The grim little secret about diets, of course, is that they usually don’t work at all, although I like to think that my repeated doomed forays into sensible eating have had a kind of cleansing, spiritual effect over the years, like forest fires that sweep the overgrown wilderness away, so that greener, more verdant forests can grow up again. The countless number of doctors, dietitians, and witch doctors promoting bizarre powders and juice cleanses whom I’ve consulted have tended to appear at intervals of two or three years, like prophets rising from the parched desert, speaking in mysterious, barely understood tongues, and promising the salvation of everlasting thinness. One of the first was Anne-Marie, the proprietor of the Ashram, a famous diet boot camp in the hills of the Kardashians’ future home, Calabasas, where I bunked with a portly chef from Belgium on leave from his job overseeing the kitchens for a large hotel chain. The Ashram was a Spartan offshoot of the famous Golden Door, a spa outside San Diego, but instead of pampering skin treatments and delicious low-calorie dinners, guests paid thousands of dollars to get rousted out of bed in the early morning darkness to go on long, half-starved hikes through the parched California wilderness.
The chef and I fantasized about flaky, triple-layer napoleon pastries as we nodded off to sleep at night, and we discussed our favorite braising and sauce techniques as we huffed up and down the windy, sun-splashed hiking trails in the hills above LA. One of the sacred days of the Ashram experience was Toxic Tuesday: after three days of this rigorous, hyper-clean, coffee- and sugar-deprived lifestyle, the impurities began to emerge from the body, giving everyone toxin headaches and causing a strange acid taste in the back of the mouth. With her icy blue eyes and walnut-colored skin, Anne-Marie looked like she’d managed to stay toxin-free for thousands of years on a diet of dried berries and water. She would appear periodically during the course of the week, arriving in her gold Mercedes-Benz, to dispense bits of puritanical dieting wisdom to her half-starved flock of overweight record executives and B-level celebrities. Anne-Marie was famous in West Coast health circles for being an early pioneer in the gold-mine field of “wellness” and weight loss. She was the first person to bring dance music to her exercise classes and the inventor, among other things, of a gadget called the “Thighmaster,” and her little compound in the hills was filled with all sorts of early adopter health gadgets like this, going slowly to seed.
When the Belgian chef and I weren’t staggering up and down the California hills, we spent time in a crumbling geodesic dome hung with strings of weirdly colored crystals, getting our chakras checked for the first time and meditating fitfully to the canned, mellifluously rumbling chants of Indian healers, and twisting ourselves into painful yoga positions. At the end of the week, we were so suffused with lightness and well-being that I remember we shared a celebratory nonmeat pizza (with salad) before going our separate ways at the airport. I think I lost fifteen pounds at the Ashram on that first week-long visit, and another ten pounds when I went back for a second torturous visit (“Maybe don’t eat too many almonds next time,” Anne-Marie said), and when my brothers heard about my adventures, they lumbered out to the Ashram too.
I lost hundreds of pounds on similar boondoggle excursions that I contrived to write about over the years, including a slightly hair-raising survivalist program in the wilds of southern Utah designed to replicate the wanderings of the early Mormons in the wilderness. During the course of a long, desperate week, my fellow campers and I slept on the cold ground and subsisted miserably on cans of beans warmed up over sad little fires, which we attempted to start, caveman style, by rubbing sticks together. We fell into creeks and got lost in the hills, and our efforts at fire starting became increasingly futile as we slowly starved to death. Those who lasted into the second week (I didn’t) were treated to a live, bleating goat led out to the campfire by the instructors, who directed the group to figure out how to butcher it, then cook it for dinner, before disappearing back into the wilderness to eat their bountiful campfire supper.
These occasional, biblical starvation regimes can become a kind of addiction, of course, and back in New York, I consulted a series of madcap diet shamans, many of whom would force me, in comically humiliating fashion, to keep a meticulous food diary of my nightly restaurant visits, which I would write out in my tiny, largely indecipherable big man’s handwriting. One year, after noting an alarming twenty-pound weight gain during my annual checkup, my increasingly perplexed internist, Dr. P, sent me to a spectrally slender nutritionist in my neighborhood whose tiny office looked out onto the back of an elevator shaft. She gave me cups of laxative tea to promote what she called “intestinal well-being” and a powder that made my ears ring so loudly that I stopped showing up after several visits.
I did much better with a good-natured tag team of nutritionists named Vinny and Diana, who cajoled me into losing almost fifty pounds over the course of several months for an article I’d been assigned by the magazine. The piece was never published, however, and I would end up gaining all of the weight back over the course of a happy year of eating. Rummaging around in my desk drawers not long ago, I found a few sections of one of my long-ago food diaries, which gives a snapshot of the manic life of the dieting restaurant critic:
MAY 16: Breakfast shake, apple. Lunch, too dizzy to remember. Maybe a chicken breast or some goat cheese and a diet Coke. Took daughter to birthday party—abstained from chocolate cake. Dinner—2 chicken cutlets, salad w. tomatoes, almonds, goat cheese. Popsicle for dessert. Piece of salmon before bed and a handful of peanuts.
MAY 22: Wake up weak and woozy. Walking at half speed. Protein shake for breakfast. Eat an apple and some almonds and feel marginally better. Lunch at Macrobiotic restaurant, filled w. “the slightly cadaverous mien of the severely health conscious.” Wild salmon, scrambled tofu, hijiki (seaweed). Observing me feed among the pale faced folk clutching their yogi pamphlets, my friend says “this is an absurd spectacle.” Dinner—two diet pops preceded by more salads. In bed that night, Mrs. Platt whispers, “good night, Shamu.”
MAY 23: Feeling light headed, a little befuddled. Find myself staring blankly at the computer screen. Stomach crying for grub. Pad over to the refrigerator. Gnaw on a piece of fatless swiss cheese. It tastes like old candle wax.
MAY 24: Breakfast shake mixed w. frozen raspberries. One apple for snack. Lunch at Mexican restaurant, chicken salad w. pico de gallo. Dinner at Italian restaurant—taste of swordfish, eggplant, salad w. octopus, piece of prosciutto, mushrooms, half a glass of wine. Popsicle for dessert. I ask Mrs. Platt if I’m smelling strange recently because Vinny has said the toxins are now being released—“No more than usual.” She smells my breath. “Come to think of it, your breath smells like animal by-products.”
MAY 25: Breakfast shake mixed w. frozen raspberries. Two pieces of (salty) tofu for lunch snack. Tasting menu at Per Se, including bites of oyster and [Ossetra] caviar, a taste of foie gras w. pickled white peaches, a bite of crispy skin black bass, a (delicious) bite of lobster and fennel in vermouth sauce, a bite of rabbit w. braised swiss chard, a bite of (delicious) “calotte de boeuf grillee” w. crispy bone marrow on top, followed by a taste of vegetarian cheese made w. whey, a taste of almond sorbet and a (tiny) taste of a milk chocolate “cremeux.” All delicious. I am so fucking doomed.
It turned out that I wasn’t completely doomed on that particular diet, or while following any of the other crackpot regimes I attempted in the decade of serious and generally unregulated feasting—at least not for the few months of illusory skinniness and good health I briefly enjoyed before the needle on the scale began, inexorably, to quiver upward and I stuffed the offending instrument in the closet and vowed never to weigh myself again.
A few years back, however, as I began to enter the choppy waters of middle age—a time when many of my portlier colleagues were either leaving the fraternity of professional gluttony for healthier occupations or disappearing slowly under the waves—I began to think about taking a last, gasping lunge at the golden ring of good health. After an absence of three or four years, I made an appointment to see the eternally patient and long-suffering Dr. P. When I waddled sheepishly into his office, gasping for breath and with my shirt untucked and covered, as usual, with random stains from a not-so-modest dinner the night before, he shook his head sadly and gave me his best imitation of a disapproving scowl. Dr. P is a chatty, convivial soul in normal times, and over the years we’ve developed an elaborate choreography around my weighing phobia. He distracts me with cheerful pleasantries about the weather or questions about the family while gently herding me, like a skittish barn animal, toward the scale in the corner of his office. Once I’m on the scale, he makes pleasantly diplomatic comments (“It could be worse” or “Not as bad as last year!”) while I hum nervously and gaze at the ceiling. Once he finishes adjusting the weights, he quickly pushes them back to zero so that I won’t see the number and become despondent or overly stressed.
On this visit, however, there were no pleasantries during the ceremonial weigh-in as I looked apprehensively up at the ceiling and hummed to myself. Once Dr. P had made a note of my weight, he pushed the measuring weights back with an authoritative snap, then conducted the rest of the checkup in an ominously perfunctory way. When my blood tests came in later that week, Dr. P called me up with a note of alarm in his voice—sounding, as I later wrote in yet another story about one of my professional dieting adventures, like the engineer of a wallowing, recently stricken ocean liner making a last, desperate call to the bridge. My numbers were spiking, and in all the wrong directions. I weighed close to 280 pounds, up 15 from the last time I’d staggered into his office, and by his calculations, if drastic measures weren’t taken soon, I would be drifting past what one of my brothers calls the dreaded, 300-pound “blimp line” by the next year. Once his patients drifted over that line, he said, there was often no return. Dr. P was prescribing cholesterol-lowering statins for the first time and horse-sized pills to control my blood sugar levels, which had suddenly gone haywire too. He would be introducing me to my new diabetes specialist, a strict, no-nonsense gentleman named Dr. K with a cool, appraising manner, along with my new eye specialist, with whom I should check in at least twice a year for the rest of my increasingly tenuous-sounding life, since people who eat themselves into ravenous diabetic comas, like I was doing, sometimes tended to go blind. And finally, Dr. P said, I should try one last time to lose a little weight and bring some kind of order to my unchecked grazing over the long run, or consider making a change in what he diplomatically, and a little darkly, called my “professional routine.”