About Chef Stu
I’m Stu.
I’m a chef, a dad, a writer, and someone who has spent a fairly significant amount of time trying to work out why being good at coping can sometimes make life harder rather than easier.
Most of what I make now sits somewhere around the idea of practical rebuilding for people with real lives.
Work. Family. Fitness. Money. Setbacks. Changing direction. Starting again without pretending the rest of your life has politely stopped while you do it.
The “Chef” bit came first.
I’ve spent most of my working life in kitchens. Long shifts, busy services, stupidly hot rooms, and the strange hospitality habit of treating complete exhaustion as if it’s just part of the uniform.
For a long time, being a chef was the most obvious thing about me.
It still matters. A lot.
But somewhere along the way I became just as interested in everything happening around the job as the job itself.
What work does to your identity.
Why being reliable can become something you hide behind.
How family changes the decisions you make.
Why getting fitter is much harder when you’re already knackered.
How money, pressure and responsibility quietly shape your life.
What happens when you realise you probably don’t want to keep doing the thing you spent years becoming good at.
And how you change any of it without blowing your whole life up first.
So what is Chef Stu?
I’m still working that out.
There are videos.
There’s writing.
There’s a book.
There will probably be other things later.
Some of it is serious. Some of it is me trying to make sense of something. Some of it is just something I found interesting and wanted to talk about.
That’s probably the best description of it.
I’m interested in what rebuilding actually looks like when you’ve still got work tomorrow, children who need collecting, bills that don’t particularly care how inspired you feel, and people who reasonably expect you to keep turning up.
How do you get stronger without turning fitness into another job?
How do you think about money when there never seems to be quite enough of it?
How do you change career when you’ve spent years becoming good at the one you’re trying to leave?
How do you look after yourself without deciding that everyone who relies on you is suddenly an inconvenience?
How do you make progress when you don’t have the time, energy or mental capacity for a complete reinvention?
Those are the questions I keep coming back to.
I’m not an expert in having life sorted
This feels worth mentioning.
I’m not writing or making videos from the other side of some enormous transformation where everything now makes perfect sense.
A lot of this is happening while I’m still in it.
I’m still working things out.
Still changing my mind.
Still trying things.
Still getting things wrong.
Still occasionally discovering that something I was absolutely certain about six months ago was, in fact, bollocks.
That’s part of why I make any of this in the first place.
I’m much more interested in what change looks like while ordinary life keeps happening than presenting a beautifully organised version once all the difficult bits have been tidied away.
There’s plenty of advice on the internet from people who seem to have conquered mornings, money, fitness, productivity, parenting and possibly mortality before breakfast.
I’m probably not going to be one of them.
One Fight At A Time
Eventually, a lot of this thinking turned into a book.
One Fight At A Time: Rebuilding Yourself While Carrying Real Life is about what happens when you’re still functioning, still turning up and still doing what needs doing, but you’ve started to realise that coping isn’t necessarily the same thing as being okay.
It covers a lot of the territory I keep returning to here: work, exhaustion, family, identity, money, fitness, responsibility and the difficult business of changing things without waiting for the rest of your life to conveniently stop first.
It’s probably the clearest expression so far of what I mean by practical rebuilding for people with real lives.
What you’ll find here
This website is basically somewhere permanent for everything else.
Social platforms are useful. They’re where most people will probably find me.
But they all have their own formats, limits and algorithms deciding what deserves to be seen this week.
This doesn’t.
So some things here will start as videos.
Some will be longer pieces of writing.
Some will connect to One Fight At A Time.
Some will be about kitchens, work, fitness, family or whatever else I happen to be figuring out.
And some will simply be random things that seemed worth putting somewhere.
Not everything needs to become a content strategy.
Sometimes something can just be interesting.
Anyway…
That’s me.
Chef.
Dad.
Writer, apparently.
Trying to get a little stronger, make slightly better decisions, build some interesting things and work out what comes next.
If any of that sounds familiar, have a look around.