‘Talking to a man about his diet,
is, to some degree, a gateway to talking about his feelings,’ says Steve Grant. ‘There’s so much emotion tied up in what we eat. You might be talking about fundamentals, such as macros and calories, but you’re often going to find yourselves unstuck if you don’t acknowledge the social and psychological reasons people make the choices they make.’
It’s an intense chat for a Monday lunchtime. Grant, a nutritionist, and I are sitting in the Arcade Food Hall at Tottenham Court Road.
It’s a glutton’s paradise of tacos, burgers and noodle dishes, with a long, well-appointed bar. It will cater to every kind of blowout, but we’re here to work out whether it can offer a more restrained path, too. For the committed eater and drinker, is there a way to marry pleasure and the pursuit of better health?
Tempting Fate
My work makes it difficult to diet. As a food columnist and restaurant critic, my life is awash with calories. Researchers refer to ‘obesogenic environments’, which is to say atmospheric factors that might lead to weight gain. Usually, it’s used to describe offices where you’ll find the odd birthday cake or meeting-room croissant. My working week is one endless obesogenic environment: a parade of free food and drinks. There are breakfasts with publicists, lunches with interviewees at sleek new openings in Soho, then dinners and launch parties and reviewing slots. If I want to, and usually I do, I can have my face stuffed from morning till night, like a foie gras goose, on someone else’s dime. The kinds of meal most sensible civilians eat a couple of times a week, I eat constantly.
I realise this doesn’t sound like a sorry tale. Thousands of pounds’ worth of booze and food, every month, all in the name of journalism. But you should be careful what you wish for. The gastronomic treadmill doesn’t slow down at the weekend. When it is known you are a ‘food person’, your friends and acquaintances want you to eat well with them, too. I sympathise with this view: if I were friends with a clown, I’d want them to do a bit of juggling. Dinner companions expect you to lead them on a Rabelaisian odyssey every time you sit down. Of course you’re drinking, of course we should get a bottle, of course we’re getting a starter and pudding, of course we’re not getting the pizza with a little hole in the middle, or a salad.
The result is that it feels impossible to be a lean, clean machine and a professional eater. As far as I know, a restaurant critic has never adorned the cover of this magazine – or if they have, they have kept their tops on. I’m hardly the first critic to whine about this state of affairs. Jonathan Meades, the former Times critic, quit reviewing in 2000 after he reached 19st – having put on, by his estimation, an ounce for every meal. He lost a third of his body weight over the next six months. Some manage to have their cake but not wear it. Giles Coren, the current Times restaurant critic, manages his intake with a strict exercise regimen, low carbs and the chastening discipline of having to see himself on TV.
He is unusual. For most, this way of life, for its other consolations, precludes the six-pack. The only time I’ve lost any serious amount of weight as an adult was during the pandemic, when the pubs and restaurants weren’t open. Apart from that, I fluctuate between chunky and sizeable, despite running 12 miles a week.
But is there any way to do it? Is it possible to spend your life in restaurants without actually looking like you do? To find out, I enlisted three leading experts and took each of them out for a meal, to chart a course.
A Stronger Start
First was breakfast, the least important meal of the day. Or so I have always thought. I’m a skipper. Always have been. Partly this is laziness. Breakfast is the easiest meal not to have, especially once you get used to it. Wake up, get the kid out of the house, get to work. Maybe a black coffee or two along the way.
But there is a gastronomic factor, too: breakfast is simply a less interesting meal than lunch or dinner. Or at least, the breakfasts people tend to eat: porridge, muesli, toast. No one who takes eating seriously would waste a meal token on a bowl of All-Bran, whatever its benefits for regularity. I’ll make an exception at the weekends: for bacon sandwiched in soft white bread.
Restaurants are another matter. Where once a restaurant breakfast meant a choice between a continental or a full English, perhaps a kipper if you were somewhere fancy, the options are broader today. A great example of this diversification is Caravan, a group which operates seven all-day restaurants across London. The breakfast menu is a world tour, with the usual fruit bowls and fry-ups, but also a range of more ambitious plates. There are charred oyster mushrooms with sweet miso and buckwheat, or vanilla pancakes with lemon curd cream cheese, poached pear and sumac praline. Or how about a grilled bacon chop, served with a kimchi pancake, gochujang ketchup and a fried egg: bacon and eggs with a fiery Korean kick.
To navigate this appetising minefield, I took Sinead Roberts, who began as a research scientist before turning her hand to nutrition. She now works with elite sportsmen, helping boxers reach their target weight before a fight. As we sit down at the King’s Cross branch of
Caravan, shortly after 8am, she explains that she has already been for a swim that morning. I, on the other hand, have only been for some aspirin.
‘It’s not about good food or bad food, it’s about context,’ she says, surveying the menu. The top of the list features juices and shots: mysterious drinks with ingredients such as ginger and turmeric. I’ve never been a turmeric drink man. I hope I won’t have to start now. ‘From a calorie perspective, juices are useful if you’re trying to add calories without feeling full, because they’re just pure fruit sugars. So, it’s a great way to add extra carbohydrate if you’re struggling to get that into your diet. On the flip side, if you’re trying to lose weight, they’re probably not the best things to include,’ she tells me.
I’m certainly not struggling to get carbohydrate into my diet, I explain. We skip the juices and order two black coffees instead. Flavoured milks, similarly, get a pass. Even fresh fruit, that healthy breakfast standby, doesn’t get an unequivocal recommendation.
‘We focus on protein in sports nutrition,’ she says. ‘Unless you’re the size of The Rock, the majority of the protein you eat goes to the organs and tissues that are being worn out. You want to eat it throughout the day. Breakfast is particularly important because it has probably been a long time since your last hit. You want carbohydrates, so fresh fruit is great, but you want a protein as well.’
Yoghurt is not necessarily a good option, either, contrary to popular wisdom. ‘Yoghurt’s a funny one. Everyone thinks it’s high protein, but it really depends. Natural yoghurts are low protein.’ Vanilla pancakes are out, for obvious reasons, but so is the tofu puree that comes with the mushrooms, which I would have thought was exceptionally light and wholesome. Bacon is preferable to sausages, she says, of the items in a traditional English breakfast.
She advises against fried bread.
‘In terms of lighter options that hit all your food groups,’ she says, ‘you’re looking at something like the avocado on toast with poached eggs, or the smoked salmon with scrambled eggs.’ In the end, we choose to share the jalapeño cornbread with fried eggs
– a classic dish at Caravan – and the baked eggs, a shakshuka-like combination where the eggs sit in a spicy stew of chickpeas, peppers and tomatoes. I’d be wary of the cornbread, but Dr Roberts says it’s good because it has such a range of ingredients. ‘If calories aren’t an issue, when I look at a menu, I look for what gives you the biggest taste and bang for your buck in terms of nutrients. That’s why
I’d go for cornbread over pancakes. It has a huge list of ingredients, all doing different things, whereas the pancakes are more flour and sugar.’ More than that, it is delicious.
Another risk at breakfast, Dr Roberts advises, is portion sizes. These can vary from place to place depending on the generosity of the venue. But calorie counts on menus are not the answer either, she says. ‘I get the value in educating people about what they’re eating,’ she says. ‘We want the population to be healthy and knowledgeable. But I don’t think
calorie counts on the menu do that. It diminishes food to calories, which we know isn’t sensible. I could lose weight just eating chocolate, but
I’m going to be a lot less healthy than being overweight with a balanced diet. Calories don’t tell the whole story.’ Secondly, they’re not always accurate. People trust numbers, but they’re just as susceptible to human error as everything else.
Common sense beats strict dietary discipline. ‘Generally, you’re eating three times a day, so that’s 21 events in a week. It’s quite a lot of your time. You don’t want that to be miserable. Life is stressful enough. You might as well make it a highlight of the day.’
As I use the final piece of cornbread to wipe my plate clean of the egg yolk, I couldn’t agree more.
Fitness Before Pleasure?
My friend Janan, another keen restaurant-goer, skips lunch as well as breakfast, a trait he is proud to share with General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan. As a result, he is as ravenous as a lion in the Colosseum by dinner, a meal he unfailingly approaches with gluttonous licence. During the day it’s just green tea and Diet Coke. He is rake thin. I’ve been known to skip lunch, and try to on days when there’s no restaurant available. There often is a restaurant available. Done properly, lunch is the king of the meals, as Keith Waterhouse argued persuasively in his slim 1986 masterpiece, The Theory And Practice Of Lunch.
‘[Lunch] is not civic, commemorative, annual office or funeral,’ he writes. ‘It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry… a little light business may be touched upon but the occasion is firmly social. Whether they know it or not, for as long as they linger in the restaurant they are having an affair. The affair is lunch.’ This was a well-researched opinion, from a journalist who listed ‘lunch’ as his sole interest in Who’s Who.
I don’t quote this directly to Steve Grant, my lunch date. I sense he and Keith might see things differently. I chose the Arcade Food Hall because it’s a good example of a burgeoning trend for venues offering a wide range of different cuisines under one roof. You order using a QR code and pay on your phone. There are tacos, burgers, fried chicken, sushi and wraps, among other things, all made by different operators. It’s perfect for a mixed group, where people might have different dietary requirements, budgets or levels of hunger.
Or so I thought. A quick scan of the menu reveals that, for anyone trying to keep things lean, the dining options are somewhat limited.
You can approach your order by thinking in terms of macronutrients: proteins, carbs and fats, says Grant. ‘So, with the carbohydrate-based foods, you want one with a lower calorie density, probably one that doesn’t have a load of fat in it. If we’re not having deep-fried stuff, we’re probably going to have a wrap or some rice or something like that. Obviously if it’s fried rice it will have more fat than sushi.
‘You can navigate it,’ he adds. ‘If you know there will be fat added as part of the cooking process, you make your other options leaner. You can also ask, “Can I choose more foods of a lower calorie density that might bulk out the meal?” Vegetables, basically.’ Normally, given a choice of cuisines like this, he says, sushi is a good pick, especially sashimi and edamame. ‘But edamame’s not the sexy choice,’ he concedes. Indian can be surprisingly easy to tailor to your needs, if you avoid bhajis and samosas and stick to tandoori meats, lentils, spinach and lighter options.
Some things people think of as healthy can be surprisingly calorific, he adds. ‘People often have hummus and falafel, but hummus is just oil and chickpeas, and it’s quite calorie-dense. People can trip themselves up, consuming a lot more calories than they would have thought.’
Weight loss is not about a single meal, Grant adds, but patterns of behaviour. ‘It’s about the overall choices you make,’ he says. ‘One meal
isn’t going to scupper your weight loss plans. If you know you’re going to have a burger or something, you can get back on course by eating more healthily at another meal.’ He advocates the odd blowout, because a schedule of constant restriction can accentuate the impulse to rebel against it. ‘On the other hand, if you eat out 10 times a week, you have to be a lot more mindful about the choices you make.’ We go for some maki rolls, which are covered, for some reason, in parmesan cheese, and a sea bass ceviche on a tostada.
‘Another thing to do is plan for where you’re going and look at the menu before you go,’ he says. ‘And try to plan what you’re going to eat before you get there. Once you’ve got talking, you don’t want to spend that much time thinking about the menu, and you default to your usual order, which might not be the best option.’
Alcohol is the other elephant in the room.
‘It depends on what you’re drinking,’ he says. ‘But cocktails can be an extra 1,000 to 2,000 calories on top of your meal if you’re having a heavy one. You can learn to navigate that better, too. Non-alcoholic beers have about a third of the calorie content of a normal beer. There are things like that you can do and still not have an issue with being able to lose weight.’
As a nutritionist who loves restaurants, Grant finds himself on the other side of the restaurant writer’s dilemma. ‘In the first few years of being a nutritionist, it’s challenging,’ he says. ‘As you learn about food, you start to place too much importance on it. Over time, you become more relaxed and are able to coach people in a less neurotic way. When you’re starting out, you can become fixated on small things and not zoom out to see the bigger picture.’
Men, he adds, have recently been exposed to more information about nutrition and lifestyle, compared with women, who have been targeted by marketing for much longer. ‘Men are new to the party,’ he says. ‘With social media, we’ve been exposed to a lot more than we would have been before. Younger men are more self-aware about nutrition and lifestyle and that sort of thing.’ He says five years ago his client base would have been 70% female, whereas today the figure is getting nearer to 50% or 60%.
Knowing The Steaks
After the range of cuisines available at breakfast and lunch, for dinner I take it more traditional.
It’s time for some flesh. Rick Miller, a dietitian, chooses the venue: Blacklock City, the branch of the Blacklock chain in London’s Square Mile. This is the kind of place you could easily imagine bankers ending up for a client lunch: it’s a bit cool, very meaty and dimly lit enough to feel like an appropriate place to flex an expense account.
It is also, however, a surprisingly easy place for the red-blooded foodie to chart a course through his macros, which it turns out is why Miller has chosen it. ‘If you’re trying to navigate a social situation while meeting your goal, it means emphasising certain things – in this case, the meat. Here, I can have an 8oz steak, some veggies on the side and one glass of wine.’ Snacks and nibbles are often where things fall apart.
‘I usually say to my clients, “You’re a big boy. You have to make tough decisions during the day anyway. Which of these things do you want to compromise on?” On the meat, he says he’s more relaxed about fat than some of his other colleagues, because it satisfies. ‘People think they should go for a sirloin or something, where it has been trimmed. But you might be better off with a rib-eye, or even lamb. If you eat fat in its native form, you reach satiety a lot faster than if you were to consume it with carbohydrates.’
He cautions against alcohol, but suggests opting for one glass of something really good, rather than eight pints and a pina colada. We dodge the starters and each go for a rib-eye with sweet potato and broccoli on the side.
It’s delicious. By the end of the meal, I do not feel I’ve missed out on anything.
Eating With Conviction
After three meals talking about food and drink, I come to view most of the more specific prescriptions as being beside the point. Most of us know that lean chicken and broccoli is better than a burger and chips. Choosing tandoori chicken over deep-fried pizza, or a gin and slimline tonic over a pint, might reduce your calorie count, but it will not spare the professional eater in the long run.
I think back to Grant’s statement at lunch about feelings. I worry how much I’m making excuses for myself in all of this. I was always a greedy boy. Perhaps as an adult I’ve simply managed to will into being a job that licenses this greed. Undoubtedly, I like eating and drinking, but in my experience, people around me like it, too. It’s relaxing being around someone who wants to indulge.
This is true of eaters in culture, too. Whether it’s Mr Creosote or Falstaff or an enthusiastic critic on TV, a Hairy Biker or a Fat Lady or Nigella, the professional eaters are a vision of what it’s like to eat like a child: happily and without worrying about it. It’s the confidence that’s refreshing, not the calories. It’s infectious, too. But gastronomic pleasure needn’t be coupled with gluttony. What people crave is authority. It’s notable that James Bond, no stranger to the table, favours a steak with a salad, rather than potatoes. No one would accuse him of a lack of indulgence, but that Cold War dinosaur was across his macros all along.
The great American writer MFK Fisher expressed something similar to Grant, when she wrote that ‘our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others’. Modern jargon about protein and macros and carbs can’t obscure the fact that when we talk about what we eat, we’re talking about ourselves.
What you eat is important, just not quite as important as how.
‘One meal alone isn’t going to scupper your weight loss plans’