Lifestyle
This Pilates class is harder to get into than the Magic Castle
In a cozy pool house in Holmby Hills, 33-year-old Liana Levi counts backward from 10 as I move my leg in a slow circle. “Think happy thoughts,” she says as the deceptively simple movements cause my muscles to shake on the Pilates reformer. Her distinctly Californian voice wafts over a Bad Bunny-heavy playlist. She has a deep tan in January and dainty gold jewelry. Her sweatshirt, emblazoned with the logo for athleisure brand Sporty & Rich, seems custom made for her. Underneath it are her signature washboard abs. We’re talking a Marvel movie, can’t believe it’s-not-CGI eight-pack that her 130,000-plus Instagram followers know intimately. Her secret? Her Pilates method, Forma.
Levi did not invent the movements she teaches, but with her body as a case study, she quickly became their gatekeeper. Forma Pilates elevates the fundamentals of classical Pilates with what Levi calls “athletic edge.” Rather than shouting buzzwords, Levi breaks down what it means to engage your pelvic floor or really feel your outer glutes and guides clients until they really feel it. The slightest tweak transforms a two-inch movement. The walls of Forma studios are adorned with signed rubber resistance bands that past clients have snapped in half with the strength of their thighs.
Rubber resistance bands, snapped and signed by past clients, adorn Levi’s home studio.
Los Angeles is no stranger to trendy workouts. Classes promoting Joe Pilates’ famed technique have existed in America’s fitness capital since 1972. There have been plenty of copycats, too. Faster-paced classes using supersize machines like Solidcore or the Megaformer take inspiration from Pilates, but can’t use the name. Like Champagne versus sparkling wine, Pilates is exclusive by nature. Forma is exclusive by design, an invite-only exercise community that charges $100 for semi-private reformer classes and $250 for private sessions. Forget Raya, Soho House, or even the Magic Castle — getting into one of Levi’s Forma Pilates classes might be the hardest ticket in town.
Levi grew up “very sheltered” in the manicured suburb of Holmby Hills. While a student at the elite private Jewish day school Milken, she played sports and danced competitively. At 16, she took her first Pilates class to supplement her training and was immediately hooked.
“I worked muscles that I didn’t know existed,” she said “I felt longer and taller and my core was as strong as it had ever been. I realized this is the most elegant and beautiful type of fitness out there.”
Liana Levi.
Liana Levi guides Kassia Taylor in the use of pilates equipment.
Following a handful of fashion-industry jobs in her 20s, Levi took a chance, and earned her Pilates teaching certificate. She’d long been frustrated by local Pilates classes that failed to teach correct form or emphasize the importance of “mind-body connection,” and thought she might be able to do better. In 2020, she launched Forma Pilates out of her mom’s pool house during the thick of the pandemic lockdown. With safety in mind and only room for two reformers, she had no choice but to start small. First with informal classes for friends, then friends-of-friends. Word of mouth about her rigorous technique spread from her well-connected acquaintances to a handful of celebrities. Within four months, the small business Levi began as a pandemic experiment was drawing A-listers like Hailey Bieber and Bella Hadid.
A year after launching, Levi expanded Forma to a Melrose Avenue studio in West Hollywood. Despite demand, she kept the studio intimate, at just four clients a class. Soon, The Daily Mail was running paparazzi pics of Kendall Jenner leaving the studio, and interest in Forma ballooned. Levi extended her clientele to connections up to six degrees away from herself. “I wanted to keep it exclusive and unique and niche and boutique and luxury,” she said.
In November 2023, Forma debuted heated mat pilates classes in a new Beverly Glen studio that fits 14 people. It’s the largest and least expensive of Forma’s classes. Levi calls it “more accessible,” but it remains true to the exclusivity at the core of the brand. At $50 a pop, it tops Barry’s Bootcamp ($34), SoulCycle ($34) and Solidcore ($40) in price-per-class. Like all Forma classes, referral is required. When I took a class at noon on a Friday, there were just five students. A paparazzo lurked in the parking lot.
Liana Levi, owner of Forma Pilates, chats with her students Kassia Taylor and Colleen McCabe at her home studio.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Today, Forma has a total of six locations across Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix. There are upwards of 3,500 approved clients who have the choice of more than 50 classes a week, taught by 16 different Levi-trained instructors. Levi, meanwhile, travels for pop-ups and teaches 10 classes weekly in L.A.
Despite the droves of followers who would happily fill a spot in Forma’s classes, those outside Levi’s charmed orbit must settle for Forma’s online platform. The $50-a-month service is updated weekly with pre-recorded mat and reformer workouts. They may not hold the mysterious allure of membership to an invite-only exercise cult, or the possibility of sweating next to Kaia Gerber. But hey, you can actually get in.
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On-air challenge
Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
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This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
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On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
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