What chefs actually eat — and what I learned about my own health
This Eid I worked a split shift. After three years on evening service I was moved to mornings. First day off after the change, I couldn't sleep — lying awake at 11pm on a night I had completely free, nothing to stay up for. Three years of the same hours had set something in me I didn't know was set.
That's the thing nobody tells you about kitchen work and your own health. It's not the food. It's the routine.
The mise en place your body runs on
A kitchen runs on mise en place. Your body works the same way. It sets itself around consistency — sleep, eat, move at the same time — and it learns to be ready. Disrupt the pattern and you pay for it, even on days when you have every reason to be fine.
I've seen chefs eat badly and stay sharp because their schedule is consistent. And I've seen chefs eat well but run on broken sleep and irregular hours, looking five years older than they are. The consistency is doing more work than the content.
The meal after service matters more than the meal during it. What you eat winding down at midnight is what you're sleeping on, recovering on, showing up on. Simple food prepared at home — not assembled from whatever's left in the kitchen — changed my sleep quality more than anything else I tried.
I didn't know how much that routine was holding up until it changed.
