About Kevin Curry | Founder of Fit Men Cook
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Kevin Curry – Founder of Fit Men Cook

I’m Kevin. I started Fit Men Cook in 2012 because I was tired of two things: being out of shape, and boiled chicken breasts.

Here’s the short version. A friend posted an unflattering photo of me on Facebook. My doctor was already warning me about my blood pressure. So I did what a lot of people do first: I tried to outtrain a bad diet. Hours in the gym, five days a week. It didn’t work. It never works.

I couldn’t afford a trainer’s meal plan. So I went to a half-price bookstore, bought every diet book on the shelf, and taught myself nutrition. Then I made a vow: never again would I eat a boiled, bland chicken breast in the name of “health.”

In the summer of 2012 I started posting every single meal I made to a little Tumblr blog so strangers on the internet could critique my diet. That was it. That was the business plan. Accountability, in public, for free. The first posts got maybe 50 likes. By early 2013 there were 100,000 people following along. Today the Fit Men Cook community is over 2 million people across platforms, in English y en español.

What I believe


Our bodies are built in the kitchen and sculpted in the gym. Healthy food should never be boring, and it should never require a big budget. I built this whole thing on a simple idea: eat good, feel good, and keep it real about the struggle it takes to get there.

That struggle is part of my story too. I’ve been open about my depression and anxiety diagnosis, and about the year food and fitness helped bring me back. I gave a TEDx talk about it. CNN told the story better than I can summarize here. If you’re in that place right now, I see you. Start with one meal.

The work

The Fit Men Cook cookbook — Fit Men Cook: 100+ Meal Prep Recipes for Men and Women (Simon & Schuster, 2018). Hit #1 in Amazon’s fitness category the month it dropped.

  • The FitMenCook app — named to Apple’s App Store Best of 2015 and an Apple Editors’ Choice. Top-3 Food & Drink app in the US and UK, top-ranked in 80+ countries, fully bilingual (English/Spanish).
  • The Fit Cook spices and teas — my own line of freshly ground, low-to-no-sodium seasoning blends and wellness teas. No fillers. Flavor first.
  • YouTube, meal plans, and coaching — hundreds of free recipes and budget meal plans, from the $75 Whole Foods Challenge to feeding a family on a Dollar General budget.

Beyond the kitchen

Food is bigger than macros. It’s access, dignity, and community.

Community work in Dallas — my home. Monthly soup kitchen partnerships, teaching healthy meal prep to neighbors who need it most.

Global Ambassador, International Medical Corps — I work with their teams on food access and nutrition. That’s taken me from cooking demos with seniors in Puerto Rico to a culinary exchange with Syrian refugee families in Jordan’s Azraq camp, where I made Texas chili, and they schooled me on tabouleh.

Partnership for a Healthier America — I had the privilege of supporting First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating initiatives with the “Let’s Move!” campaign.

American Heart Association — collaborating on content that clears up nutrition misinformation, and advocating for people to embrace walking as a proven heart-healthy activity.

NPR — I’ve joined Life Kit and All Things Considered to talk meal prep and finding no- and low-cost groceries. I’ve used SNAP benefits myself. I don’t talk about food access as theory.

The background nobody expects

This is not how I imagined my life would turn out. And I’m glad! Before all this, I was in corporate America. After graduating from The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Business Administration (Business Honors Program) and a Bachelor of Arts (Hispanic Studies) I was still uncertain about what I wanted to do in my life.

My junior year in college changed me. Rather than take a well-paying consulting job at a top firm, I “delayed the real world” and applied for and received the Rotary International Ambassadorial scholarship, which took me to Quito, Ecuador. I went to a language school, and to further immerse myself in the culture, I got a job! I worked as a waiter in a restaurant, and taught “hip hop” dance classes at a local gym. (Confession: I couldn’t dance, but they believed anything I said because I was a Black American. Lol)

I learned there was so much more of the world than what I was seeing from Texas.

Even though I returned to the States and worked at KPMG Consulting, I knew that I wanted to do something to help people. As I told my boss during a performance review, “I want to feel that the work I do impacts the world – I want to feel connected to it.”

I left corporate America to study at the Harvard Kennedy School (Master in Public Policy, Strategic Management) and received the John F. Kennedy Academic Scholarship and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Scholar.

I graduated during the housing crisis, so I found myself back in my hometown, in my childhood home, in my bedroom, trying to figure things out while on food stamps… and that’s where the FitMenCook journey began… want to know the rest? Check out some of interviews below – I recommend the CNN segment.

All in all, I feel blessed by the path I’ve been able to travel, and even now, I’m still on that journey. Thank you for being a part of it.

As seen on

TV & Radio

Forbes

Print & Online Press

Institutional & Awards

Podcasts