Six years ago, at the height of my demanding career in financial auditing, my health fell apart in ways I couldn't ignore. Pre-gastric cancer symptoms. Fifteen years of chronic bronchitis. When conventional medicine offered little beyond symptom management, I started looking elsewhere. Through years of research and honest trial and error, I found my way back through science-backed functional nutrition and traditional Chinese medicine. Neither condition has recurred since. That experience cracked something open. If food could reverse what medication couldn't, what else was it capable of? Then I left finance and pursued a master's degree in Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University — not just to learn what to eat, but to understand what food actually is: biologically, culturally, and personally. It's been a pivotal decision in my life, steering me away from a career that once consumed my health to one where I nurture not only my own well-being but also that of others.
ABOUT ME
This shift led me to create 贝西生活 BESSLIFE, my wellness social media account that has since grown to over 330,000+ followers and reached millions of views across Chinese media platforms. My work focuses on making complex nutrition and wellness knowledge more accessible and digestible for modern life. This work also became the foundation for PURE LIFESTYLE (纯净生活方式), a movement I initiated in China to challenge the one-size-fits-all approach that often dominates mainstream health culture, while inviting people to discover a path to wellness that truly fits their own lives. But the deeper I went into nutrition science and media, the more I saw that what we eat is only one small dimension of the story. The questions kept expanding: Why do we eat the way we do? What do our emotions, our histories, our culture, our communities, and our relationships have to do with how we nourish ourselves? And beyond the individuals — what about the systems we live in?
These questions eventually led me to pursue a second master's degree in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard Medical School. One of the most formative frameworks I encountered there was structural violence — the often invisible ways that social, economic, and political conditions shape people's health. It gave language to something I had long sensed: health can never be one-size-fits-all, not because people have different preferences, but because the conditions shaping our bodies, behaviors, and choices are deeply unequal.
It crystallized a belief I now build everything around: health is fundamentally relational. At the structural level, it lives in whether the systems and communities we are part of create conditions for people to actually be well or quietly undermine them. At the personal level, it lives in how we relate to food, our bodies, and ourselves: the emotions we eat around, the histories we carry, the way we treat ourselves when we fall short. These aren't separate problems. They operate at different scales, but they are the same question.
That understanding now runs through everything I do — across content creation, wellness education, health consultation, and health communication work. It's also what's driving the health and wellness tools I'm currently developing, focused on self-relationship and emotional eating. Because I've seen in my own story and in the people I've worked with that lasting change rarely begins with more information. It begins with understanding yourself. The work has grown in ways that kept surprising me. PURE LIFESTYLE has been recognized in world-renowned publications, and I've collaborated with and consulted for some of the world's leading health brands and award-winning food companies. Each of these has clarified what this work is for and made it more apparent how much is still left to build. That gap doesn't discourage me. It's where I want to be.
CONTACT ME
For inquiries about wellness workshops and events, nutrition consultation, food development consultation, or other partnerships and collaborations, please fill out the email form. Alternatively, feel free to send me a friend request to my WeChat account besslife.
To see more of my work, please visit my media accounts listed below.
