Giusto

Over time we molt skins, we live multiple lives, and we change direction. The same applies for businesses. Long-time insurance behemoth Lloyd's of London started as a coffee house. Nintendo started out selling playing cards and vacuum cleaners. And long before it sold motorcycles, Suzuki moved looms. Likewise, the time has come for Cookbook Calculator to shed its first name and purpose and to take on a new identity more in line with its focus.

Somewhere along the line people got the idea that Italians make good food and that they like to eat it together. While my family's gatherings typically occur around religious events, what brings people out is the time with each other and the food they have brought with them out of love. A little something of everything so that everyone had something to eat, whether it was finicky eaters like me as a kid or cousins that had gone vegan, there was something there for you that was made just right.

While short on communal eating, cooking at Marea taught me about the high standard of culinary excellence. The chefs at Marea taught me how to make food "giusto", just right. Now I can not only bring something to family events, but can make sure it's just right.

Or so I thought.

With a big family it's hard to keep track of who's eating what, who's on what diet, and who has what allergy. It's become harder to make something just right for everyone.

Which leads us from Cookbook Calculator to Giusto. The business' focus has changed, and now, so has our name. We desire to help people eat together, to share the foods they love with the people they love, and to cut down the $25 billion caregivers in the U.S. lose annually from either lost wages or in health care costs due to trips to the emergency room for food allergies. That's time and money that could be spent eating well with good people instead of interrupting Thanksgiving with an epipen. That's Giusto.

Packard Place

Cookbook Calculator's first major foray into the world occurred yesterday when we applied for a three month residency at Packard Place's RevTech Labs in Charlotte.

Packard Place is Charlotte's entrepreneurial hub and RevTech Labs is the group's startup incubator, an annual three-month long accelerator culminating in a pitch meeting before local and regional funders. Doesn't hurt that Charlotte is the second biggest banking city in the U.S. behind NYC. It's a unique opportunity to make meaningful progress and to meet and share experiences with other folks in the area who are in the same startup boat.

Time at RevTech would certainly give us some street cred. While our fingers are crossed for a spot there, we will continue to take steps forward.

The Story Behind Cookbook Calculator

At first, I laughed it off. My sister dubbed me Uncle Chubbs and my newborn nephew quickly came to know me by the name. Yeah, I had put on 15 pounds, but hey, I had been a bag of bones since I was a kid. I could use some filling out. Not a problem.

Plus, I knew why I was gaining weight. Stress. It started when I lived in a bad housing situation with neighbors from hell. It got worse as I served on my building's co-op board and the insanity that brought. Throw on a couple lawsuits and yeah, stress mounts and good habits go out the door.

Not that I had good eating habits before, but I didn't eat the same bad foods everyday. This became pizza or fried chicken, ice cream, and beer daily.

After a year and a half I started to address the stress. First, I physically removed myself from it. I put distance between it and me. Second, I did not run for re-election on the board. Third, the legal BS ended. That only took another year and a half during which time the 15 additional pounds became 26.

That's when I saw a picture of myself from this past summer. I didn't recognize myself. I was shocked at how big I had become.

I had read in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg how some people had quit smoking by keeping a daily tally of how many cigarettes they smoked. The simple act of taking note, of seeing the numbers for themselves, and the shame of marking another one off over time helped people quit. I set out to find a smartphone app that would help me do the same thing with food.

I found MyFitnessPal. I cannot recommend this free app enough. It helped me not only keep track of my daily food intake by setting a specific calorie goal per day, but to learn the caloric values of the foods I ate. I quickly saw that the fish and chips I ate every Tuesday night out at trivia alone put me over my daily limit. Out went the chain restaurant fish and chips.

It also forced me to starting looking at nutritional fact labels. That cup of whole milk I drink at breakfast? That's 150 calories. A cup of almond milk? Half that. A tablespoon of Nutella on my bread? That's 200 calories. A tablespoon of Loacker, a dead-on Nutella substitute? 160. That's a 20% difference. These things add up.

I also started drinking out of a Ball's Mason jar. Why? Because they delineate portions by cup. Now I know exactly how much I'm consuming. I used to think a tall glass of milk was one serving. Wrong. It was more like three.

But life on 1,620 calories a day isn't great. So I woke up an hour earlier and hit the treadmill. 30 minutes a day five days a week. At first I took it easy burning 110 calories or so. Eventually I got up to 339 in the same 30 minutes. That turned my daily calorie allowance from 1,620 to a more manageable 1,959. I didn't have to starve myself to lose weight.

I also had a good conversation with a health consultant at the local YMCA. He gave me a reasonable idea of what to expect and what to hope for. Shoot for losing a pound a week, he told me. More than that and you shock your system to the point where it thinks you're in survival mode and it will make it harder for you to lose the weight.

So I didn't lose 16 pounds in a night, a week, or a month. No, it took 3 months, but once I knew how long it would take I could relax and not stress unrealistic expectations.

The only downside was that I couldn't use any of my cookbooks or recipes I had picked up from family or some of the best cooks in NYC that I had worked with. Michael White's Classico e Moderno and David Chang's Momofuku cookbooks, which I had just gotten over the holidays, did me no good as they didn't have nutritional facts that I could plug into MyFitnessPal. Sure, I could fudge it, guesstimate, but I could be off by 10 calories or a few hundred. I'd only know when the weight didn't come off.

Rather, I had to find new recipes that did. Fortunately, sites like Yummly.com have some such recipes, but I there are so many other recipes that don't and I don't want to give them up, especially if they are, in fact, good for me.

And so I am slowly setting out to create Cookbook Calculator, a smartphone app that will allow people to calculate the nutritional facts of their recipes, save them, and export them to apps like MyFitnessPal.

This blog will follow Cookbook Calculator's progress from idea to app.