I’m a Chef on a GLP-1. I Believe the Future of Food Is About to Change Dramatically.

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. It felt like research. It felt like joy. It felt like my job.

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.

Then I started taking a GLP-1.

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. But what has changed is my decreased appetite for everything around that experience—the extra bites, the sweets I ate because they were there, the late-night food I reached for because I was tired rather than hungry.

Before taking a GLP-1, dinner was often a bowl of meat scraps over rice at 10:00 pm after dinner service. Dessert was sometimes an emotional event—something sweet because I was tired or stressed. That behavior has largely disappeared. The meds have quieted my noise and laziness around eating.

And guess what? I actually enjoy food more now.

When I’m actually hungry, I want food that delivers. I want something nutrient-dense and deeply flavorful—protein, fruit, vegetables, grains, spice, acid, texture—food that satisfies me physically and gastronomically. A perfectly seasoned and grilled piece of charred-skin salmon with citrus and spices and some sautéed greens can be electric and gives me everything I want from a meal: richness, umami, freshness, depth.

And my new mindset has made me consider something I have examined throughout my career: the American restaurant culture of abundance. The 24-ounce ribeye, the double-stack burger, the loaded fries, outrageous dessert mash-ups.

Pre-GLP-1s, the rise of places like Sweetgreen and the broader fast-casual wellness movement showed that people were hungry for food that was fresh, nutrient-dense, customizable, and satisfying without necessarily being enormous. High-protein, plant-forward, whole-food, and “clean eating” language had become part of mainstream food culture. GLP-1s have only accelerated this trend.

Yet we're still surrounded by the message that more is better. We're encouraged to maximize protein, add supplements to our smoothies, track macros, and optimize every meal. The “healthy” bowl has to look packed with ingredients. But now, on a GLP-1, I wonder whether satisfaction has ever really been about volume.

I have always been drawn to foods that are satiating not because they are nutrient-dense but because they are gastronomically complete—a dish with acidity, heat, texture, richness, and enough flavor that your brain registers an experience. Give me a bite of juicy, skin-on chicken thigh over an oversized skinless breast any day. The thigh brings richness and flavor; the breast is always one overcooked minute away from becoming a punishment.

That feels particularly relevant now, as nutrient density has become central to how we think about a meal. The conversation is increasingly about getting more value from what we eat rather than simply eating less.

And that is how I think about it now. I don’t want less flavor. I want more flavor per bite. I don’t want less pleasure. I want less eating that isn’t actually giving me pleasure. I didn’t lose my appetite. I lost the noise around it.

And I still absolutely love indulgence. Recently, I was at a friend’s restaurant and the food was so good that I simply could not stop eating 15 dishes in, I was over-stuffed but also wholistically full. I don’t regret a single bite.

That matters to me because I don’t want the lesson of the GLP-1 revolution to be that eating less is always better. It isn’t. Food is pleasure. Food is culture. Food is celebration. There are meals worth surrendering to if we have the privilege to have them.

I still want the extraordinary meal. I still want the dish that I remember forever. I still want to travel across the world to eat something I’ve never experienced before. What has changed is that I no longer feel compelled to eat everything simply because it is there.

As a chef, I don’t think the goal is necessarily to make people eat more. It’s to make them care more about what they eat. Food is meant to feed our bodies and souls. Let’s keep it that way.