Battle of the Bulge: Kitchen as the Gym

I love my Santoku knife. We've been through so much together. Once you've gone Santoku, there's no going back to a paring knife. Santokus attack their prey like a cleaver—which, I must say, is quite satisfying. Whack! Whack! Hiiiii-ya! 

Choose your weapon.

Dicing and mincing can be quite soothing, especially with the right cutting board, wide, roomy, and thick. Even though some recipes encourage digging out the food processor, I prefer to do my own fine chopping. (Plus clean-up is a lot easier.) 

Rocco DiSpirito recommends cooking as a workout. Rocco, once too heavy, is now healthily slender, and has a new cookbook that turns the kitchen into a gym.  

The Santoku and I are an official couple because my diet contains very little processed foods. Cereal, once the breath of my life, is now a rare treat—and I'm talking about the Trader Joe's High Fiber Cereal and Barbara's Morning Oat Crunch. 

Shazam: Even foods that we think are healthy, aren't. The food companies are swift on the uptake, and are quick to adapt. They know how to market anything. 

Processed is processed—pretty much anything possessing a long and complicated ingredients list. Especially since they can winkle sugars and quasi-sugars into anything, which does a number on you (as a recovering sugarholic, it pains me to say so). 

Damon Gameau turned himself into a fattened and sickly guinea pig for his movie, That Sugar Film, by eating so-called "healthy" processed and ready-made foods. 

Note that whatever sugar is used in the discretion of one's own kitchen differs greatly than how it is chucked into products while trundling down the assembly line. It's not that one cannot ever eat sugar. But you should be the one to decide how much goes into you, not the food companies.