How I Eat Now

Plus, my personal weight loss hack (wink) and some good news!

Nov 25, 2025

a group of objects floating in the air — Photo by Tangerine Newt on Unsplash

It’s been two months since Food Intelligence was published, and many interviews later, I keep getting questions about how I eat now. My coauthor Kevin Hall and I deliberately did not go into great detail about our personal nutrition habits in the book. We share an allergy to diet guru-ism and a belief that the last thing people need is more diet advice and recipes. The major point we make is that all the fuss about individual diet hacks has been a great big distraction from how food environments drive eating behavior (and diet-related diseases, such as obesity and type-2 diabetes).

Alas, the questions about how we eat have been (understandably) unescapable. And as we also argue, individuals certainly aren’t powerless; there are better and worse ways to eat. So I wanted to take a moment to consolidate my personal approach. Here’s the big picture.

I cook every day: I grew up in a family of home cooks and before the age of 10, knew how to roll gnocchi and deploy a sofrito. Cooking comes naturally to me and I (mostly) enjoy it. There’s a lot of evidence, over many decades, that home cooking is better for health than industrially processed or restaurant fare. Of course, cooking also takes time: the planning, buying, and cleanup. I make cooking easier by preparing extras for leftovers, especially on the weekends, and freezing meals for days when I’m strapped for time. When I can’t cook, I seek out healthy, prepared ingredients or meals. I’m really lucky here in Paris. There’s no shortage of healthy, prepared options, from grocery stores filled with flash-frozen fruits and vegetables, to caterers offering freshly roasted chickens and stewed fish.
I buy the best ingredients my family can afford: I go to a fromagerie for cheese, a butcher for meat, a fishmonger for fish, and a sustainable produce shop for everything else. This is as much about health as it is about flavor. Any chef knows that your finished dish will only taste as good as the ingredients you put in. To me, fresh, well-sourced ingredients are generally more delicious.
I use lots of fresh herbs, olive oil, and don’t shy away from salt: Salt makes everything taste better, and fresh herbs do too, while improving the nutritional profile of meals. I always have bunches of parsley, basil, coriander, or dill around (and used to grow my own before moving to Paris; it’s definitely cheaper). On salt, unless you’re adding a snowy layer to each dish, the sodium that damages health is what’s been added to industrially processed food, not home-cooking. Americans get some 70 to 80 percent of their sodium from processed products. (Michael Moss nicely details the folly of the American public health war on the salt shaker, in his book Salt Sugar Fat.) Home food with low or no salt isn’t very appealing. My kids are more likely to eat their green beans and broccoli if both are drizzled in olive oil and lightly salted. So am I!
I make vegetables available at every meal — and try for a mix of raw and cooked: More vegetables means more nutrients. More vegetables means more insoluble fiber — as well as more calorie dilution and less calorie absorption. I feel better when I eat this way. I also use frozen, jarred or canned vegetables when I don’t have time to source, wash, and cook them myself. I pay attention to mixing up how I’m cooking my vegetables. Roasting for long periods in an oven can zap veggies of their nutrients. So I steam, stir fry, and eat them raw, too.
I avoid red meat: This, along with the next point, is probably the biggest change I made while writing Food Intelligence. There is a significant difference between the environmental footprint of read meat and other kinds of animal protein. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land use, and feed conversion, beef (with lamb coming in as a close second), requires far more resources than chicken, pork, fish or eggs. (For a deep dive on the environmental footprint of our food system broadly, see the excellent book We Are Eating The Earth by Michael Grunwald.) I never was a big red-meat eater, but now I deliberately seek out alternatives.
I avoid ultra-processed foods: Not all UPFs are alike, and they’re not all unhealthy. But because I have the luxury of cooking a lot and have lots of freshly prepared options nearby, I don’t rely on even the healthier UPFs — like packaged hummus or whole grain bread — for convenience. And I avoid ultra-processed junk foods. My rationale: they tend to contain novel additives that have unclear or negative effects on health, along with lots of the added sugar, fat, and salt that we have long knows are bad for us. UPFs also typically come in plastic packaging. There’s emerging evidence that food contact chemicals, including the chemicals that leach into what we eat from plastics, are harmful to health and the environment. But here’s another thing: the more real food I eat, the less I enjoy or crave UPFs.
I try to keep hyper-palatable and energy dense foods out of the house: My coauthor Kevin Hall found in his research that it wasn’t just ultra-processed foods that caused people to overeat calories. It was foods that were energy dense (they have more calories packed into each gram) and hyper-palatable (they contain unique pairs of nutrients that exceed thresholds that don’t usually exist in nature — like high in both sugar and fat, salt and fat, or carbs and salt). This can mean packaged potato chips but it can also mean your grandma’s apple pie or your favorite homemade cookies. These foods specifically are most linked to spontaneous overeating, and best avoided.
But when I eat them, I don’t worry too much: Eating patterns are more important than the effects of single foods on health. Because I mostly cook, and mostly eat reasonably healthfully, when I don’t, I don’t fret. Related: Given the complexity of food and designing studies that tease out cause-and-effect for individual foods, let alone meals and diets, I’m extremely wary of the kinds of ultra-specific eating advice that now fills social media. Though nutrition science can tell us a lot about the minimum amounts of nutrients we need for survival, there’s very little in the way of clear research findings on optimizing diets for different health outcomes. So that’s why I rely instead of on the sound but boring, old nutrition advice: eat lots of vegetables, legumes, fruits, fiber, and whole grains, and minimize sugar, salt, saturated fat, and junk food.
When I overindulge, I course-correct: If I’ve been eating out a lot on a holiday, or had a weekend of socializing around heavy meals, I try to make lighter, even blander, meals, in the days ahead. Think lentils and rice, or salad and bread. I didn’t grow up doing this. I learned this from my husband, who is a great eater and who changed my eating behavior for the better as much as writing the book did.
I talk to my kids about the connections between what goes in, what comes out, and how certain foods make us feel: If they’re constipated, it’s probably because they didn’t drink enough water or eat enough fruits and vegetables that week, for example. I want them to understand that what they eat is connected to health, and that what they eat will have an impact on things like how they’re feeling and their digestion.
I design a home food environment that encourages healthy eating behavior: This means healthy foods, like nuts, fresh fruits, and vegetables, are on display in my kitchen and in the fridge, while any junk food at home is stored away in a cupboard far from the kitchen that requires walking and unlocking. There’s research from rodent studies that adding a tiny barrier — the equivalent of a nose poke — reduces overeating. From my personal experience, I would say this is true for humans, too. If the cake is on the counter or in the fridge at eye level, I’m very likely to take a bite. If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. I also serve my kids vegetables as a starter while they wait for their main course. They’re hungrier and more likely to eat the cucumber or broccoli when their greens are not competing with chicken or pasta.
I’m working to improve school lunches at my kid’s school: It’s not just about home food environments. It’s about what food is like everywhere we encouter it, and we should demand better from our leaders. Paris is known for gorgeous, nutritious, and sustainable school lunches. (I wrote about them recently here.) My son unfortunately ended up at a school with a bad cantine. They feed the kids ultra-processed foods and sugary desserts on a regular basis. I got involved in the effort to improve what the kids are eating and that’s related to the final point I want to make here.
I appreciate more than ever how much eating bahvior is regulated: Over the long term, what and how much we eat is very subtly nudged by a symphony of internal signals – think hormones, neural pathways – that interact with our food environments in ways that are still somewhat mysterious. The upshot is that while we have the illusion of control that we are deciding every meal and snack, over longer term time horizons, this interaction between our biology and our environment takes over. (We get into detail about this in our book, Food Intelligence.) That’s why doing things like protecting school lunches is critically important, and so is fighting for better food environments at every level we possibly can: workplace, town, city, country. Food environments matter, and right now in too many countries, they’re sickening people more than protecting them.
So that’s the nitty-gritty on how I think about food and eat now. And that brings me to another question I get asked a lot these days…

My personal weight loss hack (wink)

That question is: how did I manage to lose weight and keep it off for so many years?

Those of you who follow my work or read Food Intelligence know I was a chubby kid and an overweight — sometimes obese — teenager and adult. I would have given anything not to be fat. Gradually, by the time I hit my early thirties, I wasn’t anymore.

I like to joke that my weight loss hack is that I married a thin person. The whole truth is a little more complicated. Body weight is driven by gene-environment interactions. While reporting the book, I found out I have a very high genetic suspectibility to obesity. I also learned that not everybody who carries such a risk is overweight. As the obesity researcher George Bray once put it, “Genes load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.” After lots of reflecting on my food environment, and how it changed as I got older, I realized the extent to which my eating habits fundamentally shifted over the years.

I grew up in a food-focused household, where lovingly home-cooked meals were plentiful, as were ultraprocessed junk foods (it was the 80s, after all). It wasn’t uncommon for my brothers and I to raid the kitchen cupboards, and eat scores of Oreos after dinner, or to down Lucky Charms and Pop Tarts for breakfast.

When I moved out of the house, during university, I tried to buy less junk while grocery shopping. I grew to love all kinds of vegetables, and refined my cooking skills. As I said, the more real food I ate, the less junk I wanted. I also started to appreciate the connection between how much I slept and what I ate, and I more often prioritized sleep (difficult these days with little ones at home).

My eating habits changed further after I met my husband. My husband eats well, and grew up eating well. He taught me about how to source excellent ingredients, how to keep meals simple but delicious, and that it helps to cut back a bit after over-indulging. None of this came naturally to me, but I learned, more often than not, through osmosis. The good news is that I’m not at all alone. Just as toxic food environments can drive obesity (below the level of conscious awareness!) in the genetically susceptible, healthy food environments cause spontaneous weight loss in those same people. (Again, we detail all of this in our book.)

The catch is that not everyone has the resources, time, wherewithal and support to eat well. I am lucky to live in a household with a supportive partner. On top of that, many other things had to align. I had to know how to cook. I had to live in a place where healthy food is accessible. I had to have the income to be able to afford the healthy stuff, and the flexibility to buy and prepare it. These are privileges too few people enjoy, so I’m under no illusions that my “diet hacks” will work for everyone. That’s why the best thing we can do for our health, individually and collectively, is create food environments that make it easy for everybody to do the right thing.

Economist “best book of the year” and an offer!

A short update on my book with Kevin Hall, Food Intelligence. Kevin and I continue to do the media rounds. A few highlights:

The Economist, a magazine I’ve read since my university days, selected our book as one of the best of the year! I’m beyond thrilled!
I had fun talking about the book with Russ Roberts of the classic EconTalk podcast, and (trying to) challenge his belief that there’s no need to regulate the food environment.
Kelly Brownell is the researcher who coined the phrase “toxic food environment.” We drew on his research for our book so it was a great pleasure to sit down and speak with him for his Leading Voices in Food podcast.
We also appeared on The How To Academy — less about how to eat and more about how to think about food and what we were aiming at with Food Intelligence. We also show up in this WHYY The Pule episode about what science says about our food choices.
Kevin did a great Bloomberg interview, including sharing some of his personal eating habits.
I also loved this Guardian podcast featuring Kevin and his work on ultra-processed foods and our book.
André Picard was one of my health reporting heroes when I was coming up in journalism. So I was delighted he riffed on our book for a Globe and Mail column about the role of food environments for health.
To discuss matters of life and health reporting (as well as the book), I enjoyed joining Moain Abu Dabrh and David Freeman for their Wellbeing Manifesto podcast.

It’s been heartening to hear from readers. The American obesity fellow who suggested our book as required reading for her fellowship program. The Norwegian nutritional biologist who, two chapters in, says she doesn’t want the book to end. The culinary nutrition professor now using Food Intelligence to inspire her students to imagine healthier products and menus for people. The Irish doctor recommending the book to all his patients. We’re delighted to get the feedback, so don’t hesitate to keep it coming!

Now the offer: I’ll be zooming into my first bookclub soon. I’m happy to join yours, too; just reach out.

Julia Belluz

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