For the 1st book in my challenge, I read "The Mediterranean Method: Your Complete Plan to Harness the Power of the Healthiest Diet on the Planet — Lose Weight, Prevent Heart Disease, and more!” by Steven Masley.
Overall, I really, really enjoyed this book and found it to be an incredibly quick read once I was dedicated - about 2.5 hours of reading time for me I think (but I do read quickly and the end was recipes, which I skimmed). I would highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone, even if you’re just curious about small changes you can make to be healthier! Beyond advocating Mediterranean eating, the book just does a really good job breaking down why and how a lot of us are unhealthy. I feel I learned a lot, and I already know I want to re-read this book in a year just to remind myself of the valuable health and wellbeing information. I would give this book 4.5 Stars, I thought it was really excellent with just a couple small critiques I’ll save till the end.
My 3 Key Takeaways:
For most of us, the difference between living a long, miserable life and enjoying our long life will come down to how we eat, and if you eat like a “typical American” you’re taking a big gamble. I can say personally as someone who went from eating largely Nigerian foods to largely American foods as I jumped from fad diets to pre-cooked foods to take-out etc. I have noticed a LOT of the symptoms he raises in the book. I plan to live to be at least 106-107 years old (I know I can’t control this but I want to say I was alive in 3 centuries!) and I don’t want to spend the last 30 or so years confined to a bed and miserable. This was a HUGE wake-up call for me in that regard.
Food is SO POWERFUL! I started this book because I want to lose weight, there’s no shame in that to me. But honestly this book reminded me how much food actually can DO! In general I want to work on my relationship with food, and this book was so inspiring in that regard. It really reminded me that we can intentionally choose our food for its benefits, taste just being one, and that’s a much more fun way to think of a lifestyle change than cutting out “bad” things.
I need to re-define “easy.” This isn’t something the book explicitly states, but more something I got to reflect on as I was reading. It made me realize that I have been looking for a change that was going to be literally as easy as ordering takeout or eating frozen meals, but be healthier. But this book challenged me to ask myself why I feel like a meal is something I need to just rush through. I spend more time/effort on social media than I do on feeding myself most days (and I barely even post). Reflectively, that’s not something I’d like to be true. If it’s a matter of finding time to cook in order to literally positively change my life for the next several decades to come, I think I can find that time and passion again.
1 Action Step Due to This Book: I plan to make the change to a Mediterranean Lifestyle! Obviously I was already leaning this way, which is why I picked this book up in the first place, but this got me over the edge. I would like to at least try it for myself and see what works for me, ideally in the simplest way possible.
Some general Pros and Cons:
Pros
Everything is backed by clinical experience and outside studies from around the world! I have read so many books that are spuriously supported by 1 or 2 studies on a total of about 100 people or less - not this one! Not only are there various studies - both the authors’ experience and clinical research - cited throughout the book, the sample sizes are usually several hundred if not several thousand people! For me, that’s a HUGE selling point, that lets me know this is quality information that I can trust. Establishing that early on really upped my buy-in.
This book gives you a LOT of practical, medical health information in a way that I found incredibly easy to digest. It is clear that a lot of work went into making this information digestible for any audience. And the actual information? Very, very helpful! I liked that this didn’t just lay out the benefits of going Mediterranean, it also compared it to other doctor-recommended diets you may have heard of. I learned the most from those comparisons, and even learned about some health concepts I thought I understood but was quite wrong about. And - it wasn’t fear-mongering. The information was presented to inform you, not scare you, and clearly showed why Mediterranean was a functional solution.
The book includes not just recipes, but a how-to guide for general things to keep in stock and glycemic load tables and an overview (multiple times) of how to build out your day for the right (recommended) nutrient balance. I like that because it makes a Mediterranean diet change feel approachable as something I can build out on my own - straying from these recipes by incorporating some from other cookbooks. I generally have a different breakfast palate than some others, and don’t like some popular “healthy” foods like avocado or sweet potato, so I already expected to source ideas from many cookbooks. Now, I have a strong idea of what I should look for. I’ll also say, the recipes in this book actually draw from a very wide range of ingredients and there were several I plan to experiment with to add to my rotation - more than I expected!
Cons:
Though in some ways this book is written as though it’s meant to be read cover to cover, in others it’s read as though you’re picking and choosing the sections you want - and in aggregate it means the book both references earlier chapters a lot, but also repeats a lot of information. This wasn’t so repetitive that it took me out of the book, clearly, but it was sometimes frustrating to read the same synopsis of the same study multiple times, but then 2 pages later see a reference to earlier explained health benefits. Not enough to be a major con in any way - just something to be aware of if you want to read the book.
A lot of this book is focused on white, European Mediterranean cultures - especially Spain, France, and Italy (the Mediterranean includes several countries in North Africa) and had even less focus on some of the other so-called Blue countries such as Japan. Not a huge issue as there is a TON to learn from those three countries, but it did feel like kind of an oversight. Not sure if it’s just because this is where the research focused, if it’s because the author was drawing on personal experience from visiting those countries, because those are “buzzy” countries to the average American, but 2/3 of the way through the book when he mentioned Japan again I was like “oh yeah…what about the rest of the world?” I also didn’t love the stated assumption that the 3 mentioned countries’ foods were somehow “more approachable” though I agree their ingredients may be more accessible. Again, there is a LOT to learn in this book and I didn’t feel anything in terms of knowledge was missing. If anything it made me curious about doing my own research into some of these other cultures.
This is so, so nitpicky but I really wish the book included some sample “meal plans” in the sense of which recipes to combine to achieve the author’s recommended daily ratios of foods. It will not take much for me to do that work, but it would’ve been nice as a starting point. For that matter, even if the recipes listed that information as part of the breakdown (e.g. this recipe is 3 servings of veggies, 1 serving of fats, 2 servings nuts, etc.) it would be helpful. I’ll likely save the recipes I like and add that information on.
That’s it! Next up is a huge shift in topic to Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans