Healthy Habits Meets cbs Challenge Contestant
Local talents collaborate to break down barriers and provide clean nutrition
By Cheryl Alexander
The Challenge USA is a brand new reality show premiering July 6th on CBS where Angela Rummans, a local reality TV personality, is competing with twenty-seven other reality titans from Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race and Love Island to find out who has “what it takes to be America's best.”
You might have run into Angela and her fiancé Tyler Crispen on Hilton Head where they call home, OR you might know them from CBS Big Brother where they were both competitors on season 20 in 2018. In addition to her current gig on reality TV, Angela is also a best-selling plant-based cookbook author and activist.
“One of the many reasons I accepted the challenge to compete on this show,” said Angela, “was to break down the stigma behind veganism and plant based eating.”
Nick Bergelt is local entrepreneur and restaurateur who has been elevating the island’s food scene since 2012 through innovative and forward thinking concepts. His newest concept Healthy Habit, located at 33 Office Park Rd Suite 227 in the Harris Teeter shopping center, is focused on delivering approachable and affordable healthy food without compromising quality and taste.
Angela connected with Nick and Healthy Habit through their common mission to provide a platform to educate people further on the benefits of clean whole food plant based nutrition and impact of being a conscious consumer.
Nick turned his attention to plant-based eating after a series of personal events and family circumstances forced him to prioritize his health. Angela found veganism while competing as a professional athlete–a pole vaulterin 2013 and has followed a mostly plant-based diet since.
“I read a book about veganism when I was a professional pole vaulter,” Angela shared, “that turned my world upside down. I went cold turkey vegan 30 days before the biggest meet of that year. I expected that I might feel lethargic, but I found that when I loaded up on vegetables it actually gave me a burst of energy, whereas in the past, when I loaded up on meat or protein, I felt like I needed to lay down and take a nap.”
During the pandemic, Angela’s on-going passion for cooking and new inspiration led her to deep dive into plant-based cooking. She began creating recipes to mirror her favorite foods that seemed impossibly vegan–so much so that she wrote a cookbook, Angela’s Plant-Based Kitchen, in 2020, and soon followed up with a second edition, Angela’s Plant Based Kitchen, volume 2, in 2021.
With that experience behind her, Angela’s participation in a physically demanding competition series lends an aspirational angle to her presence on the show, which is to counter what most people think of vegans.
“On the show, we are doing multiple challenges weekly,” she explained, “so recovery time is super important. I noticed that I was recovering faster than most, which is one huge benefit to a vegan diet.”
Improved mental clarity–another crucial element of the competition–is an additional benefit Angela reported. She feels that her brain is much clearer without meat which gives her an edge towards strategizing a winning approach.
Yet, despite their initial motivation to change their diets due to health, both Nick and Angela are passionate about benefits of plant-based nutrition beyond the physical.
“We live in a society that doesn’t think about where food is coming from,” said Nick, who started his first restaurant as an advocate for sustainability. “I saw the potential for Angela and I to move people to better health AND make them more aware of how they are spending money. ”
Once Angela started learning about problems with the food system, she realized that future generations will not have the same earth we have.
“One form of activism people are very reactive to is food,” she explained, “so I am creating a way for people to receive the information in a more palatable way. At the end of the day, people don’t want to be confronted with guilt about diet or animals or environment. But if I can give them something to eat that they love and enjoy, then they will be more receptive to learning about the problems the food chain is creating.”
Together Nick’s restaurant and Angela’s cookbooks provide the perfect synergy to create a seasonal summer menu for the restaurant, bringing her most popular recipes to the public and showcasing the creative possibilities of plant-based eating. They are testing out a variety of different recipes with Healthy Habit executive chef and partner Jorge Covarrubias to find the best of the best for the Healthy Habit x Angela’s Plant-Based Kitchen collaboration, currently landing on the comforting flavors of the island.
“For tourists who come to Hilton Head seeking a seafood-infused week of eating,” said Nick, “it’s important to highlight the new menu items that seem ‘impossibly plant-based,’ which include a crab cake sandwich and a lobster roll made entirely of plants. People literally are not able to discern that they are not eating the real thing.”
Stop in and try the new menu items at Healthy Habit, specifically the “crab” cake sandwich and “lobster roll,” pick up a copy of Angela’s Plant Based Kitchen cookbook, and you might even run into Tyler and Angela having lunch on the patio.
