14

Five Familiar Faces

Sharon Leibowitz is forty-three, married, doesn’t work outside the home, and leads an active social life. She plays tennis regularly and when she doesn’t she either jogs or takes a vigorous walk.

Sharon is hip to the latest trends in diet—has been for years—and she and her friends are all into eating “lite.” Sharon and her two (sometimes three) friends have lunch together daily at one of their three favorite restaurants. The restaurants differ in what they have to offer, but Sharon’s and her friends’ food choices are always limited to salads (chicken, tuna, or plain) and sometimes broiled or steamed fish, with no oil or butter—and no salt. Dinner is not much different: broiled chicken (without the skin) or broiled fish and more salad. When the ladies are together and want a snack, fruit is the food of preference because it’s high in fiber and low in fat.

These ladies want to keep the fat off and they believe this diet will do it, for so they have been told. They are all eating right ’cause they’re eating lite.

Sharon has some problems, though, most of which she can share with her friends. But one problem she cannot share, lest she expose her carefully guarded secret lifestyle.

Yes, she freely shares the fact that she feels cold—chilled to the bone, in fact, most of the time. She also tells her friends how she feels tight and tense, especially in her stomach, and suffers from severe constipation. Also, she is nervous and rather high-strung, although she is emotionally cooler when and if it comes to sex with her husband—and these things, too, she freely shares, because her three friends can all relate: they have similar experiences. “From stress,” they tell each other.

What Sharon doesn’t share with her friends is what she eats when she is alone and away from their company. God forbid they should see or know what she does! Little does she know that her friends are doing the same.

A half-pound of cheese with crackers, lots of butter spread over bagels, a half-gallon of frozen yogurt or low-fat ice cream at one sitting (one standing, actually), and more of the stuff she is not supposed to be eating but is compelled to indulge in to secretive excess to compensate for her extremely limited and nutritionally deficient “looking good” diet.

Sharon’s mom, a generation older and a helluva lot wiser, does not quite get her daughter’s lite food trip. If this “lite diet” is so great, then why is her daughter’s hair so dry and brittle? Why is her skin looking papery and not vibrant? And those hips, oy veh!—all that diet and exercise, but they really haven’t changed a bit! But she holds her tongue: experience has taught her, Sharon wouldn’t listen anyway.

Is there a little Sharon in you?

Hank Thomson, fifty-two, a determined winner of an attorney—more concerned with money and the law than he is with justice—is an aggressive, robust fellow with a red face, quite a bit overweight, and considered a “type-A asshole” by others in the business.

Hank is married. His wife dislikes him immensely but stays with him for the money. His two kids don’t think much of him, either. He is loud, domineering, and demanding—characteristics he uses (he thinks) to his advantage when dealing with his adversaries: his family, other attorneys, or naive juries.

His wife cooks his bacon and eggs every morning (she feels she has to) and she never questions him about where he eats dinner because it’s not worth being yelled at. The kids have to have breakfast with him, but at least they don’t see him on weekends. He spends that time with his girlfriend, and Mom doesn’t even know it, or maybe she does but chooses not to see it.

Bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning with lots of coffee, hamburger or steak for lunch with a couple of scotches-on-the-rocks, and for dinner, more meat, potatoes, and more alcohol. Lots more. Hank’s diet consists of high protein, fat, and some carbohydrate in the form of white toast or potatoes. Vegetables are out of the question. (And dessert? Her name is Julie.)

Hank is killing himself, but if he has his way about it, he’ll take down those around him first.

Bill Tanden is sixteen, on the high school basketball team—great player too, and much appreciated and liked by all his classmates. Bill is a good-looking guy who loves the girls but doesn’t have any luck with them.

It’s his face. The acne. And not a little: lots and lots of it. He has lots of gas, too, but he usually hides that more successfully than the zits.

Both Bill’s parents work, so his food at home consists of whatever he can grab. Bill doesn’t really think in terms of “meals”; his biological clock is a combination stopwatch and alarm clock. Bill’s notion of dietary planning is “getting something into my stomach”—a meal to Bill is often milk and cold meat sandwiches or pizza, hot dogs, TV dinners, and sometimes just milk and cookies.

The dermatologist says it’s a common skin problem Bill will grow out of and prescribes a topical that only produces large craters on Bill’s pizza face.

Poor Bill. He’s fermenting, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Jill Cameron is an attractive lady, even though she is a little thin, a little pale, and looks somewhat older than her twenty-six years.

A vegetarian for ten years, she tried the raw foods and vegan diets but couldn’t stick with them, so she settled on what she believes is a healthy compromise. Jill often may be found preaching the religion of “good foods and bad foods.” She spends a large amount of time trying to convince people that her diet is the diet for them—going so far as to say it will make them more spiritual, more clear, and most of all, it will make them healthier and more energetic than they ever thought possible.

Jill talks a good game; her sweet mannerisms make her all the more convincing.

Jill started her health regimen years ago because she was told she could cure her severe Candida (systemic yeast infection) problem with the proper diet, especially if she avoided animal flesh and substituted soy protein for animal products. Her belief in vegetarianism is so strong she is unwilling to consider any connection with her diet and her condition of low thyroid, severe digestive distress, and low energy. For energy, she hits Starbucks a few times a day for her lattes, unaware of how great a role this stimulant plays in her overall diet.

While she calls herself a vegetarian, her diet actually contains few vegetables. It consists mostly of “natural junk food”—soy products, sugar, chocolate, muffins, scones, bread, and other flour products made with free-radical-producing vegetable oils, all of which conspires to throw her into deep depression, exacerbated by feelings of profound isolation. So par for the course have these feelings become that it never occurs to Jill that they could be connected in any way to her fanaticism about diet.

In ten years, her yeast problems are still not actually cured. In fact, they are worse than ever, but she now has a prescription from her doctor for the problem.

Jill has become a prisoner of the Unreal Zone, a place where people go who are food-obsessed and diet-dependent. She is a believer and—despite what she thinks and feels—she is not alone.

Mrs. Margaret Page is sixty-four, a widow who lives alone, though her three grown children visit her regularly. Mrs. Page is a sprightly lady with a few problems. Her blood pressure is slightly elevated, and her bones are fragile. She has been told by her doctor not to worry, just to continue taking her blood pressure medicine, drink lots of milk, eat bananas because they are high in potassium, and take extra calcium. She’s always been a good patient and does everything her doctor says. Nothing has changed—at least, not for the better.

Margaret eats mostly vitamin supplements, prescription drugs, chicken, sugar, and lots of dairy products (“for calcium”). What this poor, sweet lady has not been told is that all those drugs and sugar are actually contributing to her lack of calcium, and taking all the calcium supplements in the world won’t do any good. While her three to four bananas daily may be high in potassium, they are also high in sugar, which is depleting her body of the vital minerals it needs to correct her problems. They also are quietly helping to make her feel cold—and increasingly, strangely depressed and fearful—at night.

It’s so difficult, isn’t it?

I mean, who are you supposed to believe? Everything is so confusing!