Absolutely. You’ve got to double fist it. I tell people, if you’re going to go out, you need to have some water. That’s my biggest rule. Because I didn’t have the best relationship with alcohol, to be quite honest with you. So I’ve learned. Part of it was out of necessity to feel better the next day, but I’ve learned that it’s also just a better, healthful practice to hydrate.
First, thank you for having me, for real. I love doing stuff like this, where I get to connect with people one-on-one. Sometimes social media doesn’t allow that opportunity.
My story started almost a decade ago. I was at a place in my life where I was just super depressed, I was overweight and I was medicating with a lot of food, period. Number one, I was broke as a joke. It was around the 2008 timeframe. The stock market crashed, everything went to hell in a handbasket. I thought I was going to get married, that fell through and I found myself back on my parents’ couch in Dallas, Texas trying to figure out life. I began to eat and drink very heavily. I’d drink in secret by myself and I mean, I was like, eating cupcakes in the parking lot of 7-Eleven so that people wouldn’t find me. Just behind the scenes.
What changed for me was when someone posted this photo of me on Facebook, and this is before the times where they had the Facebook controls to approve it. So the photo went immediately to my page. I didn’t realize how greasy I had become. That was one of the first aha moments. The second one was that I just wanted to feel better. I was super depressed. I was having suicidal ideations and I just wanted to feel better. I reached out to a personal trainer online through social media. They gave me some crazy price to go ahead and to lose weight. I said, “I can’t afford that.” So I went over to a bookstore, Half Price Books, and I bought every single book they had about nutrition. I just began to consume the content. My idea was much more of a crowdsourcing idea, in that I was going to start up a blog and post every single thing that I was eating. That way people like you, Catt, who are very fit and healthy could give me some advice on what to do. I was taking meals that I really enjoyed eating, from soul food to Mexican food, making them more healthful and posting it, trying to get feedback.
But the reverse happened. I found that there were more people out there who were just like me, tired of the same old chicken breast, brown rice and broccoli meal. They began to follow me and ask about my journey. I began to lose weight through my own transformation with food. And that’s how the FitMenCook community was started. It was not always an altruistic community. Now it is. We try to help everybody. I want everyone to be healthy and fit, but really I was just trying to do a side hustle, because I couldn’t afford to pay for a personal trainer.
It’s one thing that you wanted to be fit, but it was literally about staying alive for you at one point. Now you’re changing other people’s lives. When did you first start seeing the shift?
I started my blog in the summer of 2012 and I began to grow exponentially by that January timeframe. Everyone started to go to my blog and ask me questions. I got this message from Bodybuilding.com and I thought it was spam, so I didn’t respond to it. Two weeks later I got another followup message from them. At this time, Bodybuilding.com was one of the top 100 websites in the world. It had so much traffic, because that was the only way… this was pre-Amazon where you could get your healthy supplements and whatnot. It was a hugely popular website. So, I got an email from them the second time around. I thought, “Alright, let me just respond to it.” I said, “Sure, we can hop on the phone.” I thought they were trying to set up some type of affiliate thing, but it was the editor-in-chief of Bodybuilding.com. He said, “Our athletes love your meals, love your approach. Will you come and write for us?” I was thinking, “Do you know what I look like? Because I don’t look like a fitness model. I’m not the person that you put on the front of magazines. I’m not that dude.” He said, “It doesn’t matter. We love your approach to healthy living.” And that was one of the first things that got me thinking, “Maybe I have something and maybe this passion that I have to help myself get healthy can be something.”
From a business standpoint, what were some of the bigger obstacles once you started growing?
A lot of stuff goes on behind the scenes that you just don’t share with people. One thing that I will share is that, content doesn’t always come easy. When you change from a position of passion to all of a sudden doing it full time, it becomes a job. I didn’t have the right boundaries set up in place, so I allowed my passion to become a chore. I began to hate what I was doing because I’d think, “Ugh, I’ve got to do another post. I’ve got to make sure that people are subscribing. I’ve got to…”, and so the very thing that I loved to do, I was falling out of love with it because I was doing it all the time. I had to have the right boundaries, not just with content creation, but also with being on social media. It’s funny saying this because I’m a social media personality, but I try to spend the least amount of time on social media. I’m the dude that says, “Hey, please don’t send me a DM; you need to call me. If you have my number, you need to be calling me.” I’m not the guy who texts often. I pick up the phone. I want to go back to pre-social media times. In fact, my girlfriend, when she met me, I don’t think she knew what I was doing. She asked me at one point, “Do you want me to follow you?” I said, “You can, if you want to, but even more, I’d love it if you asked me about my day, instead of discovering it on social media.” What we did before. I want that interpersonal connection. I genuinely try to spend less time on social media so that I can have more of those in-person interactions.
It sounds like you’ve fine tuned your mental health. Food and how we feel, what is that connection and why is it so important?
Scientifically, a lot of people know that serotonin is a mood booster. It’s that part in our brain that makes us feel good, it makes us feel happy. Well, the highest concentration of serotonin has been found inside of our stomach. So gut health and what we eat is really important to how we feel. That’s why we have that term comfort food. When we eat something, people say, “Oh, I felt really good afterwards.” Or, “Oh, I felt really good about eating it.” That’s because it gives us instant satisfaction. But studies have also shown that maybe five minutes later, you end up feeling bloated and lethargic. So, that comfort food high is short-lived. If you think about food like that, then you understand that what we put into our bodies makes us feel good.
I want to give you an empirical example of what I went through and why I believe what I do. When I was at my lowest and having a suicidal ideation, I was in counseling, I was on medication to feel better. When I started cooking for myself it was out of necessity, because I couldn’t afford a lot of things. I was on food stamps at the time because I had lost my job, I had lost everything. I didn’t have anything. I was literally just trying to find my way, and cooking for myself was a way for me to stay within my budget.
A crazy thing began to happen. I began to feel so much better. I began to work out and really get into exercise a lot more. Weight began to fall off me. I started to feel better in my mood. Then all of a sudden I woke up y’all and I realized, “Oh snap, I haven’t taken my depression and anxiety medication in two weeks.” So I went to my psychiatrist right away. I said, “Oh my God, I’m probably going to be due for… I’m going to spiral out of control.” He said, “No. This is a good thing.” He said, “If you don’t need it right now, don’t take it, because sometimes it’s circumstantial. What you’ve discovered is that there’s a big synergy between being active and eating better. It makes you feel better, too. So, continue doing that. You don’t have to take it right now, but if you need it, take it.” That right there, just a light bulb, a huge light bulb went off. Food is the key to me feeling better. Medication is good and needed in some cases, right? Medicine is a really good thing y’all. But it showed me that I don’t have to rely on that solely to feel better.
I know so many people —especially in the last year or so —have fallen into these slumps, forgetting about their exercise regimen, eating unhealthy foods.What are some tips to baby step back into practices to feel better?
Start small. Don’t try to overhaul everything on day one. I actually want to speak to something that I know I’ve dealt with and I know a lot of other people are dealing with. The first thing that I want you to do if you gained some weight because of what we’re going through… and it is trauma. All of us have been going through something traumatic. Even if we haven’t lost anybody or experienced that, this is traumatic. I want you to give yourself a break. Give yourself a break. Alright? Don’t be hard on yourself. Don’t get down. We just went through hell and we’re still going through it. I want you to give yourself a break. I say that because the more we rehearse these types of comments in our heads, the more we actually go down that path and continue the same behavior. So, I want you to forgive yourself and give yourself some grace to get back on track. When those negative thoughts creep in, I want you to rehearse that. It’s really important.
Then, I want you to pick one habit that you’ve perhaps picked up during this whole pandemic and I want you to work on that. Perhaps you’ve been a little bit more loosey-goosey with the alcohol consumption. I want you to work on just that one thing. I’m not saying to go cold turkey with it. I’m saying, if you drink three bottles of wine in one week, I want you to go to two bottles of wine. And then one bottle of wine per week. That’s your goal. That’s what I want you to focus on. Once you get done with that, you’re going to think, “Kev, that was easy.” Correct. That’s the way I want you to feel. And I want you to add one more thing onto that. And one more thing. And one more thing. For me, it was, “I can start to cook my meal, cook my lunch and bring my lunch every single day to work.” So that way, first of all, I can save money, but also I can stay on track. I did that for a minute and thought, “This is easy. Let me do my breakfast. Let me do my post-workout meal.” All of a sudden, my entire diet was something that I was cooking. But it didn’t happen on day one. Get out of that day-one mentality, do it gradually.
You have built this business and you’ve been so successful in your endeavors. What impact is it at the end of the day that you are trying to leave with people?
Thanks for asking that. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question before. Fundamentally, I don’t want anyone to ever feel the way that I felt a long time ago when I felt that I had zero options. But more than anything else, I want to broaden people’s perspective and definition of what wellness is and what it can be. We’ve been told and we’ve been shown a very narrow definition of what it looks like aesthetically, numbers-wise. Health and wellness is so much more than that. It’s so much more than the magazine cover. It’s about the dad who wants to get off his heart medication so he can take a walk around the block with his kids. It’s about the woman who wants to be able to travel the world. It’s about that person who just wants to feel better in life. All those things, I’ve found, really do start in the kitchen. That’s what I want people to be left with. That our lives can be so much richer. And that’s why I say being healthy and happy because it’s so broad in how we define both of those things.
[Q/A Quinn]
What was one of the hardest eating habits for you to break and what was the solution, whether conventional or unconventional?
For me, it was the late-night bingeing. Hormonally, I get a lot hungrier after 8 p.m. I can go the whole day without eating. And so, late night bingeing, partly just so that I could go to sleep with a full stomach, but also just out of anxiety and depression.
One thing that I had to do was first off, make sure that I’m eating adequately throughout the day. I would literally put a timer on my phone to remind me to eat so that way I won’t be super hungry at night. The other thing I did was, and some people would disagree with this, but I actually stopped buying things, my little comfort snacks. I would just go in and eat tons and tons of nut butter out of anxiety in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m. I’m up there just scooping it out. So, I stopped buying nut butter and that really did help me out because I didn’t have that to reach for. I replaced it with fruit, if I were to be up at that time. I’m not up anymore. The third thing is that I got on a better sleep routine. I got myself a weighted blanket, a weighted sleep mask. Having a system about how to wind down the day actually worked out. And then one of my top things, I got from a body builder friend of mine, is to eat boiled eggs. If I were to be hungry in the middle of the night, I would have a boiled egg. The yolk is really filling. Put some hot sauce on it. The capsicum in the hot sauce helps to curb my appetite and I go right back to sleep.
[Catt Sadler]
Last question, if you have a cheat meal, what is it?
Whataburger, easy. Whataburger, IHOP or Waffle House. Because I just know what I’m going to get. There is something about having a treat meal and you go to a place thinking, “Oh, okay. I’ll try something new,” and it’s a terrible thing and you’ve been saving up for it. You’re like, “I just wasted my treat meal on this!” But those places, they will always hit. They will always slap.
