I HAVE SPENT much of my adult life traveling the world in pursuit of food. As a chef, obsessive eater, and amateur food anthropologist, I have planned trips around eating: multi-day street-food crawls, three or four restaurants in a day, 10-, 20-, even 40-course tasting menus. At the time, it didn’t feel excessive.
But my relationship with food started somewhere very different. I grew up modestly and was taught early that you cleaned your plate. Food was something you respected because you didn’t always have an abundance of it.
Wasting food was unacceptable. That lesson followed me into my career. As a chef, I’m acutely conscious of food waste—not only because I know how much labor and resources go into getting food onto a plate, but because I think constantly about the environmental cost of what we eat.
So for much of my life, I had two ideas operating simultaneously—food was precious and shouldn’t be wasted, but food was also something to pursue, experience, and celebrate as fully as possible. I entered my late 40s mid-pandemic, facing a dramatically slower metabolism, COVID weight gain, and a torn meniscus. I knew how to lose 40 pounds.
I had done it a few times before, but the usual cardio, weightlifting, intermittent fasting, eating keto, and weekly 24-hour fasts weren’t delivering the results they once had. Losing the weight took twice as long. Despite the initial public backlash around GLP-1 medications, I saw a potential lifeline from the weight-loss yo-yo I’d experienced so many times before.
I’ve been on tirzepatide for two years and it’s worked. I’m surprised by how the medication has changed my life in many ways—but especially when it comes to my relationship with food. I still love bold flavors, food with depth and intensity, and dishes that make you pause after a bite because there is so much happening.
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