I joined the "Steps" program. They gave me a pedometer, and my goal was to achieve 10,000 steps a day. I learned that 10,000 steps is really hard to achieve for the average person who sat 8-10 hours a day in an office and spent up to 3 hours a day commuting. On my worst days I'd log 2,500-3,000 steps. Better days I'd log 5,000-6,000. I mean, when you're real busy you can only make so many trips to the copier!
My favorite was when a group of us would "get healthy" by walking for lunch. The closest, most convenient places were a fast food restaurant across the street and a small deli/sandwich shop. Everything else was driving distance. The irony was that if you wanted to walk for your lunch to get healthy, you had to eat garbage. You didn't get any credit in this healthy program for preparing a farmer's market salad with quality ingredients in the morning and packing a truly healthy, nutrient-rich lunch for yourself every day. Some who brought their lunch would, after eating, walk aimless laps around the parking lot to bulk up their steps. I always felt stupid walking around the campus without a purpose, thinking of the phone calls and emails piling up in my office. And, at the end of the day, after enduring a 1 1/2 hour commute home who feels like cooking dinner? Five days of this each week just led to frequent unmotivated do-nothing weekends. You eat crap, get no exercise, feel like crap, which leads to crap performance at work. So you get depressed, which leads you to eat crap, etc . . . See the pattern?
In the few years that I've been cooking for a living my outlook on wellness, work and everyday food has changed. I work in a restaurant. There's no health insurance, much less a wellness program encouraging employees to be healthy. We're a high-end farm-to-table place that sources a majority of ingredients from local farms and purveyors. From late Spring to late Fall we grow most of our own produce. Meat, poultry and eggs are farm fresh. The fish also comes from high-quality sources. It's a little expensive to eat there, but that's because we spend money and effort sourcing the best ingredients. Not to mention the time and skill that goes into expertly preparing it.
All employees are entitled to one free meal during their shift. Usually two cooks make this meal from whatever we have available in house that creates the least possible expense to the restaurant. For example, on a day we break down chickens there are tons of legs that won't be used for dinner service. They are cooked up for the staff. Along with a vegetable side and a salad. Something like that. Every single day, my lunch is an expertly prepared meal of farm-fresh, unprocessed ingredients (with the exception of occasional flour, dried pasta, or some kind of condiment). That, plus the physical activity you are forced to maintain every day just to complete the job led to me losing 15 lbs in my first few months there without even trying. One day, just for fun, I wore the pedometer and noticed that I cleared 19,000 steps before my shift was over. Nearly twice what the wellness program at my last job recommended!
Funny thing is that everyone around me is surprised to see that I lost the weight. I always get comments like "If I was around food all day like you, I'd gain a hundred pounds!" But my new life of working with food has actually put me in a better position to be healthy long term. I live and breathe food now. I understand so much more about where it comes from, how it's produced, and the difference between fresh vs processed. And it's not just at work. It's part of my everyday life now. The more I practice my cooking skills at home, the better I eat. I'm always looking for the best food to cook with and making preparations from scratch. Like chicken stock, a staple that any good scratch cook has on hand all the time. No stock in a box for me!
Below is a grilled farm-fresh vegetable and chickpea salad I recently made for lunch on a day off. Way better than the crap I used to eat on a daily basis!
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