Page 21 of The Husband Diet
This actually works, because once you’ve managed that, you don’t want to swallow it anymore.
Eat everything in moderation.
That simple, huh?
Put knife and fork down between mouthfuls.
That’ll be interesting to watch when you have two kids at the same table playing tennis with their food. It’s a question of when I canpick upsaid knife and fork.
So there they were – the eight things I’d never, ever thought of and nor had any other woman on Earth.Really? If I cut my intake by 50 per cent, I’d swallow less calories? The asshole who wrote this syuff was full of it and had certainly never had to starve himself (a woman, even a thin one, would never have written such bullshit). What was he on? La-la drugs? And where did he live? Down a rabbit hole?
Determined to have a better understanding, I began to observe what thin people ate. Did they really eat less than me? Then how come everywhere I turned in the street there were slim jims gobbling down hotdogs, ice-cream sundaes, nachos –with salsa– chicken curries and all the food you could possibly imagine? And at every hour of the day? Once, I had to pop to the pharmacy in the middle of the night and I ran into a man wolfing down something that looked disgusting but smelled delicious. I almost asked him where he got it from.
How was I expected to ignore food that literally surrounded me 24/7, filling my nostrils, day in, day out, from the doughnuts I found at work in the mornings, to the snack trays that passed my office on their way up to the suites? Not to mention the dining hall, laden with delicious fancy foods.
My boss, good old Harold Farthington and owner of Farthington Hotels, had given me access to the same food to which our guests were treated. And everywhere else I went there was great grub: carts with hotdogs on the streets, pastries in shop windows, mouth-watering fragrances wafting out of restaurants and cafés. Making it home clean and empty-stomached was impossible without being ambushed by a drive-thru sign or a plaza teeming with diners, bakeries and restaurants. This was, after all, the United States – land of plenty too much.
Thus, you can understand how grocery shopping was a real torture treat for me. Since Paul was preparing snacks for the kids at my place, having picked them up from school, I shopped alone. Word of advice if you’re on a diet: never shop alone. Food will ambush you. So, bring your trusty back-up – someone who will still love you after you’ve verbally assaulted them for not minding their own goddamn business. Andalwaysshop on a full stomach. Otherwise you’ll get all sorts of food fantasies and end up buying the whole supermarket.
Once, I had a dream that I got locked in this shopping center for a ten-week period of closure. They were the happiest ten weeks of my life. Aisles and aisles of everything I always (and constantly) wanted. Hot chocolate? Choose your brand. Reese’s Pieces peanut butter candy? All you can eat. And don’t worry about your shrinking clothes – the plus-size department is on the third floor.
So this new me, I’d decided, was going to eat properly. Not to attract Ira, but to look better and feel better about myself. No more caramel-coated popcorn, no more chocolate (I know it sounds heinous and unnecessarily cruel, but that’s how I did it the first time), no more bread and butter, no more mayo, no more fried stuff, no more desserts, no more nothing. Just good, wholesome food. Half the quantities I used to eat (see Golden Rule Number One). And a trip to the gym every other day. There was one in the hotel and I’d been given an honorary membership years ago when I went back to work after Maddy’s birth. Yeah, as if I had the time.
Maybe someone should invent a washer-dryer that’s pedal-powered, or maybe build a ‘pedal while you do the dishes’ thingy. That would break the world record of the most bought and least used piece of shit ever.
I squeezed my Kia van into a space big enough for a Mini Cooper right opposite Food World, debating whether or not to get a shopping cart. If I was going to buy myself some diet food and eat half as much (was I really sure I wanted to go through with this?), surely I didn’t need a shopping cart. But you know me – soon I’d be standing at the checkout, breaking my bladder for a pee and craning my neck looking for a basket, juggling my low- to no-fat items in my arms and evil-eyeing the usual old lady who had bought half the store and wouldn’t leave me an inch of space on the conveyor belt.
I decided to do a dummy-run diet first. So I grabbed a small basket and picked my way through the healthy foods section which, in my local supermarket, was way at the back. In fact, I’d never even noticed it before. Right. Here I was. So. Low-fat cream cheese. Rice cakes for when I was sick of melba toast. Melba toast when I got sick of rice cakes. Parma ham? Are you kidding me? Pay twenty-seven dollars a pound when I could get it for free from my dad’s Italian shop? Yoghurt. Low-fat, of course. Cereal? Muesli, to help the digestive system, if you know what I mean. Which reminded me. Skimmed milk. Fruit, lettuce, tomatoes (no mayo, no bacon). What else? Not much, apparently. I turned the corner and… ooh! Low-calorie jam? Tucked inside low-caloriedoughnuts? And, further down, low-fat muffins? Unbelievable!
There were shelves and shelves of low-calorie desserts, from tiramisu to apple pie. How was this even possible? And in the freezer, low-calorie lasagne.Andcannelloni. Shepherd’s pie? Chocolate ice cream? Surely I’d died and gone to diet heaven. How could it be possible to eat all these fantastic mouth-watering foods and still lose weight? And why did it have to come out of a box if I could make my own?
Oh, why was good food fattening? Why couldn’t we just live an easy life, eating what we wanted, like animals? Have you ever seen a fat tiger? Or a fat fly? I did everything I could to avoid delving inside me. I ate because I was sad. I always had been. The brief gorgeous stint in my early twenties had simply been a commercial break in the long miserable movie of my life.
Accepting I needed to change wasn’t a gung-ho idea or a knee-jerk reaction to Ira’s infidelity like it may seem. It was a painful process – a daily ordeal with just me and my shortcomings. Me and my weaknesses. And my goddamn fear of failing again and again. I was sick of failing, sick of trying to lose weight all my life. So in the end, I’d given up.
Skinny women had absolutely no idea what we were going through, every single day of our lives. Therapists made me laugh, especially thin ones. Granted, they were balanced. But I’d be balanced, too, if I’d had a normal life, possibly in someone else’s skin.
My mouth already watering, I juggled all my stuff – and there was loads of it – to the checkout, paid and went home. Paul was going on a date and waiting for me by the door.
‘I thought you’d gonedietshopping,’ he sighed, peeking into the bags.
‘I have,’ I answered, hustling by him in my haste to sit down to a succulent dinner and not feel guilty about it for once.
And so after I’d fed, washed and put the kids to bed, I rubbed my hands together and reached for my succulent, guilt-free foods.
Guilt wasn’t the right word. Disappointed was more like it. The shepherd’s pie, which I’d had a major hankering for, was about as big as the palm of my hand. All that big, big box and cellophane to protectthis? I opened the lasagne as well, just to make sure I hadn’t been gypped twice. There it was – Golden Rule Number One. This was less than 50 per cent of what I was expecting. Much less. It wasn’t fair, considering I’d paid double for it. If I’d made my own, it would have been free. Ah, but myown, I argued, wouldn’t have been low-fat. So chin up and dig in!
Sighing, I nuked the lasagne and shepherd’s pie. There was no point in lying to myself by thinking that the lasagne would be enough. I mean, look at it. I could hide it with my hand cupped over it. At least I was being honest with myself. I know people who would have defrosted one thing at a time, pretending to have good intentions when they knew very well they were going back into the kitchen to nuke the second box as well. At least I was straightforward and I knew what I wanted. And right now, all I wanted was to swing by Le Tre Donne restaurant and have my zia Maria cook me all my favorites inmyhelping sizes – not this microscopic processed bullshit.
I poured myself a glass of Nero d’Avola red wine and reached for my prettiest place mat, the one with the linen fringes. As per all the weight loss websites, if you set the table nicely, with maybe a candle or a rose and some pretty crystal glasses, you could fool yourself into enjoying your meal. Sighing, I set my place with small plates and cutlery. From Maddy’s old plastic toddler set, to be exact, which was the smallest I could find. Andstillit didn’t look like much.
Gathering my provisions on a tray, I went into the living room and flicked on the TV just in time for the BBC America program,Fantasy Homes by the Sea. People wrote in the requirements of their dream home and every week, searching families would be featured. This week it was a British couple looking to move to Tuscany. The host of the show had found them a lovely farmhouse in Chianti, with acres of vineyards, outbuildings for guests and even a pool. I instantly sat up, ignoring my measly meal. Now that was something I’d swap a tiramisu for.
The host walked us around the property and I found I was hanging from her lips. It had everything I wanted, including my annexes. But when she revealed the price, I winced, thinking that at least once in her life, Marcy had been right. She’d always told me to marry as rich as possible, average-income guys being, according to her, cheaper and much meaner than the rest. Not that she spoke from experience, having been raised in the lap of luxury, with a silver spoon stuck down her throat.
My parents both came from high-income Italian families. My paternal grandparents, the Cantellis, owned a successful citrus conserve factory in Sicily while Marcy’s, the Bettarinis, had olive groves and vineyards in Tuscany – very much like this one on TV – and shrewdly marketed their own brands of olive oil and wine. Then in the Fifties for reasons beyond me, both families had emigrated to Boston. I wish I’d been born and raised in Italy. I wish my nonna Silvia hadn’t sold up and invested in the USA. Why the hell would someone want to leave beautiful climes, a simple life and happy faces? I’ll never understand. Here in the States, it was always rush, run, rush, hurry hurry hurry. The silence and slow-paced life in Italy was more appropriate to my solitary nature.
The Cantellis had met the Bettarinis at a wedding in Boston a few months after they’d immigrated. You know, those big Italian weddings à la theGodfather, where there’s enough food for even the relatives still living in Italy. And then amid the singing, the dancing and the food, boy’s eyes meet girl’s. Only this time it was more complicated.
