Early this year, I went for my first physical in longer than I’d care to admit. At the time, I was about halfway through a list of 140 or so restaurants I planned to visit before I wrote the 2024 edition of “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.” It was a fair bet that I wasn’t in the best shape of my life.
My scores were bad across the board; my cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments. The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese.
OK, not just technically.
I knew I needed to change my life. I promised I’d start just as soon as I’d eaten in the other 70 restaurants on my spreadsheet.
But a funny thing happened when I got to the end of all that eating: I realized I wasn’t hungry. And I’m still not, at least not the way I used to be. And so, after 12 years as restaurant critic for The New York Times, I’ve decided to bow out as gracefully as my state of technical obesity will allow.
Really related to this. I was briefly a restaurant critic for a local paper in the 1990s, and within 8 months I’d put on 60lbs and ran my cholesterol up to 260. I was 22 years old.
Dropped the column, became a pescatarian, dropped the weight within a few months.
Sometimes I get sad thinking about all the great meals I missed out on… but it’s just as likely I’d be on my third bypass by now.
There’s an interesting bit in the above link about a Sporkful podcast with Wells that included this:
Pashman: Pete usually practices his own very attentive style of eating five nights a week. He’s always checking out possible places to review. I wondered how going out that often affects your relationship with food.
Wells: Well, I’ll tell you, if you, like, regularly consume 6,000 or 7,000 calories at a single meal, like I do, you’ll find that, the next day, your appetite is kind of moderate. You know? … I’m very often not hungry at all until I sit down, and even then, I’m not really hungry.
Pashman: That feels a little sad, Pete, I have to say.
Really does eliminate some of the romance around the allure of being a critic.
When I was doing it, I was way less hardcore (small paper, no real pressure to get a review to print every week), but I complained REGULARLY that I had lost touch with any physical sense of what hunger felt like. I was eating out of professional duty and intellectual curiosity rather than any kind of physical necessity.
I see the effects of heart disease, diabetes, and strokes everyday at work. I see young people who have been diagnosed with fatty organs. Health is wealth.
I honestly don’t see myself being a “foodie” anymore. I wouldn’t call myself a vegan but I have cut down on a lot to the point I don’t miss it or care. I am trying my best. I don’t contribute much to here.
I think I got into this because I wanted to experience and learn about different cultures like Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold. I can do that thru other outlets.
Nothing wrong with here and there I guess. But as I get older the less I care or excited I am about things. I guess when you realize your own mortality and how little time we have left some things get put in perspective.