So, What's This All About ~ Mouth Edition

I guess this is the origin story for Mouth & Muscle... at least the Mouth portion; and maybe a clarification of who I am.  Let's start with that one... I'm Dr. Claire Menck, one of the co-founders of Mouth & Muscle.  Specifically, I'm the Mouth part of the operation.  I'm a professional chef whose been in the food service industry for over 35 years.  Among other things, I'm also a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in change processes, specifically, my work has looked food and meaning making in the face of crisis.   [If that fascinates you, I will direct you to my dissertation right over HERE.]

About a year and a half ago I was a Corporate Chef for a cheese company.  That meant I spent a lot of time flying around the country cooking and selling cheese.  It was a great job with a great company... and I was miserable.  The travel was intense (three or more days a week in the air), long hours on my feet, lots of food and alcohol, and very little physical activity.  The job took its toll - I gained a lot of weight, had incredibly painful sciatica, and developed an intense gastro-intestinal sickness that would not go away.  Finally, it got to the point that when I boarded a plane out of Milwaukee the flight crew (all of whom knew me by name) would just hand me a Bloody Mary  because I was always in so much pain. I knew something had to change.  I went to the doctor, and after a battery of tests, he diagnosed me with a severe intolerance to casein... the protein in dairy. 

​You know, that's a problem for the chef of a cheese company.  By fall it was clear that I was not getting better, and I realized it was time to make some serious changes in my life.  I was 47 at the time, and it was now or never.

So, in December I left the land of dairy for good... including my job, and I began a pretty intense shift in my lifestyle.  Part of that change included going to the gym every day.  Around the same time I kept seeing posts on Instagram from one of my former students, Narin, who was involved with a pretty serious weight lifting program.  My fascination with weights had begun!  I began following accounts like PowerLiftingWomen, GRRRL, and GirlsWhoPowerlift.  I was completely obsessed with the power and strength I saw in the women in those posts, but more than that, I fell in love with their attitude.  This was a group of tough, determined chics doing things and looking ways society doesn't always embrace.  These ladies supported each other and celebrated differences in body shape, form, and ability.  This was my tribe.

In January of 2018 my health club offered an Olympic Powerlifting class, which I immediately signed up for.  It was apparent from the very first time I tried a clean and jerk that I lacked a few things: power, strength, and coordination.  If I was serious about this weightlifting thing, I needed someone to help me figure out how to do it.  And that's where Dan (the Muscle part of this equation) comes in the picture.  He led that class, and the next week he became my trainer.

Dan's a big football player type dude... looks like your average Bro, and that's what I needed - a Bro Translator.  I needed someone to teach me how to set the bar, how to load the bar.  I didn't know anything.  I didn't know what anything was called, much less how to sequence a workout.  Obi-Dan-kenobi, as I lovingly nicknamed him, was my entry into this world, and I was dogged in my determination to figure it out.

It quickly became apparent to me that Dan was not your average Bro.  He's an adoring father of two little boys, and husband to his lovely wife, Emily.  He's also infinitely more maternal than I will ever be, and he's incredibly sensitive to the challenges people, and women in particular, face when they embark on changing their lives in a dramatic way.  Powerlifting is traditionally a man's sport, and seeing women lifting heavy is unusual and threatening for a lot of people (men and women).  If I was seriously going to do this, I needed an ally who would explain this new language and world to me.  Dan's that guy.  He not only accepts women in the space, he actively promotes and celebrates them.  Dan's the guide through the wilderness of physical transformation, and the sometimes scary jungle of the gym.

And I'm no easy task.  I'm ridiculously impatient.  I want result now, and I am willing to hurt myself to get them.  I analyze things to within an inch of their lives (thank you doctoral degree!), and I hound Dan incessantly with questions about everything.  "Why is it called a 'kettlebell' and not a 'kettleball'?  It's a ball, not a bell."  "Why can't I workout seven days a week?"  "I can't possibly need to eat 3,000 calories a day! WTF?"  And every time Dan responds with the same patience and determination to make sure I do what I need to do, not what I want to do... dude is Chill AF.

Meanwhile, over in my kitchen this lifelong professional chef was trying to figure out the whole "no dairy" lifestyle.  Chefs eat... it's our job.  You have to know what things taste like to know how they will combine to make new taste and flavors.  We are professionally obligated to eat whatever we can, whenever it's made available. However that incessant drive to consume often leads exactly to where I was... sick and sidelined with a garden variety of physical maladies.  When I removed dairy from my diet I noticed the inflammation in my hip almost went away.  As I improved my muscular strength it has completely disappeared.  It became clear to me that this doctor-chef needed to heal herself.  The answer was in the food.  The food was the medicine.

Not being able to eat dairy logically led to learning a lot about plant-based cooking, including a short stint as a vegan.  I enrolled in Cornell's Plant Based Nutrition program (and became certified in March), and then set out to make this often maligned and unappetizing diet taste fabulous.  I have long believed that the true mark of a gifted chef is her (or his) ability to cook vegetables properly.  It's pretty easy to make meat taste good; throw some butter on it and you're good to go.  "Fat is flavor" is the mantra of most restaurant kitchens.  Put some cheese in whatever you got going and you're good to go... I know this because I sold a lot of cheese that way; it's an easy out. 

The real masters know how to make vegetables taste good because of their inherent qualities, not by shrouding them in animal fat.  Raw by Charlie Trotter was eye opening for me... unapproachable and unrealistic, but unbelievable.  Of course, there are the many Chez Panisse cookbooks that focus heavily on plant based cooking.  And Jaques Maniere's The Art of Cooking With Steam introduces many ideas for plant based preparations that don't load on the dairy.  And then we've got the whole sous vide movement... but I'll leave that for another blog post.

I've been a cook for a long time, but this was a new challenge, and I was invigorated by it. It was the first time in a long while I had a deep passion to learn about cooking again.  Yes, I eat meat.  Yes, Mouth & Muscle prepares meat in our meal service, and promotes it in our culinary coaching, but we also love our phytochemicals (nutrients derived from plants).  And we embrace our vegan brothers and sisters with open arms.

Between the gym and my kitchen, I started to change physically, emotionally, and on a deeper, more spiritual level.  I found a new passion for being in my body.  I became fascinated with nutrition, and completed the Precision Nutrition level one certification.  Working out and eating in alignment with what my body wanted was no longer a prison sentence, and I was no longer driven to eat what my subconscious mind had been habituated to wanting after years of over-indulgence,  .  I stopped having a "final destination" weight, or goal, and instead completely and totally fell in love with living in a 48 year old body that moved and functioned like it was 32.

I knew how to make healthy food taste amazing, and Dan knew how to get my body to build muscle without destroying itself.  And that, my friends, is the exact moment when Mouth and Muscle was born.

One day I emailed Dan and told him I had finally figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up... I wanted to spend every waking hour reveling in healthy food and being strong, and I wanted to spread that to the entire world.  My thought was, that if everyone felt this good, there would be less bad stuff because everyone would just be happy.  And I wanted him to help me do it.  Flash forward a couple months, and you are now perusing the fruits of those initial conversations.  This is the nexus of two people's very different skill sets, but very similar passions - making life better through eating and moving.

Dan and I are very different people, but there are a few things we absolutely agree on... meat is good, and life is better when you are strong and healthy.  Your world is easier to navigate when your body is capable of meeting the challenges it will invariably face.  Food and fitness are not punishments for bad behavior.  Instead, they are places to explore who you are, and what you are capable of becoming - places of great joy, and unlimited possibility.  You don't work out to get somewhere, you work out to be where you are right now, fully present in the body you have at this very moment.

So, welcome to Mouth & Muscle.  This is our community, and I sincerely hope it will become your community.

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