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ALSO
IN THIS ISSUE In His Element College for Kids Parking 101 Go With the Flow Close Encounters Chancellor's Page Development News Factoids Newsmakers Accomplishments
of faculty and staff… |
Marilyn
Biggica’s recipe for success is teaching how to cook healthy meals
that taste great. Lighten Up Gnocchi, perogies, ravioli, polenta, varenyky, rissoto, pasta, dumplings… Marilyn Biggica was weaned on traditional favorites from her Ukrainian-Italian heritage, but there’s nothing light about these rustic comfort foods. “My relationship with food is very family oriented,” Biggica said. “My parents owned a restaurant in New York when I was a toddler, and there was always talk of food in our family.” Biggica’s love for food came with a price, though. Biggica ate most of the things she cooked, even if they weren’t good for her. She gained a considerable amount of weight, tipping the scales at more than 300 pounds at one point, before becoming obsessed with healthy cooking and healthy eating. What she learned, she hungered to share with others. Biggica has blended this zest for food with her appetite to teach cooking into the ever-popular class in healthy cooking offered at Standley Park Recreation Center through the Centers for Education and Technology. The class has been a staple of the curriculum since 1985, when she began teaching it. “The significant thing about losing weight is keeping it off, learning how to adjust to a new lifestyle of cooking and eating,” she said. “Diets don’t work. People think they can lose weight with a diet, but they can’t keep that weight off.” Biggica says she’s learned to adjust. She’s never wanted to give up pizza and chocolate completely, but has learned to balance things out with fruits and vegetables. Her expertise in the art of cooking with health and weight in mind has earned her the respect of professional medical practitioners, who send patients to Biggica’s class. “There are so many people who come to me for many different problems where healthy eating is important,” Biggica said. “My own personal physician refers people with weight problems to me, because I can help them.” Biggica admits she’s still learning. “There is endless knowledge on a subject like this,” she said. “There are always new recipes, new things to eat. We look for new things to take the place of the almighty hamburger and the high-fat pizza.” And it’s not about willpower. “There’s no such thing when it comes to this,” she said. “Willpower is associated with diets, and it just doesn’t work. You need to educate yourself. Know about the alternatives and the other things available. It’s not necessarily oils and fats that make a meal taste good.” When her weight problems became severe, Biggica experimented with new recipes, adapting some of her old favorites, and lost a significant amount of weight over a reasonable amount of time, maintaining the loss for 16 years. She decided to create menus and recipes that people could adapt for whatever medical needs they had, using low fat, low sugar or low salt. In other words, she kept it low. That apparently satisfied a craving, because even when she changed from decadent gourmet cooking to lighter, healthier fare, the students kept coming. Every recipe Biggica teaches includes a nutritional analysis, so her students can adapt to their personal dietary needs. Biggica taught in several different locations early on, but eventually moved all of her classes to the rec center on Governor Drive. Enough of her students followed her to continue classes three days a week, and have stories to tell. Jean Leuthard retired from work as a registered nurse, and gained 50 pounds. A friend recommended Leuthard try Biggica’s class, and she adopted the cooking-style changes, losing 30 pounds the first year. Leuthard continued to enroll in the classes, and lost another 10 pounds. She has kept the weight off for more than five years. She is convinced this new lifestyle has assisted her in managing her non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, currently in remission. “The best thing is that we know Marilyn went through the weight loss and the health problems before us, and she really knows how to create food that tastes great and is good for us,” Leuthard said. “She’s a terrific teacher and she puts recipes together for taste as well as health. My husband had a heart condition requiring a bypass operation, and combining that with low-fat cooking, he’s in much better health now.” Biggica has some rules. “I have three
tenets for my class: The food will be low-fat and adaptable to other needs,
it will have relatively simple preparations required, and it will taste
great,” she said. “I don’t have enough room for everyone in the kitchen with just one stove top and one double oven,” she said. “We don’t have a demonstration overhead mirror, so we have to be a really cozy group when I’m preparing the foods. But the students all know we are there for a common good, and so we make do.” In addition to her teaching, Biggica belongs to the International Association of Cooking Professionals. She is a consultant to several local restaurants, providing guidance to their chefs on healthy cooking, recipes and menus. Florence Potter, who first went to the class to learn how to make low fat foods for her husband after his heart bypass surgery, says it was fun to cook in a different way, not needing all that butter. “I’ll
keep cooking,” Biggica promises. “Healthy cooking means having
more fun eating.” |
