I’m Tom, the founder of fu:di.
I’ve always worked with and around food - I bloody love it! I used to think I knew about health – I ate mostly homemade food and enjoyed a good run around the park. Life was ticking along nicely until I fell off the health wagon. All of a sudden, I found myself morbidly overweight (130kg!!), with aches and pains all over my body. The real wakeup call was being diagnosed as pre-diabetic at the age of 39. The thought of going on medicine for the rest of my life, not to mention the other consequences of managing diabetes / risk of further health complications, was the final straw.
When I spoke to my best mate Ben, he suggested I try cutting out sugar and reducing carbs to try to help reverse my diagnosis. Eating more fat and cutting out healthy grains, however, didn’t make sense to me - fat makes you fat, right? Turns out I was wrong. Ben pointed out that your body either runs on carbohydrates (glucose) or fat (ketones). If you cut out carbs, your body goes into ketosis and you’ll slowly start being able to burn the excess fat (of which I had plenty!) and put your body into a healthier metabolic state - in theory giving you a fighting chance to reverse diabetes - fingers crossed...
To cut a long story short, after just 3 months of this new diet, my blood sugars had returned to a “normal” level and were no longer in the pre-diabetic range. Within 6 months I had lost 15kg and within 12 months another 15kg. All of this was great, but I still felt I had lost a big part of my personality - my “foodiness”. Cutting out everything I used to love was hard. I missed the Friday night burgers with my family. I missed bowls of pasta shared with friends. Not to mention, none of the brands in the market spoke to me - often overly sweetened and almost never foodie!
Once I realised it was these moments with friends and loved ones that I missed so much, I started to try and hack some everyday recipes. First came ketchup, then bread and burger buns. Jams and chutneys followed, with chilli sauces, granolas and mayo (don’t forget the seed oil!!) soon after. All of a sudden, I was living again. Healthy & Happy.
Ben & I decided that with his obsession with statistics & metabolic health and my obsession with food (and new found obsession of metabolic health), we had the ingredients to build a business that could really make a difference. Et voilà - Purpose Driven Foods was born!
We’ve got a simple ambition - improve the metabolic health of the world.
