Book Review: Foodist by Darya Pino (PLUS: Win a Free Copy!)

“Life should be awesome.”
-Darya Pino

I find that most healthy living and diet books are pretty damn depressing.

No matter how hard the author tries to sell you on his or her “system,” the fact remains that you are ultimately giving something up that you love.

Personally, this is most frustrating to me when it comes to food.

I love food in all shapes, sizes, and flavors, and the thought of having to give up on some of the great gastronomic treasures in life fills me with utter dread.

But I’m a longtime believer that life doesn’t need to be hell in order to become healthy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one with this philosophy, and a book called Foodist by Summer Tomato blogger Darya Pino really fleshes this idea out!

Since I thought that this book would really resonate with a lot of you, I figured I’d throw together a review article where I go over my favorite things about this book (as well as my least favorite things).

And oooh, oooh! You can also enter to win yourself a free copy if you read all the way to the end, so ch-check it out!

Eat Better, Not Less

For decades now, we’ve been led to believe that improving our diets requires demonizing one nutrient or the other.

First, fat was evil. Then, okay, maybe not all fat is bad, but saturated fat is certainly the one to watch out for.

Then, the pendulum swung the other way, and carbs were the nutrient to beware. When that didn’t cut it, it became sugar specifically we needed to look out for, then fructose, then…

uggggggggh…

You’d be forgiven if you feel like you now need to send every meal you eat to an analytical laboratory in order to compute its composition to within a tenth of a percentage point before you even take a bite off your fork.

I’ve long believed that we need to take a step back and start looking at our food from a bigger picture view if we are to improve our diets, and Darya agrees.

The whole fat vs. calories vs. carbs debate is moot once you realize that we need a much more precise idea of the caloric content of our food than we are currently able to achieve if we want to think that this “nutrient-centric” approach is practical for average people to eat more healthily.

What if there were a way to eat better without breaking out a calculator?

Thankfully, Foodist is bereft of the kind of “nutrienticity” that pervades our modern “dietosphere”. (Dang, I just coined two new words there. You heard ’em here first!)

In this book, carbs are cool. Fat is fine. And protein is worth prancersizing over.

When it comes to a healthy diet, quality trumps quantity.

Cooking

In Foodist, Darya makes it clear that to get healthier and in better shape you should spend less time at the gym and more in the kitchen.

The human diet has drastically changed over just the past 100 years or so, and it is nearly impossible to realistically point the finger at any of the thousands of “new” things we eat as the biggest culprit of our poorer health and obesity rates.

Eating a more traditional diet based on the kind of old-school meals that your grandpappy ate may not be the sexiest diet plan, but it does have a proven track record of success.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to find healthy food made of fresh, minimally processed foods out in the real world these days, and when you do find it, it’s in a fancy-pants restaurant you can’t afford to eat at all the time.

The solution is learning how to cook.

Cooking used to be an essential life skill passed down through the generations, but the Food Products boom, along with our increasingly hectic lifestyles, have driven most people to a diet of primarily sugar, flour, and seed oils.

Cooking is dead…

…or is it?

Like salmon swimming upstream, there’s a burgeoning movement of passionate people interested in learning the lost art of learning how to cook, and realizing that this simple skill set does wonders in improving overall health and fitness.

Darya’s focus on cooking is refreshing in a world where every diet book is all about restricting nutrients, with no thought to where those nutrients are even coming from.

Habits vs. Sacrifice

If there’s one key takeway you’ll get from Foodist, it’s probably that learning how to cook is perhaps the one skill that will help you improve your health the most.

As a bit of a productivity geek, I know that the key to succeeding in achieving any goal is building the habits that help you to unconsciously do the things you need to do to get what you want.

I’ve long championed this idea on this site, talking about how we should seek to deplete our willpower as little as possible and set goals that don’t suck.

The problem I have with most “restriction” diets, specifically those focusing on caloric deficit, is that it makes you fight your body every step of the way, depleting the willpower you could otherwise use to make progress in other parts of your life.

Trying to get a lot done at work? Good luck focusing if your stomach’s growling. Hoping to get straight As this semester? You can forget about that if you can’t study because you can’t stop thinking about how bad you want an Animal Style Double-Double.

Your body knows what it wants. And the more you try to work against it, the harder it will try to get it.

But when you learn how to cook food from scratch, you eliminate all of the garbage that food companies put in their products in order to get you hooked. You’ll no longer be eating enough sugar, salt, and vegetable every day to fill up a kiddie pool!

Cooking is a skill, like learning to walk, ride a bike, or drive a car. Just like these things, the hardest part comes at the beginning, when you are doing something you have no experience in and terrified of failing. And just like these things, if you persevere long enough, you will become an expert and won’t sweat it when you have to do it.

This goal of learning how to cook at home is building the habit of creating delicious meals based on whatever fresh ingredients you have on hand. And will pay off many times more than what you put into it.

Smarter Science

By education and by profession, I am a scientist.

However, I am pretty disappointed of how our culture as a whole views science.

It seems to me that most people think that science as it stands claims to have All the Answers to All Things (except for some really abstract stuff that doesn’t have much relevance to our day-to-day lives).

But while there are a lot of disciplines that we have worked out pretty well with the aid of science, it must be said that nothing is ever 100% case closed.

All scientific fields must constantly change in order to produce theories that better fit our observations.

Early astronomers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, with all the stars and planets revolving around it.

But throughout a turbulent history involving an increasingly-complex model of our universe, and a much simpler “insurgent” theory where the sun was proclaimed as the center of our solar system, science showed itself as more of an ongoing journey than a one-way trip to a definite finish line.

While we should acknowledge the power of science, we must be a little more humble in our attitudes towards its bold conjectures.

Nutrition is a great example of this.

In the grand scheme of things, the science of nutrition is still in its infancy. There’s a lot of theories flying around out there, but we are far from reaching a consensus that suits our observations.

You need to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty when it comes to nutrition science, and thankfully Darya (who just so happens to have a Ph.D. in Biology, dayum!) does just that in her book.

Holistic Perspective

Throughout Foodist, Darya touts the importance of being happy first and foremost.

I’ve personally had too many meals of protein shakes with fish oil, egg white omelettes, and unflavored oatmeal to last several lifetimes.

Too often we are told that to be healthy requires a never-ending battle of self-sacrifice.

Perhaps this is just a puritanical mindset run rampant, but it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

What if, instead of making our first and foremost priority to look like our favorite celebrity, and instead put our own happiness first?

What if, rather than trying to constantly deprive ourselves, we instead embraced abundance, cultivated healthy and sustainable habits, and didn’t sweat the small stuff?

Darya uses the word “healthstyle” to encompass all the habits that lead a person to:

Be happy, and
Be healthy.

This means instead of focusing on quantity of food, you instead focus on quality. It means having an adventurous attitude towards food. It means sharing meals with others you love instead of eating in solitude.

It also means incorporating a reasonable and invigorating amount of physical activity into your life, socializing with others, and resting and relaxing.

Many diets will tell you they should be thought of as lifestyle changes in order to succeed. Darya’s approach is one of the few that actually live up to that promise, and almost certainly the only one that will make you love life more in the process.

Weight Loss Focus

I have to admit that I felt like I was a little outside the intended target market of this book.

No, it’s not because I already love cooking food from scratch, but because I’m looking at it through the eyes of a guy.

The main benefit of the healthstyle approach outlined in this book (as can be deduced from the subtitle) is weight loss.

While I’m sure that “losing weight” or “losing fat” is high on the list of desires most people have when it comes to getting healthy and in shape, I think the story for guys is a little more nuanced.

After decades of increasingly jacked-up (ugh, how I hate that word) athletes, bodybuilders, and celebrities bombarding us from everywhere we look, we guys tend to be much more interested in building muscle than women are.

While I do think that the steroid-injecting and working-out–8-hours-a-day guys we look towards are unrealistic role models, I still think most people (both men and women) could do with adding a little more muscle than the average Joe.

While Darya does address the problems of overexercising, it’s more from the standpoint of someone who used to do “chronic cardio” than someone who used to get half their calories from a “nutrition store” and wake up every morning at 4 am to do bench presses and bicep curls.

Also, despite the assertions that food quality trumps food quantity, I still detected a distinct “low calorie” focus throughout the book. While this may do the trick for people who are looking to reduce fat and don’t really care about muscle, it can be hell for those of us looking to put on more bulk.

I’ve been more than happy with my body composition for years now, “despite” eating what most would consider a high-calorie diet. I chalk this up to eating quality food, being really active, and having enough rest and recreation to fully recharge my batteries.

I understand that the book has a stronger voice and character since it is written from Darya’s point of view rather than a more general omniscient one, but I think it’s important to realize that you can be healthy when you focus on eating real food, and if circumstances are right you can eat a pretty high-calorie diet, too.

And lastly, this book is more about changing your outlook than in learning the specifics of how to cook. While you will find several tasty recipes to get yourself started, you’ll still need to look elsewhere to learn the nitty-gritty of getting started with kitchen hacking.

A Revolutionary Outlook

Despite my worry that this book might not “click” as well with men as it will with women, I’d strongly urge you to give it a look.

Darya takes an approach to food and nutrition that I frankly haven’t seen anyone else use.

By prioritizing eating good, fresh food over heavily-processed food products, counting calories (or anything else) quickly becomes a moot point as your body adapts to a diet more in-line with what it truly needs to be strong and healthy.

By realizing that diet is just one component of a healthy life, you will learn to embrace a lifestyle that is simultaneously more active and relaxing.

And by acknowledging our limited willpower and the importance of building positive habits that your brain can run on autopilot, a healthy lifestyle becomes less of an issue of trying in vain to deprive yourself than one where you can monitor your progress and tweak as necessary.

If you are jaded by all the variations of low-calorie, low-fat, and low-carb diets dominating most bestsellers, then I strongly suggest you read this book. I truly think it’s a revolutionary approach relative to what most people are currently doing, and, as Darya says, “life should be awesome!”

Free Book Giveaway!

In the interest of spreading the word, I will be giving away one copy of Foodist to a lucky reader!

If you live in a country Amazon delivers to, I will send you a hardcover copy. Otherwise, you will receive a Kindle copy. (Kindle has apps for pretty much every computer operating system, so we should have you covered either way.)

To enter, all you need to do is leave a comment below telling us why you’d like to read this book.

I will pick a winner at random at 12:00 (Noon) Pacific Standard Time on Thursday, July 18th 2013.

Make sure you enter your email in the contact field when you comment so I can contact you if you win.

Since it only takes fifteen seconds to enter this contest, make sure you leave a comment below right… NOW!

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