If you strip it down to the basics, The Sexy Chef is involved in the food delivery business. However, they don’t offer and deliver just any type of food. The Sexy Chef specializes in meals patterned after the very popular and very much talked about South Beach Diet.
Their business is simple but quite compelling: They prepare a particular South Beach Diet menu for the day, and then they deliver the specially-concocted, anti-flab meals in ready-to-heat containers. The Sexy Chef will give you the luxury of not having to worry about what you’re going to eat (or not going to eat) during the day. If you tap them, they will deliver to you five meals for that particular day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and two in-between snacks. That doesn’t sound much of a diet, right? It sounds more like gluttony. Two in-between snacks? Heck, I only have one per day! But according to Barni, this is precisely the magical mystery behind the South Beach Diet. You don’t have to starve yourself to death to lose weight and stay fit. In fact, you can even eat things like pudding and cake. But it has to be made of the right ingredients and of course, it should be the right volume.
The Sexy Chef is one of many booming businesses that offer products and services that cater to our need to stay fit and healthy. This need is a relatively new need. Ten years ago, we couldn’t really care less about what we ate and the number of calories we needed to burn. In the "dark ages," people actually ordered food without considering the amount of lard that was used in cooking the meal. Back then, people didn‘t count calories, fat, or cholesterol that they took in with the food that they ate. Whenever we’d have family get-togethers and crispy pata, lechon, sisig, and chicharon bulaklak were laid before us on the buffet table, we’d say "Uy, pampabata yang pagkain na yan ha! Bata kang mamamatay!" And we’d all have a laugh – and eat heartily.
It’s different these days. If you prepare a big feast in your house, you’ll notice only a handful of people will touch the oily foods. Nowadays, you have to serve a lot of lean meat, fish, and veggies – low calorie stuff. In fact, not a lot of people touch their rice bowls during parties. Rice is the new millennium’s crispy pata. What used to be our staple food is now branded as the ultimate weight-gainer and a diet no-no. I recently read an article about a 17-year-old celebrity who said she didn’t eat rice at all because she wanted to lose weight. But if you look at her, she’s as thin as Olive Oyl. And yet she asserts, "I have to lose weight, I’m so fat!" Clearly, the "staying fit" business is serious business. Any industry that can convince a 98-pound girl that she’s fat is doing one heck of a marketing job!
Oddly enough, even people who have unhealthy habits are trying to have that "I have to stay fit" mentality. Recently, my wife and I went to Hong Kong to visit an old friend, Tet Bermejo. We went to our favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant and we gobbled up two full plates of roasted duck. After the meal, I said, "Man, that was sinful." Tet replied, "You know, I don’t feel too guilty, because every day naman, I try to watch what I eat. Healthy living ako." Then, she got her lighter, lit a cigarette and took a heavy puff. I just stared at her. Tet then looked at me and realized her contradicting statement. I then said, "Oh, I see. Healthy living, huh?" We laughed our lungs out.
It’s great that a lot more people today are health-conscious. With more and more people having heart attacks and cancer in their 30s (and even in their 20s), eating healthy and staying fit are the better alternatives than being hospitalized and bedridden during their prime.
Sometimes though, staying fit becomes an obsession. We now measure everything just to stay fit – from the caloric intake, to the number of minutes on the treadmill, to the number of power bars we need to munch before a game, to the number of badminton games we play weekly. It’s become a science. It’s not fun anymore. And what happens when they don’t achieve the fitness level they want? They throw a fit. This is the bad kind of fit, not the good one.
An analogy can be made in the corporate world. Sometimes, we try too hard to fit in our company to the point that we try to do everything and anything to make sure we win people over. But in my experience, there is no way you can perfectly fit in a company. There will always be that one person who hates you or can’t get along with you or is not fond of you. Maybe it’s your client or supplier. And when you can’t fix it, what do you do? You throw a fit. Fit is a strange word.
There is no such thing as the perfect fit. It is not about having an all or nothing attitude. Whenever you buy shoes, you never really get a perfect fit. Even if it’s the right size, one foot is almost always less comfortable than the other (because our feet are never the same size). So, if you become too much of a perfectionist, you’ll end up barefooted the rest of your life.
While there can never be a perfect fit in this life, we can always try. In the end, having that good fit in life is all about living life fully in the situations that you find yourself in. It’s doing the best you can with the situation. If you end up being miserable in the process of trying to get that perfect fit, then it’s not worth it. You’ll just find yourself having a fit. The bad kind, that is.