I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting

by Rebecca Harrington

At three thirty my caffeine-withdrawal headache is so bad that I break down and buy a tall black coffee at Starbucks. It is delicious and my headache immediately goes away, but I do experience guilt. However, it is imperative to not have a headache when playing a super-competitive game of basketball. This time, I invite two friends to the basketball court and we play Horse for forty-five minutes. I am the worst at it by far, but I have a lot of energy from all those beans.

  I break my fast with a steak dinner, just as Carmelo Anthony did when he told a crowd of reporters, “I surrender.” The steak is superlative, and I greatly enjoy the accompanying bread. I also surrender.

  At the end of the Daniel Fast, I feel the usual relief one feels at the end of a diet. It is hard not to have a cookie when you want it. But does this diet deserve the consternation that many sports analysts gave it? Of this I am unsure.

  Is the Daniel Fast boring? Yes. Does it get tiring to eat oodles of beans without much seasoning? Absolutely. Would this diet be even harder if you are a pro athlete of Carmelo Anthony’s stature and skill level? With my new appreciation for the difficulty of throwing a large orange ball through a circular net atop a pole, I suspect so. But is this worse than what Jackie and Marilyn had to put up with their whole lives? Does it hold a candle to the travails of dietetic folk hero Gwyneth Paltrow? Absolutely not! In conclusion, men are babies when it comes to diets. NBA superstars are less hard-core than the average American teen girl the week before prom!

  I Tried Dolly Parton’s Diet

  “I

  tried every diet in the book,” Dolly Parton, a woman after my own heart, once said. “I tried some that weren’t in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets.”

  But Dolly does have a subtle and interesting distinction in the world of dieting. She actually has an iconic diet named after her. The Cabbage Soup Diet is also known as the Dolly Parton Diet and sometimes known as the TWA Stewardess Diet (?). I didn’t know that either until I googled “Dolly Parton” and “Diet” together. The more you know.

  I have never actually seen any evidence that Dolly did the Cabbage Soup Diet in particular. She did say that she once saw a diet named after her in a magazine and tried it. “It had nothing to do with me,” she told People magazine. “But I thought I might as well see if I can lose weight on my own diet.” And hopefully the Cabbage Soup Diet was what she was referring to? I don’t know.

  Preparation

  The Cabbage Soup Diet looks incredibly, incredibly gross. If you look up pictures of cabbage soup online you will see what I mean. It looks like a poisonous stew that would kill someone in the last act of a medieval play, and it is an odd magenta color because of the canned tomatoes in it.

  Apparently, you usually have to go on the Cabbage Soup Diet for seven days, but I decide to do it for only two. Cabbage soup allegedly is quite violent to your digestive system. I’m sure Dolly would agree that brevity is probably best in these circumstances.

  It’s not like you are only eating cabbage soup on the Cabbage Soup / Dolly Parton / TWA Stewardess Diet. You can eat other things! One of the days, you can have some fruit along with your cabbage soup. Another day you can have some vegetables and as much cabbage soup as a girl could possibly want! You can also have a baked potato on the vegetable day, but Dolly once said that every time she ever “fell off of” a diet, it was because of potatoes. So I will probably avoid them.

  Day 1

  The general order of the Cabbage Soup Diet is 1) cabbage soup with only fruit, 2) cabbage soup with only vegetables. You are supposed to do the fruit day first, but I switch it up because vegetables work better for me the first day. I have to go out to lunch and dinner, and ordering vegetables is far less obnoxious than asking for a fruit plate. Ordering a fruit plate is just asking people to hate you (veteran dieters, take note!).

  In the morning, I decide to make my first batch of cabbage soup. I chop up an entire head of cabbage and combine it with canned tomatoes, onions, carrots, and a slight pinch of garlic. While it is cooking, I open a window. It smells like burnt rubber, which is not something you would necessarily associate with cabbage.

  After that, I decide to go out to lunch. When Dolly goes out to lunch, sometimes men spontaneously erupt in applause and Dolly says things like, “I don’t even know them.” When I go to lunch, I realize that I forgot I left cabbage soup on the stovetop with the stove still on. It dawns on me when I am about an hour into a non-applause-ridden repast of unadorned carrot. I excuse myself to my lunch friend and rush home to the pot and realize that, though reduced, the soup still exists and did not burn down the apartment. I am relieved, and as a treat I serve myself a bowl of cabbage soup. It tastes like boiled cabbage with ketchup on it.

  Later that evening, over a plate of boiled okra and cauliflower (Dolly likes okra but only the fried kind), I think about Dolly and her mysterious husband, Carl. No member of the public has seen Carl for forty years. Apparently Carl has only seen Dolly perform once. His likeness is not even in Dollywood (the Dolly Parton theme park). Dolly put it this way: “Carl said, ‘I want to go up there any time I want, and I don’t want somebody coming out of the museum and telling me, ‘You’re Carl.’”

  Dolly tells many stories about Carl, despite his ostensible absence. When she is at home with him she “teases her hair and puts it up in a little scrunchie.” I try to do the same thing for my boyfriend, but he does not seem to notice or care about it.

  Day 2

  In the morning (I don’t wake up at 2:30 a.m. like Dolly does; I wake up at a decent hour), the cabbage soup has settled into a congealed mess. I have to open three windows in my apartment just to air out the scent of the soup, and even then you can still smell it in the hall outside my apartment. I feel bad for my neighbors. I make the executive decision that I cannot handle the soup for breakfast.

  When I finally arrive at brunch, I confine myself to a huge bowl of fruit, like some kind of saint. At around 2:00 p.m. I force myself to have a smidgen of cabbage soup. The cabbage has disintegrated into the soup and has become one with the broth. How is this possible? It seemed so solid yesterday. It is as shocking as the fact that Dolly is Miley Cyrus’s godmother!

  At least I can take refuge in living like Dolly. She once famously said, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” and with that in mind, I start wearing a small minidress I once bought from American Apparel around the apartment. I have always been too embarrassed to wear that dress in the light of day. I pair it with towering shoes and look at the cabbage soup bubbling in its pot, even though there is no heat source interacting with it. While wearing the minidress, I can see why Dolly is so militant about diets and plastic surgery. These spandex tubes are unforgiving. At one point she said, “If I have one more face-lift I’ll have a beard!”

  After eating some fruit (and some vegetables too, breaking the rules slightly) I decide to swallow some more cabbage soup. It is the only food I have in the house except some seeds left over from the Posh diet. But as I reheat the cabbage soup, I realize that I can’t take it anymore. I have taken on too much! I will always love you, cabbage soup, but I will mostly hate you. I try to pour it into a plastic bag, but only some of it lands in the plastic bag and most of it lands on the kitchen floor. Now my kitchen smells of cabbage.

  Day 3

  Several days later (Dolly likes to take weekends off her diet but I took a few days more than that because I was cleaning the cabbage soup off of my floor), I decide to attempt a dieting tip Dolly advertised in her autobiography: chewing her food but not actually swallowing it. As Dolly says, “The pleasure and satisfaction is in the tasting and chewing.” Is it? I don’t know. I make my first attempt with a mound of tortilla chips. I put them in my mouth, chew them, and spit them out. It does not feel particularly pleasurable or satisfying. It is like chewing tortilla-chip-flavored gum. Gross food makes you not want to eat, but spitting out food seems like a crime! I end up eating the whole mound of tortilla chips.

&nb
sp; I lost a bunch of weight on the Cabbage Soup Diet, but I also lost something more important – the ability to be in my kitchen for any length of time without smelling like cabbage. Dolly may have been a trailblazer in music, plastic surgery, and even the theme park business, but her diets make me want to escape to Dollywood and never return.

  I Tried Miranda Kerr’s Diet

  F

  or a model, Miranda Kerr is often in the news, and the news about her is often exciting and romantic, like a nineteenth century novel about French society.

  She was allegedly the cause of a fist-fight between two billionaires in Australia. At some point, she flirted with a wisp of a man named Justin Bieber (who is ungallantly said to have told people they slept together), presumably to escape, like Madame Bovary before her, from the banalities of existence, because why else would you do it? Then Justin Bieber got in a fight with her ex-husband Orlando Bloom over it. Then Justin Bieber posted a picture of Orlando Bloom crying on his Instagram account!

  In addition to her romantic responsibilities, Miranda has also been proclaiming herself a diet and beauty expert and entrepreneur. She started a skincare line called “KORA Organics,” and often advocates obscure superfoods. I figured I had to try her diet. Who am I if not a woman who sees nutrition tips, tries them, and then wishes she was embroiled in an affair of the heart in nineteenth century France?

  Preparation

  According to the Daily Mail, Miranda Kerr is said to follow the dreaded 5:2 diet. The 5:2 diet, for those of you who don’t read the “Sidebar of Shame’” is a diet where for five days of the week you eat normally, and for two days of the week you eat a measly 500 calories a day. On the days when she eats “normally”, Miranda follows some Byzantine health plan of her own devising which includes various smoothies and green juices mixed with the occasional sweet potato. This is all detailed on Miranda’s KORA Organics blog, which is a blog, written by someone who refers to herself as a friend of Miranda Kerr’s but is not Miranda Kerr. It’s very confusing.

  Day 1

  Today I decide to have the full Miranda Kerr experience. The night before this, I consumed an entire bowl of cacio e pepe pasta, and I feel completely psychologically equipped. This is important before starting any diet.

  Miranda Kerr says she has a “three course breakfast” every day and so I must do the same. She starts the day off with an “alkalizing” green juice. In my exhaustive study of diets (which may be known in the future as life’s most bromidic work) I have realized that certain diets really follow “trends.” And starting the day with a green juice of kale, spinach and some kind of ginger is absolutely on trend in the twenty-first century. Maybe one day we will look back on it and sigh, much as we now look back on Greta Garbo’s diet and wonder how chopped hazelnuts ever constituted a veggie burger.

  After I consume this green juice, so similar to every green juice in the world, I have two eggs on avocado. Miranda says her favorite food is avocado. Avocados are good, but are they your favorite food? The answer is no. No one’s favorite food is avocado.

  The third course of breakfast is a nutritious shake that Miranda has described many times in interviews, because people oddly care about that more than they care about the fact that she may or may not have slept with Justin Bieber. The smoothie consists of the following:

  The water from a young fresh coconut, half a glass of goat or almond milk, 1 tablespoon acai powder, 1 tablespoon goji berries, 1 tablespoon spirulina, 1 tablespoon raw cacao powder, 1 tablespoon maca powder, 1 tablespoon chia seeds, 1 tablespoon raw vegan protein powder, and 1 tablespoon of coconut oil.

  It is unfortunately hard to find the water of a young coconut just lying around in New York City, so I end up buying a more commercially viable form of coconut water in a bottle. Then I walk into this health food store in my neighborhood and ask tentatively for spirulina, acai powder, maca powder, chia seeds and raw cacao – all of which are apparently superfoods, designed to help your body operate at its greatest capacity. I don’t know how effective they are – but all of the superfoods are tremendously expensive.

  I lug all of the jars home and put them on the counter. Then I put all these different powders into my blender. The young coconut milk turns a brown green, like sludge on the side of the road. I pour the sludge into a large glass and drink up. It tastes like very sweet seaweed. But my blender is not very good. I can still see the unmashed chia seeds clinging to the bottom of the glass.

  The rest of the day passes in a mild hunger, despite the three course breakfast and Miranda’s favorite meal of roast chicken breast. For some reason, the three course breakfast actually makes me more hungry than a bagel one. The only enlivening thing would be two billionaires fighting over me.

  Day 2

  Today, after having the three course breakfast, I indulge in one of Miranda Kerr’s favorite beauty rituals – dry brushing your skin after a shower with a huge brush. It’s apparently very detoxifying for the body and gets rid of cellulite. I buy a coarse brush made out of plastic and then rub it all over my body. It hurts, but I do feel all tingly afterwards.

  Later, I go to “Pure Food and Wine,” Miranda’s favorite restaurant in New York City, which has no meat, gluten or hot food. While there, I have a sushi roll that uses shaved cauliflower instead of rice. I hate it.

  Days 3, 4 and 5

  Today I have to do the worst thing in the world: 500 calories or fewer for a day. The point of the 5:2 diet is that on the five days you sort of “feast” to make up for the lack of calories on two the days of fasting, but Miranda Kerr never really actually feasts. She just drinks spirulina shakes and eats sushi that doesn’t have rice in it. So, I’m slightly hungry going into this challenge. I have no idea how I will be when it’s finished.

  There is a lot of information on 5:2. I read on a blog it’s easier to do the fasting if you have your first meal slightly later in the day, like three o’clock or so. So I try to last most of the day without food. The whole day you are just drinking Diet Coke and chewing gum and slowly dying. By the time I have my two yogurts at 4pm (260 calories), I’m absolutely ravenous.

  Unfortunately, I can’t eat dinner until 10pm because I’m supposed to take a three-hour car ride to get out of the city for the weekend. When I finally have the six ounces of plain halibut I allow myself (240 calories), I literally can’t even speak to my dinner companion because I am so famished. He has wine, I have a weak version of green tea. I’m suddenly very cold, like Madame Bovary is before death.

  The next day I wake up starved and almost ill. I have eggs Benedict and feel better.

  Day 6

  A thing I forgot to mention earlier is that I actually met Miranda Kerr once in my brief and ignominious career as a reporter. I was contracted to attend the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and ask all the models: “How does it feel to be so beautiful?” Without exception, no one could answer that question. Miranda Kerr, for her part, launched into a speech about how every person is beautiful on the inside or some such nonsense. I appreciated her gumption, however.

  And in that same enthusiastic spirit, I start the day just as Miranda wants me to, with a green juice, eggs and avocado and a smoothie made out of various tonics. I have also been ingesting Noni juice which Miranda is a big believer in (her grandmother turned her on to it). Noni juice tastes disgusting and is described on the bottle – very unspecifically – as beneficial. I have no idea why she likes it.

  Tonight I decide to have a Miranda Kerr dinner party. After reading her blog for several hours, I fix on preparing her roast chicken and coconut quinoa recipe.

  To get a friend to come, I don’t tell him I’m having a dinner party. I fear no one will ever come to my house for one of those again. I say “why don’t you come over for dinner?”, which could be interpreted in myriad ways. Perhaps I just invited him to swing by the house before we go out to dinner. You don’t know. When my friend actually comes over, he is shocked to see that he is at a dinner party of a famous person’
s diet. It is a very good trick.

  I will have to say one thing for Miranda. She is a pretty good cook. The quinoa is delightful (and when does anyone ever say that!) and the roast chicken tastes like roast chicken. My friend is enthusiastic even though we are sitting on the floor because I just moved and don’t have chairs.

  “This tastes like real food!” he says into the darkened room (I don’t have lights either).

  Day 7

  But unfortunately, in the puritanical world in which we live, we must pay the price for all excess, and if you have an affair or make an imprudent marriage you need to be punished. Therefore, I must fast again.

  The Daily Mail has more great tips for fasting and some recipes. This time I start earlier in the day. (I have my yogurt at 9am.) I also have a lunch I learned of on a 5:2 website. A small salmon fillet with 35 grams of feta cheese and a red pepper baked in the oven for several minutes with no oil at all. It’s actually quite filling. Having this at 4pm, it’s actually pretty easy not to eat for the rest of the day. I do have to keep myself busy at night so I end up seeing a movie by myself at a theater in Greenwich Village. It’s called “Gun Crazy.” It’s about a man who is obsessed with guns and a woman who is obsessed with guns and they meet and fall in love. Then they die.

  Day 8

  I’m off the diet! But through sheer force of habit, I end up making myself a spirulina shake. I actually like it on some level.

  So what did I learn of Miranda Kerr? I have so much admiration and sympathy for her love triangles and her diets. Here she is, imprisoned and repressed by nutrition, but still has time for love. It’s something all dieters should aspire to. Madame Bovary, c’est moi!