To eat healthier, a food critic went to the source: His kitchen

By Pete Wells, The New York Times

In 1976, David Bowie moved to West Berlin. He would make some of the most original music of his career there, but that wasn’t why he went. He was trying to kick cocaine, which had taken over his life in Los Angeles, destroying his memory and producing round-the-clock hallucinations. “I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth,” he later said.

Obviously, there are major differences between a life-threatening drug addiction and the struggles of an overfed restaurant critic, although my former life could get downright hallucinatory at times. But one of the ways I pulled myself back to health was the same method used by Bowie and countless other people who decided to get clean: I changed my environment.

I needed to eat more of my meals somewhere that wasn’t a place filled with temptation and where nobody ever said no, least of all me. I had to replace all the habits that were slowly killing me with...