Book Highlight: First Bite by Bee Wilson

I have found myself in periods where I measured out everything I ate, recorded it in apps, tracked my activity levels. Constant thinking, watching, weighing; revolving entirely around my food and weight. None of this consuming obsession helped me mend my relationship with food or my body. I picked up a few healthful habits along the way, such as drinking more water, but I still felt a constant tug between what I thought I knew as healthful eating and eating what I truly enjoyed. Many find themselves caught in a similar loop. And while thankfully I was never plunged into the extremes of disordered eating, the diet myths and obsession with weight loss that float around lead many this way.

There have been many factors that have helped me in shifting my eating habits and my mindset about healthy eating, but Bee Wilson's book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat was so eye-opening. It's not a book about dieting or weight specifically; it is centred on how our tastes and eating habits are formed. Wilson explores topics such as picky eating in children and adults (and it is a fantastic resource for parents!), cravings, and cultural diet habits. I learned so much about why I crave the foods I do and what realistic balanced eating looks like, and how anyone can go about creating lasting changes in their eating habits.

Wilson is a fantastic writer and treats each topic with care and curiosity. The result is each chapter feels like a door being opened and explored. It is quite refreshing when new diets and rules are constantly being spouted at us from every direction. To be sure, Wilson is not writing a manual on healthful eating, and she does not embrace the stoic adherence to pure nutrition I once thought of as the only way to truly healthy eating. However, First Bite helped me to understand what balance, true balance, looks like in one's diet, and how to go about changes in a lasting way. It is so refreshing in a culture of yoyo dieting and fads to approach food as what it is: both a source of fuel and a source of pleasure. Both can be true at the same time, and pleasurable foods do not have to give us guilt. Given the right season I can enjoy a perfectly ripe mango as much as I do sticky toffee pudding.