Cooking off 100 pounds: Erik Davis used his culinary expertise to get rid of some unwanted weight - Brief Article

Ebony, April, 2002 by Glenn Jeffers

THE joy and excitement didn't come with the new clothes he bought. It came from the reaction he got from friends. They noticed that the clothes were smaller, that they had a tailored, fitted look, and they were impressed. "God, you look good," Erik Davis recalls one friend saying. And every time he heard the praises, the 32-year-old Davis added a little more time to his daily run on the treadmill.

With exercise, a strict dietary regimen of protein and vegetables, and a healthy dose of encouragement, the 6-foot-1 Davis went from 310 pounds, his heaviest, to 205 in eight months--and he has kept the weight off for more than a year. That's not an easy task when you are the food service manager and special events coordinator for Sony Picture Studios and are surrounded by party platters and dinner buffets all day.

"I'm not saying that all our food is high in fat, but it's not specially designed for the health-conscious," says Davis, a native of Englewood, Calif., who now lives in the Marina Del Ray section of Los Angeles. "We prepare some good stuff, and it is very, very hard not to indulge on a daily basis. Usually I have to prepare my own meals at work and I have no trouble preparing something."

Davis has been preparing meals since he was a third-grader walking home from school. And that's where the problem started, he says. As an only child who lived with his working grandparents, Davis was a "latch-key kid" who found himself home alone between the time he left school and dinnertime. At first, Davis would make bologna sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sit in front of the television until suppertime. But in fifth grade, Davis became creative. By the time he was a teenager, Davis was a culinary wizard whose exotic meals were very expansive to the waistline. "Once you cook the food, you have to eat it," Davis says, and he did.

By the time he entered high school, Davis realized the creativity he enjoyed in the kitchen had caused a strain on his belt. "As I got older and realized that all the other kids were wearing the hip clothes, but they weren't making the clothes in my size," he says, "I realized that I was overweight."

However, his weight never got him down, or worried him, Davis says, and he parlayed his love of cooking into a career, attending culinary school at the Art Institute of Los Angeles. After graduating, Davis traveled across the globe, working for high-profile companies such as the Walt Disney World Corporation and Marriott International, before coming to work for Sony in February 2001. But it wasn't until Davis came back last year from a Japanese vacation and picked up some photos from his trip that he saw himself at 310 pounds. And he couldn't believe it.

That's when Davis decided to do something about the way he looked. The first step was to change his eating habits. He cut out the fat and the starches, the red meat and the pork, and went to a low-fat diet of vegetables and lean, white meats like turkey and chicken. He no longer ate at work, opting to bring in his own meals.

And Davis used his skill to prepare meals that were not only low in fat and calories, but also delicious. "Not everything out there is bland," Davis says. "My favorite food is Mexican food, but instead of using beef, I tried soy meat. I cooked the taco shells in the pan and put the lettuce, tomato and cheese and a little bit of taco sauce, and I could not tell the difference that I was eating a non-meat taco as opposed to one filled with meat and grease."

Davis included a lot of spices, such as peppers and onion powder, on his food instead of using salt. He also checked out the labels on a lot of supposedly "fat-free" foods at the supermarket to make sure that what he bought wasn't deceptively fattening. It's a trick he learned from ordering mass quantities of meat for his cooks at Sony, he says.

"The label in the store is going to tell you `Turkey burger, extremely lean,' and actually, each patty is 20 percent fat because they grind up the skin of the turkey," he says. "You have to go and you have to shop and you have to research. Like fat-free dressing. It's a matter of trying one and finding the one that you actually like."

Coming up with low-fat recipes was the easy part, he says. The hard part came the first time Davis stepped onto the treadmill in his apartment building's exercise room and couldn't finish the 10-minute goal he set for himself. He returned the next day determined to finish the run and sweated it out, literally. Since then, Davis has expanded his running regimen from 10 to 30 minutes a day and now runs on the beach outside of his Marina Del Ray home. He can run up to three miles on flat surface, he says, and up to 1 1/2 miles on the sand.

Six months into "changing his lifestyle," Davis felt his pants get looser. Two months later, they were falling off. When Davis got down to 205, he decided to treat himself with a new wardrobe. Since then, people have been noticing the new Erik Davis.

Currently single, Davis says he has been going out and dating a lot more in the past year. Once a "big guy with a lot of friends," Davis says he now has "the confidence that if I'm interested in somebody, I'll go up and approach her knowing that I'm on a level playing field now."