In sum: Much about the typical American diet is wrong. It’s damaging both individually and globally, and we can’t expect Big Food or the government to help us fix it.

But the realization of just how straightforwardly and even easily we can make things right—at least a great deal for ourselves, and to some extent for one another—was the driving force behind my decision to change the way I ate. The more I understood about the relationship between human and environmental health, the more I felt a need to act. (As I said in the Introduction, a key moment for me was the publication of Livestock’s Long Shadow, the UN report revealing the link between raising animals and climate change.)

Equally important, though, since I was unwilling to give up one of life’s basic pleasures, was that I saw a way to introduce a much better diet into my own life without much sacrifice.

At first, I simply eliminated as much junk food and overrefined carbs as I could, along with a sizable percentage of animal products. All this turned out to be easy enough, for a couple of reasons. One, when I did allow myself to eat meat, or dairy, eggs, sugar, or bread made from white flour (usually at dinner), I ate whatever I wanted, and as much of it as I wanted. And two, I started to lose weight, quite quickly—a big boost of positive reinforcement.

I wondered: If the cumulative effect of the American diet could have such a negative impact on our bodies and the planet, then couldn’t individuals help reverse the damage—again cumulatively—by making small changes in what they choose to eat?

Clearly, the diet was helping me; I lost weight and saw my cholesterol and blood sugar improve dramatically. But my impact on the industrial meat and junk-food complex—what I’ve been calling Big Food—and on slowing climate change was obviously insignificant. Suppose, though, I could get others on this bandwagon? This way of eating is far from complicated, has few rules, makes sense, and works. It can have its own reward in better health and often weight loss, but it also is a way to save energy in the same way as carpooling, turning off the lights when you’re not in the room, lowering the thermostat during the winter and wearing a sweater in the house, installing a windmill, whatever other parallel you care to draw.

So. Welcome to Food Matters: a not very new (but for most Americans novel) way of eating that’s personally healthy and globally sane but not deprivation-based, faddist, or elitist. No calorie counting, and no strictly forbidden foods: Just a few quite specific recommendations that you can adapt to your own style.

Sane eating, simplified

Here’s the summary: Eat less meat, and fewer animal products in general . Eat fewer refined carbohydrates, like white bread, cookies, white rice, and pretzels. Eat way less junk food: soda, chips, snack food, candy, and so on. And eat far more vegetables, legumes, fruits, and whole grains—as much as you can.

If you followed those general rules and read no farther, you’d be doing yourself and the earth a favor. And I’m by no means the only one who thinks so.

Shortly after I started eating this way, an article appeared in Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, that supports the general position of Food Matters, even in its specifics: “Particular policy attention should be paid to the health risks posed by the rapid worldwide growth in meat consumption, both by exacerbating climate change and by directly contributing to certain diseases.”

As a measure of progress, the authors propose this: “The current global average meat consumption is 100 g per person per day, with about a ten-fold variation between high-consuming and low-consuming populations. 90 g per day is proposed as a working global target, shared more evenly, with not more than 50 g per day coming from red meat.”

Ninety grams a day is about 3 ounces (50 grams is not even 2 ounces; it’s less than an eighth of a pound); Americans’ per capita consumption, as I’ve noted earlier, is more than 8 ounces per day. You might eat more than that; you might eat less. But for most Americans, cutting down to the international average would be a huge step (cutting 10 percent beyond that would be practically insignificant). In fact, it we ate the world average, 3 ounces a day, that average would fall to about 90 grams a day, or just about what Lancet recommends.

The goal of eating sanely is not to cut calories; that will happen naturally, and you probably won’t notice it. The goal is not to cut fat, either; in fact it is possible that you eat more fat than you do now, although different fat. The same is true of carbohydrates—again, you may wind up eating more, but different kinds. And the goal is not to save money, though you will.

No—the goal is simply to eat less of certain foods, specifically animal products, refined carbs, and junk food; and more of others, specifically plants, in close to their natural state.

If you made those your goals, you’d change your life. You’d probably weigh less, you’d have lowered your chance of heart disease and other lifestyle diseases, and you’d make a contribution to slowing global warming.

For a variety of reasons—it’s not temporary, no foods are strictly forbidden, and there’s no calorie counting—this is not what’s popularly called “a diet,” as in “I’m on a diet.” Rather, it’s a shift in perspective or style, an approach.

In any case, the principles are simple: deny nothing; enjoy everything, but eat plants first and most. There’s no gimmick, no dogma, no guilt, and no food police.

I want to stress, too, that this is not a new way to eat, but one that’s quite old-fashioned; you could even say it’s ancient. Among our ancestors, there were few people who did not struggle to get enough calories; it was only in the late twentieth century that people could and did begin to overeat regularly. Until then, most people considered themselves lucky to eat one good meal every day; many people spent half the year eating poorly, and the other half eating decently, though certainly not lavishly, except on certain feast days and holidays. Think of Lent and Mardi Gras, meatless Fridays and Sunday dinners, festivals in autumn and spring, and more. These were all formalized acknowledgments that food was and is something to be celebrated and enjoyed, but overdone only occasionally. Food Matters is no more than a way to look at this from a contemporary perspective.

You can go from here to there a number of different ways. You can opt out of two servings of meat a week, or of all but two servings of meat a week. You can eat an apple (or three) instead of potato chips this afternoon. You can start the day with oatmeal instead of bacon and eggs, and so on. You’ll find many substitutions, ideas for specific eating styles, and recipes, starting on Chapter 7.

How I got here

My route to saner eating was more or less accidental. Two years ago, I was 57 and weighed more than I ever had before. When I graduated from college, I weighed 165 pounds. When I stopped smoking, about five years later, I weighed 180. When my first daughter was born (and when I started writing about food), I hit 190. Over the next 20 years or so, I managed to gain another 25 pounds or so, until I reached 214. I’m not a small person, so I didn’t look that heavy (or that’s what I liked to think, though people now tell me otherwise), but you could tell I was overweight, and I developed a number of the expected health problems. My cholesterol was up, as was my blood sugar (and there’s diabetes, as well as serious obesity, in my family); I had a hernia; my knees were giving out (your knees know how much you weigh!); and I had developed sleep apnea.

I was also working on How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I had (and still have) no intention of becoming a vegetarian, but I could see the writing on the wall: Industrial meat production had gone beyond distasteful and alienating right through to disgusting and dangerous; traditional, natural ingredients were becoming more and more rare; and respectable scientific studies were all pointing in the same general direction.

For me, the combination of cholesterol, blood sugar, and apnea was the real trigger. I’m not going to go into specific details, but my problems were scary enough and, according to my doctor, all easily remedied. For the cholesterol, I could take statins—cholesterol-lowering drugs—or I could try eating less red meat; for the blood sugar, I could eat fewer sweets; for the apnea, I was told to lose 15 percent of my body weight.

No results were guaranteed. Eating less meat doesn’t always lower cholesterol; losing weight doesn’t always remedy apnea. But to me the combination of these recommendations, along with the upward trend of my weight, what I’d learned about food over the years, my increasing disgust with the way most meat is grown in this country, the UN report, and more, pointed the way to a style of eating that simply made more sense.

Along with my friend and colleague Kerri Conan, I started eating a diet that was nearly “vegan until six,” and at first may sound strict. Until dinnertime, I ate almost no animal products at all (I allowed myself half-and-half or milk in my coffee), no simple carbohydrates (though my coffee often takes sugar), and no junk food. At dinner, at least when I began eating this way, I ate as I always had, sometimes a sizable meal including animal products, bread, dessert, wine, you name it, and sometimes a salad and a bowl of soup—whatever I wanted.

That’s just one way to approach this style of eating. And though few unbiased nutritional experts would disapprove of it, it might sound counterintuitive to you. Indeed, the opposite schedule—eating the heaviest meal of the day for lunch or even breakfast—may make more sense with regard to strictly body function. But eating this way suits my particular lifestyle. I detest overly prescriptive diets that are ultimately impossible to follow, and the point of this one, again, is to eat more vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains and less meat, sugar, junk food, and overrefined carbohydrates—and to do so without suffering or giving up all the foods you love. How you go about that probably doesn’t matter much.

What does matter is results, and mine were striking. First and probably foremost, I had little trouble eating this way. (It was toughest when I was away from home, but I’ve figured that out, too.) Second, I started feeling and sleeping better. Third, I didn’t think much about it for a month or two. It was just one of those things that made sense, like—I don’t know—realizing at age 40 that I’d never liked wearing wool, or that excess drinking usually isn’t worth the hangover.

A month later, I weighed myself; I’d lost 15 pounds. A month after that, I went to the lab for blood work: both my cholesterol and my blood sugar were down, well into the normal range (my cholesterol had gone from 240 to 180 and Kerri’s dropped about 23 percent). My apnea was gone; in fact, for the first time in probably 30 years, I was sleeping through the night and not even snoring.

Within four months, I’d lost more than 35 pounds (Kerri has lost 25 over the course of a year), and was below 180, less than I’d weighed in 30 years. (In fact, of all my diet-related ailments, only my knees didn’t respond. Oh, well. One does age, after all.) On a five-week stint in Spain I gained back five pounds; I quickly lost those, but by then I’d stopped counting. My weight has clearly stabilized at a new lower level and—probably more important—I’m at home with this way of eating.

What works for me

Suggestions for specifics about how you might go about eating this way begin on Chapter 9, but this is what I do. I eat about one-third as much meat, dairy, and even fish, as I did a couple of years ago. I eat very little in the way of refined carbohydrates. (However, when there’s good white bread on the table at dinner I attack it, and I still eat pasta a couple of times a week.) I eat almost no junk food—by which I mean fast food, candy bars, snack food, and the like—though I allow myself the classic combo of cheeseburger, fries, and Coke every couple of months. I eat probably three or four times as many plants as I ever did, and my guess is that 70 percent or so of my calories come from non-animal sources.

For some people, a shift of 10 percent of calories from animal to plant may feel significant, though I doubt that; it would be the equivalent of maybe not having chicken on your Caesar salad at lunch but keeping the rest of your diet the same. A person making that kind of shift, along with cutting way back on junk food and refined carbohydrates, might still see positive health changes.

A shift of 50 percent—replacing half your animal calories with plant calories—would be significant for anyone, and would take a conscious ongoing effort. It’s not very difficult, but it won’t happen automatically. (I’m not suggesting for a second that anyone start counting calories in this manner; but you’ll know when you’ve replaced a significant amount of your animal foods with plants. Everything will feel different.)

If, as Joel Fuhrman suggests in his book Eat to Live, you choose to get 90 percent of your calories from plants, you’ll be conscious of your diet all the time, and you’ll work hard at it. I think this is an extreme alternative, but this kind of diet has actually reversed heart disease in several studies and will probably leave you feeling healthier than you ever imagined, and looking better as well.

What do I eat? For breakfast, it’s either cereal, like oatmeal or cracked wheat, or fruit salad or sometimes vegetables left over from the previous night. If I have a midmorning snack, it’s fruit or nuts. For lunch I’m strict about the type of food I can eat, but I make an effort to eat a lot, trying to get really full on beans, grilled or roasted vegetables, salads, fruit, and maybe some grains; if I’m desperate, I’ll eat a little pasta. (If I’m home, it’s one or two of those things; if I’m out, I just take everything that looks good at the salad bar, with lemon juice or vinegar and olive oil.)

Mind you, I’m not fiercely strict: I don’t pay much attention to whether there’s a little cheese on the roasted tomatoes, or whether the cucumber salad is made with sour cream or yogurt. I do steer clear of the bacon bits, the mayo-laden salads, and—needless to say—the grill, the sandwich bar (though as you’ll see it’s easy to make a delicious all-vegetable sandwich), the taco station, and so on. And I don’t drink alcohol at lunch.

Dinner varies wildly. If I’m eating at home, it might be a salad, bread, and maybe cheese; or soup and bread; or stew, with meat; or a piece of cooked fish with a couple of simple sides. If I go out, there are few limits; I order what I feel like eating, and drink what I feel like drinking. Just in case you’re wondering, this might mean a typical steakhouse dinner, a grand dinner at a top restaurant, a few typical dishes at a good Italian place, enough sushi to fill me up—whatever.

But as months of this style of eating turned into years, I found myself front-loading even the grand meals with vegetables, and becoming less interested in the heavier meat dishes that followed. This is an important point: My food choices have changed, even when I go out, and they reflect my mood more than what was surely a habit of focusing on meat, with simple carbs in second place. That balance has shifted.

I don’t want to downplay how much of a change this has been for me, but at the same time I want to stress that it’s been nearly painless. It’s as sensible a routine as I can come up with, but it’s personal: I find it easier to make strict changes than to make moderate ones, so I’d rather be supervigilant all day long, then relax at night. (It was also easier for me to stop drinking for a year than it is for me to have fewer than three glasses of wine at dinner. What can I tell you? That’s me.)

And again, let me stress that these are my personal rules. They work for me, and if they sound good to you, try them. Whatever plan you wind up with (you’ll find several beginning on Chapter 8), the direction is the same: more plants, fewer animals, and as little highly processed food as possible.

Saner eating, better health, and weight loss

This eating pattern has several obvious benefits. By reducing the amount of meat we eat, we can grow and kill fewer animals. That means less environmental damage, including climate change; fewer antibiotics in the water and food supplies; fewer pesticides and herbicides; reduced cruelty; and so on. It also means better health for you.

Reducing the amount of simple carbohydrates (including junk food) has similar ecological effects—less in some ways, more in others. Junk food uses tremendous amounts of packaging, for example. It’s likely that cutting back on this kind of eating also improves health, since there’s compelling evidence that our high consumption of refined carbohydrates (especially all that high fructose corn syrup) is largely responsible for the marked increase in type 2 diabetes.

As time goes on, we may well discover that increasing the amount of plants you eat is the most important part of this plan. Of course, the more plants you eat, the less you eat of other, potentially damaging foods. In a way, it’s addition by subtraction.

And it may be more than that. The micronutrients in plants remain little understood, and their benefits are far from being fully described. For example, it seems quite likely that eating an orange gives you a whole set of nutrients that come along with vitamin C but are far more complex than vitamin C, and eating a carrot provides many more benefits than a dose of beta-carotene. (There’s little indication that isolating nutrients, even micronutrients, and taking them as supplements, is a key to good health.)

As I’ve said, this style of eating can also promote weight loss, and that’s of primary importance to many people. The explanation is neither technical nor complicated, and mostly centers on the concept of caloric density, made popular by books like The Pritikin Principle and The Okinawa Diet. The idea is to rely on foods that have relatively few calories by volume.

Think of it this way: From the dawn of human life until the twentieth century, most people had to struggle to get enough calories, so calorie-dense foods were the most highly prized. These included meat, dairy foods, and fats, which, in a well-proportioned diet, are largely beneficial, because they’re also among the most nutrient-dense foods. Highly refined grains, sugar, and alcohol (beer, vodka, whiskey, and so on have played important roles in supplying calories in specific cultures) are also calorie-dense, but they’re nearly worthless nutritionally, and they are potentially harmful when consumed in large quantities.

If you’re struggling to get enough calories, and you want to take in as many calories as you can possibly consume, calorie-dense foods gain in importance. They’re also convenient. Though we all love to eat, it takes longer—and takes more work—to fill up on a huge pile of romaine lettuce than on a small steak.

This is in part why I would never argue for a diet that totally eliminates anything. For one thing, such a diet arouses our rebellious streak. For another, it’s no guarantee of health; there are plenty of non–meat eaters who get their fill of junk food.

But most important, I think, is that keeping some calorie-dense food in your diet—whether it’s meat, pasta, beer, or cake—allows you to reach satiety more quickly and easily. And this will keep you from feeling deprived.

Still, calorie-light foods are the key to sane eating. Most of them—like leafy greens and most other vegetables, brothy soups and stews, fruit, legumes, and whole grains—are full of valuable nutrients and fiber. If you want to be technical, you can calculate the caloric density of any food, by dividing the calories in a portion by its weight (lower is better). For some specifics and examples, see the chart on Chapter 6.

The psychology of weight loss

Of course, willpower is involved in any change of lifestyle. So assuming some will read Food Matters with a primary goal of losing weight, it’s worth spending a minute on the topic of hunger, weight loss, and will.

There’s a basic truth here: there are stages of hunger, and we—Americans in general—have become accustomed to feeding ourselves at the first sign. This is the equivalent of taking a nap every time you get tired, which hardly anyone does.

There are levels of hunger, and there is a very real difference between hunger and starvation. Starvation is a physical state; your body is deprived of essential nutrients or calories for a long period of time. Probably no one reading this book has ever been truly starving—though we all think we know what starving feels like.

Hunger is a hardwired early-warning system. At first, your brain says, “Think about eating something soon.” In the later stages, it says, “Eat as soon as you can; make eating a priority.” At no point does your brain say, “Eat now or you will do permanent damage,” though at times it may feel as if that is true. But “Eat when hungry” has become a habit. We get hungry. We eat. We get hungry again. We eat again. And so on.

I’m not saying, “Don’t eat when you’re hungry.” I’m saying that if losing or maintaining weight is important to you, think twice before you eat from simple hunger, or from other reasons, like emotion. And when you do eat, choose a piece of fruit; a carrot; a handful of nuts. If you’re still hungry, have more. And more. Eat a pint of blueberries, or cherry tomatoes; have a mango, a banana, and an apple. Have a lightly dressed salad. You would be hard-pressed to gain weight eating this way.

You can also embrace hunger, strange as that may sound, just as you might embrace the delicious anticipation of a nap, or sexual craving. Your hunger will, after all, be satisfied; why not wait an hour? (You’re not dying, after all!) You might also stop eating before you’re full (three-quarters full is probably about right). And if you eat slowly, taking your time, you’ll give the food time to reach your stomach and give you a sense of satisfaction before you have seconds or thirds.

If you embrace moderation, eat whole foods instead of junk, live within your physical, monetary, and environmental budget rather than constantly exceeding it, as so many of us do, you will lose weight, tread more lightly on the planet, and gain satisfaction from these things. The next chapter outlines specifics about how you can go about doing so.