How Pete Wells, Former Restaurant Critic for the New York Times, Changed His Eating Habits

Pete Wells tells how he recovered from binge eating. And every week in January, he and the experts will suggest ways to reset your appetite.

Amazon lists more than 70,000 food books. There isn’t one called “Eat Like a Restaurant Critic.”

That line of work, which was mine from 2012 until 2024, gave me many rewards, but an easy way to slide into life was not one of them. In my last year at work, I was a mess. I moaned and groaned like a bulldozer. Getting myself out of the back seat of the car took so much effort that I dreamed of a portable winch. I would wander to the bathroom four or five times a night, between bouts of heartburn. I woke up with a headache, a dry mouth like an emery board and a tiredness that would never shake me.

With each new complaint, I thought: So this is life after 60 years. I continued to believe this until the doctor sent me a series of numbers preceded by the words blood pressure, weight, body mass index, triglycerides, blood sugar. The numbers were huge, he said. Combined with my physical complaints, they pointed to prediabetes, fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, acid reflux and obesity.

The prospect of having diabetes terrified me. Above all, it is what prompted me to apply for another job at The Times and teach myself how to eat again.

Reset your Appetite This is the first of four articles by Pete Wells, appearing every Monday in January, about how he creates healthy eating habits.

Almost two years later, with no medication other than a daily blood pressure pill, almost all of those conditions have dropped to alarming levels, although my blood cholesterol is fighting back. Today, I’m 55 pounds lighter than I was, a loss roughly equivalent to losing a male basset hound.

Losing weight was not my main goal. I never counted a single calorie. Somehow, that took care of itself because of the new ways I started shopping, cooking and eating at that time and I’ve more or less stuck with it ever since.

Although my diet was unusual, the results of my years of binge eating are very common. More than two out of five people in the United States are overweight. A third have diabetes. One in 10 has type 2 diabetes itself. Genetics and other factors may play a role in these conditions, but the root of the problem for millions of us is that we have stopped eating sensibly. We fill our bellies with far more food than we need. It’s no wonder that nearly 12 percent of American adults say they’ve tried one of the GLP-1 weight loss medications.

I am not a nutritionist. However, when it comes to overeating, it’s hard to beat my convictions. In my long climb out of the deep hole I’ve dug myself into, I’ve come to understand a few things about how I got there. As I’ve tried to build a healthy relationship with food, I’ve learned quite a bit about the ways our bodies and minds work.

Every Monday for the next four weeks, I’ll post some of the insights that helped me, along with some recipes that reflect how I eat at home these days. By explaining how I learned to eat a balanced diet, I don’t mean to suggest that you will have the same luck with my routine, or that you should try it. I needed to control my sugar, cholesterol and overeating in general. However, I didn’t worry about sodium and potassium, which can be a big concern for someone with kidney disease. Obviously, anyone with a particular health problem should get advice from a doctor.

Recipes to Reset Your Diet

Baked Steel-Cut Oats With Nut Butter | Poached Eggs With Zucchini | Easy Boiled Vegetables | Sheet-Pan Coconut Curry With Squash and Tofu | Brussels Sprouts Salad with Pomegranate and Pistachios | Quinoa Salad | Millet with Corn, Mango and Shrimp | Salmon and Green Beans in Red Pepper Sauce | Roasted Broccoli and Chickpeas with Mole Verde | Ginger Chicken and Rice Soup with Zucchini | Coconut Fish and Tomato Bake

My guess is that, like me, most people just want to eat less of the things we know we should avoid and the things that are best for us. These are not nutritional guidelines but general principles of common sense behavior around food.

Behaviorism has become the leading school of nutrition as it becomes clear that an attitude that reduces the challenges of exercise to mere statistics – otherwise known as “calories in, calories out” – is getting nowhere for most people. Food, after all, is behavior. We learn how to do it, and we can give up our habits if a better way comes along.

Say goodbye to sugar

The first thing I decided to do when I left the doctor’s office was to hunt for carbohydrates to stop eating at home. At the time, all I could focus on was reversing my slow slide into diabetes. What I didn’t know was that the sugar in simple carbohydrates had been driving me to keep eating, and that reducing my intake would help reset my appetite.

Even I was surprised at how many simple carbs I was eating. There were English muffins with plum jam that I made myself. Teaspoons of sugar, which increased as time went on, in every four cups of coffee after waking up. Brown sugar on oatmeal, wildflower honey on buttered toast, Vermont maple syrup on waffles. Orange, pineapple, grapefruit juice. Croissants, cardamom buns, blueberry muffins, cider donuts. Cumulus piles of white rice at lunch, hunk after hunk of bread for dinner. Cookies to avoid afternoon naps, which usually come anyway.

This is a partial list.

Five months into resetting my blood sugar, I received an email from my doctor that contained a sweet and melodic phrase: “You are no longer diabetic.”

By then I had lost over 20 pounds, too, but resetting my carbohydrate baseline had devastating consequences for the rest of my life. The less sugar I ate, the easier it was to eat less of everything else. I was no longer locked into what nutritionists call the glucose roller coaster, a cycle of high sugar levels and deep lows that can lead to insulin resistance, destroying the body’s ability to control hunger.

In the United States, and increasingly around the world, supermarkets and chain restaurants are full of food roller-coasters that promise lasting flavors and pleasures, but leave us wanting more.

“We should feel full and satisfied, and we don’t,” says Ashley Gearhardt, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studies compulsive eating. “We are being deceived.”

As I ate less added sugar and replaced refined grains with whole grains, my appetite decreased, and my screaming cravings for sweet things became quieter, easier to ignore. I had more energy and seemed to be thinking clearly again for the first time in years. I’ve released the power that will make it easier to put in all the other changes I’ll be putting together over the next few weeks.

“Basically, you were eating less food that encouraged you to overeat and more food that didn’t,” says Marion Nestle, professor emeritus of food, nutrition and public health at New York University. “That’s pretty much what any sensible nutritionist would advise.”

Shift Out of Overdrive

Nutritionists say many people eat more added sugar than they should. The starting point is to find out if you’re getting more than 10 percent of your total calories from added sugars, which should be the highest intake, according to the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. (Unlike protein, fat and vitamins, added sugar is not needed by our bodies, so there is no recommended minimum amount, just a maximum.)

Over the past five years, nutrition labels on packaged foods have been required to list the amount of added sugar. They can go under many aliases, including some that sound harmless and perhaps healthy: evaporated cane juice, agave nectar, fruit juice concentrate and brown rice syrup.

For me and most people, there is little reason to worry about the sugar found naturally in fruits and vegetables, where it is packed with other things that help you feel full faster and slow down the absorption of glucose into the blood. Sweet potatoes are called sweet potatoes for a reason, but I don’t think twice about eating one for dinner because they are gentle on blood sugar, especially when boiled and served in their skin.

I might admit that king among the “other things” that help you feel full is what nutritionists insist on calling fiber, a name so bad it makes me want to seek comfort in the arms of the nearest cinnamon bun. Fortunately, when it comes to simple carbs like rice and flour, we can use the little phrase “whole grains” to describe the same general concept. Here’s what to look out for if you find yourself eating too much white rice and white bread. Whole grains happen to have more flavor, too.

This is the heart of my first reset: eating carbohydrates in their original, hard, solid, complex forms. I knew it would be better for me. And having raised two boys, I probably should have known that passing on sugar multiple times a day wasn’t producing the most rational behavior.

As my body changed, I stopped pretending to be a little kid at a birthday party. All my food, everything I ate, began to take on a new form.

Follow up New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok again Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.