We first saw Sharone Hakman on season one of MasterChef. Since then, he’s become a culinary innovator, entrepreneur, and charismatic TV personality renowned for his unique ability to blend bold flavors with clean, high-quality ingredients.
He’s here to talk about why you truly “are what you eat” and how to make healthy eating delicious.
Why he first fell in love with food:
“I just think food brings families together. Every family, whether you’re Jewish, Catholic, or whatever part of the world you’re from, oftentimes family dinners are such a tradition and create such beautiful memories for people growing up.”
It’s hard to eat healthy in America.:
“It’s really tough living in the US and making that conscious decision because when you look around the majority of things that are easily available to you are generally not good for you. Fast food, the grocery store … all the affordable, cheaper things are generally processed, loaded with junk.
And I think that’s why we have such an epidemic with obesity and diabetes. And everyone wants this quick fix, like to take medication, versus looking at the root cause, and (asking ourselves) why are we unhealthy.”
So, how do we decide to make better decisions:
“I think the power of manifestation is pretty real and powerful. Like if you really believe and you really commit to saying, ‘I am healthy. I am healthy, I am healthy’ every day, when you decide to put food in your mouth and you repeat that in your mind, you look at the food and you’re going to say to yourself, ‘No, I’m actually not going to eat that.”
Sharone’s food products are in 12,000 stores, but it wasn’t easy:
“I’m competing with brands that are like 99 cents and are ‘buy one, get one.’ You look at their ingredient deck and it’s (very long) relative to what it should be, which should just be like five or six different things. Each ingredient has 40 sub ingredients in there.
It’s really difficult to compete with them because they’ve spent 50 plus, 80 plus years training us to buy these products and to spend this amount of money for these products.”
What was Gordon Ramsay like on MasterChef:
“It was great. He’s great. He is a very different personality on television than he is in person. It’s been a while. I have not seen or spoken to him in years, but it was a great experience.”
Why Sharone is so passionate about his company Chef Hak’s and its commitment to nutrition:
“It starts with what you eat every day, right? The nutrients. The daily practice, the daily routine of making good, healthy choices for yourself, eating whole foods. I think if you do that and you can exercise three, four times a day a week, you’re 95% there.”
What’s the common denominator of people choosing to live healthy lives:
“Making tough choices. You’ve got to, you know, choose your hard. It’s hard to be unhealthy, and it’s hard to stay healthy. You choose your hard and that’s the common denominator.”
