How to Eat Healthy in One Page

Despite what the last decade’s barrage of diet gurus say, eating healthy does not have to be as complex as counting your calories, carbohydrates and saturated fats. You don’t have to cringe at the sight of salt, or a nice stick of butter. Fortunately, eating well doesn’t involve the self-torture and deprivation that most diets promote.

So what’s the big secret? Unprocessed, whole foods. In other words, that funny stuff that sometimes still has dirt on it that our grandparents used to eat. People oftentimes will ask us here at Kitchen on Fire how to identify these kinds of foods, and truly it could not be easier. To start with, if it comes in a box or a piece of plastic, you’re already moving in the wrong direction. If you do buy something in a box and you can’t pronounce most of the ingredients, that’s a clear sign it’s not food!

All this means is start buying food in it’s original form, the way it came out of the ground, and start cooking it at home. If you start to eat like this instead of eating out, you won’t have to keep worrying about your salt, sugar and fat intake. Even if you cook with these so-called “evil foods”, and by evil I mean the good stuff our grandparents cooked with like butter and cream, you will be healthy because you’ll be eating foods our bodies can recognize.

Many people today are even confused by what a whole food is. Let me elaborate. Take a delicious, in season peach. That is a whole food. Forget the label. Why do you need to know the calories contained in a beautiful, ripe peach? That right there is the whole problem. We are now so caught up in the science of eating, we’ve forgotten tens of thousands of years of trial and error by our ancestors about how to eat. If we can start to tap into this wisdom once again, we too will be able to smoke and drink our way to 110 years old like my ancestors.