Jess O’Toole has no time for guilt.

“It’s such a waste of energy,” she says, cutting Country Living a second slice of spring frittata, made that morning with chives, peas, scallions, mint and goat’s cheese.

“And I would be someone who struggles with guilt, being hard on myself,” she continues. “I just really try to avoid it, because I know there’s nothing good about it.

“Tomorrow is a new day.”

We’re talking about guilt in the context of healthy eating and why many people go into self-sabotage mode when they slip-up, instead of just starting again.

(Because who hasn’t succumbed to a Dairy Milk while trying to be good and then beaten themselves up for it?)

But while Jess might be a poster-girl for clean living through her business, Gzel, she says if there’s no pleasure, well ... what’s the point?

“Every day I wake up, I want to enjoy the day,” Jess says, passing a plate of homemade blueberry and honey muffins.

“In the back of my mind, I’m always waiting for the bad news again. Because once you’ve had the bad news, you know that in the blink of an eye everything can change.”

Given just hours to live after being diagnosed with acute leukaemia at 19, suffering multiple melanoma scares and seeing her body plunged into early menopause, Jess speaks from experience.

However, the 32-year-old has also learned that life’s too short not to live it to the last breath.

We’re sitting in the airy apartment Jess shares in Dublin with her husband, Len, who hails from Tipperary and is a business intelligence officer with Facebook, and their adorable dachshund, Minnie.

It’s a long way from Arkansas, where in 2001, 19-year-old Jess was on a college scholarship and paying little heed to the fact that she was feeling tired or had started bruising, until joining friends on a camping trip one weekend.

“I started to get a rash and I thought I had touched poison ivy,” she explains. “We were out hiking and I was really out of breath and people were giving me a hard time for being out of shape.

“But when we got home to the dorm on Sunday night, I started to feel a real sense of impending doom.”

Jess had acute lymphocytic leukaemia – her body was actually going into a state of sepsis shock – and was told she had just hours to live unless she had treatment.

Almost before she knew it, she was on an emergency jet to a specialist cancer centre in Texas, where she spent seven months undergoing intense chemo and radiotherapy, as well as a bone marrow transplant, fighting for her life.

Asked what helped her battle through, Jess relates a conversation with her mother when she was diagnosed.

“I said: ‘Whatever happens, if you can be strong, then I can be strong’,” she says.

“And throughout my whole treatment my mom was very steadfast. She didn’t fall apart on me and I think that really helped me to not lose it either. I would ask her all the time: ‘Do you think I’m going to make it?’ And she always said: ‘I know you’re going to make it.’

“I felt that if she has this inner feeling it must be good, and only in the last couple of years did I ask her about that and she said: ‘I had no idea, but I had to believe that. There was no other choice’.”

Another thing that kept Jess focused on the future was her scholarship, but when she was discharged she decided to study nursing instead. She also joined a cycling club to rebuild her strength (“motivated, sadly, by Lance Armstrong”); which is how she met Len, after she asked to borrow a water bottle.

“I knew the minute I met him that I was in love with him,” she smiles, explaining how the couple were married in 2007 by the chaplain who used to visit her in hospital.

“And we do have a joke now that he can’t ever give another woman a water bottle.”

It was Len – who lost his own mother to cancer – who was by Jess’ side when she had surgery to remove a melanoma on her arm in 2004 and on her forehead in 2006.

“I call this my Harry Potter scar,” says Jess, lifting her fringe.

The couple have also had to come to terms with the fact that they cannot have children as the intense cancer treatment sent Jess’ body into early menopause.

“You grow up thinking you’re going to have children and you take it for granted: ‘This is how my life is going to play out’, so that has been very hard to deal with,” she acknowledges.

“I think it’s very important not to dwell on things that are sad, but still allowing yourself to have the grief over it.

“When Mother’s Day rolls around every year, I sit down and have a cry and Len sits down with me and we talk about what it would be like if we could have children. But when Mother’s Day is over, I wake up the next day and I go on.”

The flipside of Jess’ health battles, however, was the realisation that life is too short not to follow your dreams.

While she loved nursing, she discovered a passion for cooking in her 20s, but agonised over giving up her sensible career.

“Once you’ve been told you have a catastrophic illness, I’ve heard this saying: ‘You can’t un-ring a bell’,” she says.

“So you always know that your time is limited and I just decided if I want to do something, I should just do it.

“But it’s amazing how in your 20s, it’s difficult to break away from the expectations that people have of you. I grieved it. I did. There was a lot of tears and stress and even understanding: ‘What is it that I actually want?’”

To find out, Jess did every job she could find in the food industry, from waitress to wine rep, barista to baker- and even farmer. But in 2011, she set up her blog, La Domestique, and discovered a talent for recipe development, food writing and photography.

In 2013, however, a new adventure beckoned when – after 15 years in the States – Len suggested a move to Ireland and was offered a job in Cavan.

“We decided to sell everything we owned and we came over here with two suitcases each,” says Jess, who immersed herself in the local food scene, working with the local farmers’ market and setting up Culinary Cavan, hosting events like supper clubs and game-tasting dinners.

However, after relocating to Dublin last year, Jess set up www.Gzel.global, which is a website dedicated to healthy eating, living and mindfulness, with services including a four-week detox plan where she provides weekly meal plans, recipes and shopping lists.

“I try to do all the thinking, so you don’t have to,” she explains.

Gzel is not about “being healthy”– with its connotations of sacrifice – but “feeling good” by fuelling your body, mind and spirit, says Jess.

She wants to build a virtual herd of Gzels globally and hopes her journey inspires others who are in a slump to seize life by the scruff of the neck.

After all ...

“Tomorrow is always a new day,” smiles Jess. “And I love starting over.”

For information, visit www.Gzel.global