Meet Avi Greene: Healthy Gourmet Chef & Meal Prep Coach

We had the good fortune of connecting with Avi Greene and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Avi, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
As a fitness professional & nutrition coach, I was always writing meal plans for my clients and noticing their biggest challenges were with nutrition. One day, a client with a family of 6, asked me to come and overhaul their entire kitchen and way of eating. As I cleaned out their pantry of junk food, explained ingredients to their 3 teenage sons and started juicing and cooking all the meals for the family, I was teaching the au pair the principles of my “healthy comfort food”. Through this process, I documented and posted on Facebook. Other friends started reaching out with requests for me to cook for them & coach them. That was the start of my business, 5 years ago in May.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Even though I have been cooking since I was 10 years old, it wasn’t until I was 50 pounds overweight that I started to learn how to cook in a healthier way. Going through the process of changing my heavy comfort food eating habits over to healthy comfort food, and meal prepping or batch cooking, is what helped me lose the weight. Because the food I prepare and teach others to cook is so flavorful, it’s sustainable habit change. Contrasted with restrictive diets that most people will not stick to, my food is both healthy and delicious.

The way I coach Meal Prep, is unique. It’s not just a meal plan with a grocery list. I actually teach people how to prep breakfast, lunch and dinner for 5 days in concert. This saves so many hours of time, clean up, food waste. The 6-week program is diverse so you never get bored eating the same dull chicken breast, broccoli and sweet potatoes. The sauces and dressings are all made from scratch with healthy ingredients. So, you are dressing your food with more healthy food rather than taking nutritional value away by dressing it with condiments made with excess sugar, salt, inflammatory oils, fillers, preservatives.

My mission is to help 1000 people in 2021 to learn how to enjoy meal prep and get away from the SAD diet [Standard American Diet] which is full of processed foods and is making people sicker than ever before.

This course that I have created was born of seeing the need. There is nothing like it. After 2020, people have become more aware of the need to cook at home and build up their immune system.

I am lit up by my mission. Starting off 9 years ago working with people one on one was very rewarding for me. But we are so far gone down the road of poor health, I felt a strong burning desire to provide something at scale that anyone in the country / world can benefit from. That’s my Meal Prep Fundamentals program.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Because I was born and raised in Venice Beach, we are spending most of our time in Venice. The boardwalk is such great people watching. We’re putting on our roller skates and skating down to Santa Monica Pier. We’ll head up to Pacific Palisades park, walk around and then head to the Promenade for more street performers and people watching. During our visit. we will definitely visit Pantages for a show and dinner nearby. And we have to go to the Comedy Store another night. There are so many good options for food, it’s overwhelming to contemplate. But Killer Shrimp in Marina Del Rey is on the list.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
It’s my clients that are my Shout Out. My work is a labor of love and they feel it and respond. During 2020, I feared for my ability to keep a roof over my head and my 3 children. Being 100% self employed in a service based business, I wasn’t sure I would be supported through the 1st year of Covid. My “meal prep family” kept me afloat and continue to support me and refer me to their friends and family and I am nothing but grateful.

Website: www.MamaAvi.com

Instagram: @empowered_avi

Linkedin: Avi Greene

Facebook: Avi Greene

Youtube: Mama Avi

Image Credits
Aaron Regnier Photography Graham Koffler