JUST EAT

The bestselling author of Tomatoland returns with a tasty exposition of diet fads and their discontents.

Estabrook, a former James Beard Award–winning contributing editor at Gourmet, opens with a familiar scenario of lament: Over the years, he has gained too much weight, the result of advancing age, inadequate exercise, and splendid dining. How to get those unwanted pounds off? “Joining the two-thirds of Americans who have medically significant amounts of weight to lose, I decided to go on a diet, something I’d never done,” he writes. The plan he chose, Whole30, was done for all the wrong reasons, he adds—it was the current fad, one whose inventors “cleverly tweaked the old paleo precepts to appeal to the social media set.” The problem was that it didn’t work. When those precepts give way to the reality of gnawing hunger, the weight comes back. Estabrook follows with a somewhat dispiriting tour of diets old and new, from the pious to the wacky—e.g., the nasty Master Cleanse, “which was invented in the 1940s but is enjoying a revival among celebrities”; the alcohol-saturated Banting diet, named for an English coffin maker whose regime consisted of “between five and seven glasses of wine, on top of his liquor-moistened morning toast and…optional tumbler of grog.” The author weighs each in the balance and finds them wanting, including the still-fashionable paleo diet, which, says one paleoanthropologist, “has no basis in archaeological reality.” After an amiable visit with French chef Jacques Pépin, who never met a food he didn’t like but has always maintained a healthy weight, Estabrook concludes with a program whose tenets seem common-sensical but also get buried in the diet-literature buzz: Take in fewer calories, avoid empty calories from sugar and alcohol, and keep track of your weight regularly with an accurate scale. His book is fittingly slender, but Estabrook packs a lot of highly useful information into a narrative that’s also enjoyably snarky.

A lively tour of paunch and pantry that proves the adage that less is more.