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We come from two different approaches, Mr. Savvy and I.  I support the slow food movement, while Mr. Savvy is on Weight Watchers.  Our approaches aren’t opposites, but they certainly make for some clashes in the kitchen — over butter, for example.  I know that butter is expensive in terms of Weight Watchers points.  He knows that eating butter is better than eating spreadable chemicals.  What’s a weight conscious foodie couple to do?

Eat well, of course.

By eat well, I mean pick the best of both worlds: as a consequence, we eat whole foods (for the most part) that are low on  points (for the most part).  We follow a few basic guidelines for our meals.

• Lots of vegetables. I treat meat, if we have it, as a side dish, and pile on the veggies to make for a filling meal with fewer points.  Humans absorb nutrients from vegetables better when we eat them with some fat, so now’s not the time to eat steamed broccoli with a side of salt.  My favorite way to serve it?  Baked, with lemon juice and Parmesan.

• Do it yourself. Food just tastes better when I’ve prepared it myself.  Sure, it takes longer to cook a whole meal than to order in, but it’s worth it.  And there are some foods that don’t take long at all: Homemade bread in less than an hour or Butternut Squash Soup or Bruschetta with Tomato and Basil (add some goat cheese and you’re in business).  By making the foods at home, I can control exactly what goes in and manage the point values that way.

• Eat your beans.  Beans are a great source of lean protein, and I try to work them in as many dishes as possible (though not every meal, as the saying goes).  The great part is that beans are cheap, store well, and there are so many varieties that they go with everything: black beans with Mexican food, chickpea hummus on sandwiches, ham and vegetable soup with white beans.

• When you’re eating, just eat. It’s a heck of a lot easier to pick out the different food flavors when all I’m doing is sitting down, eating my food.  I’m guilty of reading while I eat — a bad habit because if I concentrate on my book, all food tastes the same; I can’t tell the difference between homemade  and store bought.  When I finally set my book down, I realize that my local pizza place’s pizza is rather one-dimensional compared to homemade.

• Experiment. Find a cookbook or a food website that has some good, easy recipes, and play around.  When I don’t know what to make, I fall back on my trusty Betty Crocker, and the Nigella Lawson website.  Neither Nigella nor Betty Crocker is particularly concerned with weight, however, so I tinker with their recipes until I come up with something that satisfies both Mr. Savvy and me.

• Listen to your body. Some nights I’m just dying for a bucket of french fries.  There’s no need to restrict myself; if I want some french fries, I can have some french fries — but I’m realistic about it.  I know that eating too many french fries gives me a stomachache, so I don’t do it often.  The key is listening to your body.  With a little practice, it will tell you when it wants to stop and when it wants more.  There’s an entire movement based around this philosophy, called Health at Every Size that I recommend checking out, even if you’re on Weight Watchers or another type of diet.

I could talk about food all day, particularly the benefits of Health at Every Size.  As a culture, we’re so in love with convenience foods and so out of tune with our bodies that we forget how to eat.  Michael Pollan talks about this a little in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, about how we’re evolved to prize sweet foods because they mean a carbohydrates-rich food.  Carbohydrates = energy, and now that we live in a culture that has an abundance of carbohydrate rich food (especially processed foods), that’s all we eat.  Michael Pollan manages to break out of the cycle of eating processed foods and finally hunts for and cooks his own slow food meal:

“I prized, too, the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the food chain that linked it to the wider world.  Scarcely an ingredient in it had ever worn a label or bar code or price tag, and yet I knew almost everything there was to know about its provenance and its price….A meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted” (411).

Now that sounds like eating well.