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junker-town · 6 years

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Meet the chef who helped Dwyane Wade change his diet

Sixteen years ago, Richard Ingram didn’t know who Dwyane Wade even was. Now, he’s become one of the most important people in his inner circle.

On most days, Richard Ingraham clocks in before 5 a.m. First on the agenda: Cook breakfast for the kids.

These aren’t Ingraham’s children. They’re athletes, just like their father. So he prepares a stack of oatmeal-stuffed, gluten-free pancakes with turkey sausage and a fruit cup of kiwis, orange slices, blueberries, and strawberries. Orange juice on the side. Dwyane Wade will walk downstairs shortly after his kids.

Wade recently announced his decision to re-sign with the Miami Heat for the 2018-19 season. It will be “one last dance” that caps a decorated Hall of Fame career. It’s Ingraham job to fuel his client. We’re talking premium gas, not that regular stuff.

Before he leaves for his first workout of the day, Wade’s breakfast could have several layers such as oatmeal in almond milk, egg whites with cashew cheese, an adult-sized portion of turkey sausage and fruit, with orange juice and a glass of lemon water on the side. It could also be as simple as a fruit juice with a protein shake that includes bananas and raw oats to take on the go.

“Oats are a slow-acting carbohydrate,” Ingraham says. “Which means that it sustains the body a lot longer than your fast-acting carbs.”

While Wade goes through a morning workout, Ingraham balances a handful of projects. He could be doing schoolwork for his current culinary business courses. He could be cutting checks for his catering business, Chef RLI. He could be out grocery shopping for the next meal, fitting in a sandwich for himself, or handling some of Wade’s personal business.

One day, that meant purchasing and installing an ice bath in Wade’s home, then filling it with pounds upon pounds of ice — by hand.

“It’s very hard, my brother,” he admits, “But I’m doing it.”

A lunch Ingraham prepares could be a bed of roasted root vegetables — celery root, rutabaga, carrots, parsnips, and leeks — resting beneath a seared pork tenderloin and topped with a homemade mushroom broth. And if your mouth is watering, just wait for dinner. One night, Ingraham prepares a roasted red snapper with coconut curry sauce. It is served on top black rice and topped with purple sweet potatoes, orange bell peppers and snow peas.

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Roasted Snapper with Asian Vegetables Purple Potatoes and Coconut Curry Sauce . . . #instafood #chefsofinstagram #werejustdifferent #instagood #curry #coconut #seafood #Asian #favor #soulfood #miami #miamifoodie #instachef #teamchefrli #flavor #foodie #instafoodie #nomnom #passion

A post shared by Richard Ingraham (@chefrli) on Sep 19, 2018 at 10:31am PDT

It is a dish for a basketball player who will go down as one of the greatest of all time. It’s also (usually) the end of an action-packed work day for one of the premier personal chefs in professional sports.

Welcome to a day in the life of Richard Ingraham, the man who has put food into this Hall of Fame basketball player’s body for a decade and a half. Sixteen years ago, Ingraham didn’t even recognize Wade’s name. Now, he can say he’s fueled the transformation and body maintenance of one of of the best players in NBA history.

And he’s done it simply by making healthy foods fun and flavorful again.

“To be able to cook for somebody, man, you are one of the most powerful people on the face of the Earth,” Ingraham tells me. “You can’t get any more intimate with a person, besides sleeping with them, than to cook for them.”

Via Richard Ingram

Ingraham’s first experience as a personal chef came as a favor to a friend who wanted to surprise his girlfriend with an official home-cooked meal. By the time Ingraham brought dessert out, the couple was dancing to music and having the time of their life.

”My man said, ‘Do you think you can just pack your stuff up and I’ll bring it to you tomorrow?’” Ingraham recalls. “I’m like, ‘Nah, man! You don’t have to do that. I’ll just pack it up and take it.

“And he said, ‘Nah, you don’t understand what I’m saying. I need you to go, and I’ll take this stuff to you tomorrow.’ ... Needless to say, my first experience as a personal chef was a success.”

But Ingraham never thought that moment would lead him on a career path toward cooking for one of the highest-profile basketball players of all time. He was hustling between two jobs: one teaching culinary arts to the homeless and kids with behavioral disorders, the other as the chef for the founders of the homeless shelter where he worked.

Ingraham wasn’t into basketball, and, at the time, Wade was just entering the league as a rookie out of Marquette. So what was his response when an old client from his days as a hairstylist reached out with an opportunity to cook for an NBA player?

“Well shit, who is that?” Ingraham said.

The friend told him to Google “Dwyane Wade” and circle back if interested. Ingraham went into his classroom, looked Wade up, and asked his students if they knew who this was.

Of course they did. It was Dwyane Wade.

“I felt like a jackass,” Ingraham says now. “So I called her back and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’”

Ingraham was told to bring five or six dishes for Wade to try, then prepare something on the spot for him. In his mind, the food needed to taste better than good; it needed to be damn delicious.

So he summoned every home-cooked dish that came to mind: Mashed potatoes, cornbread, smothered turkey wings, pound cake. Ingraham brought a fresh-squeezed strawberry lemonade (he estimates it had 2.5 pounds of sugar), and he made spaghetti and meatballs in Wade’s kitchen.

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3rd Course Buttermilk Fried Lobster with Asparagus Ribbons Curry Seafood Potato Purée and Warm Bacon Vin #instafood #chefsofinstagram #instagood #wine #privatedining #lobster #asparagus #Shrimp #southerncooking #soulfood #miami #miamifoodie #instachef #teamchefrli #potato #foodie #instafoodie #nomnom #werejustdifferent #flavor #passion #love #purpose #curry #bacon

A post shared by Richard Ingraham (@chefrli) on Sep 2, 2018 at 9:36pm PDT

Impressed, Wade hired Ingraham. What started as a once-a-week arrangement quickly became three days a week and eventually full-time. But as he started to gain his client’s trust, Ingraham knew he couldn’t just feed Wade soul food if he wanted to help him extend his promising career.

“It just was in my spirit that we just couldn’t continue to eat the way that we were eating,” Ingraham says.

Making the transition wasn’t easy. Ingraham admits he didn’t know much about nutrition or trying to eat healthy, and a young D-Wade wasn’t eating vegetables at all. Instead, he would replace those veggies with vitamins or powders.

“I would try to introduce tomatoes and salads to him, and he wouldn’t want them,” Ingraham says, laughing. “[I’d tell him,] ‘I’ve been trying to get you to eat this stuff all season long and, you’re either leaving it on the plane or saying, ‘Chef, I don’t wanna eat it.”’

Ingraham also recalls a playoff injury that made Wade reconsider healthy eating. It was a strained rib in the 2005 Eastern Conference Finals against the Detroit Pistons. The Heat held a 3-2 lead entering a pivotal Game 6. Wade missed the game and Miami lost by 25, then went on to lose Game 7, while the Pistons advanced to the NBA Finals.

That injury in the second year of Wade’s career, Ingraham says, started the conversation about eating better. Ingraham told Wade he had two great things going for him: his youth and his genes. The latter could be maximized as Wade aged, so long as he ate healthier.

Wade, through a spokesperson, declined to comment for this story. But he wrote a heartfelt foreword for Ingraham’s book, Eating Well to Win: Inspired Living Through Inspired Cooking:

“For the past 10 years, Richard Ingraham has been an integral part of my career as an NBA athlete, helping me gain a better understanding of food, health, and nutrition,” Wade wrote. “Many probably think the basis of our connections with each other ends there, but what many may not know is that Chef Richard Ingraham — no — Rich is family to me.

“Whenever I’m home, you can find Rich in my kitchen preparing meals that help me recover and keep me in shape.”

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#Repost @dwyanewade with @get_repost ・・・ Man, if it wasn’t for the male role models in my life, I wouldn’t be here today. Shoutout to all the fathers and father-figures out there this #FathersDay. Check out @chefrli and I whip up some Sangria with @dwadecellars wine over some fatherhood-talk [link in bio]

A post shared by Richard Ingraham (@chefrli) on Jun 15, 2018 at 3:50pm PDT

Over the years, Wade slowly became more open to salads and vegetables as he began traveling the world. Ingraham credits Ray Allen, who founded an organic fast-food restaurant in Miami named Grown, for giving Wade advice on how to take care of his body for the long run. Wade took tips from different players, including teammates LeBron James and Chris Bosh, and brought them to Ingraham. Some worked, others didn’t.

But sure enough, Wade’s approach to nutrition began to evolve. And as a result, Ingraham began to evolve as well.

“It was and it still is a lot to learn,” he says. “But I look at it like this: If I don’t learn it, somebody else is gonna learn it. If I want to continue to help Dwyane and continue to help myself, this is is the material that I need to know.”

So after burying himself in research, sourcing new products from farmer’s markets and experimenting with healthy meals in the Wade household, this became Ingraham’s calling card. He recreates the meals everyone loves to eat, only in a nutritious way that fuels the body.

That research led Ingraham to a culinary exploration well outside of Wade’s kitchen. His business, Chef RLI, places personal chefs into the homes of Fortune 500 businessmen and professional athletes. He teaches these chefs how to create similar healthy, but delicious meals for athletes like Carmelo Anthony; NFL players Olivier Vernon, Ricky Jean-Francois, and Jorian Reed; and tennis star Novak Djokovic, to name a few.

Ingraham’s first client outside of Wade was former NFL Pro Bowl wide receiver Santana Moss, and it was Moss, still rehabbing from arthroscopic knee surgery, who challenged Ingraham the most.

Moss would say, “Chef, I want chicken pot pie,” and it was up to Ingraham to find the healthiest way to make this meal for his client.

“He would test me all the time to try to find a way to make these items healthier,” Ingraham says.

So Ingraham would use gluten-free flour in both the pot pie crust and the gravy, roast and pull his own chicken instead of buying it pre-cooked elsewhere, and use fresh root vegetables to fill out the individual pies. In other instances, Moss would go out to events and text Ingraham when there was only junk to eat. He would send Ingraham pictures of food in aisles of grocery stores, or photos of a menu when he was out at a restaurant. Ingraham gave him the best options, no matter the circumstance.

After hopping on Ingraham’s meal plan after the 2012 Super Bowl, Moss dropped 20 pounds and was in the best shape of his life entering Washington’s training camp.

“He made eating healthy something for me to look forward to,” Moss tells SB Nation. “Like I was really looking forward to his dishes, cause I’m like, ‘Man, what’s this gonna taste like?’ Everything I liked, he showed me how he can make it healthy and taste good. And that’s what kept me motivated even more to stick to the process.”

The proof is in the pudding — or maybe it’s in the kale salad.

Ingraham has served on former First Lady Michelle Obama’s obesity initiative to get healthier foods into lunchrooms of inner-city public schools, but says their efforts were stiff-armed at the school board meeting table. The reason: everything on a lunch tray comes with a multi-million dollar price tag, from the milk carton to the chicken nuggets.

Two seasons ago, Wade averaged 18 points per game on the second-best three-point shooting percentages of his career. Since 2010, Dirk Nowitzki, Paul Pierce, and Kobe Bryant are the only other players to average more points in a season at age 35 or better. When Wade was traded to Miami last February and made the playoffs, old-man Wade didn’t lose a step, averaging 16.6 points, 3.4 assists, and 1.4 steals in the postseason at age 36.

Flash will turn 37 in January, and this will be the final year of his Hall-of-Fame career. He might not be the same player who won Finals MVP in 2006 or claimed a scoring title in 2009. But as long as Wade keeps his body right, starting with the quality of gas he fuels it with, his farewell tour should be a blast from the past.

Via Richard Ingram

These days, Ingraham’s mission is to show more people that healthy eating is fun, even if that mission comes with hurdles he cannot leap alone.

His message is that healthy eating should start as soon as a parent knows their child wants to be a pro athlete, not midway through a professional playing career. He also knows, though, that most pro athletes come from low-income areas labeled “food deserts,” where the grocery stores provide the lowest quality of produce. It’s an uphill battle, a war too steep for one man to fight alone.

So Ingraham makes a mark wherever he can, nipping at the ankles of the beast with hopes to inspire other to continue doing the same.

Ingraham doesn’t take sole credit for the improved diets of Wade and his other clients. He says Allen, Bosh, and James deserve plenty, as does Wade’s wife, Gabrielle Union. Ingraham also says Wade’s love for wine has given him a drink to pair with Ingraham’s dishes.

“Like they say it takes a village to raise a child?” he says. “It takes a village to raise a palate for an athlete as well.”

Ingraham’s role in this athlete’s diet has come from building a relationship with Wade, one that has grown beyond food and basketball. It started with the second-most intimate interaction two humans can have. Now, the two talk about life, family, problems, and opportunities, all thanks to Ingraham’s work educating Wade on the food he puts into his body.

“If you just put food down in front of somebody that tastes good, they’re just gonna eat it all the time,” he said. “But if I came to you and said look I wanna give you this blueberry this morning because they’re very high in antioxidants, and antioxidants are the things that help fight free radicals, which help to prevent you from catching colds and things like that. When I say that to you, you’re looking at a blueberry a whole different way than you normally would.”

Before his journey, Ingraham couldn’t have told you the difference between fast-acting and slow-acting carbs, or antioxidants and free radicals. Now, he’s the chef responsible for dozens of athletes and businessmen taking the step toward clean eating.

That’s because he made nutritious food fun — and delicious again. Ingraham gave the people what they want. They just never knew it could be healthy and taste this good, too.

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