Maintaining your wellness with a good diet is tough enough, but what if your job was to spend all day cooking, thinking about, and tasting food. Professional chefs are surrounded by temptation but still manage to secure their wellbeing and keep in shape, so how is it done?
Dale Talde says it’s a requirement of his job to taste every dish that leaves the kitchen to make sure it’s up to standards, which means he eats thousands of calories each day ‘But you never eat a full meal’ he says. However, this also means that ‘You’re not hungry but you’re not totally satisfied either’ and often gets home after midnight and wants to eat a good meal.
This has led to Talde packing on 30 pounds and increasing his blood pressure in the last 2 years. Therefore, he’s had to find creative ways to reduce his caloric and salt intake. ‘I don’t [usually] like to eat before noon, but now I wake up earlier to get something healthy in – some cottage cheese with salsa and arugula, for example – that way I have something in my stomach before I go to work. It’s easier to maintain what you’re eating when you’re not starving’.
Diane Henderiks, RD, is a personal chef and culinary nutritionist who wants to raise the culinary bar for healthy cooking. ‘I switch up ingredients to maintain the integrity of the dish without fat and sodium,’ she says. According to Henderiks, any dish can be made healthier and she achieves great results by cooking with fresh and dried herbs, citrus juices, and nectars. She also uses applesauce or yogurt in place of butter, and broth or wine instead of oil.
Similarly, Chef Nikki Cascone uses a balsamic vinegar reduction (balsamic vinegar cooked on the stove top until it’s reduced to a syrup) for a very low-calorie salad dressing, and has replaced all table sugar with agave syrup as a way of eliminating refined sugars from her diet. Cascone found managing her weight became a challenge after having a baby, and so confined all of her meals to one bowl, consciously filling the bowl with lean protein, such as chicken, legumes, seeds, and vegetables. This helps her to limit her portions, but still feel satisfied.
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