Battling the bulge is hard no matter what your job is, but for cookbook author and recipe tester Julia Turshen, it’s especially challenging.
“It’s tough to lose weight when you’re [trying] out a doughnut recipe,” Turshen has said.
The 31-year-old has worked on numerous cookbooks, including “It’s All Good” with Gwyneth Paltrow and “Spain . . . A Culinary Road Trip” with Mario Batali. Celebs such as Sofia Coppola credit her with teaching them how to cook. And Turshen has just published her first solo effort, “Small Victories: Recipes, Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home-Cooking Triumphs” (Chronicle Books; out now).
With recipes for A Nice Lasagna and Kimchi Fried Rice, the new book isn’t focused on diet food, but it reflects a healthy approach to eating — cooking food yourself and enjoying it — which helped Turshen lose 60 pounds and maintain her weight loss for five years.
“It’s not a book of all healthy foods — it’s food that I love the most,” says the 5-foot-8 Turshen, whose weight fluctuated in high school and college. By the time she graduated from Barnard in 2007, she had ballooned to 235 pounds.
“I spent a lot of time trying to substitute stuff that was never the real thing, and it’s never satisfying,” she says.
Over a period of four years, she lost the weight by relying on Weight Watchers — regularly attending meetings, eating homemade foods and tracking everything she ate to reach her goal weight of 175 pounds.
Much harder than the weight loss itself, she says, has been keeping the weight off consistently. In the spring of 2015, she stepped on the scale and saw that her weight was creeping up. She decided it was time to refocus her efforts. Weight Watchers had helped her before, and it helped her again — this time, in app form.
“I like that the program doesn’t cut anything out: It just gives you a way of counting it all,” she says. “I’ve always preferred healthy food to unhealthy food. In the past, though, I would eat all of the healthy food. I had quality under control, but Weight Watchers helps me keep quantity under control, too.”
I spent a lot of time trying to substitute stuff that was never the real thing, and it’s never satisfying.
- Julia Turshen
A year and a half later, she says she’s the thinnest, healthiest and happiest she’s ever been at 163 pounds.
She regularly exercises, attending a class called “30 Minutes of Everything” at the gym near her home in upstate New York and going for long walks with her wife, Grace Bonney, and their dogs.
Her diet is typically lots of fruits and veggies, lean proteins, snacks of cherries or hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with sea salt, but there’s the occasional indulgence when testing recipes and traveling. She balances it out by keeping moving.
“We went to New Orleans once and basically ate everything in sight, but we walked from restaurant to restaurant,” she says. “It was a great way to get exercise and see more of a beautiful city.”
Over the years, she’s learned that it is possible to maintain a healthy weight while still enjoying the food she loves.
“No offense to Tasti D-Lite, but it tastes like cold air,” she says. “I’d rather have a small slice of Happy Wife, Happy Life Chocolate Cake — [Grace’s favorite, and one of the recipes featured in the cookbook] — than a bunch of low-cal crackers . . . you can maintain a healthy relationship with yourself and your body while still having some of what you love.”