Join me, won’t you, in the diet book drinking game. Here’s how it works: Every time you read the following words, you down a shot of tequila. Ready?
Yummy
Veggies
Detox
Green smoothie
Humanely raised
Usually, by the time I’m on Page 10 I’m ready to take off all my clothes and lick the necks of strangers — and I don’t even live in Florida. So for your safety, and my own, I’ve mixed traditional diet books with some that are half memoir and half instruction, offering a sprinkle of inspiration. Let me take two Advil and begin.
As a title it’s quite a mouthful, but DRESSING ON THE SIDE: (And Other Diet Myths Debunked): 11 Science-Based Ways to Eat More, Stress Less, and Feel Great About Your Body (Grand Central, $26) is simple and pragmatic. The nutritionist Jaclyn London thinks better (not perfect) health depends on eliminating your “self-shaming” and “cognitive distortions about your own abilities” — meaning she wants us to stop mooning over everyone else’s Instagram pages and focus on achieving our personal best. There are common-sense distinctions here between fact and fiction, and simple-to-understand nutritional workarounds for all sorts of real-life situations. So: Yes to amping up the vegetables and fruits, and yes to drinking more water, for many reasons. No to detoxing, a pseudoscience word that means nothing. Your liver and kidneys are detoxing as we speak, with no help from kale.
The title of this book should really be “Stop It. Stop It Right Now.” That powdered collagen I’m mixing into water? It’s doing pretty much nothing. Coconut oil smells good, but doesn’t actually burn belly fat. Sorry. And sorry, Tom Brady, food can’t change the pH of your blood. But how about drinking apple cider vinegar? Oops: It’s neither antibacterial nor an appetite suppressant. Well, it is, in the sense that you’ve just set your esophagus on fire, but otherwise, no.
London also points out that even if something is true, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it. For example, there are numerous studies indicating that intermittent fasting (going from eight to 24 hours without eating anything, sometimes several days a week) may in fact put you in a state of ketosis, where fat is used for energy instead of sugar in the form of glucose. But the other thing low blood sugar does is fuzz your vision (not ideal if you read a lot), prevent you from focusing at work and mess with your ability to exercise. I have fasted. Probably you have too. Here’s the SparkNotes revelation: You feel bad; then you feel really really good; then you want to die; then you Hoover up whatever’s in the refrigerator.
When an author starts off with “I’m here to tell you …” I’m pretty sure the rest of that sentence will be worthless. And here, in Jonathan Bailor’s THE SETPOINT DIET: The 21-Day Program to Permanently Change What Your Body “Wants” to Weigh (Hachette, $27), is the rest of that sentence: “you can be a member of that exclusive ‘club’ of naturally thin people.”
Super.
Still, what’s more seductive than the idea that we can change our setpoint: the number on the scale, give or take 10 or 15 pounds, that our body seems to return to again and again? Bailor has come up with the SANE diet, which suggests that not all calories are created equal and that in fact different food calories have varying degrees of Satiety, Aggression (meaning, how quickly those calories flood your body with glucose), Nutrition and Efficiency. You can become a fat-burning machine by chucking some of the foods — basically, anything that makes life worth living — and consuming a lot more of others. (Did someone say lean protein and veggies?) Although Bailor isn’t a medical doctor — in fact, he created fitness videos at Microsoft — there’s some solid science behind what he says. Depending on what you eat and when you eat it, you can make a difference. The problem? It’s the kind of eating that demands you think of food more as fuel than, say, a source of pleasure. And you have to do it forever. I know I couldn’t. But here’s my favorite Bailor factoid. In a chart on all the things that increase your setpoint — that is, keep you at a higher weight — along with starchy, sugary foods and diet pills, he lists the news. I’m confident that when the Southern District of New York releases all it knows about Trump’s various businesses, my pants will be looser.
I admit Bryan Kozlowski’s THE JANE AUSTEN DIET: Austen’s Secrets to Food, Health and Incandescent Happiness (Turner, cloth, $31.99; paper, $16.99) is probably better as a literary romp than as a dieting tome. But Austen fans and superfans (ahem) will enjoy being reminded of how smart she actually is about our health, and how she uses food, eating and exercise as shorthand for character. Kozlowski contends that Austen’s embrace of body diversity (Anne Elliot in “Persuasion” is desirable and petite; Lydia Bennet is equally alluring as a curvy, “stout, well-grown girl”) and subtle recognition of the mind-body connection (good health and happy spirits are intimately intertwined) put her ahead of her time. And in “Austenworld,” only her nonsensical characters become romantically attached to food (Dr. Grant, the clergyman in “Mansfield Park,” lived to “eat, drink and grow fat”). There are Regency-era recommendations for exercise (all that walking) and tinctures for good health that have at least some basis in reality. (Dandelion tea, popular in Austen’s novels for “liver disorder,” has been shown to maintain the proper flow of bile.)
Perhaps most delightful is the reminder of a classic exchange in “Pride and Prejudice” that every woman should emulate. When Darcy and Lizzie Bennet are at a party and he comments to his friends that her body is “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me,” Lizzie’s reaction is to crumple into a ball and cry. Oh no, wait, it’s not! Here’s her real reaction: She thinks he’s ridiculous. And then she laughs with her friends.
The health writer Virginia Sole-Smith began asking what influences our relationship to food and eating after her daughter, Violet, was born with a heart defect that required three open-heart surgeries and made her phobic about eating. Violet had to learn, slowly, that food was safe. That experience, which was perhaps even more traumatic for the parents than the little girl, set Sole-Smith on a journey to discover why eating has become so fraught — how Americans’ anxieties about what we put in our mouths have engendered entirely new forms of disordered eating. Before reading THE EATING INSTINCT: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America (Holt, $28) I thought I knew about every manner of eating disorder. I did not. For example, there is Arfid, or avoidant-restrictive food intake disorder, which is an extreme form of “picky eater.” Orthorexia is an unhealthy obsession with healthy food. Although Sole-Smith raises a lot of questions that she doesn’t answer and indulges in a little more hand-wringing than someone with my philosophy of food (which can be summed up as “eat perfectly, eat badly, die anyway”) can stomach, her book makes interesting reading. And if you follow more than five people who hashtag #cleaneating on Instagram, you might ask yourself a few questions about your own food proclivities.
Proust may have had his madeleines, but Tommy Tomlinson has his mother’s banana pudding. It will not be lost on the reader that a memoir about the pain of growing up fat in America will make you run to the refrigerator. The man can write about food (and everything else). In THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America (Simon & Schuster, $27), Tomlinson talks about how, when you weigh north of 450 pounds, your size is never far from your mind. Clothing, restaurants, seats in sports stadiums, proximity to bathrooms (because if you’re fat, your bladder is under constant pressure), even sex: You navigate the world with the realization that embarrassment may always be right around the corner. His book looks at the culture of obesity in America as well as at his own personal (slow, ongoing) weight-loss journey. Food is his constant in a poor childhood, and when he’s older, and sometimes spending days alone, it’s a bulwark against loneliness. “On those days when the gravity of solitude tries to pin me down, fast food serves as a little bridge to the other side,” he writes. “Sometimes, when I’m in a creative rut, I’ll take a drive to get out of the house and see things with a fresh eye. Almost always, I’ll end up in a drive-through somewhere. Maybe I’ll sit in the car and people-watch. Maybe I’ll just take my food home. But at least, I tell myself, I’ve been out among people for a while. I’ve tried to be human.”
“The Elephant in the Room” is quite a beautiful book, and for anyone who has ever loved a person of not just a few extra pounds but 100 or more — and wondered, “How the heck did that happen?” — it will make you understand in a way you didn’t before.
