Photo by Telephone Melts

A strange thing happens to some people after their first few experiences with perfectly cooked farmers market vegetables. It is not always easy to admit, but after awhile you might find yourself thinking that the veggies you grew up eating were, ahem, pretty horrible.

It is common for people of both my generation and my parents’ generation to have been raised on frozen spinach, canned beets, over-steamed carrots and boiled broccoli–foods that would make anyone with taste buds pick up their fork and run to the nearest steakhouse.

Is it any wonder that vegetables rarely rank on anyone’s favorite foods list?

Unfortunately, sometimes these negative early experiences can create life long food aversions that could have been avoided with a little extra TLC in the kitchen. They also help propagate the unhealthy eating habits that are now so common in America.

But our exposure to bad vegetables isn’t really Mom’s fault. Over the past 50 years America has been seduced by the allure of convenience. We’ve come to believe that meals come in packages and cooking is too hard and time consuming to bother with. We rely on supermarkets for our fruits and vegetables, which we expect to be the same year round.

The watering down of our food culture is directly responsible for our vegetables losing flavor (they are bred for shelf life, not taste) and us losing our ability to make them palatable. As a result vegetables have become an afterthought, something we eat from guilt and obligation, not from love.

But the good news is that this trend is reversing. People are starting to understand that where food comes from is important and has a tremendous impact on how it tastes. We are learning that it is worth it to go out of our way and spend a little extra money (at least occasionally) for the best ingredients. Restaurants are beginning to pride themselves on serving locally sourced foods–it is no longer uncommon to see farm names printed next to ingredients on menus here in San Francisco.

Focusing on quality ingredients and real foods is forcing us to reexamine cooking as well. I remember how surprised I was the first time I realized that instant oatmeal only saves about 3 minutes compared to real oatmeal and that sautéing fresh spinach is easier than making a bag of the soggy frozen kind. Not only are we starting to understand that taste is worth sacrificing a little convenience for here and there, but also that the inconvenience we feared isn’t as big a deal as we might have guessed.

But not everyone has been converted quite yet.

Learning to shop for and cook seasonal foods does involve a learning curve, and the first steps are always the most difficult and intimidating. (These aren’t exactly skills we pick up in school or learn in our daily lives.) To get and cook real food requires finding local farmers markets and knowing how to work a stove, for starters. Since farmers markets don’t usually run daily, a bit of foresight and planning are necessary if you hope to make it a part of your weekly routine. Working a stove demands some basic understanding of how food reacts when heated.

Luckily, neither of these things are actually as difficult as they may seem at first. And once you acquire just a few basic cooking skills–stir fry in olive oil, oven roasting, basic grain and legume preparation–expanding your culinary repertoire to include dozens of your favorite dishes isn’t much of a stretch.

One of the perks of starting with great ingredients is that messing up a meal is much more difficult than it is when you start with low-quality ingredients and rely on additional hacks and seasonings to mask the lack of flavor. Bad vegetables are almost always either over-cooked or under-salted, so if you can get these right you are most of the way there. Just a few extra seasoning tricks like garlic, chili flakes or lemon zest can elevate almost any green vegetable into something worth building a meal around.

Cooking vegetables well is neither an art nor a science. Learn to prepare a few of your favorites well, then branch out from there. Then next time you visit your parents, maybe you can volunteer to cook dinner and show them how broccoli is supposed to taste.

Have bad childhood memories turned you off to any foods?

Tags: canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, real food, seasonal, vegetables

Photo by joe.oconnell

“I eat way too much sugar and have constant cravings for it that make me feel like I am addicted … do you have any suggestions for cutting back?”

There is still a debate over whether or not sugar is an addictive substance. From the data I’ve seen and people I’ve talked to, I’d guess it probably is.

But whatever the answer, the important question for most of us is how to kill the cravings that have us eating so much sugar in the first place.

Cravings exist in both the body and the mind, and you will have the best luck overcoming them if you address both simultaneously.

The first step is good nutrition. A nourished body is a happy body, and permanently kicking a sugar habit requires healthy food.

Eating balanced meals is essential for getting real satisfaction from what you eat and leaving cravings behind. For most people this means approximately 50% of your meal being vegetables and the rest split between protein (beans, meat or dairy), intact grains and a bit of oil or other fat. However, everyone is a little different and you should experiment to find what works best for you.

Healthy eating will not squelch cravings overnight, but it is essential for permanently cutting sugar because it ensures your body has everything it needs. Once your muscles and organs are taken care of, you can address the cravings in your brain.

The first step in breaking a sugar addiction is making the decision to stop eating it completely for at least 4 days (the longer the better), and sticking to it. While I usually recommend making dietary changes gradually, sugar has the unique ability to inspire cravings which are refueled every time you give into them.

The only way to break the cycle is to stop feeding the fire.

Once your sugar tolerance has normalized you can reintroduce it in small amounts, so long as you are sure you are eating for pleasure and not from habit.

Quitting sugar cold turkey is not entirely easy, however, even if you know the break is temporary. Cravings can be incredibly intense and make sticking to your resolution very difficult. If you hope to get through it, you must have a strategy for diverting yourself from temptation.

Start by removing all sweets (especially your weakness) from the house. Do a full sweep, no secret stashes can stay. If you do not want to throw things out, try giving them away at work or even sealing them up and putting them somewhere you can’t get to them. Making it impossible to cheat will greatly increase your probability of success. Don’t rely on willpower.

Once you have removed your most likely pitfalls you need a strategy for dealing with cravings. For this it is important to understand clearly why you want to avoid sugar, what you are making the effort for.

If you aren’t sure why limiting sugar is necessary I recommend spending some time educating yourself on the subject. If you’re a visual learner, check out this video about the evils of fructose by Dr. Lustig. If you’d like all the gory scientific details, check out Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.

Being completely convinced you want to change your habits makes following through on your resolution much easier.

The next step is deciding on alternative behaviors to divert yourself from cravings–they will pass eventually so all you need to do is distract yourself for a bit while they are strongest.

What works for you will depend a lot on your own personality and needs. For many people, sugar snacking is triggered by certain environmental cues such as location or time of day. In these situations, diversions should be planned in advance to avoid slipping into habitual behavior.

Planned distractions from habitual eating can include taking different routes between locations (to avoid walking by that bakery), substituting behaviors (there are no cookies at the gym) or choosing different foods or beverages during certain activities (mint tea instead of ice cream?).

Experiment with different alternatives and figure out what works best for you. Foods with oil and protein tend to be satisfying and quench cravings, if hunger is a problem for you. Exercise is the golden ticket for others. For me personally, sugar cravings are best satisfied by fresh fruit, especially those with a lot of fiber like apples and oranges.

Make sure your alternative foods and activities are things you enjoy. If they aren’t you will eventually abandon them for your old habits. Ideally these avoidance behaviors will completely replace your sugar habit and become your new healthstyle.

As you cut sugar out of your diet, also be sure to avoid hidden sources. Stay away from sauces and condiments that are really desserts in disguise, e.g. honey mustard, teriyaki, etc. Added sugar is very common in restaurant sauces (especially mid-range chain restaurants), so you might want to avoid eating out all together for a few days if you can swing it.

When you have completed your 4 day sugar fast, your cravings should have subsided substantially (the first 2 days are the worst). Continue to keep sugar minimal and actively avoid situations that cue you to eat sweets. Integrate your new behaviors into your healthstyle until the new habits replace the old ones. This process takes 6-8 weeks.

During this time get in the practice of asking yourself why you are eating sugar before you put it into your mouth. Are you eating from habit? Because of circumstance? For a special occasion? Because everyone else is?

The purpose of this exericse is not necessarily to stop yourself from eating, but to understand the reasons behind your behavior. The goal is to find a way to allow sugar into your life as a treat and not a necessity.

As you ween yourself off sugar, your tastes can change dramatically. All my life I had a sweet tooth, but over the past several years my taste for sugar has diminished and most desserts are now far too sweet for me. Consequently limiting sugar is not something I need to think much about, except during holidays and special occasions. Even then I don’t give it much thought, it happens naturally.

Besides eating more vegetables, cutting your sugar intake way down is probably the single best thing you can do to improve your health. If sugar is a problem for you, eating less of it should be one of your highest priorities.

Have you had success cutting back on sugar?

Tags: addiction, brain, Dr. Lustig, fructose, Good Calories Bad Calories, restaurants, sugar, The End of Overeating

Photo by Sara Bjork

I have a confession to make: I don’t love to cook.

Sure I like the idea of cooking, and I’m glad that I can cook, but my idea of a perfect day rarely involves spending time in the kitchen.

What I really love is food.

I love to shop for ingredients and envision the delicious dishes I can make with them. I love the taste of fresh, ripe, seasonal produce from the farmers market. I love the way good food makes me feel. I love the knowledge that what I eat helps me thrive.

But cutting stuff up and putting it in a pan isn’t particularly fun for me. Though I certainly enjoy the fruits of my labor!

For me cooking is a means to an end. I cook for my own health and happiness, and for whomever I happen to be sharing my time with at the moment.

This is enough for me.

I came to realize my lack of cooking passion over the past several weeks as I watched my fellow food bloggers fret on Twitter over holiday meal plans, perfect cookies and fallen souffles. It became very obvious to me that I had no desire to entertain dozens of people or perfect the quintessential holiday recipe.

I’m proud of the food I make and it’s always important to me to do a good job (I love eating, remember), I just don’t have that extra drive that distinguishes a good cook from a true chef.

Some people clearly adore cooking and all it involves. These people are my heroes. They are the brilliant chefs responsible for the exquisite food all over this wonderful city. They construct the fabulous recipes I count on when cooking something new. They photograph the beautiful dishes that inspire me to try a little harder. Without passionate chefs we would not have spectacular food, and I am profoundly thankful for them.

But not all of us can be amazing chefs. Fortunately it isn’t necessary to be a great chef to make delicious food.

Simple, fresh cooking doesn’t require any special talent. It all starts with excellent ingredients and just a few basic techniques that anyone can master with practice.

The moral of the story is that you do not have to be a kitchen ninja (or even particularly enjoy cooking) to be able to feed yourself well on a daily basis. The most important step is getting in the habit of buying good-quality, seasonal food and learning the basic skills you need to whip up something you enjoy.

If you get in the habit of cooking for yourself, it will one day stop feeling like a big ordeal and become second nature. You’ll get faster at chopping, you won’t need to constantly check recipes and measure ingredients, and you’ll intuitively know when and in which order to add things to the pot. But all this takes practice, and if you don’t make a regular habit of cooking for yourself it will continue to be difficult.

The good news is once you are comfortable in the kitchen, more interesting and complex recipes start to sound appealing. This is not necessarily because you learned to love cooking, but simply because it is easier for you.

Once you’ve broken the proficiency barrier you open a world of different dishes and cuisines, unchaining yourself from repetitive stir fries and culinary boredom.

For the non-chef, this is the level of proficiency you want to achieve. You do not have to love cooking to enjoy making dinner. You just have to get beyond the point where you struggle with it. It really isn’t as hard as it sounds.

Why do you cook?

Photo by melloveschallah

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

-Rita Mae Brown

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2010 marks the beginning of not just a new year, but a new decade. Rather than using this as an excuse to set and/or stick to diet resolutions of years past, consider setting an anti-resolution to stop the cycle:

Decide today to quit diets and never pick up another one.

For some people (my former self included) chronic dieting is a way of life. Structured diets help us feel secure and in control of our fate, while giving us something to strive for and accomplish.

In a twisted way, diets can be comforting and giving them up can be as difficult for some as quitting smoking.

But most people are not trying to stop dieting, they are trying to do it better. Dieting is usually seen as a positive ambition, a form of self-improvement.

But what if diets do more harm than good? What if they lower instead of raise your quality of life?

Weight loss and better health through food and exercise are wonderful aspirations, but contrary to popular wisdom they are not synonymous with dieting. If your goals are long-term and not for specific or imminent events, then dieting will never help you achieve them.

Healthy eating and regular exercise need to be your default, automatic behaviors and not a special case scenario; weight loss diets by definition are temporary–an exception, not the rule. This is another way of saying our daily, habitual behaviors are unhealthy and promote weight gain.

Typical diets address the symptom, but ignore the problem.

Most of us will sidestep this logic by convincing ourselves that once our desired weight loss is achieved through dieting (and that’s a big IF it is achieved) we will enter into a “maintenance stage.” But maintenance is only a theoretical purgatory that looks just like the original diet dressed up to be a little sexier.

The real test of a diet’s success is not weeks or months, but years and decades later. And since we never think of diets on these long time scales, most will fail eventually. This is an uphill battle of regular slip-ups and constant restriction.

How about a different strategy?

This decade instead of picking a diet with the goal of losing X number of pounds, decide on a list of healthy habits you want to adopt over the next several months and years that will help you reach your long-term health goals. Building habits may not result in the same quick results you’d experience on a traditional diet (though they can), but you will continue to see results for many months and the changes will be permanent.

Habits take approximately 4-6 weeks to form, and most people can only adopt 2-3 new habits simultaneously. Use your list to set up short-term behavioral goals throughout the year to gauge your progress.

To start, choose the habits that are easiest and most fun for you personally. Set an end date to examine your progress in 1-2 months. Write it in your calendar and set aside 15-30 minutes that day for the analysis. (e.g. By February 15, I will bring my own lunch to work at least 4 days a week).

Remember that habits can be either positive or negative, such as the proactive taking the stairs at least twice per day versus the reductive limiting dessert to once per week. A good strategy is to pair a negative habit with a positive one that can replace it. For instance, limit red meat to once per week pairs nicely with eat fish 3 times per week, particularly if you are accustomed to eating lots of protein.

Once you have successfully integrated a few new habits into your healthstyle, pick 1 or 2 more for the following months. Continue to add new habits, minimize bad ones and assess your progress at regular intervals. Start now, and don’t wait until next January to evaluate your results.

By the end of 2010 you should be able to adopt 5-10 new habits that will significantly improve your health both immediately and in decades to come. As your health improves, your goals may evolve to reflect new and possibly more advanced ambitions. This is good, it means you’re making progress.

Not everyone will have the same aspirations or be able to tolerate the same daily routines, so you should think carefully and set goals you think you can achieve. Whenever possible, try to write your goals in specific rather than general terms. For example, instead of writing eat more vegetables, write eat something green at both lunch and dinner.

Don’t get hung up on setting guidelines you can follow 100% of the time, the goal is to set routines you can achieve most of the time. Remember, exceptions are okay and an inevitable part of life. For this exercise we are focusing on what you do as habit. That is, your average meals where you have control over what you eat.

Here are just a few examples of healthy habits to get you started, but these are only meant as inspiration. Spend some time making your own list and assigning priority to each habit. If you have any questions or suggestions, please write them below in the comments.

Healthy habits for a new decade

1. Make vegetables the centerpiece of dinner at least 5 days per week.
2. Limit dessert to once per week or less.
3. Replace soda with sparkling water during lunch.
4. Do not eat from the bread basket at restaurants.
5. Include legumes in at least 4 meals per week.
6. Take the stairs to the office at least 4 times per week.
7. Eat breakfast everyday.
8. Do not eat foods with added sugar.
9. Shop at the farmers market every weekend.
10. Put down your fork between each bite of food.

What’s on your list?

You may also enjoy:

• Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, by Brian Wansink. A fantastic book on breaking and creating healthy eating habits. Funny and informative.
• Last year’s rant about New Year’s Solutions.

Tags: New Year's

Sometimes it takes a new set of eyes to see things clearly. Sometimes a new perspective can be enough to change your world.

In the blockbuster film Avatar, advanced neuro-technology is used to plug human consciousness into alien bodies (avatars) and operate them remotely. Scientists use these avatars to explore the planet Pandora and learn the ways of its native people, the Na’vi.

The Na’vi share an intimate bond with their natural habitat, making their behavior seem primitive and incomprehensible to the humans studying them. But when Jake Sully immerses himself in Na’vi culture as an assignment, his experience changes him in ways no one could have imagined.

Behaviors we don’t understand are often the easiest to ridicule and reject. But putting aside your preconceptions and coming to a new world with open eyes can be the best way to improve your circumstances and enrich your life.

Do you have prejudices that are keeping you from eating healthy?

I have certainly had many.

Believe it or not, there was a time I thought all organic food was an elaborate, expensive hoax designed to trick rich people into paying more for food the rest of us could get for a fraction of the price. I just didn’t get it. I hadn’t yet tasted the difference, so I didn’t believe it existed.

There was also a time when home cooking seemed to me like a laughable, time-consuming and pointless affair, better suited to married life or, well, anyone who wasn’t me. Why would I cook when someone else could do it for me?

Weekly shopping at the farmers market was another tough idea to swallow (who wants to get up that early on a Saturday?), as was ignoring free food at social events–one of the most fundamental and revered components of graduate school (it’s free!!).

My problem was that I didn’t yet see the value in these activities, so they didn’t seem important.

But of course, I was wrong.

It is absolutely worth the extra effort and money for higher quality organic vegetables that I am actually excited to eat.

Cooking for myself is by far the most efficient, tasty and healthy way to feed myself.

And shopping at the farmers market and maintaining a high-quality diet is the single most important thing I do to stay healthy; it is also really fun.

But I don’t expect you to believe me. This is not the kind of information you can read on a blog and automatically integrate into your life.

To understand my enthusiasm for farm fresh food and home-cooked meals, you really have to dive in head first and try it yourself.

There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain.

So what’s stopping you?

Tags: Avatar, food culture