Divya Gugnani - Sexy Women Eat: Secrets to Eating What You Want and Still Looking Fabulous

Contents

I had a bowl-shaped haircut and buck teeth. My family called me Beaver. Just picture an eight-year old walking down the aisle of the supermarket and her dad screaming Beaver across the cereal boxes. No, my parents are not perverts. They are Indian immigrants who happen to have a profound sense of patriotism and didnt realize the sexual connotation. They gave me that name because I was always as busy as a beaver (some things never change!). Ive been trying to outgrow it ever since, but every now and then my sister just slips and lets it out like shes on a loudspeaker. As if my childhood pet name wasnt bad enough, I wore glasses and looked like a blind person dressed me for school each day. Why else do you think I hid in the kitchen when my parents had parties? It was time well spent, as I learned how to cook at a young age. My family is obsessed with food. At breakfast we discuss lunch, at lunch we debate dinner options, and after dinner we marinate our minds to start the drill all over again in the A.M . We have two refrigerators in our house and every time you open one of them, you are sure to get hit in the knees with a piece of falling cheese or knocked out by veggies flowing out from the overstuffed shelves. When we entertain in the winter, we park our cars in the driveway and put food in the trunk because there is never enough room in either of our refrigerators. You can put any protein, fruit, or vegetable in front of me and I will find a way to slice, dice, and saut it.

My passion for cooking and stints in two culinary programs eventually turned into a profession after a ten-year career in finance ranging from investment banking to venture capital. After coaching many companies of all sizes on building, growing, and selling their businesses, I retired as a full-time coach and became a captain. I founded and created Behind the Burner, a culinary media brand, which allowed me to blend my passion for food and fine wine with business.

At Behind the Burner we feature a network of experts in four fields: food, wine, mixology, and nutrition. We package our experts (celebrity chefs, winemakers, mixologists, nutritionists, etc.) best tips, tricks, and techniques in the form of videos, articles, and blogs. Our videos get syndicated on broadcast TV (NBC New York Nonstop) and a large network of online media properties. I do regular weekend programming for WNBC, and we even have a podcast on iTunes for those of you who live life via gadgets. We offer discounts on the tools and ingredients the experts recommend so you can replicate restaurant quality experiences at home, in a flash, at a fraction of the cost.

So, with my new career, I officially eat and drink for a living. I jump from city to city with my team, eating and drinking all that America (and beyond!) has to offer. Does life get better than that? I think not. With the help of braces (later InvisAlign) and Lasik surgery (thank God for both), this ugly duckling turned into a swan and smiles in front of cameras on a daily basis. Some of the best designers lend me clothes, hence masking my ineptitude to dress myself. I also stuff my face with the most delicious food, sip the seasons best wines, and go bottoms-up on the latest cocktail craze.

Regardless of my job or position, Ive always lived life with one philosophy: pick the job you love and it wont feel like work. Get the position that you enjoy; yes, the one that you would be happy to have even if you never got paid to fulfill your duties. Come into the office each day and give it your 100 percent. Scratch that. One million percent. Whether it was walking into 85 Broad Street at Goldman Sachs as an investment banking analyst or being a line cook on Sixty-third Street at Chefs Table, I lived each day as a sponge, ready to soak up every bit of information and learn every skill possible.

For the ten years prior to Behind the Burner, I paid my dues, climbed up the venture capital ladder, and eventually reached a point in my career where I had hours to spend in the gym (while minions crunched numbers in windowless cubicles, of course). Everything changed very quickly when I launched my own business. Just as fast as my six-figure paycheck disappeared, so did my personal time. Welcome to the life of a start-up. Good-bye happy hour with friends and hello twelve- to twenty-hour days filled with technical challenges, strategy meetings, delayed filming schedules, and much more. As a media entrepreneur at an emerging company I have zero minutes and zero seconds to dedicate to my personal well-being, therefore, the world has become my gym. Sleep is a luxury I cant afford. With a few mistakes along the way and a string of not-so-suitable suitors, Ive finally learned how to be fit and fabulous while enjoying every bite of my decadent lifestyle. Furthermore, if eating sweets is wrong, then I dont want to be right.

I went from roadkill to ravishing and lucky you is about to be served my culinary secrets learned Behind the Burner.

Im a food slut, or in simpler terms, a woman who eats. For me, sexy is ravishing. It is confidence and beauty with an honest appetite and a healthy mind-set. Not someone who dates just to eat good meals and after getting wined and dined gives the purchaser of their expensive dinners a little nooky. I know a girls gotta eat, but believe me, ladies, its so much tastier when youve worked hard enough to be able to afford your dining adventures. Instead, Im a new breed of food slut; someone with a disgustingly unnatural appetite; someone who scarfs down food quicker than anyone else at the table. Yet someone who has also learned that eating is a beautiful thing that can still leave you looking and feeling fabulous. So I hope youll turn the page and dig into my little black book of tips to keep your body fit and your stomach full.

Chapter 1
Spandex and Sports Bra Optional

I Dont Sweat It When I Cant Make the Gym

At 5:00 P.M. on a Saturday night I was riding down the company elevator (yes, we worked Saturdays), and John Corzine (former CEO of Goldman Sachs) asked me, If I built a gym, would you use it? My response was, Hell yeah. Sure enough, months later, Goldman Sachs had its own gym; rock-climbing wall and all. Better yet, we got workout clothes to prevent us from schlepping them back and forth to work and having people in the subway give us appalled looks. Wondering where that dirty sock smell was coming from? Not my bag! For those two years of my life, Goldman Sachs headquarters near Wall Street was my home. Early mornings, late nights, and constant travel left me little time to actually nest in my apartment. My bed was my only furniture friend and I saw it for about four to six hours a night if I was lucky! Most other nights I lived the high lifeyou know, sleeping on a managing directors couch or my winter coat on the floor of my cubicle. My puffy North Face jacket made the best mattress, I soon discovered.

On the bright side, I must say the Goldman gym was paradise. The machines were not made of gold, although they probably could have afforded that, it was just a state-of-the-art adult paradise. I ran on the treadmill while watching all of the latest sitcoms (back in the day when it wasnt all reality TV) that I secretly wished I was watching on my comfy couch at home. Thank God for Netflix. I took classes and even became a decent rock climber. One day, upon returning from the gym at 8:00 P.M. and ordering the maximum allowable food for my daily corporate dinner budget, I noticed a very nice pair of Via Spiga heels in the stall next to me in the bathroom. Hours later, after cranking out more numbers than any human brain should be allowed to hold, I returnd to the bathroom and saw those Via Spiga heels in the same place. Either someone with very nice shoes was murdered in that stall, or someone had taken off her shoes and fallen asleep mid-pee (I highly doubt passing out during mid-shit was possible). I assumed it was the latter. It turns out one of my fellow analysts was taking a much needed nap on the can. She had even walked up two flights of stairs to my floor so that no one from her department would recognize her shoes!