Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It (9 page)

Aside from my one, publicly televised bubbie enhancement (and please, we’ve already been through this; it was very necessary), I’m a natural kind of girl. I like to look good for my husband and for myself, but I’m not out there getting injections, and fat lips, and pimping fake diet pills and stuff. (Hello, O.C. Housewives! Love you!)

If you look past the lip gloss, I’m a simple, honest, straightforward girl. I tell it like it is (obviously). I’m sweet, but I’m also feisty. (And I still got no freakin’ skeletons in my freakin’ closet. Thank you. Thank you very much!) I’m the same way with my food. I like it simple, I like it authentic, and sometimes, I like it spicy.

Italians take a very simple, natural approach to cooking and eating. It’s about enjoying your life, enjoying your friends, eating good food, and drinking good wine. We work hard, and we play hard. I want to teach you how to add healthy habits so deeply into your lifestyle that you don’t even have to think about it.

This is not a diet. Diets suck. I don’t want you to ever again sign up for a strict, no-fun, no-taste, no-swallowing diet. That approach—that food is the enemy and you must control your food demons—is crap. It might work if we were robots or something, and to get energy we plugged into a nutrient machine, but we’re not. We’re humans with this incredible body, and everything we need to keep it running right in front of us. Food is our friend. It’s one of the greatest gifts we have: being able to refuel our bodies with delicious tastes and textures that can be enjoyed socially, romantically, and always sensually.

A happy, healthy, delicious, sexy life is a great thing to wake up to every day. I want you to love food, love eating, and still love your body afterward. And all three are totally possible if you follow these Six Rules for Loving Your Food and Having It Love You Back.

Rule 1
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No Obsessing

The key to a healthy relationship with food
is to stop obsessing about it. It’s hard, I know, when we’ve been obsessing about what we put in our mouths since junior high. (Some of us more than others.) But stop. Just stop. Take a step back, take a deep breath, and take an honest look at how you look at food.

Is food a happy part of your life? Something you look forward to and feel good about afterward? Or do you have a love-hate relationship with it—you love to eat it, but hate all the worry and guilt and self-doubt that comes after? Do you consciously enjoy your food, or is it a chore that must be tracked and accounted for, like pennies in your checkbook?

Obsessing about anything isn’t healthy. Not for you, and certainly not for those around you. You’re a role model, even if you don’t know it. You’re a role model to your kids, to your nieces, to your goddaughter, to your friends, to the younger girls on the subway that look to you for what they will or should be doing in their future.

You’re sending the wrong message if you’re picking out the middle of a bagel and throwing away the outside because it has too many calories. You’re sending the wrong message if you go out to dinner with your friend and eat two bites of his meal, but don’t order anything for yourself but a drink because you don’t want to get fat. (And you sure as hell won’t be invited to dinner with me!)

You’re smart. You’re strong. You’re fabulous. Stop obsessing about food right now. I promise, you can love your food and eat it, too.

Rule 2
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Surround Yourself with Good Friends and Good Food

I know a lot of people
who are in abusive relationships with food. They crave, they sneak, they binge, they starve. Some of them even forgot how to freakin’ eat healthy, let alone cook!

Remember: food is your friend. If food makes you feel bad, you’re eating the wrong food. Get rid of all the processed, unhealthy crap in your house. Don’t buy it anymore. Surround yourself with good food so that it’s not only a part of your lifestyle, but a part of your environment. Get a pretty bowl, put it out on your counter where you can see it, and fill it with fruit. Have grissini and olive oil on hand in case you get the munchies. You might have to shop more to keep more fresh food around, but it’s worth it. You’re worth it.

You also have to hang around other people with healthy views on food and healthy eating habits. If your friends make you feel bad about what you’re eating, get new friends. Bad behavior is contagious. You’ll have a hard time living a healthy, happy lifestyle if you’re always surrounded by other people who drink, snort, smoke, or pick at their dinner.

Rule 3
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No Starving Allowed

Your body needs food like a car needs gas.
You wouldn’t buy your dream car and then drive it on fumes, would you? You’d wreck the engine. You have your dream body right now. It might be covered up by a couple extra layers, but starving yourself will not reveal its better self. It will instead screw up your metabolism, make you miserable, drain you of energy, and scramble your brain.

You are kidding yourself if you think you can starve yourself thin and keep it up. You might get thin, but you’ll be chained to the whole no-eating thing your entire life. Once you try to eat real food instead of rice cakes again, your body will freak out, and you’ll gain more weight than ever. It’s far better to eat a good meal and get a little activity going than to not eat, and not have the energy to walk to the mailbox.

Rule 4
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Eat Real Food

It sounds obvious,
but more and more of the “diet,” “natural,” and “light” foods barely resemble food at all. What’s “natural” about a baked “snack stick” in a box? What the hell is a Pringle, let alone a fat-free one? It looks nothing like a potato. Same goes for a “smart puff,” a “soy crisp,” and a “cakester.” Shouldn’t food look like . . . food?

We’ve become used to things like Pirate’s Booty and pita chips, but imagine if some guy walked out of the jungle who had never eaten anything but plants, animals, and foods made from just that his whole life. Do you think he would touch sugary cereals or diet sodas? You might as well hand him wood chips and battery acid.

The bulk of your diet should be real food—food from the earth. If your great-grandma couldn’t find it in her garden, her farm, or at the grocery, it’s probably not good for you.

Another way to know if you’re eating a healthy diet of real food: you don’t have a baggie full of vitamins in your purse. If you’ve restricted what you eat so much that you have to swallow your nutrients in a squishy pill, I say that’s a problem. You can get everything you need to be healthy (and satisfied!) from real food.

Rule 5
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The Fewer Ingredients, the Better

It’s that simple:
the fewer ingredients something has, the better it is for you. Number of ingredients in a juicy peach? One. Number of ingredients in an energy bar? I counted more than twenty, including not-so-delicious-sounding things like “organic date paste” and “soy lecithin.” (Do not Google that last ingredient. You will not be happy. Oh, and avoid looking up “gelatin.” I was sick all night from that mistake!) I don’t think I cook an entire meal that uses more than twenty ingredients!

Even in recipes, look for simple and few ingredients. That’s one of the things that’s so great about authentic Italian recipes: most are made with fewer than seven delicious, nutritious ingredients. If you see a recipe asking for huge amounts of butter or heavy cream, look for another recipe. Or make a variation of your own using extra virgin olive oil. Experiment. Get your hands in there. Food is sensual. Enjoy it!

Rule 6
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Get in Touch with Your Food

You can always look
at the ingredients on processed food (and if you can’t pronounce it, put it back), but you really don’t need to read a word to know if something is healthy or not. You have your five amazing senses, perfectly designed for a job like finding healthy food. Use them!

Look at it. Listen to it. Smell it. Taste it. And, most importantly, touch it. Touch it before you buy it, and after you buy it.

If you can’t touch your food before you buy it, you probably don’t want it. I’m not saying you have to stick your head behind the deli counter, but you can feel if the chicken is firm or frozen through the wrapper. (Meat in a box? No thank you.) You can squeeze the potatoes in their sack.

Salute!

Once you get your healthy food home—and wash it, wash it, wash it— enjoy the entire experience of it. You know I toss salad with my bare hands, but I also rub spices into food, push my fingers deep into the dough, and caress my vegetables. Cooking and eating should not be a thing you do without thinking. You should savor every bit of it. Slowly. It’s almost like a prayer, the way I cook in my kitchen. I inhale the smells, close my eyes, and I’m thankful. I can’t just chop a tomato. I have to love on it first. I might rub it on my cheek or give it a little kiss. So smooth and soft and ripe and juicy. I want to know every corner, edge, surface, and texture of my food. Slowing down and appreciating the entire process will make a huge difference in how you enjoy food, how much you eat, and how your body responds to it.

Where to Find Your Food

By now, you have a pretty good idea of what great, healthy, authentic Italian food is. Before we can cook it, though, we have to find it. Yes, you can find bits and pieces in your local grocery store, but to really get the best, you gotta find a farmer’s market.

Farmer’s Market

A farmer’s market can be an outdoor gathering of different food under different tents, a large indoor market like the one on Route 46 near my house, or even a roadside stand. The important part of the farmer’s market is that it offers fresh food grown locally.

Fresh food is important because the longer food sits around, the more chance it has of losing nutrients, going bad, or just not tasting good anymore. The farther food has to travel from where it was harvested, the less fresh it will be when you get it. Farmer’s markets sell produce from near your house, so it’s got the best chance of being fresh, and you know exactly where it’s coming from.

I don’t mind bottled or dried food like olive oil or wine or pasta from another country (in fact, I like that stuff the best from Italy), but there is no way fresh food should travel across international borders to get to my table. You have no idea how long it was sitting in the bottom of some boat, how long it was sitting in that country and in our country getting checked in; and other countries do not have the same standards for food that we do. I just heard that more fresh garlic in United States supermarkets comes from China than California now. China? Last I checked, that was pretty freakin’ far away from me. I know garlic lasts a while, but I want it to last from the time I get it, not be on its way out as soon as it arrives. And after the pet food and toothpaste and lead paint business, I’m not sure what the heck they spray on their vegetables over there. (If you’re not sure where the garlic in your grocery store comes from, look at the roots. American-grown garlic has the roots still attached, but they chop them off to ship them from China. Hairy garlic is good. Bald garlic, bad.)