Seamus Mullen feels great these days. But in 2012 the award-winning chef and restaurateur was lying in a hospital bed with a fever, clinging alive after experiencing complications stemming from rheumatoid arthritis symptoms — an autoimmune disease he’d battled for years.
Mullen had already begun changing his diet by eating more seasonal foods, but his near-death experience would be a turning point. After leaving the ICU, he was set on making lasting changes — beginning with his mindset.
“Nobody can get better if they don’t believe they can get better,” he says. “The last day which i was sick was when I decided that I was not a sick person, but that I had a sickness.”
That distinction was key, he adds. “I ended defining myself by my illness and started taking control over myself and my choices, which solved the problem overcome the illness.”
Once out of his hospital bed, Mullen enlisted New York functional-medicine physician Frank Lipman, MD, to help him ease the chronic inflammation that was contributing to his illness. He switched to paleo-inspired meals that limited sugar, carbs, and convenience foods while pushing vegetables, healthy fats, and moderate amounts of grassfed meats to the center of his plate.
Seeing and feeling the drastic improvements in his own health — he’s now asymptomatic — inspired him to talk about his success in a new cookbook, Real Food Heals, so that as cohost of the Goopfellas podcast.
Improving health goes beyond food for that 45-year-old Mullen. “Setting an intention is essential for me,” he explains. “Before I truly made changes in my life, I half-heartedly did many of the right things. I was attempting to exercise, but I’d find excuses to why I wasn’t successful. I had been trying to eat well, but I wanted immediate results.”
“Change might seem slow,” he adds, “but if you commit to taking care of your entire self, you'll feel better and improve your health.”
Experience Life | How has your mindset about food changed over the course of your life and career?
Seamus Mullen | When I was a young, up-and-coming cook, I definitely centered on what I could do to demonstrate my creativity. When i matured, I realized that the real skill in cooking isn't in adding but in subtracting and editing to make sure ingredients shine.
Over the years, it became clear that the most successful dishes have the fewest quantity of ingredients that are really well handled. So, I focused on making something taste delicious without crowding home plate with a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
As I progressed within my health transformation, I started to think about what’s going on when I put those ingredients into my body system. I began asking myself, So how exactly does eating this make me feel?
EL | How did that affect the recipes you created like a chef to share with others?
SM | The cruel thing is that we’re all completely different, and what might work for one individual will not necessarily work for someone else. But I certainly started to think much more about the impact that food has on our well-being. So as I started to craft recipes and menu items, I focused on creating something that’s really delicious and nourishing but, simultaneously, isn’t full of unnecessary sugar, superfluous carbohydrates, or even dairy.
EL | You’ve gone from well-known chef and restaurateur to cookbook author and podcast host. Did your wellbeing issues influence your career trajectory?
SM | Without a doubt. There are real challenges to leading a healthy lifestyle and working in restaurant kitchens, which is unfortunate.
But I also realized that I possibly could make a greater impact outside of the restaurant. To deliver the notion that healthy food choices can be delicious and that we can take control of our well-being by the choices we make in the kitchen is something I want to bring to a broader audience.
So, I turned to the podcast, public-speaking engagements, consulting use other restaurants, and special attractions and retreats in order to do that.
EL | You’ve said being healthy is contagious. Let’s talk about that.
SM | Well, when people make changes, they influence the other people and systems around them. For instance, a number of colleagues have seen me undergo my transformation and were inspired to make their own changes — from dietary shifts to slimming down to improving biometrics to getting sober and quitting smoking.
We’ve also seen alterations in the restaurant industry, where individuals are focused more on creating healthy work environments. Our industry was heavily impacted by the #MeToo movement, and, as a byproduct of that, we were instructed to look at how the restaurant culture had existed for thus long and how damaged and dysfunctional it was. We have begun to make changes within the general quality of restaurant culture.
EL | You’ve also observed that impact in your work with No Kid Hungry, right?
SM | Yes. Several years ago, a group of chefs who, much like me, enjoyed cycling came up with a concept of doing a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry, which fits to end childhood hunger in the usa.
So, we rode from New York City to Washington, D.C., a couple hundred thousand dollars. What we noticed was that many of our colleagues who were not cyclists felt left out and told us they’d really like to give that a try. Therefore we reached out to other folks inside our industry to get people on bikes.
Two amazing things ended up happening. One, we've got a lot of chefs — who had never ridden a bike and had not done much in terms of exercise — to train, get in shape, making positive inroads in their own well-being.
The other thing that happened is we started raising a ton of money for No Kid Hungry, and we were able to grow our group, by year three, to 300 cyclists riding 300 miles in 72 hours. For a lot of these chefs, the idea of riding 100 miles a day on a bicycle for three days in a row was something they never, ever inside a million years thought they might accomplish.
Many still ride regularly, are super fit, and also have really changed their lives.
EL | In your journey, you’ve found that long-lasting change requires certain practices or pillars. What are they?
SM | I describe them as nourish, move, and recover. To maneuver well you need to nourish yourself well, and to recover you need to move well, so they balance each other.
Your body gets really good at doing whatever you ask it to complete. If you make a habit of going to yoga, then your body gets better at doing yoga. If you make a habit of sitting on a couch, watching movies, and eating potato chips, you get really good at doing that.
So it’s about producing habits and routines that support one another to create an upward spiral instead of a vicious downward one. For instance, when I was really sick, I would get out of work late feeling exhausted and terrible and have a drink to wind down, which often led to another drink and then in my experience eating a slice of pizza at 2 in the morning and sleeping poorly.
Now I get up every morning at 5:15 and exercise really hard, and by 9:30 at night I’m ready for bed, and I sleep much better. And the choices I make during the day around food tend to be better because I’ve already made one positive commitment toward my well-being. So, it can make it easier to say, “Hey, guess what happens? I’m going to make another positive decision.”
