A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great (2 page)

Staff gathers for family meal at 4:30 p.m., my first meal of the day. Family meal is meant to be cost-effective and fit for a crowd. It’s delicious, but not exactly the stuff Dr. Oz is preaching about. We’re talking a lot of meat—and not the local grass-fed variety, but the cheaper cuts loaded with fat, growth hormones, and antibiotics—or starch-heavy food like pasta and garlic bread. Vegetables? Maybe a small pile of lettuce as an afterthought, but not much beyond that.

Amped up by another cigarette and a final large cup of coffee, I head into service. Six hours of bright lights, heat, speed, and constant stimulation whiz by. Though I tasted dozens of bites and ingested a full dinner’s worth of calories, it never feels like they add up to a meal. Service winds down, and I’m thinking about relaxing with a smoke and a drink. After a few of each, I start to get hungry. I ate lunch at 4:30 p.m., so now that it’s 1 a.m., I’m ready for dinner. It’s how plenty of people feel when they finish their day of work, but for most it’s 6 p.m., and for me and the rest of the working chefs it’s 1 a.m.

At this hour, I’m not going home and whipping up a salad. I head to Corner Bistro for a few beers topped off by a cheeseburger, or go to Great New York Noodletown for a late-night Chinese feast of roast baby pig. On the nights I don’t go out, I stop by the 24-hour bodega, order ham and cheese on a hard roll with mustard and watery lettuce, smash some potato chips in it, and nail that for my 1:30 a.m. dinner just before bed. I also make up for skipping the morning cigarettes by smoking ten in the last three hours of my night.

Remarkably, this was my routine for nearly twenty years. I was overcaffeinated,
dehydrated, overstimulated, and full of starch, sugar, fatty meat, alcohol, and nicotine. Until my body started to stage a revolt.

Quite the glowing setup for a book on healthy eating, isn’t it? As we all know, life has a way of kicking you in the ass. Being forced to make a significant shift in my own diet forced me to rethink what it means to cook and eat healthy. You’ll be happy to know that it sure as hell doesn’t mean deprivation or bland, pathetic-looking steamed vegetables. Eating nutritious foods that support feeling good isn’t enough—these foods should satiate you and taste so good that you look forward to eating them. With the right arsenal of recipes, a healthy diet can coexist with delicious food. That’s a good food day. My wife, Amanda, came up with the name for this concept, and it has steered my everyday eating habits for the past three years.

Now at forty-five, post-brink-of-disaster realization, I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been. I have loads of energy, I work out and practice yoga regularly, and I cook food that actually makes me excited to eat the way we know we’re supposed to be eating. It’s a complete U-turn from just four years ago, when I was a champ at treating my body like a piece of shit.

Here’s a bit of irony for you: I grew up eating healthy whole foods. My after-school snack was a basket of mixed nuts, left in their shells with a nutcracker on the side. No sodas, no Ho Hos, no processed crap. My mom was far ahead of the curve in recognizing the importance of natural food. She was born and raised in Tuscany, where good food is central to everyday life, and much of it comes from the land just outside the kitchen window. So, while everyone else was grooving on breakfast cereals and bologna on white bread, my sister and I were eating frittatas with zucchini and basil, or warm string bean and potato salad, all made with fresh vegetables from the garden and dressed with good olive oil and red wine vinegar. I carry this with me in my own restaurant, Hearth, where I’m fanatical about preparing the absolute best-quality ingredients for our guests. When it came to feeding myself, though, my only requirement was that it be delicious. And for me, like many people in this country, “delicious” too often equates with sugar-laden, fatty, processed gut-bomb food.

The real kicker is I never thought about how what I ate might affect me in the future. I figured the physical requirements of my seventy-hour-a-week job made up for any excesses in my diet. It was my life. You weren’t going to find me sweating it out at the gym or on the ball field—I was hunched over a cutting board.

When I hit my early thirties, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and told that it would likely improve if I dropped some weight. This motivated me to start exercising, but it was only a half-assed effort until I was about thirty-seven. By then, Amanda and I had our daughter Stella, so I was over the late-night partying, but I was still smoking. My pants size had crept up from a 32 to a 38. I felt flabby and sluggish, but I thought exercise was the root of my weight issues. So I got a gym membership and, eventually, a personal trainer. That trainer
was the first person to fill my head with solid nutrition advice—eating breakfast, switching to lean meats, putting vegetables back in my diet, etc.—but I still didn’t change what I ate. I thought by working my ass off at the gym three days a week racking up hours of cardio, and cutting down on the late-night food fests, that the slim and trim Marco would appear.

But he didn’t. I had more muscle definition, but I was still busting out of my pants and feeling bone-crushingly tired in the afternoon. And yeah, I was forty, and I knew things slow down as you get older, but I thought I had made every effort to see real results. What the hell?

Immensely frustrated and game for any help, I visited a nutritionist who came highly recommended by a couple of friends. I explained to him how I’d become a loyal gym rat but I’m not losing any weight, and how I feel completely sapped of energy, even though I’m sleeping through the night. I’m thinking the guy is going to give me a few helpful tweaks to my eating habits, and I’ll be on my way.

Instead, he scared the shit out of me with cold, hard numbers: the results of my blood work and his evaluation. The verdict: I was prediabetic with blood glucose levels through the roof, I had seriously high cholesterol, and I was in the throes of full-blown gout—a painful form of inflammatory arthritis. I was also thirty pounds overweight and living on carbs, and my thyroid wasn’t functioning properly. Not pretty. My nutritionist gave me lists of foods to avoid—one for my heightened cholesterol, one for my high blood sugar, and one for gout.

This humbling moment gave way to a hole of despair that I wallowed in for days. The news was terrifying. Don’t get me wrong; I realize my condition could have been much, much worse. But the most alarming part wasn’t my condition; it was the paralyzing thought that I couldn’t enjoy food anymore. At the time, it seemed like I would be subjected to a life of calorie counting and eating celery sticks and unsalted almonds.

Food is the center of everything for me: my heritage, family, social life, and entire career. In short, it’s a key player in my overall happiness. For just about anyone, the thought of overhauling your whole diet is a tough blow, but for me it fell just short of cruel. My diagnosis lit a fire under my ass to make some changes, but I knew I would be a miserable person and unable to stick to a healthy diet if I had to eat rabbit food for the rest of my life.

My lovely wife, Amanda Filley. Without her, I’d still be an unhealthy wreck.

Once I got over my pity party, I launched into an all-out examination of what it means to have a healthy diet. Lucky for me, Amanda is incredibly well-read on nutrition and became my source of day-to-day guidance, introducing me to things like chia seeds, quinoa, and bee pollen and inspiring me to dig further into the nuts and bolts of how certain foods affected my body. To this day, she is a huge part of the reason I’ve become so interested in what it means to eat well. I dove into books on health and nutrition, absorbing everything I could from Gary Taubes, Dr. Alejandro Junger, Michael Pollan, Tim Ferriss, Robert Lustig, and Dr. Mark Hyman, among many others. It became somewhat of an obsession.

Every book has its own specific theories, but their collective advice all boils down to the same core messages about cutting down on sugar and processed foods, eating breakfast, and getting in more vegetables. The bummer is that without good recipes that deliver nutrition and delicious flavor, most of these books aren’t exactly motivating anyone to step away from the bag of potato chips. Doctors, nutritionists, and foodie intellectuals offer a bounty of indispensable information, but knowing the techniques for making lean meats insanely flavorful or how to treat kale so it’s crave-worthy isn’t their forte. Judging by many of the recipes I came across, healthy cooking and eating were simply acts of necessity, not pleasure. Food as fuel, not joy. It’s a message I could never wrap my head around.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to rely on them for guidance in the kitchen. As a chef, I know about proper seasoning and which ingredients deliver the best possible flavors to make a dish worth eating again and again. I also have a well-tuned palate and a sense of creativity and know-how in the kitchen. So, I got busy using my skills to create a stable of healthy ingredient–focused recipes that not only taste damn good but also embody my deep-rooted love and appreciation for great food.

My two amazing daughters, Stella, 8, and Zadie, 2.

With these 125 recipes, I’ve translated the advice on how you should eat into what you can cook: dishes that are delicious and satisfying, and that actually inspire you to want healthy foods at every meal. I’ll help you take the basic tenets of a healthy diet and put them into action in your kitchen, so you’re making
good-for-you food you actually want to eat. I’m not a dietician, a doctor, or your mom. I’m not here to promote weight loss or low-carb, grain-free, low-fat, or no-meat diets or to ask you to play some numbers game with calories. My recipes are focused on whole, real foods that are nutritional powerhouses. This can include whole milk from a local dairy farm, or organic grass-fed beef, because both foods are natural and packed with nutrients. The idea of low-fat string cheese and 100-calorie cookie packs as healthy foods is total bullshit—those are processed foods, not
real
foods. Throughout the book, I’ll share basic information about the nutrition topics that now influence my food choices, and you’ll see how my recipes gibe with the principles of a good food day.

Like my first book,
Salt to Taste
, this collection of recipes is for everyday cooking. You won’t find a laundry list of stuff you’ve never heard of, and you don’t need to spend five hours in the kitchen. I take on the simplest of ingredients, the workhorses of healthy diets, and give you luscious flavor combinations and easy techniques that are designed for convenience and flexibility. Once you get into a groove, I hope you’ll keep experimenting. Think of my recipes as a basic formula: Learn them, and then plug in the foods and flavors that speak to you. I’m not here to show you what a chef-genius I am—I want to share the most important and basic knowledge that will empower you to begin cooking delicious, nutritious food for yourself.

There’s an evolution that happens when you decide to go down this road. Your will to live a healthier lifestyle starts to feed on itself. It becomes reflex. I was jazzed by the positive effects, like having more energy, shedding weight, and becoming a healthier role model for my daughters. When I eat an avocado salad, I get the same burst of pleasure and sense of indulgence that I used to get from inhaling a bacon cheeseburger. I’m not kidding or exaggerating. That’s not to say I don’t go for the occasional burger or slice of pizza—I do, and I go at it with gusto. But the change hits home when you have that late-night piece of cheesecake and realize that you no longer feel guilty about it because it’s truly a treat, not a daily habit anymore.

If you recently decided to clean up your diet and you’re afraid that any enjoyment of food is now out the window, or if you’re already a healthy food pro and feel stuck in a cooking rut, you picked up the right book. With my recipes, you’ll find that healthy eating doesn’t mean being banished to a life of uninspired, bland chicken breasts and steamed broccoli. As a chef and healthy eater who knows and loves food and cooking, I’ll show you that with a healthy diet, there is still joy in eating. A good food day isn’t about patting yourself begrudgingly on the back for eating the way you’re “supposed to,” it’s about eating super delicious food with a clear direction toward better health. My joy is derived first and foremost from food that tastes good, but the bonus is that now, it makes me feel good too.