Meet Chef Meg: Culinary Instructor, Marathon Runner, and Busy Mom
World Master Chef is SparkPeople's Healthy Cooking Expert
-- By SparkRecipes
There aren’t many female World Master Chefs (only 20 worldwide), or chefs who run marathons and love rowing, or chefs who trained in the classics of rich French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu yet have dedicated their careers to creating healthy recipes. Chef Meg Galvin, resident healthy chef at SparkPeople.com, America’s largest weight-loss site and one of the largest online homes for healthy recipes, is all of these wrapped into one.
No one better embodies the type of chef who can both delight the palate and improve the health of what Chef Meg calls “our overfed and undernourished nation.” This Kentucky farmer’s daughter and mother of three applies her classical French training to create lighter, healthful recipes with simple, smart substitutions. The result is nourishing, flavorful, satisfying meals that never taste like diet food and don’t require swearing off ingredients like butter and bacon or favorite comfort foods like mac ‘n cheese and Sloppy Joes.
In The SparkPeople Cookbook: Love Your Food, Lose the Weight (Hay House, October 2011), Chef Meg shares her proven secrets for how anyone can love their food and still lose weight with her delectable, easy-to-make meals. The perfect addition to the powerful SparkPeople platform, The SparkPeople Cookbook, continues the life-altering movement that made SparkPeople CEO Chris Downie’s book, The Spark, a New York Times bestseller.
Some great content The SparkPeople Cookbook contains:
- “Slim It Down” options to make meals even lighter
- 150 meal ideas and recipes that take 30 minutes or less to prepare
- 2 weeks of meal plans, including snacks, all for 1,400-1,600 calories
- Expert tips and tricks to increase flavor and satiety while cutting extra calories, fat, and salt
- Educational chapters on healthy eating rooted in SparkPeople’s proven weight-loss expertise
- Inspiring testimonials from real people who used these recipes and the SparkPeople plan to lose weight
- A healthy pantry checklist and a list of inexpensive but nutritious foods for hard economic times
At SparkPeople, Chef Meg Galvin develops healthy recipes, tests some of our best member-submitted dishes and teaches the fundamentals of cooking through informative and entertaining videos and articles. A World Master Chef since 2005, Chef Meg was the host of the regional television show “The Dish,” which aired on a local CBS affiliate and online. Meg now hosts cooking videos for the supermarket chain Kroger that are shown on the local Fox affiliate.
Chef Meg earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Eastern Kentucky University and a Certificate of Culinary Arts from Le Cordon Bleu in London. She is certified as an Executive Chef by the American Culinary Federation and is working toward her Court of Master Sommeliers wine certification.
Since 2002, Chef Meg has received numerous awards from the American Culinary Federation, Cincinnati chapter. She accepted the ACF John Sector Culinary Educator award in 2000, ACF Presidential Medallion in 2001, was named the Greater Cincinnati ACF Chef of the Year in 2002, and received the Tastemakers award from the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2004.
Chef Meg is a culinary faculty member at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, home of the Midwest Culinary Institute (MCI), an American Culinary Federation certified college. In addition, she is the coordinator of a program that allows MCI students to transfer to the University of Cincinnati and earn a bachelor of science in the culinary arts. The program is one of only four in the country.
An author and co-editor of several books and research abstracts, Chef Meg is interested in methodology, children’s cooking, pastry, and healthy cooking. She enjoys teaching culinary students, community members who need help with basic skills or new recipes, and most of all, children. She finds innovative ways to create imaginative and fun foods while incorporating much-needed vegetables and fruits that young and active children require for growth. Meg has been an outspoken proponent of healthy food choices. “Dine from the earth to the table by shopping at local markets and selecting fruits and vegetables of the season,” she says.
Raised on a large family farm in central Kentucky, Chef Meg now lives in northern Kentucky with her husband and three sons--12-year-old twins and a 14 year old. On any given day, she can be found hitting the pavement on long runs or cheering on her sons at their numerous sporting events. She balances her busy schedule by incorporating her home life and career, bringing her kids into the kitchen and testing recipes on--and with--her family.
She is the co-author of the Amazon.com best seller The SparkPeople Cookbook: Love Your Food Lose the Weight.