You Are What You Eat

Photo: Tania Melnyczuk

If there's one thing that acts as a barometer for how my day is going to be, it's what I ate for dinner the night before.

The other night, I was at a restaurant where I was celebrating a milestone. (My new novel was accepted for publication.) Because of this, and because this particular restaurant serves the most amazing mescal I've ever tasted, I ate and drank less healthily than I normally do.

There, I confessed. I enjoyed myself. But the next morning I woke up achier and more tired than I had in a long time.

And I remembered how I used to wake up feeling that way all the time. I thought it was normal for someone my age. As we get older we get achy, stiff, sore, I was told. We lose energy. True, no doubt, but how much energy do we lose? How achy are we typically when we age? Was I more or less achy than average?

Turns out we don't have to be as achy as we may think. I learned that when I started eating better.

The difference was huge.

It's no exaggeration to say I felt ten years younger.

What gives me the energy? Plant matter, mostly. Salads and lean proteins, easy on the dressings and oils and butters and spices. Not all healthy meals are created equal, however, and I had to try different dishes to find my ideals.

But I am astonished, when I sit in one of my most frequented restaurants and watch the plates going by (to other tables), by what I see. Fried foods piled high. Burgers bursting with melted cheese, bacon, and gloppy BBQ sauce. Giant side of fries and onion rings. My eyes follow the entrees to their destinations, and most often a family of rather large, sometimes even morbidly obese diners tuck into what must be thousands of calories.

Dad wears baggy cargo pants, even in winter time; mom sports an oversized sweatshirt or tee and drawstring pants. The kids, though maybe in their early teens, are already fifty pounds overweight. All of them wear ball caps to look sporty. Dad may have a big beard and some manly tattoos. Even the biggest people have now co-opted a jock's fashion aesthetic. But though we've learned to wear our weight better, that movie about the floaty chairs was giving us a serious warning. We live in a society that is more tolerant and non-judgmental of obesity, which is good, probably because nearly half of Americans are obese, which is not.

And I can't help but wonder how many of these people, scarfing down fried foods, feel later, because I remember when I was one of them. I knew I had to make a change and I did.

"But I don't like salads ,I don't like vegetables," is something I hear a lot. I don't blame you. I didn't used to either. I grew up to think that salads were iceberg lettuce, waxy tasteless tomatoes, and thick gooey dressing, which contributed the only taste to the whole mess. This is still largely the salads they serve in many fast food and "casual dining" spots today. I get it: It's hard to do gourmet salads at scale and keep them fresh and affordable. Still, packaged salads have given healthy eating a bad name.

And that's too bad. People who skip vegetables, or just stick a dull slice of tomato and a wet piece of lettuce on their soggy hamburger, don't know what they're missing.

Trust me, those of you in the "I don't like salads/vegetables department, there are delicious, mouth-watering salads and other vegetable dishes out there waiting for you to discover them and make them your own, with delicious ingredients like roasted cauliflower, ricotta salata, roasted red peppers, red quinoa, spiced almonds, baby arugula, and avocado. Or Asian pears, dried cranberries, feta cheese, toasted hazelnuts, baby spinach, radicchio, and maple vinaigrette.

I now crave these the way I used to crave burgers, fries and sundaes. And they make me feel satisfied when I finish, instead of wanting to take a nap on the couch. And most important, they do wonders for my blood sugar—in two ways:

One is simply the obvious: They bring it down. Way down. My a1c dropped half a point in three months, on nothing but eating more vegetables. The plant part of my diet is now 50 percent. Carbs and meats (mostly but not exclusively lean proteins) are split roughly evenly for the other 50 percent.

Two is a more subtle benefit: Taste buds are attracted to what they're used to. Repeat behavior leads to cravings, trust me. If you switch over to more vegetables, it won't be long before you start craving them. You'll lose your taste for cloyingly-sweet or over-processed flavors that flatten your taste buds, and start to appreciate the subtle and subdued flavors of fresh, whole foods like those I described above...and others—there are so many.