Our desire to change the way we eat can be so blinding it stops us from doing it. When you embark on a diet, you don’t want slow and steady losses. You want to transform like a superhero. The fact that you have been here so many times before only makes it feel more urgent. Maybe this will be the one: the diet you can finally stick to. Such is the appeal of ‘clean eating’, the new form of dieting that pretends it isn’t a diet. The idea is that if you fill your cupboard with enough packets of expensive chia seeds and gluten-free coconut flour, you can start afresh as a perfect person, someone who doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘salted’ or ‘caramel’. You will glow. But then you accidentally eat a bagel. And since you are now officially dirty, you decide you might as well blow the whole thing and have two slices of chocolate fudge cake too. ‘Clean eating’ can’t be the answer because food – unlike alcohol – isn’t something you can go cold turkey on. Rather, we each have to find a way to make our peace with eating, in all its complexity.
‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,’ says food writer Michael Pollan. Wise words, but how on earth do you make yourself stick to them? It’s not as if we don’t already know that we should eat more plants and less food overall. But at some deep level, many of us don’t want to do it. In 2013 more than half of British consumers surveyed (by Mintel) said that they didn’t like diet food because the portions were too small.
Sometimes people say that our problem with food is that we are confused by all the competing information out there. Some experts tell us to avoid fat, while others insist we should avoid sugar. But when it comes to green leafy vegetables, the advice could hardly have been clearer. For decades, we have been told to eat more of them; and for decades, we have resisted. Only one in five people in Britain actually eats the recommended ‘five-a-day’ of vegetables and fruits according to a 2012 poll for the World Cancer Research Fund. Rationally, we know we should eat more broccoli. But eating is far from rational.
Health campaigns fail for the same reason that diets do. They take no account of basic human psychology. We try to force ourselves to eat in a way that we don’t like and are then disheartened when we find that we don’t like it. A better way is to work to change our preferences themselves, until you become someone who enjoys the flavour of broccoli so much that you choose it of your own free will. Strange as it seems, this can be done. If you can make enough of these adjustments, you may never feel the urge to go on a diet again.
Asked on what occasions she drank champagne, the champagne heiress Lily Bollinger used to say that she drank it when she was sad and when she was happy; when she was alone and in company. ‘Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.’ I used to be the same with food. Any occasion, whether happy or sad, was a reason to gorge. And then there were times when I ate just because I was peckish. Which was pretty much always.
For many years, until my early twenties, my eating was chaotic and out of control. I would sit alone at the kitchen table eating whole pint-sized tubs of maple pecan ice cream. We talk in a sickly way of ‘indulgent’ foods, but when you are a compulsive eater, it does not feel like being pampered. Everywhere I went, food screamed at me. There were days and weeks when I gave myself up to consuming guilty treats. And then there were the not-eating phases, when I taunted myself with short-lived diets that started with raw carrots and hope and ended, a few days later, in pastries and despair.
I never thought I would end this futile cycle. But somehow, over a period of months, if not years, a happier way of eating crept up on me. Meal by meal, I reconditioned my responses to food. It was as if I were a child, learning how to eat all over again. Structure returned to my meals. Where once I’d hesitated to eat too heartily in public, in case someone thought me greedy, now I gave myself permission to eat until I was full. My tastes subtly altered. I found myself eating more vegetables, not to punish myself, but because they were – surprise! – delicious. I shrank from large to medium without really trying. This new life was the opposite of going on a diet.
My experiences are far from unique. Humans are more capable of improving their diets than we give ourselves credit for, as I discovered when doing the research for my last book, First Bite. We often speak in fatalistic and negative terms about our own eating, as if our taste for muffins and frappuccino were a life sentence. What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to suit different environments. The consequences of bad diets are all around us, from type 2 diabetes to infant tooth decay. But the more research I did, the more encouraged I was to find that the scientific evidence suggests that our tastes and food habits are remarkably malleable. ‘All of it is reversible,’ as one senior doctor working with obese children put it to me. You could be cursed with all the genes that make a person susceptible to heart disease and obesity and still grow up healthy, by establishing balanced food habits.
This short book takes a rather different approach from First Bite, although it covers some of the same ground. I offer it to you as a sort of user’s guide to eating. It is less about science or history and more about the practicalities of everyday life. Diet gurus often suggest that the answer to eating better is a return to the wisdom of grandmothers but my own hunch is that we need new skills to navigate this bewildering new world of food. We are the first generation to suffer more from plenty than want, and this changes everything.
How do we ditch the detox and find a way to want to eat what’s good for us? How do we navigate the tricky questions of portion sizes and snacks? As a parent, how do you help your child to eat healthily, without becoming obsessive? How does anyone find a balanced way of eating that you can stick to for longer than two weeks? I kept thinking back to my own unhappy experiences with food and wanted to write something for other people who might feel similarly lost.
And yet I hesitate. What you put in your mouth is deeply personal. Bossy as I am (or so my children tell me), I’m not going to tell you what foods should pass your lips. I have no idea what you eat right now and whether it agrees with you or not. I can’t see inside your fridge. I don’t know your budget or your routines or whether you are overweight or underweight or whether you turn to food more in celebration or in sorrow. If you feel your eating – or not eating – is making you ill, a book – yes, even this one – is no substitute for professional help. One of the many problems with diet books is that they lay down the law, without pausing to consider the reader’s personal circumstances. Maybe you are one of those lucky individuals – they do exist – for whom neither food nor weight has ever been an issue. If so, please tell me your secret.
I’m not going to prescribe any food laws, not least because when someone tells us what to eat, it’s only natural to want to do the opposite. But in the course of eating for forty or so years, and feeding various people, including my own children, I feel I’ve learned some things that can make it all more of a joy and less of a struggle. These are the insights I wish I’d figured out sooner and hope you won’t mind if I pass them on. I see them as tweaks more than rules. As you make your way through the book, feel free to ignore anything that doesn’t apply to you.
This book can’t give you a six-pack in seven days or the skin of a supermodel. But I can promise that if you make even a few of the adjustments in this book, your eating life will alter for the better in ways that you can sustain. The change that we are so desperate for is possible. Unlike a diet, these tweaks work with your appetites, rather than against them. I enjoy eating far more now than I ever did before, even though I am eating less. It’s not about being thin – although for those who need it, long-term weight loss can definitely be achieved, no matter what people say. But the real end-goal is reaching the point where food is something that sustains you and gives you joy, rather than making you unhealthy or unhappy.
You know you have changed when the new habits start to be automatic and the old clamour of guilt and indulgence is switched off. One day, you eat a platter of fresh and vibrant greens with soy sauce and garlic, not because you think you should or because it’s January but because it happens to