I’m Italian. I talk with my hands, metabolize espresso at a prodigious rate, am a moonstruck romantic, and am a stellar chef. I couldn’t write down a recipe for you to follow because it would look like this:
- Add a considerable amount of beef
- A little bit of salt
- More or less a few shakes of pepper
- Enough Italian seasoning until the beef looks like a half-done sod job in Fort Lauderdale, before it rained and the foreman called it a day
- Joggle onion powder to the first two stanzas of the Tarantella—the Louie Prima version
- And a list of vague, imprecise, unclear instructions will follow
That’s how I cook, and you know what’s funny? Follow that, and you’ll most likely end up with a d-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s meat-sa-ball!
That’s exactly how most people try to approach eating to lose fat and get leaner. Like a chef.
“I drink a TON of water. I had a salad with SOME chicken for lunch. I SKIPPED breakfast, but I ate A LOT of vegetables. Everyone else was eating chips, so I just had a LITTLE OF THIS and SOME OF THAT.” And more vague, unmeasured, indeterminable, strategy-less, inconsistent barrage of murmurs will follow.
You know what’s funny? Eating like that will work—if you’re 500lbs. and looking to get down to 400lbs. Once you get to a lower weight, though, being a chef is not going to get you to your ideal healthy weight. You need to become a baker.
Baking is a science. It’s precise. It’s chemistry. You need to use specific measurements and ratios to ensure your finished product turns out a certain way. You don’t have the freedom to experiment that you do in cooking. Don’t believe me? Watch some of those crazy cupcake dottys on the Food Network—it’s more intense than the Super Bowl!
The leaner you get, the less you knead to be a chef and the more you knead to be a baker. Try making cupcakes with a chef’s hat on and winging it with a precise recipe. Use some of the flour, skip the baking powder if you don’t feel like it, maybe you like eggs and want to add a few extra; whiskever you choose to do, mix it all up in a bowl and toss it in the oven. The only rise you’re going to get is the birthday kid bawling his eyes out over the titanic wreck of a cupcake, sunken lower than the calamitous ship!
If you’re following a proper nutrition plan like a chef, you’re only going to get results to a certain point. Maybe you can get from 250lbs. to 200lbs. as a chef. Then you’re able to get from 200lbs. to 185lbs. as a full-time chef who moonlights as a baker. Then you’re stuck. At some point, if you want to take it further, you need to learn to embrace the baker’s hat, accept that you must be precise with your nutrition, and follow in the path of Robert Frosting: take the road less traveled by, and you just may find the results are so much sweeter.
About the author
Chris Rombola
Chris is the owner of Fit House. He's run the training departments at several commercial gyms, and after years of seeing how awful those environments were for his clients, he opened his own studio. He is devoted to getting people strong, lean, and healthy.
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