What Should I Eat?

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People often ask me for a recommendation regarding healthy eating and diet books.

As you may know, over the years I have definitely read my fair share of diet and health books, and when it comes down to building a lifestyle of sustainable, long-term healthy eating, there is one book that comes to mind as a simple, straightforward resource for learning how to eat and live well:

Food Rules by Michael Pollan

It’s a tiny book, a handbook in fact. 139 pages from cover to cover (some pages don’t even have any writing) that lays out 64 principles addressing the age-old question, “What should I eat?”

After he spent a couple of years researching nutrition for his last book, In Defense of Food, Michael realized that the answer to this ever confusing question is not really that complicated at all. In fact, he says, it can be answered in just 7 (plain English) words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

It really can’t get much simpler than that! In Food Rules, he organizes the 64 principles collected from a wide range of sources based in both science and tradition… from doctors and nutritionists to grandmas and folklorists… under one of these three sentences (Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.) as categories.

The purpose of the book isn’t for you to necessarily memorize all 64 rules, but instead to shift the way you think about food and eating.

Here are just a few of the topics discussed in the book, which I found most interesting.

Packaged food, media, and confusion

In the intro, Michael talks about how it seems that we are on a never-ending quest to demonize one nutrient or another, when ultimately being healthy isn’t about good and evil nutrients. A lot of the confusion around what to eat and what not to eat is contrived so that the food industry can reformulate products (and health claims) and so the media continues to have things to write about.

He says, “there’s a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes.” There is also a lot of money to be made in confusion.

Sugar and salt

In “Rule 34: Sweeten and salt your food yourself,” Michael says that prepared foods contain more salt and sugar “than any ordinary human would ever add – even a child.” Obviously he doesn’t know my sister. By sweetening and salting foods ourselves, which would also mean that we are making food ourselves rather than eating packaged foods, we’ll eat a fraction of the sugar and salt.

Personal note: Ryan and I have started only eating bread that we he makes at home. It’s a great feeling to know that we are literally only eating flour, salt, yeast, and water. Period.

Treats

This also ties into “Rule 39: Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself” and “Rule 60: Treat treats as treats.”

Michael says to eat desserts, bread, even fried food (gasp), etc… things that you might normally buy pre-made, only if you made them yourself. Not only will you be eating them far less frequently, since it takes a lot of time to bake bread or make fried chicken from scratch, you also control all of the ingredients.

Personal note: I’ve noticed that since I stopped telling myself that I couldn’t have something, I really only want a bite or a small portion of whatever it is that I used to tell myself I couldn’t have.

For me, words like “eat all the junk food you want” don’t really feel good, but words like “if you really want that, have it” do.

So it’s really not a big deal to have bread or chocolate in the house anymore. Yes, chocolate… which I most likely didn’t make myself. This falls under “Rule 64: Break the rules once in a while.” Even as I say the above regarding bread, we still eat some packaged foods (in particular this and these), but the point is really to just be picky about (and know) what you put into your body.

The French paradox

In the “Not too much” section, Michael touches on what he calls the French paradox, which is “the mystery (at least to nutritionists) of a population that eats all sorts of supposedly lethal fatty foods, and washes them down with red wine, but which is nevertheless healthier, slimmer, and slightly longer lived than we are.” He believes that the missing link is the relationship that French people have with their food… their behaviors “may matter more than any magic nutrient in their diet.”

Personal note: I thought this was interesting because although I really know nothing about the way that French people eat, I do know that once I changed my relationship with food, my behavior changed. I place way less attention now on ratios, calories, eating a certain number of meals per day, and I feel way healthier than I ever have before. Also, the food I tend to crave most? Salads. Really colorful ones.

Gas station hot dogs

“Rule 57: Don’t get your fuel from the same place that your car does” was especially funny to me, because Ryan and I often laugh about how some of his most frequent lunchtime meals used to be a hot dog out of that little rolling machine with the hot lamp at the gas station. Paired with pork rinds. Ew.

Overall… tune in

Ultimately, I like this book because it lays out a very healthy (both emotionally and physically) plan for people to learn how to change life-long learned habits. But, even Michael will tell you, “obsessing over food rules is bad for your happiness, and probably your health too.”

This book is a great resource to get you on the right track, but as I mentioned above, when you set rules, you tend to feel bad or guilty if you don’t follow them. That’s even worst than eating the food you feel bad or guilty about!

Don’t get too caught up in rules. The most important rule you could ever set for yourself, even above “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” is to listen to your body and eat what makes you feel best. Your body knows what is good for you. Your body knows what nutrients it’s lacking, so tune into what it is telling you, and what you will most likely find after you get really good at listening to it, is that your body will tell you what it wants is… food, not too much, mostly plants.

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