In truth, I naturally gravitate toward food that’s best (and perhaps complimentarily) described as trash. I’ve never met a bowl of sugar cereal I didn’t love. Pizza rolls for dinner? I’m there for it. I started developing healthy recipes so I could enjoy cookie dough milkshakes without feeling sluggish and waking up with the inevitable constellation of pimples starring my forehead. And for a long time, that worked for me. I had my green smoothies in the morning, brought leftovers for lunch—except for the exceptions. I wasn’t eating the “worst” food—I’d order salads and soups for lunch, and eat at trendy, wellness-y restaurants—but I still felt slow, foggy, and my bank account read like a wasted inverse of my extra poundage. Something had to be done. But what? While I think that the many doctor-backed diets we feature on mindbodygreen are great for solving specific issues, I don’t love the idea of restricting or eliminating whole categories of food with no real reason (my health was still great; I just felt undiagnosably bleh). “I do cook,” I protested. His side-eye burned. “Kind of—you still make smoothies every morning. But you were spending so much time in the kitchen making these creative, original recipes for your cookbook that you stopped making normal, easy meals. On a day-to-day basis, you’ve stopped cooking.” It was true—I’d fooled myself into thinking that, because much of the time when I was eating out, I was ordering “healthy” food, the fact that I wasn’t making it myself didn’t matter. But even many of the healthiest restaurants still use inflammatory vegetable oils and other questionable ingredients (they tend to be much cheaper, and restaurant profit margins are notoriously tricky!). When you’re eating out, the chef’s priority is to make your dish delicious, so you’re more likely to become a repeat customer. If that requires elements you would never put in your food at home, so be it. It’s not like your tikka masala comes with a nutrition facts label. Zack and I decided to make it a challenge, mostly because we’re motivated by competition. For 30 days, 100 percent of our food had to be made at home. We could do this—right? I spent much of the first Sunday meal-prepping vegetable-filled almond flour flatbreads for hummus-filled lunch sandwiches throughout the week and making butternut squash and poblano chipotle enchiladas to heat up for dinner. While they were delicious, by Wednesday, my palate was uninspired, and I found myself ruefully eyeing the veggie-filled quesadilla at Dos Toros, my favorite grab-and-go dinner. This is where the challenge turned for me: I could make my favorite quesadilla; I could make the cookies I’d lamented passing up at an editorial meeting. I could make and eat whatever I damn well pleased—I just had to, you know, actually cook it myself. A post shared by Liz Moody (@lizmoody) on Aug 9, 2018 at 4:49pm PDT About a week later, the challenge hit another snag when friends invited me and Zack out to dinner. I told them about the challenge, apologizing for the inconvenience. “I could host you here, though,” I said. I normally shy away from work-night dinner parties; when people come to my house, they often bring expectations with their wine or flowers, and I feel the need to perform a meal at the level I perceive them to expect from someone who has devoted her life to food. Because I didn’t really have a choice (if I wanted to see friends and be social!), I lowered my standards and ended up creating one of my favorite dinner party meals ever, a carbonara-type pasta that took approximately 10 minutes to prep. My friends arrived at my house around the same time as me and happily went to work setting the table and helping prep a salad, talking about how fun the idea of the challenge was. Instead of spending $50 on dinner in a loud, crowded setting, we relished the intimacy of our shared kitchen activity—and spent $20 to serve four people. A post shared by Liz Moody (@lizmoody) on Aug 21, 2018 at 4:54pm PDT After spending years interviewing hundreds of the world’s best doctors and reading thousands of studies—many of whom and which contradict each other—I’ve found that the most universally agreed upon health tip is to stress less. No matter what we’re eating, if we’re eating it together, we’re healthier. (Full disclosure: I feel so strongly about this sentiment that my entire new cookbook, Healthier Together, is based on cultivating relationships and true wellness through cooking together). At the end of the 30 days, I had effortlessly slid back into what I consider a happy weight for myself while eating homemade cookies and pasta to my heart’s content (it didn’t hurt, of course, that the hour it took to make the cookies was enough unto itself to decrease the frequency with which I consumed them, and my pasta dishes were packed with vegetables and half the portion size of anything I’d get at a restaurant). I’d regained my excitement about getting into the kitchen and saved more than $800 compared to my previous month’s spending. Most importantly, though, I’d regained a sense of perspective about food and wellness in general: It’s a tool, not an end unto itself. Salad shoved hastily in your mouth between meetings isn’t the same as getting your greens by buying a lettuce that’s enticing, selecting vegetables you think complement its flavor, and sitting down to eat it with someone you love. There’s eating, and there’s nourishment, and I’ll take the latter any day of the week.
