Daniel Edlund

The short version

I cook for a living, I have trained my whole adult life, and I know what the research says.

Most people who can cook at a professional level do not know much about training. Most people who know training do not cook. Almost nobody in either group has read the clinical literature on what they are putting in their body.

I ended up in all three, in that order, over about thirty years. It was not a plan. It became one.

What it produced is a way of working where the food, the training and the recovery are treated as one system rather than three hobbies that happen to share a person. That is the whole argument of my books, and it is how I cook for the households I work in.

The kitchen

Le Cordon Bleu, and fifteen years in private estate kitchens

I trained at Le Cordon Bleu and have spent the last fifteen years as a private chef, cooking daily for principals and their households, and for dinners and events. Private estate work is different from restaurant work in a way that suits me: you cook for the same people repeatedly, so you learn them. Their preferences, their schedule, what they are training for, what they will actually eat on a Tuesday night.

Menus get built around the household rather than chosen from a set list. Macronutrients are balanced deliberately, not as a marketing line. Everything is sourced organic where it matters and where it does not I will tell you it does not.

I am Swedish, and I cook in English and Swedish.

The training

Thirty years of strength training, and a licence to coach it

I have been strength training for about thirty years, and I am a licensed strength coach and personal trainer. That matters here for one reason: it means the nutrition advice in my books comes from someone who has spent three decades applying it to himself and to clients, not from someone who read about it.

I am also an internationally licensed massage therapist, which is the part of the picture most people leave out. Recovery is not a rest day. It is a set of things you actively do, and soft tissue work is one of them.

The books

Why I wrote three of them instead of one

They answer three different questions, and mixing them would have made all three worse.

• The Optimized Performance Lifestyle is the framework — sixteen chapters on how eating, training, sleeping and recovering hold each other up. It is the architecture, not another diet.
• The EASY Way to Organic Cooking is the cooking — 240 recipes with short ingredient lists and no step that needs a technique you would have to go and learn first.
• The Complete Supplement Guide is the reference — 147 entries across nine categories, each graded against the clinical evidence, including the ones I could not recommend.

If you want to see how I work before paying for any of it, The Overhyped Ten is the ten supplements that failed my own grading, published in full and free. A rating scale that never returns a negative result is not a rating scale.

Common questions

The things people usually ask