That kind of health which can be preserved only by a careful and constant regulation of diet is but a tedious disease.
Attributed to Montesquieu
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The only diet worth going on is the one you never have to come off.
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The major obstacle to changing your diet is in some ways the most obvious one: no one – adult or child – likes eating foods that they do not like. Our challenge is therefore to enjoy new ways of eating. You won’t find the miracle cure in any product that you can buy, whether it’s probiotics or seaweed. The answer is in your own brain. If you feel trapped in unhealthy ways of eating, you need to reboot some of your tastes until you are consoled and excited by different foods.
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Eating in a balanced way doesn’t mean every meal has to be nutritionally ‘perfect’ (not that there is such a thing, in any case). A balanced diet could mean spinach and chickpea soup for lunch but spaghetti carbonara for dinner. The journalist Mark Bittman lost a substantial amount of weight and improved his health by eating as a vegan before 6 p.m. and then anything he fancied for the rest of the day (as he explains in his book VB6). Balance means taking pleasure in many different foods. An obsession with making every plate immaculately balanced can itself become unhinged. The great American food writer M.F.K. Fisher once lamented the trend for combining ‘a lot of dull and sometimes actively hostile foods’ in a single meal, purely for the sake of covering your nutritional bases. Fisher wisely wrote: ‘Balance the day, not each meal in the day.’
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One person’s health food is another’s poison. It would be genuinely impossible to construct a balanced diet to suit everyone. Don’t take your cues about what to put in your body from someone else’s needs. There’s so much noise and nonsense about diet that needs to be filtered out. A celebrity may – in all honesty – attribute her good looks and health to the fact that she avoids ‘nightshades’ such as tomatoes. An endurance runner may insist that the secret of his success is 2 litres of chocolate milk a day. But avoiding tomatoes and drinking large amounts of chocolate milk may not work quite such wonders for you.
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Diets like to pretend that certain foods are absolutely good or absolutely bad. The truth is messier. If you are asking, ‘How much should I eat?’ of any given food, the answer is somewhere between ‘at every meal’ and ‘never’. In Overeaters Anonymous, recovering overeaters divide foods up into ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘amber’. ‘Red’ foods are ones that you decide never to eat (a junk food meal of hamburger, fries and milkshake, let’s say). ‘Green’ foods are ones you will eat without limits (vegetables). All the other foods – from macadamia nuts to fajitas – occupy the in-between state of ‘amber’, to be eaten ‘in moderation’. All of us – overeaters or not – have to find a way to live and eat in a state of amber.
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Your first job when eating is to nourish yourself. Food can be many things: it can be entertainment, culture and even art. But unless it is sustenance – something that keeps you alive and gives you energy and strength – it is not food. Example: a 10-calorie pot of low-calorie ‘fruit’ jelly – zero fat, zero protein, almost zero carbohydrate – is not really food. Among other lost eating skills – see also How to Eat, below – we seem to have lost the basic and old-fashioned concept of ‘nourishing’ ourselves. You can be overweight and still not getting enough good food to eat – in fact, plenty of people are. Around the world, obese populations suffer disproportionately from micronutrient deficiencies, notably vitamins A and D, plus zinc and iron. Junk foods may be high in calories but they are low in nourishment. Learning how to eat better is not about reducing consumption across the board. While we undoubtedly need to eat less of many foods – sugar springs to mind – we need more of others.
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Calories are not the same as morals. No food can be either ‘naughty’ or ‘virtuous’. Cheesecake is not sin. It’s all just food. I’m not saying that everything for sale is worth putting in your mouth. Whole sections of the supermarket are now devoted to products that don’t deserve the name of food at all. We’d all do well to avoid these non-foods, as far as possible. But this isn’t a question of individual morals. If anyone should feel sinful, it’s the manufacturers who cynically push these fake, sugar-laden products at us without any regard for what they will do for our health. The end-goal here isn’t to ‘be virtuous’ but to adjust your tastes and habits – or enough of them – so that the overall pattern of what you eat consists of real foods, especially plant foods, eaten in regular instalments and with pleasure. If you manage to do this, the calories will take care of themselves.
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Sugar is not love. But it can feel like it.
Don’t feel bad because you crave a little sweetness occasionally (OK, every day). This isn’t a moral defect; it’s human nature. A love of sweet tastes is hard-wired in babies the world over, from China to Denmark. What makes sweetness feel even more wonderful is that the first food any of us knows is milk, which is both sweet and given to us along with the cradling warmth of a parent. From our earliest tastes, we receive sweetness and love together, so we could be forgiven if later in life we have trouble distinguishing the two. During my first term at university, I sometimes sat alone in my student room, sipping Diet Coke and eating compulsive handfuls of jelly beans, wishing I could leave the room and meet someone but feeling unable to do anything about it.
A big part of learning to eat better is unravelling the connection between sweets and love. When you use sugar as an emotional prop, there is no reason to stop. No ice cream, no matter how caramel-intense, will satisfy your hunger if what you really wanted was friendship or to be touched.
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Eating well is a skill. We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age. The three big things we would all benefit from learning to do are: following structured mealtimes; responding to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness rather than relying on external cues such as portion size; and making ourselves open to trying a variety of foods, especially vegetables. All three of these skills can and have been taught to children; and we adults can learn them too, if we give ourselves the chance.
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If you sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by the process of choosing what to eat for the best, and how to stick at it, join the club. No generation has ever had to navigate a world of such bewildering plenty as the one we now inhabit. We live in an environment pretty much engineered to make us a) overeat and b) have complicated emotions about food. Sometimes glib people tell us that eating well is incredibly simple and that all we have to do to be healthier is ‘eat less and move more’. Thanks, Einstein! Actually, neither part of this irritating saying is true. Exercise by itself doesn’t seem to generate weight loss (although it’s still pretty much essential for lots of other reasons: see Making Changes below). Simply eating less by itself is also not the answer. A smaller quantity of junk food is still junk and calories are never the whole story. Calories alone do not tell you how easily the microbes in your gut will cope with this or that particular food, or what it will do to your blood sugar or whether the flavour will trigger you to eat three helpings of it. More to the point, if it were so very simple to ‘eat less and move more’, we’d all be doing it.
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Judge food by what it has in it – not by what it doesn’t. So many packaged foods boast about what they have taken out: ‘free from’ this, ‘no added’ that. Zero per cent fat, reduced sugar, reduced salt. These terms are usually just marketing devices trying to persuade us to spend good money on bad food. Perhaps more damaging, they are part of a wider mindset that views healthy eating in fundamentally negative terms, as something that doesn’t have anything supposedly ‘bad’ in it.