Against the Grain: Rethinking Sports Nutrition with Lentine Alexis

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk Bachmann: Hello everyone, my name is Kirk Bachmann, and welcome back to The Ultimate Dish. Today, we’re thrilled to welcome Lentine Alexis — chef, endurance athlete, Ayurvedic practitioner, and a trailblazer in the world of holistic sports nutrition.

Lentine’s journey into food and performance began nearly two decades ago while training as a professional endurance athlete on a subtropical island in Japan. Struggling to fuel her training with traditional “athlete foods,” she began to reimagine nutrition through a more intuitive, flavorful, and – I love this – joyful lens, one rooted in real food and personal connection.

She holds a Diplôme in Pâtisserie and Baking from Le Cordon Bleu, a B.A. in Social Ecology and Economics, is a certified holistic nutritionist, Ayurvedic health counselor, yoga and breathwork instructor, and sports performance coach. Over the past decade, she’s worked as a consultant, recipe developer, and wellness advocate within the sports nutrition world, guiding others to fuel not just performance but purpose.

Lentine’s culinary philosophy goes against the grain, encouraging athletes and everyday eaters alike to nourish themselves through flavor, intuition, and, again, joy. Through her teaching, writing, and personal story, she invites others to pursue their wildest dreams with food that fuels both body and spirit.

So get ready for a conversation about redefining nourishment, listening to your body, and building a life—and a plate—filled with intention.

And there she is. Good morning! How are you?

Lentine Alexis: I’m well. How are you, Kirk?

Boulder Roots

Kirk Bachmann: I’m a little exhausted, and I’m probably going to need some replenishment after that amazing, amazing bio. I’m so excited that you’re here. We have the occasional Boulder locals on the show. Recently, we had Hosea Rosenberg from Blackbelly.

Lentine Alexis: Love him.

Kirk Bachmann: He’s amazing. Super happy to continue this trend today with you, Lentine. I have to give some love to my wife, Gretchen, who really put me in touch with you through social media. We love following your adventures on IG, as she calls it. Whether it’s sharing a recipe or going on a bike ride in Boulder with your son, your content is – the word I like to use – it’s peaceful.

Lentine Alexis: Thank you.

Kirk Bachmann: We have a little bit of a script here, but as we talked earlier, I’m going way off the script. I’m super, super excited. We were joking earlier that you have a calmness about you. I don’t. I’m going to try to balance that somehow. Let’s just start with how long you’ve been in Boulder. And how much do you love Boulder?

Lentine Alexis: I was born and raised in Boulder, actually.

Kirk Bachmann: Oh, wow! Which high school?

Lentine Alexis: I went to Boulder High, and I grew up right at the foothills of the Flatirons, which is an incredible place to be. I remember scrambling up one of the trails that exited out of our neighborhood and up to the Star, the famed Star. Many nights from Thanksgiving to New Year’s or whatever. Then I left and went to college in New York, and ended up moving to the Southeast and then to Asia. Excuse me. First to the Southeast and then to Europe and then to Asia. Then to the Pacific Northwest and all the way down to California. Then moved back to Boulder about twelve years ago now.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s about when we came back. I grew up first [in] Chicago, and then the Gunnison Crested Butte area, which is really removed. In high school, we would play sports in the Boulder area and stuff. I have to say – having been gone for a long time, back to Chicago again, the Pacific Northwest and then here again – boy, Boulder has changed.

Lentine Alexis: I feel like I get into this conversation with a lot of people in Boulder.

Kirk Bachmann: Especially now with Sundance and everything.

Lentine Alexis: Oh yeah. There are things about Boulder that have shifted and that are different, for sure. If I walk down on Pearl Street, I don’t remember exactly what buildings were where. People are coming. More visitors are coming. Places and trails and quiet secret spots in the mountains that no one knew about have definitely been discovered.

But at the core, my dad moved here because he took a job at NCAR, and then he was an astrophysicist who worked at Ball. He moved his family here because he wanted to be close to the mountains. Boulder is surrounded by an incredible trail system and land that will never be developed. It’s a really, really special place in that regard. We have so much nature right around us. People that live here value that, and the people that move here value that. That’s not changed; that’s still exactly the same. We know a lot of friends in our close group of people who weren’t born in Boulder who moved here for quality of life and for access to nature and connection to nature. That is the same. It’s just that the companies that they’ve built were successful, and they’ve now moved those companies here.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah.

Lentine Alexis: That’s something that feels like a bit of a pain pinch. The density that Boulder might be achieving feels much, much different than it was when I was a little kid. Ultimately, I wish everyone could live in alignment with the natural world and spend more time moving their bodies, breathing fresh air, and eating beautiful food that’s grown locally. All of those are things that I wish every community would embrace and value. I can’t really complain about it.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s so beautifully said. It’s one of the reasons we started the Escoffier school here about twelve years ago. In many ways, that was the reason. We wanted the smaller community that had this educational vibe. CU took care of that for us. We did the same thing in Austin with the University of Texas.

If I could – and I have to say, what I love about your comments about Boulder, they are so consistent. We have a really good relationship with Bobby Stuckey and all the folks at Pizzeria and Frasca, of course. Our students all aspire – “Why’d you come to Boulder?” “To go to Frasca.”

Lentine Alexis: Bobby’s amazing. He’s such a dear friend of ours.

Kirk Bachmann: He’s so great. I figured he was. You know Bryan from Corrida. Every morning I get inspired by jumping on and seeing where Bobby ran or where he rode his bike, or what you’ve been up to, or some other friends that I mentioned – Lauren Lewis doing yoga in the park. That’s very, very special. I know you can find that in different places, but not so close.

Lentine Alexis: It’s up close.

Kirk Bachmann: We do in Boulder.

Lentine Alexis: You know, I used to be very close to an organization called No Kid Hungry. They have something called Chef Cycle. There were many years where my schedule allowed me to go and do Chef Cycle. I met so many really incredible chefs, all of whom were just getting into cycling. To be honest, a lot of them had finally reached a pinnacle of success in their careers where they were able to step away from their restaurants and their work and take care of themselves again. Bobby and Bryan and other chefs in our local community here – and even chefs that I know from the Los Angeles area, Travis Lett and others – their natural cycles and their connections to themselves and to nature were never pieces that left them. In my opinion, it’s really influenced their food; it really influences the way that they eat. It influences the way that they show up in their communities and the way that they think of their responsibilities as chefs. I just think that’s a really important piece of food community, having people who tend the food who are also able to take care of themselves so they can feel it and understand the value and think about our planet. Those sorts of trends.

Kirk Bachmann: Fully, fully agree. You know what’s really interesting is that they’ve been able to – when you walk into Frasca, to a person, there’s a culture there, whether it’s Sergei or…. Ian, who’s the chef there, is also a Cordon Bleu graduate, Atlanta. We joke about that. They are all here for the same reason. They want to provide incredible hospitality, but they also take care of themselves.

Lentine Alexis: One hundred percent.

Performance and Purpose

Kirk Bachmann: Absolutely love that.

This is a quote from you: “Guiding others to fuel not just performance but purpose.” Can we open with that? What does that mean?

Lentine Alexis: Yeah. I work with a lot of professional athletes from multiple-year Olympians to professional freeride skiers and freeriders. And everyday athletes, too. A lot of the way that every one of those individuals looks at eating and fueling is from a place of fuel. “I’m going to put in this thing because I want to get this output.” That’s something I certainly experienced as a professional athlete when I was working with my coaching team and the nutritionists that were guiding me. There was a very real piece of “we need B vitamins, so put this in. We need carbohydrates, so put this in. We need the proteins.” That completely separated me from joy. You’ve mentioned I use the word “joy” a lot.

Kirk Bachmann: Such a great word.

Lentine Alexis: The feeling of being connected to my body and being in awe of what it can do. When I am eating and nourishing myself in a way where I am cellularly aligned and bio-energetically balanced, I can be philanthropic. I can be creative. I can be outgoing. I can push myself beyond limits that I think are reasonable. That is something that measured fueling cannot do.

An analogy that I like to give my athletes is if you think about – let’s say you’re a hundred-meter sprint distance runner and you’re trying to set the world record. Your muscles aren’t like, “here’s how many calories you have.” It’s not measured. You have to trust that you have that base, that power, that spirit within you, to blast through your old definition. That has nothing to do with macro-nutrients. Nothing. Every single day can be like that for us as human beings. There are endless possibilities of things we can do and achieve and connect and become. That’s where the purpose piece comes in.

What are we here for? Is it to get a medal at the local race? Is it just to cross the finish line? Maybe. Maybe that is the purpose, but being able to connect to what makes you joyful, what makes you tick is something that dense nourishment – in a way that can’t be measured – gives you.

Kirk Bachmann: I had to write a few of those things down. It was so insightful. This is not on the script. As I told you earlier, I went up to the University of Oregon with my son a weekend ago. He was at a pretty cool baseball camp; Showcase, they called it. You just triggered something for me because one of the coaches was talking to the players around nutrition. Listen, when you’re a baseball player at the University of Oregon, you’re going to see the dorm over here. You’re not in that dorm! You stay over here because we control your schedule, your workout, your diet. He talked about – you said the word “blast.” I love that word. He used the word “explosiveness.” Is that something you concur with, this idea that you have prepared your body to explode? It’s all my son’s talking about now. “Dad, I need to get explosive. I need to be explosive.” He’s going to be a sophomore in high school. Is that connected? Are we talking about the same thing?

Lentine Alexis: Yeah, we’re talking about the same thing. I think especially when you’re working with athletes – for example, I have one client, an athlete that I’ve worked with for many years. She’s a professional freeride skier. She’s been to the Olympics many times. Now her work is to pick mountains in the world that she wants to ski down.

Kirk Bachmann: I want to sign up for that!

Lentine Alexis: Right? Amazing. Just chills. When you look at this woman’s biometrics, it’s incredible how strong her body is. The capability of doing this comes from a place. First of all, you’re not [thinking] “Oh, I’m worried I’m not going to poop.” Got that locked down. Sorry to jump ship to a different place. All the things that we’re thinking about as individuals who are struggling to navigate the noise. “Do I need more protein?” No, you are eating. You are living. You are breathing in a way where you’ve got this foundation of being like, “Oh, yeah. I can do this impossible thing.”

In Ayurvedic wisdom, we call this “ojas.” Ojas translates directly to vitality. It’s fueled and “juiced up” by three things: rest, which means sleep, but also psychological and emotional rest from things that challenge us. It’s fueled by joy, doing things that make us genuinely happy; connecting with our people – sharing a meal, standing on top of a mountain and breathing fresh air, walking through the wildflowers and brushing your fingers, cuddling your dog or your favorite person, whatever it is – and it’s fueled by dense nourishment. This is beautiful food. This is delicious food that has tons of flavor, which by the way, is connected to nutrition from an Ayurvedic perspective. These three things give us this stable foundation to do the impossible.

So trusting that and trusting that as a framework, as opposed to one that counts out measurements and uses individual packets or accouterments or scales to measure what we should be putting in is where I’m coming from. That’s this purpose. It can be, “I’m going to be the best mom I can be,” or “I’m going to run my fastest marathon time,” or it can be “I’m going to create a foundation that benefits this,” or “I’m going to start a company that does that. It’s all from the same place.

Kirk Bachmann: It feels simple, right? Rest, joy, and dense nourishment, but it’s not.

Lentine Alexis: It’s very challenging.

Kirk Bachmann: Rest is one of the toughest, depending on how busy we are. Do you know Kelly Newlon at all from RAD?

Lentine Alexis: Yes.

The Rapha Clubhouse

Kirk Bachmann: She’s also a culinarian, went to school at the CIA. She worked with us forever, still comes running when I call. She’s amazing. Super, super cool.

Noelle is dying already now because she can tell I’m way too comfortable. I’m way off script. I’m way over time, but I don’t care. I’m in charge. I’m having so much fun. If you run out of time, just tell me. I’m going to keep going; I’m having so much fun.

I didn’t know this. I should have known it. But you spent ten years with Rapha.

Lentine Alexis: I’m still with them. Yeah.

Kirk Bachmann: You’re still with them! You’re still with them. I don’t look like a cyclist, but I love, love, love cycling. I was at the World Championships at Colorado Springs like fifty years ago. Maybe not that long ago. It used to be really big in the Crested Butte area. They did a lot of criteriums up there. I did a little bit in college, but when I go to Rapha – and you talk about culture – when you hear the clicking of the cleats coming in, and the riders are putting their bikes up, and they’re getting a cappuccino or an espresso. They’re talking about their ride, and they’re watching races on the screen. Of course, the apparel is insanely beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about that experience? I’ve been to Rapha in Chicago. I’ve been in London. Wherever I go, I try to go. I’m in Nice and I look for a bike shop just because I love the culture there. How important is Rapha to Pearl Street [and] to Boulder, Colorado?

Sorry! I should get money for this, but I love the place! It’s my place. It’s my space.

Lentine Alexis: Totally. The clubhouse in Boulder is a really special place in our house because I was a professional endurance athlete. I was racing for Cliff Bar. I was doing pretty much any type of endurance challenge I could get my hands on. But I landed in a place where I started doing a lot more road cycling because the culture was there. I wanted to meet friends. I didn’t want to just train on my own. I didn’t want to just hammer myself into the ground by myself or something. I enjoyed the challenge and the experience and the adventure of riding with others.

I joined with Rapha as an ambassador in 2015. That was the same year that I met my now husband here in Boulder. He was a professional cyclist. They had approached me about, “Oh, we’re opening this clubhouse. Would you be interested in being a part of this?”

I was like, “Well, yeah, of course.” Also, they needed somebody to actually run the place. My husband was in a place in his career where he had an opening, so he joined Rapha. He was the general manager at the clubhouse.

At that time, the business model included that all of the clubhouses around the world had a cafe. I don’t know if you would remember this or not, but I designed the menu for the cafe here in Boulder and also for the one in Los Angeles. Some pieces of that spread out to Chicago and other spots because we created a menu that was really easy to implement by anybody anywhere.

That store opened on Pearl Street with this beautiful, simple menu. We had a rice bowl. We had some fancy toasts and a couple things. Because we didn’t have a full kitchen and because we were using a rice cooker, a sous vide machine, and basically a blender and a Cuisineart to make our menu. We were able to not charge very much for our food. People from all over Boulder, whether they were cyclists or not, came to the clubhouse and they were eating lunch with us, and they were watching races on TV, and they were touching the clothes, and they were getting a chance to connect. Again, they didn’t have to call themselves cyclists; they were just coming to Rapha to enjoy.

Eventually, that business model no longer fit the goals of the business. I wish that it would return, but the clubhouse has sort of shifted and changed. Nonetheless, it was a real hub for cycling. It was a real hub for town. It sprung up the idea in my former colleague, Allen Lim, to really build the rice bowl that he offers now at the Skratch Labs Cafe, which is also on Pearl Street. Even Chef Kelly Whitaker – I was in Dry Storage the other day and was like, “Can we sit down and talk about the rice bowl at some point in time? Because you guys really crushed the rice bowl.”

I was like, “Yeah. If you want to talk about the rice bowl, we can totally do that.”

It was something. I think Rapha has permeated Boulder in a really important way. The people that live here – as we’ve talked about – really value their physical activity. We value being out and being in nature. Doing that comfortably and easily and beautifully is something that we value, so Rapha is a really easy alignment there.

I think that as Boulder shifts and changes, and even as the cycling community shifts and changes, we still need to put hubs for cyclists to meet and greet. I think watching the brand change – Rapha has gone through some interesting transitions. Rapha was, at one time, a very aspirational brand where everything was about glory through suffering. It felt exclusive and difficult to touch. Frankly, that was something that was really fun about being a part of that community, feeling like you could fit in there and challenge yourself unapologetically. But Boulder also needs places for beginners to learn and other people who are curious about cycling to come and join, to hop on rides, to have places to view racing. I really genuinely feel that Rapha is growing and shifting and changing with our town here in Boulder. The clubhouse here is unique in ways that extend beyond just selling clothes, and I think it’s really important for us to have those sorts of places in a town like this.

Kirk Bachmann: That whole block. Sometimes I struggle because I love going in, getting my little latte from Rapha, but my buddy’s over here at Boxcar. The best thing that could have happened to me is that they opened up the new location over by us. I’m in there every day.

You mentioned Chef Kelly. He’s been on the show as well. If there’s a podium of my favorite places to go, in no particular order, Frasca, Rapha, and Dry Storage. My wife is at Dry Storage so much. They don’t have a frequent flyer card, but they kind of have an imaginary one for Gretchen. “Oh, Gretchen’s here!”

Lentine Alexis: I love that. We go there all the time. Kelly and I actually worked at Providence together at the same time.

Kirk Bachmann: You know, I thought I recognized the name. So he’s been really busy working on a cool concept in Oklahoma. I don’t know where it is. God bless him.

Lentine Alexis: Yep. They bought a really cool restaurant. They’ve been uplifting it. I can’t speak for him, but I think it’s been challenging in its own right. And obviously growing Hey Kiddo and expanding Wolf’s Tailor and being still so creative with that menu. I was just talking to a friend the other day about how I want there to be a farm-to-table community lunch space, all-day cafe in Boulder. The person I know that would be best positioned to do that would be Kelly. I just need to borrow a part of his brain. “Can you pop up a Gjusta here?”

Kirk Bachmann: How do we do this? How do we do this? Hey Kiddo is amazing by the way, too. What a fun space.

Lentine Alexis: So fun.

The Onigiri Moment

Kirk Bachmann: As we talk about finding nourishment in the unexpected, I hope that we can rewind a little bit to something that completely stopped me in my tracks as I was preparing. This story, this vivid story, of you on this 100-mile-plus bike ride in Japan when a simple rice ball turned your whole world upside down. You described this moment as a “turning point when food went from being fuel to being” – here’s the word again – “a joy, a connection, a catalyst.” Here’s another quote: “My black and white life as an athlete was suddenly colored in.” Can you take us back to that day and what specifically – or not specifically – changed for you in that moment? I’m talking spiritually, emotionally, physically, of course.

Lentine Alexis: All those things. Yeah.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah, all those things.

Lentine Alexis: To quickly paint the picture of my professional career. My professional career started in Okinawa, Japan. My incredible partner – who I’m still very close with but we’re no longer together – we lived on that island together. We called that island our home for about five years. I was there for the duration of that time, and he was only there for about a year and a half because he was often stationed in other theaters around the South Pacific. Most of my training unfolded by myself. I didn’t have training partners. I just would wake up and go do my job, come home and eat, and wake up and do it again. A little bit lonely, but also really fulfilling because, if I can be honest, I was putting myself into a place of physical and emotional discomfort that I almost felt matched my partners because he was in some really challenging situations as well.

On this particular day, Okinawa is beautiful. It is like the Hawaii of Japan; it’s this gorgeous island with a very interesting history through World War II. A lot of different cultures have clashed there over centuries. It’s actually closer to China than it is to Japan. The island is kind of oblong. We lived right in the smack [middle] of this island, and it’s about sixty-five miles to one end and about sixty-five miles to the other. That’s the extent of the island.

Kirk Bachmann: Wow!

Lentine Alexis: One of my training rides would be that I would leave our house, which was in the middle of a sugar cane field about ten minutes from the ocean. I would spin my big all the way along the coastline all the way to the northernmost tip, and I would come back. I’d build on a couple little bit, but I could basically do a 112-mile bike ride, out and back bike ride through these tiny little villages with cerulean blue seas rolling. It was just beautiful.

I’m a triathlete. I’ve got a time-trial bike. There isn’t much of that going on out there. My kit, my jersey, had these tiny little pockets on the back for my sports nutrition. I had a little box on the front of my bike that you still see people using that had some emergency money, a cell phone that could only send SMS text messages. Who would I call? I didn’t have anybody there to come and pick me up. I had my little box, I had my little whatever pack, my little pockets filled with snacks, and I’d start on my way.

About halfway up, it starts to get more and more remote as I’m riding. It’s brutally hot. It’s up in the 80s with 95 percent humidity, so I’m just drenched in sweat. I reach into my pocket, and my pocket is empty somehow. I pulled something out and all of my packaged snacks have come out. I’ve got another ninety miles – probably not, about halfway – sixty miles to go, several more hours of riding. I was A) completed physically, and B) emotionally and psychologically…”What do I do?” This is the worst news ever.

I unzip my little pouch, and I see that I had some yen inside, just enough to go into the Family Mart. If you’ve ever been to Japan, Family Mart is prolific and such a beacon of joy and pleasure. This little convenience store. I take my tiny little coins in, looking to see what I can afford to buy. The sliding glass doors open, and this rush of ice cold air conditioning just hits me in the face.

Onigiri, of course, are little seasoned rice balls that typically have some kind of filling inside, whether it’s salmon, or salmon salad, or seaweed salad, or avocado, or tuna, whatever it is. They’re wrapped in a piece of seaweed. At this time, you could buy one for like two yen. Less than two dollars. I had enough to buy two of these.

I was like, “I guess this will work.” I clopped back out of the store in my cleats, and I sit down on this parking space, the little bumpers for the parking spaces. I dismally eat this thing that is not the nutrition that my coach described to me. The beautiful rice ball was salty and sweet and savory and umami. I just remember – literally, if I close my eyes now, I remember that flavor, that taste of being as if paint dripped down the screen of my life and my body, and I all of a sudden felt whole again. “Wow! That was not the thing I was planning on eating.” And it was exactly what my body required in that moment of total depletion. I shoveled it into my mouth and looked for more yen.

As it turned out, there was another experience along that same ride where, as I’m spinning back home again, I stopped to look at the ocean and also to fill up a water bottle at a little spigot that I knew about. There was a man who had been fishing. He had a woven basket on his back with fish inside. He saw me, obviously was like, “You look like an alien. You must be hungry, because what are you doing out here?” He had a stump that he obviously typically frequented. He pulled the fish out of his bag and first cleaned the fish, filleted it. I don’t even remember what kind of fish it was, but he also had a little packet of shiso leaves in his pocket. He pulled out a shiso leaf and he laid this beautiful piece of bright pink fish on it, squeezed some lemon on it, and passed it to me. All things he had in his pocket because this is his meal.

Again, I was just like, “Wow! This incredible culinary experience that I wish I could articulate more about in this exact moment. If I thought about it, I probably could do that. “You saw me. You gave me something that you knew that I needed.” We had this really beautiful exchange on a stump near the ocean without any type of pomp or circumstance. We bowed to each other, and we walked away. I went my way. It was just this really powerful sense of – I was nourished and fueled by something that was not a gel on this ride. It was like the Grinch has his heart explode. My heart had exploded. I was totally in love with training again. I felt so lucky to have had this experience that my bike took me on. It was just a lesson that has stayed with me since, which is that we’re nourished – as we’ve talked about already – beyond measure when we are open and connected and present.

Eating in Tune with the Body

Kirk Bachmann: That’s got to go in the book. It’s a beautiful story. I kind of feel like I’m there with you. What I find powerful here is that this idea – and this goes along with what you said earlier – that this idea of nourishment isn’t just calories and macros. It’s sensory, as you described. It’s emotional. It’s cultural. Maybe more than anything, it’s deeply human. You’ve never forgotten about this individual that helped you.

Did you know at that moment that this would shape the rest of your career? Or did that just kind of happen as time went?

Lentine Alexis: It totally just happened, but it was the first moment. Several other things happened after that onigiri moment. The first is that I stopped being so strict with myself about whether or not I was eating cleanly and eating exactly the way that my coaches were telling me. I started thinking about making my own real food, particularly that meant carbohydrates because all I really was craving was cake and muffins, whatever it was. That was some of the spark. “I need to learn how to do this which is supportive of my goals.” Which is one of the reasons why I went to culinary school.

I felt that if I could be in tune with what my body was craving during these really, really challenging efforts, I would be able to fuel myself better as opposed to chicken breast with lemon and no fat, or watching carbohydrates, or watching whatever it was. When I craved a bowl of pork ramen, that’s exactly what I went to go get. That worked really beautifully for me. I watched my performance climb. I watched my body heal. I watched my rest improve, all of that.

I had no idea, obviously, that this was an important piece, but one of the threads of my experience and my mindset before we went to Japan was that what I really wanted to be and what my partner was aiming at when he joined the military – I wanted to be in foreign service. I wanted to be working clandestine services. I wanted to help support food systems and food security from what we then called “snoop and poop” level. I wanted to be a spy that helped to support food systems.

As I was on this island unable to work in a conventional sense because I was SOFA status – military wife – I got the sense that I wasn’t going to go back. I had actually put an international development degree program on hold at Johns Hopkins and ended up never attending because I really got the sensation after five years of thinking about it on these long bike rides and having these crazy experiences that if I was going to change the world in any way, it was going to be through cookies. It was going to be through food. It was going to be through sharing something tangible that was just enough of a seed to plant an idea that would sprout. That is probably the only piece of congruency between what happened on that day at Family Mart and now.

Stories and Trust

Kirk Bachmann: But the relevance is absolutely amazing. At Escoffier, we talk a lot about the connection of food and story. We ask our instructors to be storytellers. Don’t talk at your students; talk with them. I can’t imagine you being a student in front of me. You have so much to share. It’s changed over twenty, thirty, forty years. We have a holistic nutrition and wellness program, and we also weave some entrepreneurship into that program for those that would like to make this their life work, much like you did. Your work really embodies that. How do you help people reframe their relationship with food to be more intuitive and less prescriptive? That’s hard. That’s really…”Listen to your body. Listen to your mind.”

Lentine Alexis: Something that I actually grapple with very, very presently in my work is that I studied food policy and social ecology and economics in college. I was in courses at that time that were talking about our food system, organic food, GMO food, and what it meant to eat locally and sustainably. Thinking about that from the age of nineteen, it shaped the way that I ate then. I used to do crazy things. I was a rower in college. I would leave practice on Saturday mornings and drive straight to Ithaca. There was a food co-op that sold non-GMO food. I would come back home with my haul for the week. Everyone thought I was an insane person. I’m still that person.

That’s been going on since I was nineteen. It’s not like these experiences that I had in Japan – they were concrete experiences that solidified everything that I had learned about but had never experienced. I genuinely feel that the experience and the trust of having those interactions with food is one of the things that helps us to believe it and embody it.

Something that is true and something that is really challenging is now we [even have] Instagram. A lot of my business is based on Instagram. It’s how clients find me. It’s how I tell stories. It’s a direct outlet for my work. It’s also such a challenging place because there’s so much noise that’s talking about what you can eat, what you can’t eat, the latest fad, the latest wellness trend, all of this. If I’m honest, I think a lot of the way that I’m able to help teach my clients how to do this is just by example, just being like, “I hear you. I understand this is a lot. This is not new to me. I’m talking about something that’s been present since the beginning of man. The philosophy I’m talking about is way older than science. It’s way older than the study that was done last month. It’s something that is still with us and informed all of our medical systems, and I’ve been living and doing this since I was twenty. I’m not waffling here. I’m really serious, and the sooner you try it and trust it, the sooner it will start working for you.” I think that’s probably one of the most powerful selling strategies I have, if I’m honest.

I think there’s also a piece. We’ve compartmentalized our food in so many ways, or rather it has been compartmentalized for us, an industrial food system that’s trying to think about selling product. “Where do we put our nitrogen? Oh, by the way, we can put it into packaged products. Isn’t that so great?” The skill of cooking that didn’t get passed down to us because we got busy, or something else felt more important.

I don’t ever meet a client where they are like, “Oh, I never want to learn to cook. I don’t want to spend my time that way.” People who are genuinely interested in eating and supporting their health, and their well being, and their families, and their joy, and their vibrancy with really beautiful food – and they love food – want to create more space for it.

I think being able to translate skills. “You don’t have to have a culinary degree. These are easy hacks that you can make. If you get good ingredients on board, the recipes that I share now, have nothing to do with French culinary technique.” I love making chocolate croissants, making pain au chocolat is one of my favorite things to do, and I don’t remember the last time that I did it because my own life is quite full of tasks and things I’m juggling. Yet, eating in a way that keeps me connected and is rooted in whole, beautiful ingredients that came from the earth is one hundred percent the way that we eat in our house. Teaching that – I don’t want to say “hacked” skill set – but this is all you need to know how to do. You don’t need to have a deep culinary background, but know how to do this and trust yourself, and trust that you can’t mess it up.

Kirk Bachmann: Trust is important, and you can build upon that. I don’t want to take away from the secrets that you provide your customers, your guests, your team, but for students that will listen to our chat, and even other guests who may be stuck in this rules-based approach to nutrition, is there any advice? I’m going to come back to the word “joy” again. That’s the theme of our show today. What’s the advice to tap into your joy and trust at the table? It’s easy to hear you, it’s easy to say it, but how do you trust yourself to do it?

Lentine Alexis: I talk a lot about routine with my clients. Yes, I’m a holistic chef. Yes, I’m a classically-trained pastry chef. Yes, I’ve worked in food for a very long time. But ultimately, if we don’t have life practice that allows us to understand that the choices that we’re making are working for us, it doesn’t really matter what we’re eating. I talk about routine a lot in my work. It’s one of the first things that I recommend to my clients: taking five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour, an hour-and-a-half to unplug from noise and sit with ourselves.

Ayurveda obviously – or maybe not obviously – offers a lot of different ways that we can fill this time. It’s often called meditation. Sometimes it’s called pranayama, which means breathwork. Sometimes it’s a yoga practice. Sometimes it’s journaling. These days, sometimes it’s just me in my own practice laying on the patio in our house, listening to the birds and trying to breathe and feel my body again.

Creating this time and space to [think] “How am I feeling and why might I be feeling that way?” My one-on-one client work goes hand-in-hand with a conversation around the doshas, which are three bio-energies that Ayurvedic medicine hinges on. Understanding where wind is prevalent, where fire is prevalent, where earth or groundedness is present. At the beginning of our chat, you’re like “I’m constantly spinning around.” I can say, “Cool, where there is a lot of wind in your personality.” Understanding whether that’s feeling exhausting or whether or not that’s feeling inspirational – two ways that wind can work for us – is the charge.

I think that it really comes right down to unplugging. We must unplug, not because digital media is bad for us, not because it’s toxifying our system, but because it’s taking us away from really listening. If we’ve got a few minutes every single day to listen and go, “I’m feeling hungry. I’m feeling thirsty. I’m feeling tired. I’m feeling excited,” whatever it is, these are all hints and ways we can nourish ourselves, what our bodies really need.

Stemming from Discipline

Kirk Bachmann: I just want you to know that Gretchen’s going to call you this week and say thank you. You can bill me. Just invoice me. Just invoice me.

One of the things, Lentine, that I find so compelling, honest and truthful about your story – it’s a long word – but it’s multi-dimensional. Your journey wasn’t a straight line. Even though you’re a pastry chef, so technically you’re very linear, however, creative. It isn’t a straight line. You created your own map from the ultra-endurance experiences in Japan to patisserie training at the Cordon Bleu. Now you work with Ayurvedic. You’re a counselor, a yoga teacher, a holistic nutrition practitioner. It’s like this mosaic, like the background in your kitchen.

You once said, “The unconventional combination of these inquiries has made me highly intuitive and suitable” – incredible word – “teacher for others interested in achieving their greatest potential.” How did you learn for yourself the process of weaving all of that together, rather than trying to fit it into one role? Or are you still working on that?

Lentine Alexis: That’s a really good question. As I’m hearing you talk, I’m like “Oh, yeah, I guess all that stuff has happened.”

Kirk Bachmann: This is really good for me!

Lentine Alexis: In my mind, it all stems from the same place. There wasn’t a lot of leaping around, if that makes sense. While each of these different disciplines – curiosities is better. Each of these different curiosities that look very different on paper, what they all have in common is a certain amount of discipline.

Kirk Bachmann: There’s that word again.

Lentine Alexis: That’s something that actually really landed for me in culinary school. I was always in love with pastry. I was always in love with food and particularly pastry, and just so turned on by the idea that I could create anything. But probably the most important thing that I’ve gained from culinary school that’s helped me for the rest of my career is watching the way that my brain worked.

I am actually a very linear and organized person. If I have that structure or that foundation – this is something that applies to Ayurveda, too. Ayurveda only deepened my understanding of its importance. If I have this solid structure, then I can explore and be super creative and super generous and ebullient and can dive really, really deep so long as I can still have touch to this straight line, which, I think for me, had a lot to do with staying true to myself, staying connected with nature, being, honoring the earth, staying true to an environmental ethic that is still very important to me. All of the things that I pursued and continue to pursue have that same backbone. I think being able to do things in culinary school like do my mise en place, recognize what that did to my brain, and go “Oh my gosh! I feel so dialed right now!”

Before attending culinary school, I was definitely the person – I can think about this – with a recipe where I would be so intent on the recipe, but maybe I wouldn’t set everything up right, so there would be some flub, and it wouldn’t turn out the way that I expected or that I knew that it could. Or maybe I didn’t measure properly. Maybe I didn’t give myself enough time to make the thing happen. All of life was like that. Maybe there was just a little bit of a loose end. Attending culinary school, locking that in, and going, “First, I’ve got to set the stage every time. Mise en place in my life. Mise en place Ayurveda.”

It’s something that actually really sets me apart from my colleagues that work in Ayurveda because generally speaking, I’m much more [of a] calculated individual than most body workers or holistic practitioners. The tail ends of the business. I didn’t track the numbers. I didn’t organize the thing. I didn’t have a system for that. I’m just swirling around this work with love, and that’s awesome, but I think the way I’ve learned I really need to be able to thrive as a practitioner, as a chef, is with that foundation. I hope that answers the question.

Curiosities and Changing Lanes

Kirk Bachmann: There’s a lot there. I’m going to do the dive. Here’s the deep dive. There are so many things. It’s so funny; my son is a sophomore in high school, and the word “locked in” is something I learned from him. It’s very, very prevalent in those spaces today. He kind of giggles when I say it, but I love it. He’s got a baseball game. “I gotta be locked in, Dad.”

You must be so good with your clients because I feel changed, and I didn’t pay you! I feel changed sitting here today. You, be prepared, because Noelle will reach out. Your comments about mise en place and how that was connected to culinary school is a very, very powerful quote. We’ll get your permission to use it.

I think this is such an important moment for me, for our students, to hear because many of our students come to us trying to figure out how to blend their passions. The word passion is used a lot. Sometimes people don’t understand what a passion is. Culinary arts, wellness. I’m entrepreneurial. I want to have my own business. They’re wondering, is it too much? I’m suggesting here, listening to you just for a short time, Lentine, that all can be your superpower. That can all really come together in a beautiful way.

I’m so excited about this next subject, culinary school. What our guests don’t know is that we have a connection there because you went to Cordon Bleu in Portland, and I was highly involved with that organization back in those days. I went to that school. We talked about Anjali who was one of your pastry instructors. She’s going to be so excited that we talked today. I’m going to send her a text. I’m going to go for that magical moment, I’m wondering, Lentine, what do you say to – I was going to say students – but to a human being who feels like they have to choose a lane? It’s either chef, or it’s coach, or it’s creative, or it’s practical, or it’s linear, or it’s all over the place. It’s a tough question. Do they have to choose right away?

Lentine Alexis: I definitely didn’t choose.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah. And it all worked out.

Lentine Alexis: And it all worked out. To piggyback on the previous question, all the different curiosities I pursued were all things that felt right to me. I was interested in them. I could see themes between yoga and culinary nutrition. I could see themes between – and maybe it was just irony. I want to be able to use croissants for my Iron Man training. I could see why that was important. That made sense; my body needed those things.

So long as there is passion. I’m a true believer that we have gut feelings about things, about the foods that we eat, the people that we want to align with, the places we want to live, the partnerships we want to enter into. That’s where taking that space to think and feel about it is right. We never know until we try. We never know if a lane is right for us until we’ve stepped into it, and knowing we can always step out.

Something that I think is pertinent is that you can always change lanes. You can always change lanes. There’s a lot of reasons to want to do that. As a person who I can safely say spent very little time in professional culinary kitchens – I only worked in that format for about a year and half. It was a very high-end restaurant. We did really, really beautiful food. All the other things I’ve done in my career have definitely tied to “I’m a chef,” but that was not a vein that spoke to me. It was not where my strengths [lay]. I got my inspiration of what I wanted to cook from being outside. At the time that I graduated from culinary school, there wasn’t a path like that. First of all, there weren’t that many women that were in the kitchen the way that they are right now. This was 2010. There just weren’t that many women that were popping up in the kitchen and powerhouse-ing through this incredible piece of our society. And there certainly weren’t any chefs for athletes, which is what I told myself I wanted to be. I wondered why that was true. I honestly couldn’t hack it. I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t have the passion or the drive to stay in that particular environment anymore, so it wasn’t an option for me. I watched my own health and well-being deteriorate. I did know that if I couldn’t take care of myself, I couldn’t show up to work the next day. There were a lot of other patterns that I saw starting to unfold in chefs around me to keep the pace of life that they had to keep to stay in their lane.

One of the first things we lose as modern human beings is the notion that we have to check the box. There are a lot of ways to be a culinary professional, so many ways that if you don’t explore other lanes and use your personal experience to infuse your food, your work, your inspiration, then you don’t get to be this thing, as it turns out.

Western Medicine and Ayurveda

Kirk Bachmann: So well said. A couple of comments. I always try to find analogies to be a better parent as well. I remember my son, a pretty good baseball player, [started] as a freshman in high school. There are a lot of kids playing different positions. The coach came to him. He wanted to be the first baseman. He wants to play for the Cubs, yada, yada, yada. Without any prompting from me, Coach said, “Where do you want to play?”

[My son,] having the foresight of knowing there were these two kids over here and there’s that one kid on varsity, “I’ll play wherever you need me to play, Coach.” Talk about changing lanes. Unprompted by Daddy.

We talked about this a little bit before – again off script – when we think about Ayurveda and its connection to food. I told you that one of my daughters is a doctor of physical therapy who also has studied this. Can you help me better articulate to my wife how the two are the same while being different?

Lentine Alexis: Totally. They’re not the same. They’re not even close to being the same.

Kirk Bachmann: She’ll love to hear that she was somewhat right.

Lentine Alexis: I think we can say – not even I think. We can say that Ayurveda is one lens through which to view things.

Kirk Bachmann: Beautiful.

Lentine Alexis: It is a very old lens. It is one. The history of Ayurveda, in a nutshell [is] a medicinal system that popped up in the Indian subcontinent we think about 9000 years ago, but we know at least 6000 years ago because in the Stone Age when we got writing implements, the texts that my colleagues and I study [were] written down.

In these texts, they talk about how first of all, all life is created from the same building blocks, the same five earth elements: ether, air, fire, water, and earth. No matter how things were created, whatever entity that created the universe used the same Legos. Whether it’s the water in my glass or the molecules in my body or the screen of my phone, you can think about it like a different Lego system that just has different shapes. This philosophy goes so far as to suggest that in the natural world, these earth elements lump together to create dosha or bio-energy. We have vata, pitta, and kapha. Vata is the wind or the composition of wind and ether. Pitta is the fire and the water. Kapha is earth and water.

Because all of us are created from the same elements, we all have uniqueness. We all have fingerprints. We also have unique bio-energies, which means that we have different callings, different ways of expressing ourselves, different passions, different drives. It doesn’t mean that our work ends up looking that much different, but the way that we arrive at that work looks different, to relate to our previous conversation. This is really, really important because from Ayurvedic nutritional philosophy, the way that we eat needs to be in line with our own constitution. The fad diet of 150 grams of protein a day for every single person doesn’t fit for all constitutions. I’m a unique individual; I need different things than somebody else might. These bio-energies shift through the seasons, which is how we get a bounty in the fall, which is how we get blossoms in the spring, which is how we get dormancy and hibernation in the winter, all of which are incredibly important for all natural life to subsist and thrive.

So, this is a medicinal system that informed Chinese medicine. It informed Western medicine for the most part. While there aren’t that many threads that now are looking at 6000-year-old systems because we’re leaping forward with other types of things, there are a lot of practitioners that still reflect and refer to this system. From a perspective of – to take it back to physical therapy.

Physical therapy is a Western or an allopathic modality that looks at the physical structures of the body and seeks to undo patterns that have permeated that system. From an Ayurvedic viewpoint, the mind, the body, and the spirit are one. Something that we eat impacts both the way we think and the way we feel in our body. The way we feel impacts the way that we digest our food and the way that our bodies assimilate. The digestive system or the way that we process that food changes the way the mind and the spirit are able to function. There’s no separating those things. An Ayurvedic perspective laid onto something like physical therapy means returning to this totally holistic way of thinking about things where all the things we think, all the things we feel, all the things we eat deeply, deeply, deeply matter to our well-being. That is, to me, a really valuable thing to add onto an allopathic modality like physical therapy because if we can think about that, we might find a solution faster than just doing [physical therapy].

I used to do IT band issues when I was a super swimmer. Doing my IT band stretches. If I actually think about why my body might be getting tight in the upper regions where kapha is based and think about the way that joy might be able to leave. Am I telling my boyfriend how I feel? Because if I’m not, I’m keeping that in and that’s actually contracting those muscles in that part of me. All of that comes into play.

Fuel for Every Role

Kirk Bachmann: I’m so appreciative. My daughter, when she was in grad school, did a report. That’s when I was first introduced to this concept and understood it a little bit more. I couldn’t help her with the content, so I focused on the grammar. I’ll send it to you. I still have it. I still have it, and she’ll be so excited to know that we talked.

I’d love to talk a little bit about performance nutrition. You’ve worked with some serious athletes, but what I appreciate is how, in getting to know you, I appreciate your “human-first” approach, if I’m saying that okay. Not metrics-first. I’m sure it’s different for everyone. That’s the sense I get. You’ve talked about the dangers of attaching morality to food, of clean, dirty, good, bad, especially in performance culture. Here’s another quote: “I was doing everything right and still didn’t feel nourished.” What shifts do you hope to see in the way athletes, chefs, and even the average eater, think about performance and fuel? Is it going in a direction that you’re comfortable with? That you’re helping guide? Are you worried?

Lentine Alexis: Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think the first thing I want to say is it actually doesn’t really matter whether you are a chef or an entrepreneur or a badass mom or a professional athlete. We call this dharma. Your calling. Your work in the world deserves performance nutrition. I often have clients who are everyday athletes who say, “I’m not a professional athlete, so maybe I don’t need to do that.”

I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no!” It doesn’t matter. Your body, your spirit, your mind are your vehicle to carry this out, so it matters.

The shifts that I am seeing are actually in polarity. I think there’s a really big movement right now of some individuals who are wanting to take more charge of their health with different shifts and changes that are happening in our healthcare system. We’re no longer trusting that system to take good care of us or to provide for the exorbitant cost of caring for us. I shared something on social media this morning. I was up in the high country for a photo shoot and a hike yesterday with a really dear friend of mine. As I was thinking about questions a client had asked me: “What supplements do I take?” I was like, “These are the supplements. Sunshine. Fresh air. Smell the grass. Move your body and sweat a little bit.” I literally am not taking any other supplements, and I recommend that you don’t do that either. It’s free. There’s no cost associated with it. I don’t need to have follow-up appointments. There’s no big lab costs for this. There’s no refill costs.

There is a population of people who are really, really drawn towards this way of thinking, and I think it’s going to become a necessity, especially with political climate and some other things. We’re going to need to take more care of ourselves. We’re going to need to take on that responsibility, which is something that we have outsourced in a lot of ways. That’s really hopeful. I’m always so pleased to see. Sometimes I’m just sitting here in my own little hole in Boulder and wondering if anyone’s listening. There are people listening and really responding to the way that I’m sharing Ayurveda, the way this this type of wisdom – not even wisdom – perspective is entering the world.

At the same time, we are more than ever bio-hacking. Something that came to me this morning as I was doing my own exercises was, “Why are we trying to hack our biology? Biology is so smart!” The natural world created us and was here before all this science bio-hacking. Why we are we trying to continue to stray further or do the job for a system that is quite smart. I’m constantly seeing new products, new powders, new comments. All of this is commercialization. All of this is someone with a crafty idea and a patent and they’re pitching it to you. That feels dismal, if I’m honest.

Every time I see some shiny new product pop up that seems easy, it’s just one more thing that I’m going to have to suggest why it’s not. Something I experience in my work often is I get hit with a lot of scientific research and also with a lot of nutritional wellness fads. I kind of run them through the Ayurvedic lens. Sometimes they pop up on the other side and I’m like, “That’s what Ayurveda’s been talking about. This is awesome. This is something we’ve known for 6000 years. We know this works.” Other times, I’m like, “Cool, we’ve totally just gotten eight degrees separated from the way this should work.” We could talk about what those fads are. It’s kind of both.

I hope and feel that I’m helping to guide, and to give an example of ways that this perspective and this really ancient philosophy can be used in a modern way for somebody who’s very busy and very active. I don’t have a lot of time to cook these days, but I’m able to find the time I need to make this happen. That’s kind of what it distills down to. If we start cooking for ourselves with ingredients that are whole and real from people in our communities, that’s enough of a shift. You don’t have to buy into any of the other stuff. You don’t have to know the doshas. You don’t have to know Sanskrit. You don’t have to know the bio-energies. If we return to cooking and cooking with food that looks good, feels good, and it’s from hands that we know and trust, that really speaks volumes for our health and well-being as a society, I think.

Recipe Club

Kirk Bachmann: You know what’s so beautiful about everything you’re saying today, especially right there, is your genuine humility. Just correcting yourself from the word wisdom to perspective – I’m going to call wisdom – but wisdom to perspective, it brings me joy. I really, really appreciate that. Gretchen is going to be [happy]. I’m paying more attention to you than I do to her on any given day.

I’d love to touch on something very, very special that you’ve created. I hope it’s okay to bring it up. Your Recipe Club, which is not just this place to get recipes. It’s this space where food is an entry point to perhaps something deeper. Lifestyle. Better word: community. In trying to connect this to my students, for Escoffier students that want to build their own wellness-focused brands or lifestyle and all of that, what have you learned, Lentine, about building community versus just offering content?

Lentine Alexis: That’s a great question. I’m learning that still. First, when I left professional kitchens, I was like, “I’m going to be a chef for athletes. I don’t know how that’s going to work out.” But the first place that I started thinking about sharing recipes was with magazines and publications that were speaking to triathletes and runners. I started pitching recipes to those outlets, and I also had a blog where I was publishing my own journey. I was publishing things I was cooking along the way and how I was training, where I was racing, that sort of stuff. Obviously, my career grew and I did other things. Always, I just kept this blog.

I found myself in a space where I was really doing holistic nutritional consulting for athletes. During the pandemic, all of the trips that I had to go meet these athletes, spend time with them, and cook for them live were gone. I had to get really creative about how I was going to sustain myself in a time where all of my resources now had dried up. As we all remember, this was a time where we couldn’t go to restaurants, so we started cooking more. This was really powerful. I popped up a recipe club on Patreon. I told my social media community about it, and that was how it all began.

I’ve been publishing a recipe every single week since March of 2020. We now obviously have over 400 recipes on the website, and there are over 800 members in Recipe Club. It is actually that the information shared in Recipe Club is a recipe that is designed with my philosophy. Obviously, I’m an athlete. I’m not competing anymore, but I’m still moving my body and taking care of my son and running my business and some other things. I need to use that high-performance nutrition.

When I finished my Ayurvedic training program in 2022, I really started infusing deep into those recipes Ayurvedic philosophy on flavor. Our bodies don’t perceive macro-nutrients; they perceive flavors. The way we taste something sends messages to the digestive system about what enzymes to produce so we can break that down. Hopefully, those recipes, which are structured to talk about the flavors that are in each ingredient, are helping to teach this way of thinking about food, which is that flavor must be first. It’s really important to include as many of the flavors as possible when we eat.

Then there’s also a description of why I created the recipe and why I might not have made it a different way. I think this is the only recipe. I love the New York Times recipes. There is so often something on there where I think, “That’s not the way I’m going to do this! I’m going to leave this out, or this is just not going to suit my needs for digestive health,” etc. These are the things that Recipe Club subscribers can benefit from because they are all built into the recipe. All the information is there. You can just scroll down to the recipe and make it if you, or you can do your own deep dive.

Just this April, I launched another community/membership platform that I’m calling Back to Forward, which is the behind the scenes recipes. Behind the recipes, the things that make this philosophy tick. I feel like this is actually where the exponential increase of community is something I’ve really felt. From the moment of its launch, this community has been really, really well received. We have almost a hundred members already in this particular space who are curious and excited about Ayurveda and about using it in a modern way. It’s part of my job to put out content into the broad world to try to catch people and try to get them to come in. Similar to the conversation that we had earlier about straying from a path, on paper, I am a certain type of person, and I’m now resting my laurels and building my work as a holistic chef and nutritionist and an Ayurvedic practitioner. Specifically, there are a lot of holistic chefs and nutritionists out there. I am a board-certified holistic nutritionist, but you do not have to have any qualification to call yourself a nutritionist. You can take a course online, and in a day you can become a nutritionist.

So much of the conversation sounds the same. What actually creates community around my content, I believe and feel, is my story and my experience and my perspective. It’s harder to create content that feels authentic to me than to just follow the model of what someone else is putting out. “Oh, there’s so-and-so’s weight loss program. Do I need to put out a weight loss program?” “Here’s my bikini-flex.” I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. Just being able to use that filter of what turns me off about this and what do I really want people to know as opposed to “How can I get followers fast?” It’s taken a long time to build the community that I have. It’s still building slowly and authentically. I feel like if I can’t put something out into the world that I feel provides real, true benefit and insight, I’m not going to put it out there. There’s plenty of that.

Kirk Bachmann: I love the word “authentic.” Some of the most fabulous human beings, individuals, that we’ve had on the show have that as the common denominator, the concept of being authentic. Again, another rule for parenting: try to help your children be somewhat authentic. You mentioned that you create content as part of your job. It’s kind of my job as well. Everyone’s creating content. It’s absolutely crazy.

Just a couple more questions, I promise.

Lentine Alexis: You’re fine. No problem.

Mission and Success

Kirk Bachmann: I want to jump back to holistic nutrition and what comes next. You’ve said before, “We’re not just feeding our bodies; we’re feeding lives, creativity, and possibility.” Love that. That really feels in sync on how we try to approach our holistic nutrition program here at the school, at Escoffier. It’s not just what’s on the plate, it’s about what’s possible because of what’s on the plate. I’m really curious, with all of that as a backdrop. You’ve worked across so many different disciplines that we’ve learned about today, from sports to wellness to being a partner, culinary arts. You’re an entrepreneur; you’re coaching; you’re building community. This is the toughest question – well, the second toughest question. What does success look like for you now? Is it a feeling? Is it a project? Or is it even bigger than that? Is it a mission?

Lentine Alexis: That’s a really good question.

Kirk Bachmann: You can pause. That’s tough.

Lentine Alexis: I think it’s two-fold, actually. We discussed how I had this onigiri moment in the parking lot of a convenience store that sparked an idea that led to a backbone of personal work and exploration. A variety of different things that I explored as a way of learning about myself and figuring out how I could do something that felt authentic to me through my career. I never thought of myself as a thought-leader in this. I was just doing the thing that felt authentic for me to do.

Over the last couple of years, it’s become apparent to me that I’m not doing it the same way that everybody’s doing it. Really, truly. I have a two-year-old son now. Now, I’m watching his little seeds sprout on the world. I’m watching the way that we do things here in our house. I’m watching the way he’s going to preschool now. Growing a human being from seed.

Kirk Bachmann: Yeah. It’s wonderful.

Lentine Alexis: I feel really strongly that there have been a lot of valuable lessons learned accidentally, some intentionally, along this path. I felt it work for me and felt it work for thousands of other clients and people in my community now. It’s become more of a mission.

I joked with someone the other day. “I’m not NOT trying to build an empire’” but I really see a place-

Kirk Bachmann: That’s fair. That’s fair.

Lentine Alexis: I really see the possibility of creating more tools and deeper understanding for the subtle ways that our physical, emotional, and psychological beings work that anyone can use. I want to be able to share those with the world, and I want to be able to…. I don’t have a system. People don’t enter my work and enter into my five-step system. I basically bring you into a way of thinking about things. You take these seeds and bloom yourself. I just want to spread them as far as I possibly can.

Your other question was what does success look and feel like to you? There have been a couple of really, really cool invitations that I’ve received from the outside world this year that have not blossomed into the exact shape that we want them to yet. The way that that’s been driven has been a general feeling. This feels right, this feels maybe not in alignment yet. Success, to me, feels like being able to stay true to this backbone of taking good care of myself, harvesting the lessons from that, translating them into a way that other people can digest them, and exploring and gathering tools to better inform that work, and feeling those – at the cost of sounding super “woo” here – the energetic alignment of, “This feels like a good fit. This is something I want to pursue.” That really led me down the right paths of pursuing Ayurveda and exploring yoga and learning breathwork, and going to culinary school. All of those were pieces that were like, “This feels like the right thing for me right now.” Staying in that place where I can feel it’s the right thing and being ready and fueled to pounce is success to me.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s the right answer. It’s very consistent with everything we’ve talked about today. You’re a great teacher, and I’ll tell you why. In many ways, you flipped the classroom today. Not at any point have you lectured me or talked to our audience. You’re talking with our audience. It’s really, really important. We’ve tried to do this over the last couple of years with our faculty. “Listen. Listen. You can gain so much from your audience.” I really want to thank you for that. Being a storyteller is a really amazing thing. I feel like I have just listened to a story today.

Lentine Alexis: Thank you, Kirk.

Lentine Alexis’s Ultimate Dish

Kirk Bachmann: I do have one more question.

Lentine Alexis: That’s so fine.

Kirk Bachmann: The name of the show is The Ultimate Dish, and I can’t let you go. I could ask you your top three bands of all time. We didn’t get to that. I love that. That question always gets people kind of riled up, but in your mind, what is the ultimate dish?

Lentine Alexis: Oh man. I thought you were going to ask for my best taste memories, which is a whole other question.

Kirk Bachmann: Memories are good, too, by the way. It’s two different things.

Lentine Alexis: How do I want to answer this question? There’s a clinician side that wants to answer, well, the perfect dish is something that contains all six flavors, and is easy for us to digest, and is in line with the seasons. As it turns out, my non-clinician answer is not that. It’s not that different, but it uses different language.

I think the perfect dish, I think this is actually something that really turned me on to becoming a chef and studying food and working in food. In my early twenties, I did a lot of traveling. I was living in Italy for a little while. I was working as a journalist, which was a really funny piece of my history. I was living there alone. I didn’t speak any Italian. I was navigating this very, truly rich place from an American food perspective. Going to the market and watching the little old ladies ask for the tomatoes, and look for the perfect peaches. I was there for about a year. Watching the way that they asked for what they needed, took it, and brought it home. Learning their recipes and eating at restaurants by myself. There were so many incredible things that I tasted during those years. Obviously, I had some of those same experiences when I was living in Asia, and have had experiences since.

The perfect thing is whatever is being offered up by the natural world in that moment, whether it’s me sitting on the back porch with my son eating a peach that is so juicy it’s dripping down his chin, all over his face. Or it’s the simple culmination of the ingredients that we have in the fridge with the time that I have to put something together so I can enjoy it with my family. The perfect dish can be in anything that we’re paying attention to the subtleties around it, I suppose.

Kirk Bachmann: I’m not surprised by your answer. It’s perfect. It’s perfect. It’s similar in many ways to – we have a good friend, his name is Lee Jones. He goes by Farmer Lee Jones. He had a beautiful family farm in Ohio. If you ask him that – and he gets asked that a lot. Chefs call and say, “What should I put on the menu?” His response is real simple: “Whatever’s in season.”

Lentine Alexis: What’s in season.

Kirk Bachmann: That’s the perfect dish. Could be an apple at a roadside. It could be the peach you just mentioned. It could be a zucchini in the field. It can be anything.

Lentine Alexis: To take this one layer further, the way that that actually ties into my work. When we think about and talk about what’s in season from an agriculture perspective, we’re talking about what nature’s providing in that moment. But when I work with clients one-on-one, I’m talking about the weather outside. What’s the weather outside doing? That’s telling us what we should be eating and how to be responding. When are we resting?

But we also have to watch the weather inside because the weather outside impacts the weather inside. What’s in season for us in this outward season is also a very unique thing. When my son’s requesting graham crackers, he’s actually doing that. He’s going, “Here’s my in season and my out season, and here’s what I really need, and it’s graham crackers, Mom!” Trusting that. What is my in season? What is in season for me right now is always the right answer.

Kirk Bachmann: I love it.

Lentine Alexis: Particularly when it’s in alignment.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s where Mother Nature’s natural rhythm meets Mama’s natural rhythm.

Lentine Alexis: That’s right. That’s right.

Kirk Bachmann: What a fantastic show! Lentine, thank you. Thank you. We heard the word discipline a few times, which I love. We learned about Snoop and Poop. More than anything, we just learned and we felt and we heard joy. The joy of cooking. The joy of living. The joy of loving. Just an absolutely beautiful show.

You have a friend in Escoffier. We are here in Table Mesa. We do a lot of really, really cool things. We do stuff with Jake Plummer, with Lauren Lewis, with Kelly Newlon, and Bobby Stuckey. We have one of our classrooms named after Frasca. We feel that we are in the Boulder lane and we love being here.

Best wishes always. If we can ever do anything. I’m going to send you a paper that my daughter wrote, and we’ll be in touch. Thank you so much for taking over an hour of your valuable time to hang with us.

Lentine Alexis: Thanks so much for inviting me. It was such a pleasure to speak with you. I’m honored and flattered.

Kirk Bachmann: Thank you for listening to the Ultimate Dish podcast, brought to you by Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Visit escoffier.edu/podcast to find any materials mentioned during the podcast, including notes, links and other resources. And if you can, please leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, and subscribe to support our show. This helps us reach more aspiring individuals ready to take the next step toward their dream careers. Thanks for listening.