Tucked into Winter Park, FitLiving Eats isn’t your typical health food concept. There’s no drive-thru, no meal-kit subscription, and no trend-chasing menu. Instead, it’s a thoughtfully built culinary wellness space where real food is prepared with actual intention and the community is always invited to the table.
The business started back in 2016, not in a commercial kitchen but on a blog. Carly Paige, a Winter Park native who grew up cooking with her mother and grandmother, was working in marketing when she realized she needed an outlet for what she actually loved: food, wellness and helping people live better. After earning a health coaching certification and culinary credentials, she started seeing clients one-on-one. Before long, people wanted to buy whatever she was making.
“Someone tried a cupcake I had given a friend,” Paige said. “’I need more of wherever that came from.’ That was my first client.”
From those early home visits, FitLiving Eats grew into a full-service culinary wellness kitchen and event space. It was a project three years in the making, designed to handle both back-of-house production and front-facing community experiences. When Paige finally opened the doors, she realized the physical space looked almost identical to a vision board she had sketched years prior.
Today, FitLiving Eats offers three core services: customized prepared meals for private clients, boutique catering and hands-on cooking classes. The prepared meal service is the heart of the operation, with menus built around each client’s needs, sourced with care and crafted from scratch. Demand has grown so steadily through word of mouth that a waiting list is now the norm.
“We only have the capacity for a certain number of clients each week because of how customized the service is,” Paige said. “It takes a lot of manpower to pull off and to pull it off well.”
A massive part of what sets FitLiving Eats apart is its commitment to local sourcing. The kitchen partners with regional staples like Frog Song Organics and local sustainability initiatives like O-Town Compost. For Paige, it’s about the environmental impact and quality; local produce tastes better and retains more nutrients than vegetables that spend days sitting in a grocery supply chain.
“I love being able to support other business owners,” Paige said. “It’s very hard to have a small business. We’re better together, stronger together. I want to build friendships in the entrepreneurial community and see each other win.”
The cooking classes bring that same philosophy into a hands-on setting. Built around what Paige calls the “simple swap method,” the classes help everyday home cooks upgrade their meals without the typical wellness-industry overwhelm. It’s about swapping all-purpose flour for an almond-and-oat blend, learning to use nutritional yeast, and cutting through diet-culture noise to get back to basics.
“No matter what dietary lifestyle you choose to follow, we can all agree we should be eating more plants,” Paige said. “Meeting them where they’re at and encouraging them to take that next step, not do a total transformation overhaul, but maybe one new food ingredient that you might want to play with, instead of 10 new things to incorporate.”
Hands-on cooking classes are one aspect of FitLiving Eats, founded by Carly Paige. (EMMY BAILEY)
Looking forward, FitLiving Eats is exploring ways to bring that same quality to a wider audience in a more flexible format, with plans to grow the space into a true community hub where local chefs, wellness educators and neighbors can gather.
“I want Fit Living Eats to be a place that people come to, and they can gather around the table,” Paige said. “They can have a conversation. They can understand what it means to nourish their body from the inside out. They can experience food a little bit differently and be a community hub and a home away from home.”
For now, the operation remains one of the area’s best-kept secrets. But between the food and the waitlist, it won’t stay a secret for long.