The Elements Story: Stan's White Hot Pain Leads to Discovery
The idea for these meals emerged in 2015 when I was training to crush the world record in the Men’s 50+ mile run. That was an extremely difficult year for me. Divorce, single fatherhood, business travel … All heavy, responsibilities that were wearing me down.
One of the ways I dealt with the adversity was by giving my Athlete full rein. My training was off the hook. Being constantly on the road created my greatest frustration—my WHITE-HOT-PAIN. Whether on the highway or local streets of a city or town, it was all the same. Every franchise sign yelled at me:
I knew the truth. It’s all garbage, unidentifiable and unlabeled. I constantly found myself asking, “With all the technology out there, why so much garbage and poison?”
All our friends who train had the same experience. Everyone was high intensity, everybody’s training for a purpose, and yet we all struggled to find clean food. That white hot pain was burning everyone. It always had.
A lot of my friends meal prepped. Sundays and Wednesdays were spent kneeling to the oven, the stove, the food. Cooking up veggies and rice, the chicken breasts, dividing them into never-ending containers of Tupperware, and carrying them around in our sacred freezer bags.
But I would regularly swear, “If I have to eat another microwaved, 4-day old chicken breast I am going to come unhinged”. Then I’d choke them down anyway because that was my best option..
If you train and care about your nutrition, I know you know what I'm talking about.
As I said earlier, my frustration in finding clean food to eat led to anger—anger from trying to govern my life and realizing I was being governed. What’s the value of my health if it kept me from giving my best to family, friends, church, profession and community. This led to the overwhelming desire to create a solution.
So, I took my visualization to a team of food scientists and you won’t believe what happened.
We worked long and hard to not only dial in the macros an athlete needs, but to make the meals delicious. This was no easy task and took months and months of trial and error, working with the best, whole ingredients; animal and plant proteins, clean carbs, healthy fats, herbs and spices, endless taste testing, getting the proportions right, starting over and trying again.
Elements was born! Simply ADD HOT WATER and enjoy our delicious FOOD when your body needs it, wherever you are.