How to Eat (68 page)

I find just drawing up a shopping list of diet-enhancing ingredients fills me with all the zeal, good vibes, and necessary I-can-do-thisness to make me feel positively impatient for it all to start. My stock list would be something like this.

PANTRY STUFF

best-quality vegetable bouillon cubes and a small selection of other packaged stock, including Thai pork and tom yam (a spicy, citrus-y broth) cubes

about 92,000 types of soy sauce (tamari soy, shoyu, light soy, dark soy, Japanese soy, citrus-flavored soy, Indonesian kecup manis, the lot)

teriyaki sauce and sukiyaki sauce (both these are really just soy sauce with other ingredients, itemized below, added for you)

Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, nam pla or nuoc mam

sake

dry sherry

vermouth

mirin

rice vinegar

miso

instant dashi (sometimes called dashi-no-moto or hon dashi)

few packs Japanese instant miso soups and ramen noodle soups

Japanese pickled ginger

balsamic vinegar

good red wine vinegar

various mustards—English, powder and made, Dijon, Meaux, tarragon, and other flavors you like

various dry pastas and noodles (Italian short and long and Asian rice, buckwheat, and egg noodles)

Tabasco, red and green

chili sauce

comprehensive collection of spices

dried shiitake mushrooms

basmati rice

garlic

onions

shallots

lemons

limes

dried red chili peppers

good bought low-fat tomato sauce for pasta (check nutrition tables on bottles in the stores and try out till you find one you like)

toasted, or fragrant, sesame oil (yes, really)

garlic-infused oil (ditto)

IN THE FRIDGE

There is no way you can make sure of an adequate supply of all the ingredients you might like to use without also having, sporadically, to throw away stuff that’s gone off. Even the exotic ingredients can mostly be found at the supermarket.

one each, at least, of each package of supermarket prepped vegetables

bok choy or similar leafy greens

salad stuff

bunch each of coriander and flat-leaf parsley

lemon grass

Thai basil

fresh rice sticks and somen noodles

shrimp paste

miso (I add it here, too, as it goes in the fridge once opened and I buy containers from a Japanese shop, for preference, not awkward-to-use plastic bags of it)

fresh chili peppers

fresh ginger

scallions

a ready-prepared but nonfrozen meal (see below)

fat-free fromage blanc

fat-free yogurt

very-low-fat fruit yogurts

FOR THE FREEZER

kaffir lime leaves

one or two bagged-up portions cooked rice

some ready-prepared (either by you or the supermarket) frozen meals

¼-cup portions of good Cheddar, shredded

1 steak, well wrapped

1 chicken cutlet, well wrapped

sliced bread

frozen whole-leaf spinach

frozen raspberries or mixed fruits

Bread, good bread, is one of my weaknesses, and I can eat an entire loaf without difficulty. If I’m having a poached egg on toast, as part of my dieting intake, I want to make sure I know I’ve eaten it. For this I need proper bread. I go to a French bakery and buy a couple of loaves of their pain du campagne (sludge-colored and grainy with a toothsome, tough hide) or other round country loaf, which I get put through their slicer and bagged up. I put these bags in the freezer. I can then toast, slice by single slice, as needed, from frozen, and it’s not quite so easy to chomp through an entire loaf without thinking.

EQUIPMENT

If you’re keeping food in the freezer, a microwave is a near-essential piece of equipment. I figure that most of us who need (and often repeatedly) to lose weight are those for whom instant gratification takes too long. I seek to minimize damage (it’s awe-inspiring how many calories you can consume, standing up, just while the dinner’s cooking) by having a supply of food I can get from frozen to cooked in a few minutes.

I am not going to suggest that you rush out and buy a great number of gadgets. Many of you will already have a food processor and a microwave. I think there is really only one other essential item and that’s a good nonstick frying pan. The only other piece of equipment I’d mention isn’t essential but is useful: a griddle. No one needs reminding about plain grilled fish or chicken, but I find too much of this stock-diet food immensely depressing. Most domestic broilers are just not hot enough, so that all lean cuts dry out before they are cooked—which is where the griddle comes in. By this I mean one of those heavy cast-iron slabs, ridged on one side for meat and vegetables, smooth on the other for fish. You do need to oil this to some extent, and I use here an oil and water spray I make myself (pinching the idea from the low-fat culinary evangelist Sue Kreitzman) by buying an atomizer and filling it with one part best olive oil to seven parts water. You can, of course, just buy an olive oil spray from the supermarket if it makes life easier. The griddle’s good for giving that charcoal-striated edge to otherwise plain foods, and the searing heat that comes over cast iron seems to make food taste more acutely of itself, keep it juicier, and make it look better. On the down side, it is very heavy (often I feel just too limp-wristed even to contemplate dragging it out of its drawer beneath the lower oven) and can be nightmarish to wash up; the feel of scourer against cast iron is rather like nails down a blackboard.

Dieting demands exact measurements. You need scales, proper teaspoon and tablespoon measures (the whole set, indeed, comprising ¼- and ½-teaspoon measures, too), and, of course, measuring cups.

BASIC PRINCIPLES

Immerse yourself in the desirable ethos before you begin and settle into good habits once you do. Alcohol is immensely useful in bringing real depth of flavor to food cooked without fat, but if you really want to lose weight, I think you have to give up drinking. I am more of an eater than a drinker so I don’t mind, but I know this is difficult for many people. It’s not just the calories in the alcohol; even a small drink makes me feel positively insouciant about weight, diet, food, calories, all of it. This is a wonderful feeling while it lasts, but dismal when—several thousand calories later—it stops. Also, if I drink enough to give me even a little shadow of a hangover, I have to eat vast amounts of fatty, stodgy food the next day to absorb—or so it feels—all the excess alcohol of the previous evening.

With eating I am less rigid. For just as I find a balance between large portions of low-fat and small portions of relatively high-fat food the best way of maintaining interest in what I’m eating when trying to lose weight, so I find I can stick longer to any diet if I keep a balance between repetition and variety. For example, I find it uncomplicates matters if every day I have the same breakfast and more or less, but not exclusively, the same lunch. Dinner I like to vary, and as much and as thought-consumingly as possible. Those who can’t make their own lunch (although many workplaces have rudimentary cooking equipment now) might prefer to swap lunch with dinner, though I must say I’d find it hard to stick to a diet if I ate the same dinner every night. I need to feel dinner is a proper, celebratory meal, when the food I eat is food I can concentrate on, think about, both beforehand and afterward. Breakfast is about 1⁄3 cup oatmeal (preferably organic, or it’s just a slimy, too-smooth wallpaper paste) cooked with a scant cup water and eaten with 1 tablespoon golden syrup. If I know I will just stagger into the kitchen in the morning and get that underway, it stops me from deciding on the spur of the moment to put a couple of pieces of toast on, slather them with butter, then heap them with marmalade.

Although a low-fat diet makes things easier in terms of losing weight, for me a low-sugar one doesn’t. I found that if I used hardly any sugar (or some ghastly sugar substitute), the food I ate just wasn’t as filling. The same’s true with hot drinks. I don’t take sugar in tea, but I do in coffee. For ages I used one of those powdered ersatz sugars, the sort that fizz up spookily after you add them to the filled-up mug; then I just went back to sugar. What I found was that if I had a mug of coffee with sugar, it filled me up as if I’d eaten food (which of course I had, in the form of the calorie-bestowing sugar). Having said that, I virtually inhale all those fizzy, Nutra-sweetened drinks, the ones we are finger-waggingly told to give up in the name of cellulite-banishment, when I’m trying to lose weight.

BAKED POTATOES

CHEESE

Now, lunch: the most filling and somehow undiet-tasting lunch I found was a baked potato with cheese. Diet books and magazines advocate reduced-fat cheese; I cannot. Despite my love for the well-piled plate, I would prefer to have a small piece of some proper, good cheese than double, quadruple the amount of some low-fat, depressing variant. (Yogurt and fromage blanc, however, somehow taste low-fat even when they’re not really, so you may as well go for the low-fat ones.) Food shouldn’t be tampered with so that all its rightful, taste-giving properties are taken out of it. Try to find a way of cooking food that’s meant to be low fat rather than eat strangulated versions of food that was born to be saturated in the stuff. That is one of the reasons why most of my diet-minded suppers (see below) are Thai and Japanese, or otherwise Asian in tone, if not directly; these cuisines quite naturally don’t use a lot of fat in many of their dishes, so the food tastes right, is right, cooked like that. Fake diet food, like reduced-fat Cheddar, which tastes like bitter rubber, is a waste of your time. In your baked potato, real, strong Cheddar in a smaller quantity will have more taste, and will melt more seductively into the floury flesh, so that you won’t even feel that you’re getting less for your calories: 1 ounce true Cheddar comes to about the same calorie count as a similar reduced-fat cheese. So we’re not even talking about much less in quantity. To be this precise (or obsessive) about calorie counts, it is easier to buy well-labeled packaged cheese. You also need electronic scales. And the grater and the freezer. Were I to have a chunk of Cheddar in the fridge, I’d eat it. So instead I keep a large supply of bagged-up grated cheese, all weighed and uniform, at 100 calories a bag. (And this principle is worth applying to any food that is permissible for your diet in individual portions but not eaten
en bloc.
) Each lunchtime, I take the little frozen bag out to thaw as I put my potato in the oven to cook. It is a routine, a ritual. If you work in an office that has a microwave, you’ll have to make do with that. (I absolutely can’t take a packed lunch anywhere with me or I’d eat it by eleven in the morning. I can feel it throbbing away beneath the desk or in my bag and just can’t concentrate until I get rid of it.) This is the advantage of the baked potato option—it becomes routine, which prevents lunch being a significant, decision-provoking issue, but somehow makes it a reassuring fixed point; and it’s there, but uncooked till the moment of blitzing, so you can’t just wolf it down.

A potato that weighs about 7 ounces raw, which is a goodish-sized potato, plus my 100-calorie package of cheese, makes a lunch of 250 calories. Include my breakfast, of just above 150 calories, and I’ve still got quite a lot of calories saved for the evening. But I want to offer up one more pearl of dietetic wisdom. Don’t allow yourself to get too fiercely and unforgivingly hungry. If you leave eating till you could scrape the wallpaper off and eat that, then two things will happen: the first is that you will be jumpy and depressed; the second is that you’ll be so hungry you won’t be able to stop eating when you’re full up. The more nagging hunger you feel during a diet, the more likely you are to ditch it.