Well, synopsis anyway: Pollan asked readers of Well, a health blog on nytimes.com, to tell him their personal eating-well rules. He posted his favorites. Now I post my favorites of his favorites, or parts of his favorites that are my favorites, based on originality, practicality, cleverness and of course humor. Now if only I had a digital design friend to make them artistically competent; alas.
My parents are both from Italy, and one of our family rules was that you could not leave the table until you had finished your fruit: "Non si puo lasciare la tavola fino che hai finito la frutta." It was a great way to incorporate fruit into our diets and also helped satiate our sweet tooths, keeping us away from less healthful sweets.
(Resisting urge to translate that into Spanish...)
Don't eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow.
"Make and take your own lunch to work." My father has always done this, and so have I. It saves money, and you know what you are eating.
The Chinese have a saying: "Eat until you are seven-tenths full and save the other three-tenths for hunger." That way, food always tastes good, and you don't eat too much.
Avoid snack foods with the "oh" sound in their names: Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Hostess Ho Hos, etc.
Never eat something that is pretending to be something else ... If I want something that tastes like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be more healthful.
(Except I don't know if I'm as gung-ho as this lady... she says "no 'low fat' sour cream", so does that mean no skim milk? What is low fat sour cream pretending to be?)
"When drinking tea, just drink tea." I find this Zen teaching useful .... Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning.
"It's better to pay the grocer than the doctor."
(Or farmer!)
And my favorite, for its realism:
After spending some time working with people with eating disorders, I came up with this rule: "Don't create arbitrary rules for eating if their only purpose is to help you feel in control." I try to eat healthfully, but if there's a choice between eating ice cream and spending all day obsessing about eating ice cream, I'm going to eat the ice cream!
This Laura Usher and I have this in common. These rules are all great for principles and theories but I'd rather refer to them as "guidelines" than "rules". As I've stated before, I think it's the restrictive nature of diets (and their rules) that actually frustrates and inhibits healthy eating.
But to each their own; I'd rather see people talking about healthy eating, even in the context of restrictions, than not talking at all.
Which, by the way--Pollan is still taking suggestions. Have one you want to add? Go to Tara Parker-Pope's blog and post it in a comment. Think another one of Pollan's faves should have made it on here? Let me know. Democracy is fun.
Wow. That's a nifty doohickey over at the NYT. I think you should start posting your own parameters. You could call it Kayla's Criterion.
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