The Man Who Ate Everything (14 page)
Read The Man Who Ate Everything Online
Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
Tags: #Humor, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir
And that’s why calories don’t count. For Montignac, “the
calorie theory is probably the greatest ‘scientific swindle’ of the twentieth century.” I like the sound of that.
Armed with my newly gained knowledge of good and evil, I cross the Oakland Bay Bridge and approach my motel in Berkeley with a quickening appetite for an ample feast of proteins, fats, and green vegetables. But the hour is late, and I am lucky that room service is still operating. Dinner is chicken wings, chopped steak, cauliflower, green beans, and caffeine-free diet Pepsi. After a trying transcontinental journey, I customarily reward myself with a little treat to help forget the indignities and humiliations I have suffered. Sometimes the reward is a jumbo family pack of bite-sized Snickers bars. This time I refrain.
Days Two to Five.
Do I still weigh 170 pounds or has Montignac already started to work? I will not know for nearly a week when I return home to my Detecto Doctor’s Scale.
I am in Berkeley to attend three days of baking demonstrations by Professor Raymond Calvel at the Acme Bread Company. Calvel, now eighty-three, is probably still the leading French teacher of bread baking. The Bread Bakers Guild of America has organized the whole thing, and every morning fifty of us meet for breakfast at the motel—coffee and juice and baskets of muffins, Danish pastries, and some of Carvel’s breads, baked the day before.
The problem is I am not allowed to eat any of them. And any minute now I expect my skull to implode in a nightmarish spasm of pain from a caffeine-deprivation headache.
But the pain never comes. I have made the transition to a caffeine-free lifestyle without catastrophe, though I miss the happy rush of mental vitality that real coffee has brought to mankind for centuries. My mind feels at half-mast.
Montignac allows you to eat two kinds of breakfast. The first consists mainly of good carbohydrates—dry whole-grain bread (the only kind of bread he ever allows you to eat at the only permissible time of day), whole-grain cereals, skim milk, artificial
sweetener, low-fat cottage cheese, and decaffeinated coffee. The other breakfast is full of proteins and fats—eggs, ham, sausage, bacon, cheese, and decaffeinated coffee, with cream if you wish. Cream is dietetic in the Montignac Method.
I am not fond of motel-quality whole wheat bread. So every morning before meeting with the Bread Bakers Guild, as soon as room service opens up, I order the biggest American breakfast it sells, plus various side dishes, throw away the toast and the home fries, and feast upon the rest. (You may eat whole fruit—not juice—twenty minutes before a carbohydrate breakfast or an hour before a protein-fat one. Bananas are banned. There are lots of little rules.) Then, at our communal breakfast, I take a bite of Professor Carvel’s bread, chew it awhile, and discreetly spit it out into a paper napkin. Under other circumstances I would kill for a loaf of Professor Carvel’s bread.
Keeping to the Montignac diet at lunch at Acme Bakery is easy because a caterer brings in enough cold cuts, cheese, olives, and salad to distract me from the tables piled high with Acme bread, the best in America. I take dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Lulu in San Francisco, a dramatic new restaurant where everything is grilled or roasted over a huge open wood fire. At Lulu it is child’s play to follow Montignac. I have artichokes with Parmesan cheese, just a little bite of the excellent bread, a few sips of red wine, a plate of eggplant and peppers, and gigantic portions of rib steak, chicken, and lamb. The potatoes look scrumptious, but I follow Montignac’s admonition to “look upon the steaming potato in your neighbor’s dish with the utmost contempt!” For professional reasons, I eat a quarter of a teaspoon of each of five desserts. My friends can hardly tell that I am on a diet.
One evening I have work to do in my motel room. I have heard about a new Chinese restaurant in Berkeley, so I telephone to ask about its specialities, order twice as much food as I can eat, and spend the next half hour in a taxi searching for the restaurant. Back in my room, I dine alone in front of the television on
emerald Prawns, Mandarin Pork, Tofu Hunan Style, and Lemon Chicken—nothing battered and deep-fried and no white rice.
M
ontignac’s book contains all sorts of lists and charts of bad and
g
ood foods. But he lists only foods that French people eat, with scattered concessions to American products, and provides no guidance at all for lovers of Asian food. Most Chinese sauces contain cornstarch, which must surely be an extremely bad carbohydrate, and sugar, which is almost as bad as white bread. I wonder why the Chinese are so skinny.
Japanese food is easier to figure out. Sashimi yes, sushi no.
If Montignac is right, then the distinction universally used by American nutritionists between complex carbohydrates (like pasta, potatoes, and bread) and simple carbohydrates (like sugar and sweets) is not only misleading but possibly harmful, at least to dieters. Traditional nutritionists prescribe a diet low in fat, low in protein, and high in complex carbohydrates. But even complex carbohydrates like bread and potatoes have a high glycemic index and trigger a rush of insulin, while simple carbohydrates like fructose do not. Of course, Michel Montignac is neither a nutritionist nor a doctor. Michel Montignac was director of personnel for Abbots Labs in Europe before he got famous. I will carefully investigate the glycemic index when I get back to New York.
Day Six.
Home again. It is late afternoon. If I weigh myself now, the scale will report a number that is two or three pounds higher than it will be tomorrow morning. I will get discouraged and go on a binge. Better wait.
On my kitchen table stands a towering ziggurat of candy boxes and tins and bags, assembled for my Christmas article on mail-order treats. There are four kinds of chocolate-covered toffee, Rainforest Crunch, hazelnuts and almonds covered in Valrhona chocolate, shortbread, chocolate-dipped macadamia nuts from Maui, a ten-pound slab of bittersweet Merckens chocolate, three flavors of brittle, chocolate truffles, bonbons both dipped and filled, and graham crackers covered in thick, delicious dark
chocolate from Cafe Beaujolais. I pack nearly everything into two bulging shopping bags and send them off to
Vogue.
Let them gorge on bad carbohydrates.
Day Seven.
Down to 167.5! I have lost two and a half pounds in six days—6.66 ounces a day! At this rate it will take me only eighty-four days to lose 560 ounces, precisely the 35 pounds by which the charts tell me I exceed my ideal weight! Eighty-four days is twelve weeks. Eleven to go.
I walk down to Greenwich Village and shop for bran flakes (without forbidden raisins), seven-grain bread, skim milk, diet Sprite, caffeine-free diet Pepsi, French beans and bulbs of fennel, four thick and marbled rib steaks, two ducks, ten pounds of chicken wings (to be roasted, for snacks), a box of NutraSweet, four kinds of French cheeses, low-fat artificially sweetened vanilla yogurt, six varieties of Aidells sausages, a bag of exotic and fabulously expensive salad greens, fresh cured olives from Apulia, and four types of apples. This, with minor variations, will be my diet at home for the next three weeks.
I thumb through a book of Montignac recipes, published in French. I own dozens of French cookbooks filled with dishes that already fit within his rules or can easily be made to do so. But I am not inspired to cook. Slowly, day by day, I am losing interest in cuisine. I wonder if I am suited to any other line of work.
Day Eight.
I awaken so hungry that I eat breakfast before I remember to weigh myself. Better not weigh myself now.
My barber of eight years has gone out of business. This is a complete and total disaster. Normally, I would have a candy bar or two to help me solve the problem. Better not go outside. That’s where the candy stores are.
Day Nine.
167.5. Not quite as breathtaking as the first time I weighed 167.5, two days ago. My rate of weight loss is down to five ounces a day. Maybe something is wrong with my old Detecto Doctor’s Scale.
I dig up the January 1993 issue of
Consumer Reports
and its analysis of bathroom scales. The Health O Meter 840 is the highest rated. The Salter Electronic 971, though rated seventh, is the most accurate and gives the most consistent readings; it must have been downgraded for some other reason. Both use the latest in strain-gauge technology and contain no old-fashioned springs. Both have square white platforms, activate when you step on them, take a tantalizing six seconds to decide what you weigh, and tell you about it in large, red LEDs. The Health O Meter is easier to read, and it measures your weight in half pounds. Neither is as accurate as a full-blown balance-beam scale with sliding weights. But those cost two hundred dollars and up.
I go out and buy one Health O Meter and one Salter. Now my bathroom floor is littered with scales. I warn my wife not to trip on the way to the shower.
Day Twelve.
Today I weigh 166.5, 166.5, and 167, depending on which scale you believe. I slide the old Detecto into the corner and go totally solid-state.
One bowl of bran flakes takes four little envelopes of Equal to make edible. I have become proficient at emptying all four with one deft twist of my wrist.
I feel wired this morning. The sensation is essentially pleasant, but I am suspicious of the coffee and of the person who brewed it before she left for work. I telephone my wife and launch into an interrogation. She finally breaks down and admits that she substituted full-strength Kona beans for my new Thanksgiving-brand French-roast decaf. She can’t stand my coffee any longer. Recently, the
New York Times
ran an article about spouses who sabotage each other’s diets. I did not bother to read it. How wrong I was. Now I know the dangers that lurk on the other side of the bed.
The North American Association for the Study of Obesity is holding a meeting in Milwaukee. Reports of breakthroughs are beginning to appear in the newspapers. I obtain copies of all the abstracts:
· A leading and responsible researcher has announced the invention of an ointment that, applied once a day to the upper legs of women, can shrink the circumference of their thighs by as much as 4.25 centimeters! That’s 1.66 inches. The ointment somehow alters the receptors in the fat cells of the thigh. But the women do not lose weight. The fat goes somewhere else. Their elbows? Their hearts?
· An experimental combination of two commonly used appetite drugs, fenfluramine and phentermine, was shown to produce very impressive weight loss and to lower the subjects’ blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol.
· Drugs are being developed to stimulate beta-3, a receptor in our fatty tissues, in an attempt to burn our body fat more quickly.
· A brain protein called galanin has been identified as the key to our craving for fats. When galanin production is blocked in rats, their weight plummets.
Should I go back to crusty bread and creamy potatoes and wait for the ideal drug? Better stick with Montignac for now.
Day Fourteen.
No improvement. This is depressing. But at least my Health O Meter and my Salter are consistent. This means I am a good shopper. Montignac promises that some people lose two to four pounds a week, others a little less. For me, considerably less.
Although I am no fan of nutritional cliches, I am beginning to worry about the amount of animal fat in my new diet. I have experimented with brown basmati rice and other whole grains, good carbohydrates that can be eaten freely on the diet though never with butter, olive oil, or cheese. But without any of these fats, brown rice tastes even worse than it did in the early seventies. And beans without olive oil or butter hardly qualify as food. So I resort to thick and juicy rib steaks and crisply roasted chickens and ducks whenever I do not have much time to think about dinner. I cook them expertly, and they are always delicious, but they ooze saturated fat. When I have time to think about dinner, I prepare fish with beurre blanc.
“Butter, charcuterie, oil, foie gras, fresh cream, cheese, and wine are all part of the French daily diet, and yet the French suffer from neither obesity nor heart disease,” Montignac writes.
T
his is true. It is a phenomenon widely known as the French paradox.* But if the French do not suffer from obesity and heart disease, then why is everybody in France on the Montignac regime?
*I discuss the French Paradox in “Why Aren’t the French Dropping Like Flies?” in Part One.
When Montignac’s diet first appeared in France, it was attacked by nutritionists there as a “passport to a heart attack.” With each succeeding edition of his books, Montignac put more stress on the difference between bad lipids and good lipids, between saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats, not for losing more weight but for keeping your heart healthy. This makes him sound more and more like your typical nutritionist.
I telephone my doctor and schedule a full set of blood tests on Day Twenty-eight of my diet.
But a ray of hope penetrates my dark forebodings. What the surgeon general does not tell you is that a substantial portion of the population is diet insensitive—their cholesterol and other blood lipids are not much affected by what they eat. Public-health programs and pronouncements are aimed at increasing the greater good, not the good of each one of us. If everybody were diet
-
sensitive, there would be no need for cholesterol-lowering drugs. And if my lipids do not fall on a low-fat diet, they may not soar on a high-fat one.
I sit down at the computer, log on to Medline, and search for “glycemic index.” On this subject, Montignac has his facts approximately right. There are surprising and unexpected differences between carbohydrates; some cause sugar spikes in the blood, and others do not. The complexity of a carbohydrate molecule does not determine how quickly and energetically it raises the level of glucose. A food’s glycemic index depends not only on
the raw ingredient itself but also on how it has been processed and the form in which it is eaten. Fiber eaten with other foods reduces their glycemic effect.
Day Eighteen.
Both scales agree—166 pounds. Only a half-pound improvement, but better than nothing.
This evening we will attend a cocktail party at restaurant Daniel for Daniel Boulud’s terrific new cookbook. Cocktail parties are times of greatest danger for Montignac. “British cocktail parties are some of the most tedious to endure. Do not count on being served dinner before 9:30 or 10 o’clock.” But food cooked by Daniel Boulud is always a time of greatest pleasure for me. Tonight will be no problem. I have decided to eat and drink as though I am already in Phase II. How much damage can I do?
In Phase II, although bad carbohydrates are still banned and fruit must still be eaten in isolation, other deviations from the strict rules of Phase I are permitted two or three times a day. Scallops, oysters, foie gras, lentils with pork, for example, are prohibited in Phase I because they combine fat with sugar or starch but are considered only minor deviations in Phase II, as is a half liter of wine a day—three full glasses—always to be drunk with food. So I eat the filet mignon with cranberries, the oysters and caviar with lemongrass and cream, little slivers of
rouget,
and layers of scallops and black truffle, fastidiously leaving behind the little pieces of toast on which most of these are served. Halfway through the party, I begin drinking wine.
Montignac loves wine, though when he repeatedly recommends that we all drink young Bordeaux, it is hard to tell whether the advice is dietary or aesthetic. He goes so far as to include a seven-page chart entitled “How to Cure Yourself with Wine,” based on the publications of a Dr. Maury. In the left-hand column is a list of diseases beginning with acidosis and running through neurosis and on to ulcers, and in the right-hand column are lists of wines that will remedy the diseases on the left. For acidosis, drink Pouilly-Fuisse and Sancerre; for allergies, try Corbieres,
Medoc, Minervois, and Ventoux; for anemia, turn to Cahors, Cotes-de-Nuit, C
o
tes-de-Beaune, Cotes-de-Graves, Pomerol, and Madiran; for angina, open a Medoc, a Julienas, or a Moulin-a-Vent. And that covers only half the
A’s.
D
ay Nineteen.
Disaster has struck. My weight is 168.5, up 2.5 pounds. I am gripped by despair. I guess I am not ready for phase II.
Maybe there are worse things than obesity. Hunger, for example, or a life without Scotch. Maybe I should quit and return to enthusiastic random eating. But then what would I write about?
I leave the bathroom, wait a few minutes, come back, and weigh myself again. Only a half-pound improvement. And now the two scales differ by two full pounds. The Health O Meter seems particularly fickle.
My wife has finally crumbled. She has joined me on the Montignac diet. Twelve pounds from now, she’ll be skinnier than Kate Moss.
Day Twenty.
I have returned to my downward path: back to 166 on one scale, 165.5 on the other. This is a new low. Yesterday was a hideous aberration.
A grand lunch in Chinatown with friends: roast suckling pig, roast duck, cuttlefish, clam soup, stir-fried fish cake with pickled mustard greens, squid with Chinese broccoli, grouper with a white pepper coating, and a plate of four types of sausage and cured duck. I avoid the tea and the white rice, and worry a little about the sugars in the marinades and the sauces. Otherwise, Montignac imposes no restrictions on me, even in Phase I.
On television tonight,
PrimeTime Live
has a segment on the Montignac diet. I count at least one error in every sentence. Montignac himself is over six feet tall, slim without being gaunt, and has been on Phase II for nearly ten years. He looks nice. I would look nice, too, with yearly revenues of eighteen million dollars.
Day Twenty-one.
No change. What a relief! I had feared the consequences of unbridled Chinatown feasting even though everything I ate was Montignac-approved (or would have been if Montignac were not so French provincial).
I telephone Louis Aronne, M.D., director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Program at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center, to ask about insulin resistance and obesity. He is not a fan of the Montignac Method, which he characterizes as “Atkins revisited,” a reference to a once-popular high-fat, high-protein diet considered unhealthy because, unlike the Montignac Method, it eliminated carbohydrates entirely and led to metabolic imbalances. But he concedes that some people do poorly on the high-carbohydrate diet recommended by the American nutrition establishment. A substantial minority of the population does suffer from insulin resistance, he tells me; their excess insulin causes an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase to appear on the surface of their fat cells, and this brings additional fat into the cells. As Montignac says, a low-carbohydrate diet does seem to suppress insulin secretion, making it harder to store fat. But Aronne worries that, even if adherents to the Montignac Method lose weight initially, their bodies may soon find ways around it.
And Aronne tells me something new: he suspects that insulin resistance may be one cause of high total cholesterol and triglycerides and low HDLs (good cholesterol). If I am insulin resistant, then my blood test next week may show an improvement in my cholesterol and triglycerides despite the amount of saturated fat I have been eating.
Aronne believes that drugs are the real future of obesity treatment. “Before now obesity has been seen as either a behavioral problem or a moral failing,” he says. “But now, for the first time, we are entering a period of rational medical therapy.”
Day Twenty-two.
Progress again. One scale says 165 and the other 165.5. I celebrate with a lunch of scrambled eggs, a half
pound of bacon, Rebl
e
chon cheese made in France from raw milk and smuggled into the United States, and decaffeinated coffee, more Chinese food for dinner.
People tell me that I look thinner. It’s probably my new haircut.
Day Twenty-five.
My scales have gone haywire! They are a pound and a half apart! I spend half an hour stepping first on one, then on the other, then on the floor. I move the scales around the bathroom, and they change their minds, slightly. Then I try standing on them in different ways, my heels close together or wide apart. I was penny-wise and pound-foolish to go electronic.
I telephone two leading French nutritionists, Marian Apfel-baum, M.D., and Jacques Fricker, M.D., both of the Hopital Bichat in Paris. Neither is impressed with the Montignac phenomenon. Fricker concedes that foods rich in fiber and those with a low glycemic index assuage our hunger more effectively than others, but he says that without some high-glycemic starches in our diet, any weight lost is more likely to come from lean muscle mass than fat reserves.
Apfelbaum has been quoted as saying that losing weight permanently is more difficult than being cured of cancer. If people temporarily lose weight with the Montignac method, he tells me, it is not because the diet is particularly clever but because it is a diet. That is, it focuses our attention on what we eat. I ask him whether lowering one’s insulin level by eliminating most carbohydrates will automatically prevent weight gain. His answer is no. For centuries before Europeans arrived, Eskimos had subsisted on fish and sea mammals—all fat and protein and virtually no carbohydrates. Yet in their native state, Eskimos were fatty and obese.
But Apfelbaum is pleased that after thirty years in which hundreds of fad diets were imported from the United States to
F
rance, at last one has traveled in the other direction.
Day Twenty-eight.
My weight is at a new low, 163.5 and 164. But in only ten days my wife has already lost six pounds. I travel uptown to my doctor’s office to have my blood taken Results back in two days.
Day Thirty. No change in weight. Every newspaper you can think of has published an article or two about Michel Montignac in the past year. Everybody stresses the foie gras and wine part. Nobody investigates the science or tries the diet for very long. Today I do a computer search for newspaper articles about Montignac in the eighties, before he discovered the Montignac Method.
I come up with something disturbing. Back in 1987, when Montignac was a personnel consultant, the
Financial Times
reported that “he has resurrected, amended, and renamed the ancient study known as numerology… . Numerimetrics, Montignac’s name for his version of the arcane system, assigns a number to each letter. Added in various combinations, the numbers give totals that, he says, are clues to a person’s personality, strengths, weaknesses, and aptitudes.”
Late in the afternoon, my blood test comes back from the lab. The results are terrific! Despite the tons of highly saturated fat I have been consuming, my cholesterol is unchanged, my HDLs are improved by more than 10 percent, and my triglycerides, which had been in the abnormally high 400s, are now in the normal range! This is precisely the result that Aronne suggested might occur with people who are insulin resistant.
I walk down to Dean & DeLuca to buy ten pounds of cheese. As I enter the store, a feeling of deep sadness washes over me. All around me is a celebration of foods from around the world, baskets of bread, trays of tarts and cakes, rows of jams and condiments and olive oils, pasta in every conceivable shape, and the smell of dark coffee beans grown on four continents—a profusion that has never failed to bring me a rush of joy. But now, for the first time in my life, I feel completely apart from it. I buy my cheese and leave the store.
Day
Thirty-one.
This is the last mandatory day of my diet. my weight is at a new low: 163 and 163.5. Total weight lost: 6.5 or 7 pounds. Weight lost per day: 3.47 ounces.
My diet is over; my promise to
Vogue
complete. Now I am free to eat my favorite foods—pies, pierogi, pistachios, pizza, popcorn, popovers, potatoes, puff pastry—and that only covers the P’s. On the other hand, at 3.47 ounces a day, I can reach my ideal weight in 129 days.
I doubt that I will last that long. But I can surely stick to Montignac for just one more month.
January 1994
