How Pete Wells, Former New York Times Restaurant Critic, Changed His Eating Habits

Pete Wells reveals how he recovered from an out-of-control diet. Every week in January, he and experts will suggest ways to reset your appetite.

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

This line of business It was mine from 2012 to 2024It gave me many rewards, but an easy glide path to health wasn’t one of them. I was in terrible shape my last year on the job. I squeaked, groaned and burped like a tractor. It took so much effort to lift myself from the backseat of a car that I envisioned a portable crane. Between heartburn attacks, I would waddle to the bathroom four or five times a night. I woke up with a headache, a dry mouth, and a heavy layer of fatigue that I couldn’t 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. He said the numbers were huge. In addition to my physical complaints, they pointed to prediabetes, fatty liver, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, acid reflux and obesity.

The possibility of having diabetes scared me the most. This, after all, is what drove me to ask for another job at The Times and to teach myself how to eat again.

Reset Your Appetite This is the first of Pete Wells’ four articles, published every Monday in January, on how to create healthier eating habits.

Almost two years later, with no medication other than a daily blood pressure pill, almost all of these ailments have receded to less alarming levels, despite still struggling with the cholesterol in my blood. Today I am about 55 pounds lighter than I was at my peak; this is a loss roughly equivalent to dropping an entire male basset hound.

Losing weight was not my main goal. I’ve never counted a single calorie. Somehow, that took care of itself, thanks to the new ways I started shopping, cooking, and eating around that time, and which I’ve more or less stuck to ever since.

Although the way I feed myself is unconventional, the results of years of overeating are all too typical. More than two in five people in the United States have obesity. The third is prediabetic. One in 10 people has Type 2 diabetes. Genes and other factors may play a role in these disorders, but the fundamental problem for millions of us is that we have stopped eating mindfully. We fill our stomachs with more food than we need. No wonder that About 12 percent of American adults They say they tried one of the GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.

I’m not an expert on nutrition. But my credentials for overeating are hard to beat. During the long climb out of the deep hole I had dug myself into, I began to understand some things about how I got there. As I strived to develop a healthier relationship with food, I also learned a little about the ways our bodies and minds work.

Every Monday for the next four weeks, I will present some information that has helped me and some recipes that reflect how I eat at home these days. When I tell you how I learned to eat a more balanced diet, I don’t mean to say that you will have the same luck with my routine or that you should try it. I needed to control sugar, cholesterol, and overeating in general. But I wasn’t worried about sodium and potassium, which can be a big concern for someone with kidney disease. Obviously, anyone with a particular health problem needs to seek advice from a doctor.

Recipes That Will Reset Your Appetite

Baked Steel Cut Oats with Hazelnut Butter | Zucchini Scrambled Eggs | Simple Stewed Greens | Sheet Pan Coconut Curry with Zucchini and Tofu | Brussels Sprout Salad with Pomegranate and Pistachios | Quinoa Salad | Millet with Corn, Mango and Shrimp | Salmon and Green Beans with Red Pepper Sauce | Roasted Broccoli and Chickpeas with Mole Green | Ginger Chicken and Zucchini Rice Soup | Baked Fish and Tomatoes with Coconut

My assumption is that many people like me want to eat less of the things we know we need to avoid and more of the things that are better for us. These are not nutritional rules, but general principles on how to be more sensitive with food.

The behavioral approach has become a dominant school of thought in mainstream nutrition; It’s become clear that the mentality that boils down the challenges of dieting to pure math (otherwise known as “calories in, calories out”) gets most people nowhere. Eating is, after all, a behavior. We are learning how to do this and if a better way is found we can unlearn our habits.

Stay Away from Sugar

The first thing I did when I left the doctor’s office was hunt for simple carbs to get rid of the meals I was eating at home. All I cared about at the time was reversing my slow slide into diabetic territory. What I didn’t know was that the sugar in simple carbohydrates increases my need to keep eating, and reducing intake would help reset my appetite.

Even I was surprised at how many simple carbs I ate. There were English muffins with plum jam that I made myself. Each of the four cups of coffee drank upon waking contained a teaspoon of sugar, increasing as time went by. Brown sugar on oatmeal, wildflower honey on buttered toast, Vermont maple syrup on waffles. Orange, pineapple, grapefruit juice. Croissants, cardamom scones, blueberry muffins, cider donuts. Cumulus heaps of white rice for lunch, hunks of bread for dinner. Cookies to get through the afternoon naps that usually come anyway.

This is a partial list.

Five months after my sugar reset, I received an email from my doctor with a beautifully lyrical sentence: “You are no longer prediabetic.”

By then I, too, had lost more than 20 pounds, but resetting my simple carb baseline had ripple effects throughout my life. The less sugar I ate, the easier it became to eat less of everything else. I was no longer bound to what nutritionists call the glucose roller coaster, a cycle of sugar highs and lows that can lead to insulin resistance, wreaking havoc on the body’s ability to regulate hunger.

Supermarkets and chain restaurants in the United States and increasingly around the world are filled with bumpy foods that promise more intense flavors and pleasures, but only leave us wanting more.

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

As I consumed less added sugar and replaced refined grains with whole grains, my appetite diminished and my howling desires for sweet things became quieter, easier to ignore. I had more energy and seemed to be thinking clearly again for the first time in years. I have unleashed forces that will make it easier to implement all the other changes I will be covering over the next few weeks.

“Basically, you were eating less of the foods that encouraged you to overeat and more of the foods that didn’t,” he said. Marion Nestle, Professor emeritus of food, nutrition and public health at New York University. “Pretty much what any smart nutritionist would recommend.”

Exiting Overdrive

Nutritionists say many people consume more added sugar than they should. The starting point is to find out whether you get more than 10 percent of your total calories from added sugar (which should be your maximum intake), according to the federal government. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. (Unlike protein, fat, and vitamins, added sugar is not necessary for our bodies, so there is no recommended minimum amount, only a maximum amount.)

For the last five years, it has been mandatory to state the amount of added sugar on nutrition labels on packaged foods. They may travel under many aliases; Some of these may sound harmless and perhaps even healthy: evaporated cane juice, agave nectar, fruit juice concentrate, and brown rice syrup.

For me, and for many people, there is little reason to worry about the sugars found naturally in fruits and vegetables, which help you feel full more quickly and are packaged with other things that slow the absorption of glucose into the blood. Sweet potatoes are called yams for a reason, but I don’t think twice about eating one for dinner because they’re pretty sensitive on blood sugar, especially when they’re boiled and served with the skin on.

I must admit that among the “other things” that help you feel full is what nutritionists insist on being fiber; It’s such a repulsive word that it makes you want to seek solace in the arms of the nearest cinnamon bun. Fortunately, when it comes to simple carbohydrates like rice and flour, we can use the less crude phrase “whole grains” to describe the same general idea. This is what you should look for if you find you’re eating too much white rice and white bread. Whole grains also have more flavor.

This is the heart of my first reset: Eating carbohydrates in their original, solid, crunchy, complex form. I knew this would be better for me. And having raised two boys, I probably should have known that excessive consumption of sugar multiple times a day does not lead to very 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.

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