Essential listening for anyone who has driven themselves so hard, for so long, that they woke up one day and didn't recognize themselves anymore.

Heather Crosby built YumUniverse, the Gluten Free Baking Academy, and the Good Food Cooking School almost entirely alone. She designed everything, photographed everything, wrote and tested every recipe, and handled every decision. From the outside, it looked like a thriving creative business. From the inside, it was quietly and steadily grinding her down.

What followed was burnout so deep that she lost her joy for cooking entirely. An identity crisis she hadn't seen coming. And then, slowly, something else. Horticultural therapy and a job.

Heather is in what she calls the fertile void right now. She has all the pieces for what comes next and a genuine resistance to rushing toward it. She is learning, maybe for the first time, to let something come to her instead of building toward it at full speed.

This conversation is about what happens after the big thing. About the loneliness of doing it all yourself. About losing and slowly finding your way back to the thing you love. And about trusting that what is underground is still growing, even when you cannot see it yet.

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Covered In This Episode

• What it actually looks like to build something meaningful from scratch — and what starts to quietly break when you've been doing it alone, at full speed, for too long.

• The layer cake of burnout: how a major surgery, a growing resistance to performing online, and the slow erosion of joy in her own work converged into a moment where Heather no longer recognized herself.

• What losing your love for cooking feels like when cooking has been your entire identity — and the long, disorienting process of mourning it before it could come back.

• The "fertile void" — Heather's name for the underground space between what was and what's next, and why trusting it might be the hardest and most important thing you ever do.

• Why doing everything yourself isn't dedication — it's isolation. And what Heather would have done differently if she'd had someone outside the tornado giving her perspective.

• The body as decision-maker: how Heather has always felt her yes and her no physically, why women are trained to ignore that signal, and what happens when you finally start to listen.

• What it means to take the "good enough" job — and why a full-time in-house design role became the life preserver that gave Heather room to actually think.

• The compulsion to turn everything you love into a business, and what it looks like to sit in the garden and let something just be yours for once.

• Why real community — dinner tables, familiar faces, a corner of the internet that requires a login — might be the most quietly radical response to where culture is heading.

Chapters

00:00 Podcast Introduction & Episode Overview
00:48 Meet Heather Crosby: Plant-Based Pioneer & Educator
02:45 Early Food Blogging & Building an Online Presence
05:05 Transition from Design Career to Food & Wellness
07:40 Using Food as Healing: Plant-Based Nutrition Journey
14:22 Online Courses, Cooking School & Scaling Education
17:22 Burnout in Entrepreneurship & Hard Lessons Learned
21:34 Hitting a Breaking Point in Business and Life
24:22 Pivot to Horticultural Therapy & Nature-Based Healing
32:15 In-Person Connection, Community & Reciprocity
33:52 AI-Generated Content, Recipe Integrity & Creativity
42:52 The Myth of Freedom in Entrepreneurship
53:38 Trusting the Fertile Void & Navigating Uncertainty
55:40 Collaboration, Final Thoughts & Closing

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Related Episodes

• EP 006: Why Not Knowing Is Exactly Where You Need to Be — Because the fertile void isn't empty. It's underground, preparing for spring — and this episode is your permission slip to stop rushing the bloom.

• EP 013: Why Releasing What You Built Could Be Your Greatest Move — On the mourning that comes even when you chose to leave — and why grieving what you built is not the same as regretting it.

• EP 035: The Freedom Myth: What No One Tells You About Entrepreneurship — For anyone who has traded one set of chains for another in the name of being your own boss — and why there is real wisdom in keeping it small, simple, and actually yours.

Resources and Links

• Heather Crosby — Heather's personal home on the internet, where she writes about the things she loves — from black walnut dye to the beauty of a single petal in the garden. Requires a login, by design. Only those who actually want to be there get in.
• Good Food Cooking School — Heather's beautifully curated library of whole foods and gluten-free plant-based cooking, still very much alive and worth every penny of your subscription.
• The YumUniverse Cookbook and Pantry to Plate — Heather's two cookbooks, described here as the only textbooks you need on whole foods plant-based cooking. Meghan stands by that.

More About Heather Crosby

Heather Crosby is the author of the “YumUniverse” and “Pantry to Plate” cookbooks, and the Founder of Good Food Cooking School. A career designer, forever learner, and lover of all things plants, she is also a Horticultural Therapy practitioner (and Master Gardener)— dedicated to creating beautiful, thoughtful, experiences that help people connect to themselves and others by re/connecting with nature, creativity, and good food.