This Is Not A Diet Book: A User’s Guide to Eating Well

There isn’t time in the world to examine all the food fads.

Logan Clendening, The Balanced Diet, 1936

Most people hate diets, and who can blame us? Diets are generally the opposite of a good time. They leave you famished and force you to eat weird things that you don’t enjoy. Diets dangle the promise of a new life – or a new body – only to make you feel like a failure when you can’t stick to their insanely restrictive rules. Lose 6 pounds in six days on kale juice and walnuts and never feel hungry again! But you do feel hungry and, worse, you now feel guilty too.

Considering how unpleasant diets are – not to mention the fact that they generally leave us worse off than when we started – it’s surprising how many of them we go on. Consumer research from 2013 suggested that more than half of all adults in Britain had tried to lose weight over the past year. The sad fact is that, much as we dislike dieting, we dislike our own bodies even more. Many of us are trapped in destructive eating habits. Given the broken food environment that now surrounds us, it’s no wonder. It’s hard to eat in a balanced way, when you have to walk a gauntlet of pink glazed doughnuts every time you go to the shops for milk. Yes, we are lucky to have access to abundant calories, something that many of our fellow citizens, in this country or elsewhere, still cannot rely on. But the distress of overeating – or believing that you are overeating – is also real.

As an overweight and self-loathing teenager, I was a sucker for diets. The Rotation diet, the F-plan diet, the ‘don’t eat anything except for celery and low-fat cream cheese until you nearly pass out’ diet (this my own special invention). Each time I embarked on one, I felt I was slimming my way into a brave new dawn.

At gyms in January, you can see how desperate we can be for instant change. One morning last year, I saw a mother and her daughter – aged maybe 11 or 12 – weighing themselves before hitting the treadmills. An hour later, back in the changing room after a shower, I saw them weighing themselves for a second time, shaking their heads sorrowfully. The numbers on the scales had not gone down. Fail.

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 be what you feel like eating at that precise moment. In this new life, a life beyond diets, there is no fail.

BALANCE (#uc8be4627-2a5c-532d-ac35-0dbf540493f9)

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

1

The only diet worth going on is the one you never have to come off.

2

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.

3

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.’

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

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.

8

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.

9

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.

10

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.

11

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.

A NOURISHING SALAD (#uc421083c-c51c-5f72-b52e-c8ed608c6978)

Back when I was unhappy about food, I thought I should eat salads precisely because they had almost nothing in them. I thought of nutrition as a form of absence. Fat-free, sugar-free. At the height of the low-fat craziness of the 1990s, my best friend C and I (she was a recovering anorexic) used to sit side by side chomping through salads containing little but dull iceberg lettuce, over-refrigerated tomatoes and possibly half of a pallid chicken breast. No dressing, no flavour, no joy.

Now that my relationship with eating has changed, I see that what makes salads great is that you can fit so much nourishment and variety into a single easy plateful (or Tupperware box). A salad is a vehicle for good things like toasted nuts, bright herbs, juicy roasted vegetables and cheese. Depending on the time of year, it might be leftover charred peppers with aubergine purée and feta; or roasted pumpkin with sage, pearl barley, hazelnuts and watercress. Some torn-up chicken from yesterday’s roast dinner might make a welcome second appearance with black grapes, cucumber, mint and rice, rather tartly dressed. Whatever the time of year, I like carrot salads, both raw and cooked: great for when you feel broke but in need of zingy sustenance (even organic carrots are cheap). Canadian food writer Naomi Duguid makes an incredible Burmese carrot salad with peanuts, lime juice, fish sauce and fried shallots. Steamed sliced carrots dressed with oil, garlic, lemon and chopped coriander is another good way.