The more I learn about habits, the more I believe that simplicity is the best policy—
especially when it comes to food.
I’m not a fan of restrictions or numbers when it’s time to eat. Food, and the time we spend eating it, should be enjoyed—it’s one of the great pleasures of life, and to con-strain it with complicated rules and numbers is completely unnatural.
Simplicity is the reason author Michael Pollan’s three-sentence manifesto from In Defense of Food has resonated so well. (“Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”) And the stickiness of that phrase is probably what led Pollan to write Food Rules, another goodie full of short, memorable rules of thumb like, “Eat only what your great-grandmother would recognize as food.”
Here, I list the simple food rules I live by. They’re not meant to be as catchy or easy to remember as Pollan’s, but they’re an honest distillation of what I believe is the healthiest way to eat. Not just this month or until you lose those last fifteen pounds, but for life.
1. Avoid processed foods and choose whole, unrefined foods instead.
This one should come as no surprise. It’s listed first because if you were to throw out every other message you’ve heard about healthy food and retain only the three words
“eat whole foods,” you would dramatically improve the way you eat if you’re currently doing something different.
But this single guideline flies in the face of the way people eat in the Western world today, so you’ll have to reject the shiny pseudo-food that food manufacturers want you to buy. Some specific examples of what you’re looking for:
▶ Brown rice instead of white
▶ Fruits instead of fruit juice
▶ Whole-fruit smoothies instead of juice that’s been separated from the fiber
▶ Whole-wheat flour instead of white (more on wheat in a bit)
2. Get most of your food from plants.
Unlike many other vegetarians and vegans, I tend not to believe that meat and eggs are inherently bad for you (dairy products are a different story—to me, drinking milk from another species and beyond infancy doesn’t make any sense). We’ve seen that people can thrive on a variety of omnivorous and plant-based diets, and I think we’re built to handle either one pretty well.
The problem with meat, as far as health goes, is the sheer amount most people con-sume. Although our ancestors might have gone several days between successful hunts and the meat that resulted, modern people treat every meal like a post-hunt feast. The caloric density of that much meat leaves little room for other foods and puts a digestive load on our bodies that leaves us feeling sluggish and full for hours after big meals.
People in many countries other than the United States use meat as a flavoring agent or as a side dish, perhaps, but rarely as the focus of the meal. I believe that if the ethical implications don’t bother you and you’re going to continue to eat meat, this is the only healthy way to do it.
3. Cook your own food.
To follow the first guideline of eating whole foods nearly dictates that you prepare your own food. Nonetheless, I’ve included it as its own rule because it runs counter to the way so many people now obtain their meals.
Much of Section I of this book is dedicated to helping you make your way into the kitchen and start cooking. But it doesn’t stop with preparing meals: just about any food worth eating can be prepared at home, bringing you one step closer to the source of the food you eat and giving you complete knowledge of every single ingredient that goes into it.
Here are a few foods you might be tempted to buy that you can make at home with equipment no more sophisticated than a food processor or high-speed blender.
▶ Hummus
▶ Baba ganoush
▶ Pesto
▶ Sauces: tomato, barbecue, and ketchup
▶ Nut butters
▶ Flour from grains or beans
▶ Sprouts
▶ Smoothies
▶ Sports drinks
4. Make raw fruits and vegetables a big part of your diet.
There’s a lot of debate over the virtues of raw versus cooked food. On one hand, some say that raw food is more easily digested because digestive enzymes that exist in the raw state are denatured by excessive heat. On the other hand, many foods are inedible unless they are cooked, and cooking is a practice that has gone on for much our existence (long enough to have influenced our evolution).
I take the middle ground on this one, choosing to eat foods in both states. But because we’re so used to eating cooked foods, it’s only raw foods that we need to make a conscious effort to make sure we eat each day.
raW Veggies are great, buT soMeTimes it PaYs to Cook theM
Cooking can improve the nutritional profile of some vegetables. For example, cooking carrots actually increases the amount of beta-carotene that our bodies can absorb. The same is true for tomatoes—cooking breaks down the fibrous walls and increases the availability of the phytochemical lycopene.
Early studies show that lycopene may be involved in the prevention of cancer.
There’s still a lot to learn, but the research is promising.
One of the best habits you can develop is having a mostly-raw smoothie each morn-ing and a big salad each afternoon. Combine this with a few pieces of fresh fruit for snacks throughout the day, and you’re getting a significant amount of wholesome, raw food without even thinking about it. Which brings me to the next guideline.
5. Drink a smoothie and eat a salad every single day.
Even if you ate whatever you wanted the rest of the day, I’d be willing to bet you wouldn’t get fat as long as you made sure to drink a smoothie and eat a big salad every single day.
Sure, if you were to eat at McDonald’s for lunch and Outback Steakhouse for dinner the rest of the time, you could probably succeed at packing on a few pounds. But here’s the thing: The smoothie and salad act as anchors that keep you on track, to remind you
just how great it feels to put real, fresh fruits and vegetables in your body. After you start the day with a smoothie, McDonald’s for lunch doesn’t seem so good anymore.
And when it’s time to start thinking about dinner, the salad is there to help you make a good choice.
In this way, those two healthy meals turn into three or four—which doesn’t leave much room for junk.
6. Don’t eat too much wheat (or any one food, really!).
I realize that you might have no desire to stop eating bread and wheat pasta. And that’s fine. I don’t either.
But so many food products in our culture are now based on wheat that it’s very easy for it to show up in every single meal you eat if you don’t pay attention! Relying so heav-ily on a single food just doesn’t make much sense, even before you consider the reasons many top athletes now avoid wheat.
People have varying levels of sensitivity to wheat. For some people, gluten is tremendously difficult to digest. For others, the sensitivity isn’t so severe that it’s recognized as a problem, but wheat nevertheless may adversely affect their energy levels. Health problems associated with gluten occur even with 100 percent whole wheat products, not just refined wheat flour (which most athletes avoid anyway, except perhaps at certain key times around workouts).
The good news is that there are now plenty of good alternatives to wheat products, especially when it comes to pasta, the runners’ staple. Among the many varieties are those made from rice, quinoa, and even chickpea flour.
My suggestion: Don’t cut out wheat completely if you don’t have a gluten sensitiv-ity, but limit it to one meal a day instead of three or four, or ideally to just a few meals a week, like any other food.
7. Eat a wide variety of foods.
If the idea of eating a mostly vegetarian diet doesn’t appeal to you, it’s likely that you view it as a “taking away” process. Maybe your meals are centered around meat, and without it, the plate would seem pretty empty.
But the reality is quite different than that. If you’re mindful of what you eat and don’t simply rely on vegetarian junk food, you’ll actually end up adding many foods to your diet as you’re forced to go outside of your normal routine and explore new options at home and in restaurants.
This is a great thing for your health. It means you’ll get a broad mix of vitamins and minerals, rather than potentially getting way more than you need of certain ones and none of many others, as you might if you were to eat the same few foods over and over.
8. With the exception of a daily smoothie, don’t drink your calories.
If you’ve paid any attention to healthy eating over the past few years, this guideline probably isn’t new to you. It’s essentially a restatement of the “eat whole foods” guide-line because most drinks with substantial amounts of
calories are processed.
Because drinks, even fruit juices, take up relatively little room in your stomach, it’s very easy to take in way too many calories before you feel full.
This reasoning applies to smoothies as well because you can drink much more fruit when it’s blended into a smoothie than you could eat whole. But as long as they’re made with whole ingredients, I give them a pass because they’re such a great way to start the day with a bunch of fresh fruits and vegetables.
But please, do whatever it takes to stop drinking soda, even diet soda. It’s caffeinated sugar water—or fake-sugar water, perhaps worse—and it has no place in a healthy diet. The same goes for most commercial energy drinks and sports drinks. Although sugary sports
drinks have a place in an athlete’s diet—during long workouts, when you need to replen-ish carbohydrate reserves in your blood—there’s simply no reason to take in that much sugar at other times.
9. Eat when you’re hungry, but make sure you really are hungry.
Eating is one of the true joys in our lives, and to me, imposing a limit on our intake significantly takes away from that. Fortunately, if you’re eating the right foods, limiting your intake is unnecessary unless you’ve got a serious weight problem. As we’ve men-tioned several times now, when you eat foods that contain all of their original nutrients and are in a form close to their natural one, your body will naturally feel full at the right time. The stretch and density receptors in your stomach tell your brain that you’ve had enough for now and additional intake will become uncomfortable.
That is, if you give your body a chance to realize you’re full. Rushing through your meals sidesteps the system, allowing you to take in excess food before your stomach has had a chance to sense fullness. Take your time, chew your food, and pay attention to how you feel.
The Japanese have a phrase hara hachi bu, which refers to the practice of eating only until you are 80 percent full. It works well because there’s a lag time between when you eat a food and when you feel its volume in your stomach. Start paying attention to how