any form before I started reintroducing things back into my diet (I still vividly remember the first time I sat down with a bowl of berries after that).
Like so many who find themselves in these positions, I took my health into my own hands, became passionate and educated about nutrition and ended up involved in it both personally and professionally. I started a plant-based food blog in 2011 to share my new journey with food because I figured I could help others as I helped myself, and I can confidently say I accomplished just that.
If you want to hear a good story, just ask me about how I started a raw vegan dessert line, how I was asked to submit plant-based recipes for the Let's Move campaign through the Harvard School of Med, or the time I was a vegan personal chef for a porn star.
Yup, that's me with the red hair.
Along the way as I became more flexible with my diet, the thing I enjoyed making the most were smoothie bowls. I loved decorating them, I loved how versatile they were, and I loved that it made me feel like I was eating ice cream for breakfast.
So I made a LOT of smoothie bowls. So many, in fact, that my friends created a name for them: Maria Bowls.
And if you must know... I received the nickname Maria after enjoying one too many margaritas in Mexico and thought I knew how to salsa dance (I don't). The nickname stuck, and so did the term Maria Bowls.
Now here’s when things come full circle. A decade later, I found myself living alone in a new country for the first time, reevaluating the things I had considered valuable in my life up until that point, and asking myself what are the things I really enjoy? As I was forced to slow down and take that opportunity to reflect, it brought me here, to this.
The funny (not haha) thing was that as I began dreaming about Maria Bowls, I ended up back on antibiotics that I used to take for Lyme Disease, and was also once again in a position where I had to cut back on my sugars. The fact that this all happened at once in that moment, while very challenging, was a sign that this was something I was meant to create.
I guess it was also a sign that finding the silver lining and starting a new business when I'm sick is my coping mechanism.
Since I had been dreaming about starting Maria Bowls and sure as hell wasn't going to ditch the idea just because I had to slow down on sugars, I instead found myself reinventing the smoothie bowl as I knew it. That meant ditching the high sugar fruits like frozen bananas, and swapping them for ingredients like frozen avocados. Where there's a will, there's a way.
So this is for the people who are fighting inflammation, who need to lower their sugar intake, who are allergic to bananas, and for everyone else who could just use a new approach to smoothie bowls...
This is so much more than a smoothie bowl company.
This is for all of us.