Team Second Helping
Kevin DeMarco, Executive Chef

Top: Kevin gets ready to demonstrate the TRX method at his gym, The Urban Studios. Kevin is a pastry chef and personal trainer/gym owner; Bottom: Yes, that's Kevin in the middle. The moustache gets me every time

Kevin’s exploration of healthy cooking started with one concept: “If you take saturated fat and sugar out, how are you going ot put flavor in?”

To answer that, he didn’t look at the normal ways “healthy eating” are thought about. He didn’t look at the latest diet books or fads. Instead, he drew upon his knowledge of flavor and panache he developed while being an up-and-coming pastry chef in New York City.

“The Best Life Diet” or any of the multitude of recipes making “lite” versions of the same foods that got you fat to begin with usually bore him. Instead, he draws inspiration from high-end gourmet books like “The Elements of Taste,” and plethora of world cuisines and mixes and matches to his heart’s content.

“Not only is the food filling, it’s interesting,” Kevin says in this thick New York accent. “I don’t worry so much about things like caloric content or statistics, but more if you’re interested in the food you’re eating.”

It turns out tough guy Kevin Demarco started out as a 250-pound Italian kid in the boroughs of New York. Always a cook, Kevin lived off stir fries until he shed all this weight, and then trained as a pastry chef at The New York Restaurant School.

He felt many chefs tended to overemphasize sugar at the expense of other herbs, spices and other flavor-maximizing techniques, so Kevin created thoughtful desserts that steadily gained him recognition him through the ranks of New York’s restaurant scene. His work earned the interest of then-New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl and the then-fledgling Food Network.

Kevin moved to Myrtle Beach, S.C. to open the gourmet health-focused DeMarco’s Café. His food was a revelation to local diners: not only did he apply his pastry chef experience to diet food, he also bestowed it an uncommon glamor. In his off hours, Kevin pursued bodybuilding and won three S.C. Excalibur bodybuilding competitions in a row, ran a half-marathon and completed a triathlon.

After his last bodybuilding competition, Kevin suffered nerve damage which worsened after a brief, disastrous move to California. Newly single and in poor health, Kevin returned to the Carolinas — this time Wilmington, N.C. — to recover.

He was introduced to the TRX method, a Navy-Seal-designed form of functional training that utilizes body weight as resistance. In the process of using this method, Kevin’s condition improved and he could resume his workouts. His vigor returned, Kevin became a trainer in the technique.

After hopping around the country, Kevin felt well-suited to the small-town-meets-metro feel of Wilmington and operates a personal training studio and personal chef business, DeMarco Studio.

At his studio, he teaches training methods that draw upon your own body weight, and expounds what he calls the 60-40 philosophy:

“In conjunction with 60% healthy eating, 40% is exercise and giving 100% to your training, whatever that 100% is on a given day, don’t give up. It’s within this combination that I feel you get to your goals and create a healthy lifestyle at the same time.

I’ve said it over and over, there is no such thing as “diet”, it’s a balance … a healthy way to live and look at food. Not only balance in your day to day but in each meal, a balance of fats, carbs, protiens and whole, natural foods.”

More about Kevin | See the pages for DeMarco Studio. E-mail Kevin at kevin@secondhelpingonline.com