About - Online Cooking Classes
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FOOD IS EVERYTHING.

Food can heal us, make us healthy and strong. It can bring us joy and comfort, nurture us, and strengthen our bonds with loved ones. 

The right food choices can recover our planet, too.

Our Food Philosophy

We believe that there is no universal diet that suits everyone. What is right for your health depends on where you live, your personal body type, your lifestyle, your age, and many other factors. We do our best to provide you with unbiased information about food and nutrition and bring it to your kitchen through our online programmes. 

All our challenges and online cooking courses focus on natural whole foods and derive inspiration from traditional diets from around the globe. In the modern world, there is a stigma attached to traditional home cooking. It’s considered to be a time-consuming and difficult practice, that falls into the hobby category, while in reality, it belongs to vital life skills.

There are a few basic principles of healthy eating, that health experts agree about, and you’ll find them in all our challenges: 

✅  Eat as many natural, whole foods as possible
✅  Eat healthy fats, proteins, and carbs, appropriate for your body needs
✅  Have a variety of foods daily, that support your gut health and digestive system
❌  Avoid refined sugars, unhealthy oils, and processed junk foods
❌  Cooking shouldn’t be stressful, and healthy eating shouldn’t become an obsession

To learn more about our approach to food and cooking, check out Happy Bellyfish YouTube Channel.

YOUR DAILY HABITS AND CHOICES MATTER THE MOST

We focus on the formation of healthy eating habits, that’s why our online programmes run in the format of challenges:

  • If you want to form a new habit, you need to have the skills to do so. It’s impossible to stick to healthy eating if you can’t cook a healthy meal
  • Doing something once is much more important than watching ten YouTube videos about it. We promote action over theory and support you with trying out new skills in the kitchen right away
  • Consistency is the key to success. Our challenges are designed in a way, that helps participants to follow through on their new habits and develop new skills that will stay with them for life

We embrace the “one-step-at-a-time” approach, where you learn the most, by making very small actions and changes in the way you eat and live, but daily. 

THE BIGGER IMPACT OF OUR FOOD CHOICES

As a company, we are dedicated to researching and promoting more sustainable ways of eating, that support not just human health, but also the health of our planet, and promote biodiversity. We study and document the traditional and artisan ways of food production and cooking, that can be followed in the reality of modern life. You can learn more about this in our micro-documentary series The Origins of Food that Matter

In our work, we often turn to the wisdom of our ancestors, who had a close connection to natural cycles. We run an annual summit “Food as Medicine: the Ancestral Way”, where farmers, chefs, herbalists and traditional health practitioners come together and share their unique knowledge.


MEET OUR TEACHING INSTRUCTORS

Anastasia Sharova

sugar-free sweets, fermentation, natural superfoods

Srikant Singh

Spices, indian cuisine,
natural superfoods

Alla Sharova

traditional
sourdough

Sheela Singh

traditional
indian cuisine

Mirna Bamieh

fermentation,
traditional palestinian cuisine

Barbara Donnelly

Vegan Baking

Natasha Borkowski

kombucha,
organic gardening


OUR STORY

Happy Bellyfish is a family company. It was started by Anastasia Sharova and Srikant Singh, who come from families of traditional cooks from India and Russia. After building successful careers in the education and corporate tech sector, they ventured into building a company that promotes healthy and sustainable ways of eating and transforms lives through simple habit changes.

Over the last 15 years, together they lived in five countries: India, Russia, South Africa, Germany and New Zealand. During their stays they observed a worrying trend: despite these countries being so different and far away from each other, the diets of their people were becoming more and more similar, and so were their health problems. 

Driven by their own health struggles, Anastasia and Srikant started exploring the healthy eating traditions of their native regions. It was a big revelation, that a lot of modern nutrition advice was correlating with the way our ancestors ate during the times of abundance. 

Online Healthy Cooking School was created with the mission to preserve the traditional knowledge, adapt it to the reality of today’s life and make it easily accessible for healthy life seekers around the world. Now, Happy Bellyfish is a growing team of passionate traditional chefs, nutritionists and even farmers, who share the same mission of re-connecting to real food for the health of our bodies and our planet. 

Anastasia Sharova is a certified plant-based chef, certified in ayurvedic nutrition, and the creator of micro-documentary series about traditional and artisan foods. Srikant Singh is a PN certified nutrition coach, a certified habit coach, and a spice expert. Both Anastasia and Srikant appear weekly as hosts on Happy Bellyfish Cooking Show.