How to Eat Well and Influence People

Who needs to spend an evening hearing about another diet plan from a food celebrity? Having lived through the ravages of eating disorders brought on by diets, I was especially skeptical about Mark Bittman’s new book, Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health. … For Good. www.markbittman.com Heavy title. Surprisingly, he had a lot to say that is directly applicable to our country’s continuing scourge of eating disorders.

It started with his attitude: funny. He joked about how he is now called a “food movement visionary.” After all, Bittman has written a bunch of excellent cookbooks, appeared in a PBS series with Gwyneth Paltrow, starred on the Food Network and meanwhile writes prodigiously for the New York Times on politics as well as recipes. While making light of the whole visionary mantle he now carries, he also takes the responsibility seriously. He clearly cares about food beyond the cooking of it.

Despite the title, Bittman’s book is not just another weight-loss regimen. It is about diet, in the original sense of the word. He pointed out that the Latin origin of the word “diet” is “lifestyle.” It is not “torture,” “denial” or “misery.” So, whatever the 25,000 companies in the $3 billion a year weight-loss industry would have us believe, everybody has a diet. We don’t suddenly decide to “go on” a die. (Nor, usually within days, “go off.”)

Eating disorders almost always begin with a diet, in the weight-loss industry sense of the word. My daughter’s troubles started when she began crossing foods off her list. First, red meat. Then, fried foods. Then, any meat. Then, anything after 6 p.m., and on until she ate practically nothing at all. www.sheilahimmel.com

Turn all that on its head and you get Bittman’s idea, which by the way helped him lose the weight that worried his doctor, cure his sleep apnea and rebalance his cholesterol and other vital bodily numbers. And, he still gets to enjoy good food and the pleasures that accompany cooking for and eating with other people.

As he explained to the assembled Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley www.commonwealthclub.org, he eats only plant products until dinner. Breakfast might be oatmeal with maple syrup, brown rice or soba noodles with leftover vegetables (sautéed in oil, not just steamed). Fat is not evil in his book. It fills you up, and tastes good.

He doesn’t starve all day and come home famished, but he is on the run a lot. Lunch might be fruit and nuts, which are tasty and filling, or a hearty chopped salad. Nutritionists often advise eating your big meal in the middle of the day but really, who has time? And with Bittman’s plan, VB6, for short, he can look forward to dinner.

That is, food is nourishing and a pleasure. If he happens to have a hamburger for lunch or start dinner at 5:45, so be it. He has his plan, so he doesn’t have to think about what he is allowed to eat all the time, but occasional rule breaking is not catastrophic. He isn’t obsessed with eating the “right” foods.

Contrast this with people whose eating disorders are all about control, labeling every food good or evil. They have no time to think about anything else, become very isolated, risk heart failure, bone loss and death. http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/get-facts-eating-disorders.

I’m with Bittman, who said, “I like to end the day with dinner.”