A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great (3 page)

It’s easy to get bogged down in the constantly evolving, sometimes confusing details of healthy eating advice. The following set of principles is my stripped-down version of all the nutrition noise, and it functions as my day-to-day guide. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to a good food day, and your own definition of it may change over time. My hope is that this roadmap is flexible enough to help guide you, no matter what your interpretation.

1
Eating must be enjoyable.
On a good food day, eating is still a primary source of pleasure. With quality ingredients, a few basic cooking skills, and the recipes in this book, you can create meals that are so delicious and satisfying, they feel indulgent. Deprivation isn’t the solution—satisfaction is.

2
Cooking empowers you to eat better.
By cooking your own food, you’re in control of what goes in your body, and you won’t eat nearly as much sugar, salt, and fat as what you’ll get with processed foods. As Michael Pollan said, “Cooking, transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and drink, is one of the interesting and worthwhile things we humans do.”

3
Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance.
Feeding yourself (and others) the right foods requires thought and planning. You don’t want to have to cook every time you need to eat, so plan to make larger batches of leftover-friendly foods that can be repurposed into new meals. Many of the recipes in this book are scaled up for great leftovers—these will save you from a lot of poor impulse choices. It might seem overly time-consuming at first, but once you establish a system—planning meals, choosing a shopping day, and making a schedule for cooking days—it becomes a reflex.

4
Get in sync with Mother Nature.
In-season ingredients check every important box: They are better tasting, more nutritious, higher quality, and more affordable. As seasons and ingredients shift, so should your cooking methods. You don’t want a slow-cooked stew on a hot summer day or a cold tomato salad in the dead of winter, right?

5
Quality ingredients are everything.
The closer a food is to its whole form, the better. The surest path to finding quality ingredients is your local farmers’ market, where everything is fresh and in season. At a supermarket, organic becomes more of a priority because certified organic foods are held to a higher standard of production. Choose the highest-quality option you can afford.

6
Eat real food.
Many processed foods have artificial ingredients, chemicals, additives, and excess salt, sugar, and potentially harmful types of fat. This can be true even if the food is organic or from a health food store, or screams buzzwords like “whole grain!” on the package. If you buy processed foods, ignore the labels and let the ingredient list be your guide. Look for real ingredients that you know are good for you.

7
Be a conscious eater.
The act of eating should be a restorative interlude in your stressful, chaotic day, not a time for multitasking. By giving meals the attention they deserve, you eat at a slower pace and give your body a chance to register taste and satisfaction. You wind up feeling satiated with smaller portion sizes and enjoying your food more. Slow down. Chew. Savor your food.

8
A twinge of hunger isn’t the end of the world.
Most of us shovel food down with such frequency that we don’t know what hungry feels like. Familiarizing yourself with hunger signals is a key part of learning to feed yourself well. Not shaky, lightheaded, desperation hunger, but the twinge of tightening in your stomach that first alerts you to hunger. When you start from this point, you’ll discover which foods and quantities truly satisfy you. You may need a lot less food than you think.

9
Diversify.
Food boredom is frustrating and leads back to old habits and crappy choices. Eating well for the long term requires choosing foods with a wide range of flavors, colors, and textures. This not only keeps meals interesting and satisfying, but eating a variety of foods also increases your chances of getting all the nutrients you need.

10
Make indulgences a guilt-free part of the program.
Call it a cheat day, the 90/10 rule (eat well 90 percent of the time, splurge the other 10 percent), or whatever resonates with you. Granting yourself permission to say “to hell with it” once in a while increases your chances of successfully sticking to good eating habits.

To stack the odds in favor of having a good food day, it’s essential to surround yourself with the right foods—those that really amp up the flavor
and
the nutrition of your meals. This list is a window into my kitchen on an average week. It’s by no means exhaustive, since much of my cooking is driven by seasonal produce and fresh fish and meat. But you’ll find most of the ingredients you need to prepare the recipes in this book, plus a few other basics that lend themselves to easy, delicious impromptu meals and keep you out of the fast-food drive-thru line. The good-for-you benefits of many of the items here are covered within the chapters where I put them into action, so this list is an at-a-glance shopping reference. Also, I don’t call out local or organic in front of every food here—these are a given for me (see Principle #5), and a personal choice based on your budget.

You might raise an eyebrow at a few items here, but each has its place in a healthy diet. Right off the bat, you can see I don’t shy away from fat. Good fats, even some saturated fats like whole milk and grass-fed butter, are foundation ingredients in every one of my recipes for flavor, mouthfeel, and, yes, their
nutrition benefits
. I also don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with eating meat, as long as it’s properly sourced. So, even though they’re often associated with healthy eating, I don’t use meat substitutes like tofu, tempeh, or seitan. It boils down to this—taking a whole food in its natural form and processing it (to remove its fat, reduce its carbs, or turn it into something that acts like meat) denatures it to some degree. Processed foods are never as good as the real deal.

(yes, these should be refrigerated, so they stay fresh longer)

(refrigerate; otherwise they’ll go rancid)

^*
These flours and nut meals can be made by grinding the whole grain or nut in a food processor.

More than a few questionable trends were born in the ’80s (acid-wash jeans, sun-dried tomatoes, my smoking habit), and one of the more notorious still lives on today—fat phobia. For years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has handed us the line that fat is evil, especially saturated fat, and that it turns you into a blimp with high cholesterol and clogged arteries. People have traded fat-containing foods like steak, butter, and eggs for chemical-laden mutant foods. The fact is that while everyone was busy stressing over fat grams, we all got fatter. What gives? Well, we replaced fat with sugar and refined carbohydrates—the real culprits behind weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease. Fat brings flavor, so manufacturers made up for it by loading “healthy” fat-free foods with sugar. Like all refined carbs, sugar only increases your appetite, setting the stage for you to polish off a box of reduced-fat Snackwell cookies in one sitting (
see more on sugar’s effects on the body
).