A former restaurant critic changed his eating habits. You can, too. ...Middle East

By Pete Wells, The New York Times

Amazon lists more than 70,000 diet books. Not a single one is called “Eat Like a Restaurant Critic.”

That line of work, which was mine from 2012 until 2024, gave me many rewards, but an easy glide path to health was not one of them. By my last year on the job, I was a mess. I creaked and groaned and belched like a tractor. Heaving myself out of the back seat of a car took so much effort that I dreamed about a portable winch. I waddled to the bathroom four or five times a night, between bouts of heartburn. I woke up with headaches, a mouth as dry as an emery board and a heavy coating of fatigue that I could never shake.

With each new complaint, I thought: So this is life after 60. I continued to believe this until a doctor sent me a series of numbers preceded by the words blood pressure, weight, body mass index, triglycerides, blood sugar. The numbers were large, he said. Taken together with my physical complaints, they pointed to prediabetes, fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, acid reflux and obesity.

The prospect of diabetes scared me the most. Above all, it’s what drove me to ask for a different job at The New York Times and to teach myself how to eat again.

Almost two years later, with no medication except a daily blood-pressure pill, almost all of those conditions have receded to less scary levels, although the cholesterol in my blood is putting up a fight. Today, I am about 55 pounds lighter than I was at my zenith, a loss roughly equivalent to dropping an entire male basset hound.

Slimming down was not my main purpose. I never counted a single calorie. Somehow, that took care of itself because of the new ways I started shopping, cooking and eating back then and have more or less stuck to since.

Although the way I used to feed myself was unconventional, the results of my yearslong binge are all too typical. More than 2 out of 5 people in the United States have obesity. A third are prediabetic. One in 10 has Type 2 diabetes itself. Genes and other factors can play a role in these conditions, but the root problem for millions of us is that we have stopped eating sensibly. We stuff our stomachs with far more food than we need. No wonder about 12% of American adults say they have tried one of the GLP-1 medications for weight loss.

I’m no expert on nutrition. On the subject of overeating, though, my credentials are hard to beat. In my long climb out of the deep pit I dug myself into, I’ve come to understand a few things about how I got there. As I’ve tried to build a healthier relationship with food, I’ve also learned a bit about the ways our bodies and minds work.

Each week this month, I’ll lay out some of the insights that helped me, and some recipes that reflect how I eat at home these days. By describing how I learned to eat a more balanced diet, I do not mean to suggest that you will have the same luck with my routine, or that you should even try. I needed to control sugar, cholesterol and overeating in general. I didn’t worry, though, about sodium and potassium, which would be major concerns for somebody with kidney disease. Obviously, anyone with a specific health issue should get advice from a doctor.

My assumption is that, like me, a lot of people simply want to eat less of the stuff we know we’re supposed to avoid and more of the stuff that’s better for us. These are not nutritional guidelines but general principles on how to behave more sensibly in the presence of food.

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The behavioral approach has become a dominant school of thought in mainstream nutrition as it’s become clear that the mindset that reduces the challenges of dieting to mere math — otherwise known as “calories in, calories out” — gets most people nowhere. Eating is, after all, a behavior. We learn how to do it, and we can unlearn our habits if there turns out to be a better way.

Break Up With Sugar

The first thing I set out to do when I left the doctor’s office was to hunt for simple carbohydrates to cut out of the meals I ate at home. At the time, all I cared about was reversing my slow slide into diabetic territory. What I didn’t know was that the sugar in simple carbohydrates had been driving my need to keep eating, and that reducing my intake would help reset my appetite.

Even I was surprised by how many simple carbs I was eating. There were English muffins with plum jam I made myself. The teaspoons of sugar, which towered higher and higher as time went on, in each of the four cups of coffee after waking up. Brown sugar in oatmeal, wildflower honey on buttered toast, Vermont maple syrup on waffles. Orange, pineapple, grapefruit juice. Croissants, cardamom buns, blueberry muffins, cider doughnuts. Cumulus heaps of white rice at lunch, hunk after hunk of bread with dinner. Cookies to stave off the afternoon naps, which usually came anyway.

This is a partial list.

Five months into my sugar reset, I got an email from my doctor containing a lovely, lyrical phrase: “You are no longer prediabetic.”

By then I had lost more than 20 pounds, too, but resetting my simple carbohydrate base line had ripple effects throughout my life. The less sugar I ate, the easier it was to eat less of everything else. I was no longer strapped into what nutritionists call the glucose roller coaster, the cycle of sugar highs and deep lows that can lead to insulin resistance, wrecking the body’s ability to regulate hunger.

In the United States, and increasingly around the world, supermarkets and chain restaurants are packed with roller-coaster foods that promise evermore intense flavors and pleasures, but only leave us wanting more.

“We’re supposed to feel satiated and full, and we don’t,” said Ashley Gearhardt, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studies compulsive eating. “We’re being tricked.”

As I ate less added sugar and replaced refined grains with whole ones, my appetite shrank, and my howling desires for sweet stuff became quieter, easier to ignore. I had more energy and seemed to think clearly again for the first time in years. I had unleashed forces that would make it easier to put in place all the other changes I’ll cover in the next few weeks.

“Basically, you were eating less of foods that encouraged you to overeat and more of foods that don’t do that,” said Marion Nestle, an emerita professor of food, nutrition and public health at New York University. “Pretty much what any sensible nutritionist would advise.”

Shift Out of Overdrive

Nutritionists say that a great many people eat more added sugar than they should. A starting point is to figure out whether you’re getting more than 10% of your total calories from added sugar, which should be the maximum intake, according to the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. (Unlike protein, fat and vitamins, added sugar isn’t necessary to our bodies, so there is no recommended minimum amount, just a maximum.)

For the past five years, nutrition labels on packaged foods have been required to list the amount of added sugars. They can travel under many aliases, including some that sound harmless and maybe even wholesome: evaporated cane juice, agave nectar, fruit juice concentrate and brown rice syrup.

For me and for many people, there’s little reason to worry about the sugars naturally found in fruits and vegetables, where they are packaged with other things that help you feel full sooner and slow down the absorption of glucose into the blood. Sweet potatoes are called sweet potatoes for a reason, but I don’t think twice about eating one for dinner because they’re fairly gentle on the blood sugar, especially when boiled and served in their skins.

I might as well admit that chief among the “other things” that help you feel full are what nutritionists insist on calling fiber, a word so off-putting that it makes me want to seek solace in the arms of the nearest cinnamon bun. Luckily, when it comes to simple carbs like rice and flour, we can use the less lumpish phrase “whole grains” to describe the same general idea. And this is what to look for if you find you eat too much white rice and white bread. Whole grains happen to have more flavor, too.

This is the heart of my first reset: eating carbohydrates in their original, sturdy, crunchy, complicated forms. I knew it would be better for me. And having raised two boys, I probably should have known that going through sugar overdrive many times a day was not producing the most rational behavior.

As my body adjusted, I stopped acting like a toddler at a birthday party. My whole diet, everything I ate, started to take a new shape.

Seared Sweet Potatoes With Chermoula

This recipe is featured in a four-part series about creating healthier eating habits. Boiling sweet potatoes instead of roasting them slows the rate at which their sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream, as does serving them in their jackets, which contain even more fiber. (Maintaining steady blood sugar levels can help with a range of health issues, from poor sleep to weight management to liver disease.) The somewhat flat flavor of sweet potatoes really benefits from a fresh herb sauce such as chimichurri, Italian salsa verde, zhug or North African chermoula. The potatoes can be boiled in advance, then reheated in the microwave and seared at the last minute, making this a quick light dinner with a small salad of young arugula or crisp chicories.

By Pete Wells

Yield: 8 servings as an appetizer, 4 servings as a main course

Total time: 1 hour 10 minutes

Ingredients

Preparation

1. Scrub the skins of the sweet potatoes and halve the potatoes lengthwise. In a pot, cover them with plenty of salted water and bring to a boil, then simmer until tender, 15 to 25 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, make the chermoula. In a food processor, blend the cilantro, parsley, chile, garlic, paprika, cumin, cayenne and 1 teaspoon salt with a tablespoon or two of the oil to make a rough paste. Gradually blend in the rest of the oil. Finally, stir in the lemon juice. Adjust the seasonings: The flavor should be bright and assertive, so add more lemon juice, salt or cayenne (judiciously) if it needs a kick. Smooth out with 1 to 2 tablespoons additional oil if the chermoula is too thick. Put the sauce in a small bowl.

3. When the sweet potatoes are done, fish them from the water and let them steam themselves dry on a dish towel while you warm a few tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Working in batches, sear the cut sides of the sweet potatoes to caramelize them, 4 to 6 minutes (you may need more oil for the second batch). Spoon some of the chermoula over the top and serve the rest on the side, with roasted chickpeas if desired.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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