A Conversation about Healthy Eating

OK, this is really more of a glorified preface but I wanted to be sure that you didn’t skip it. I tend to skip prefaces because I prefer my experience of a book to be unbiased. I don’t want to know anyone else’s thoughts about a book – not even the author’s – until I’ve finished reading it and formed thoughts of my own. But this approach does have its risks: sometimes my expectations are wrong and I end up disappointed by a book that I might have otherwise enjoyed if I’d been properly prepared for it (Trainspotting, as it turns out, was not quite the ode to railways that I was hoping for . . .). So that’s what this introduction is about: setting expectations. Perhaps I should start with a bit of background. I’ve always enjoyed eating but, until a few years ago, I’d never really thought very deeply about my diet. Which is not to say that I’d never really worried about my diet: like most people I was constantly watching my weight and stressed about whether or not I was eating the right foods or the right amount of food. But at some point I realized that I didn’t need to live with that uncertainty. Like any physical system, the body is governed by rules that determine how different inputs – for example, diets – are transformed into different outputs – for example, health. To eliminate the stress associated with eating, I simply needed to learn the rules that determine how diet affects health and then use those rules to make systematic choices about what I eat.