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

by Rebecca Harrington

  I Tried Elizabeth Hurley’s Diet

  S

  o many celebrities these days act as though it is a terrible chore to be a famous. Perhaps it is – who’s to say? I wouldn’t want my every move dissected by a mob of people animated only by virulent anger and the means to express it electronically. But it does make the modern celebrity so much less fun and exciting than celebrities used to be. One does long for Elizabeth Taylor’s unironic love of jewels, or her belief in the cleansing properties of marriage.

  That’s why I enjoy Elizabeth Hurley. She seems to get an honest kick out of being a celebrity. She has a lot of ne’er-do-well boyfriends, and sometimes those boyfriends seem to be wearing lip gloss! Even when you don’t think she’s going to, she unapologetically hawks her swimwear line. Maybe if you are primarily famous for wearing a dress held up by safety pins, it keeps you more in touch with the reality of life.

  Preparation

  If you Google Elizabeth Hurley, her diets are one of the first things you’ll come across, which is another great thing about her. Liz diets routinely and publicly. She seems especially to enjoy fad dieting and scandalizing people who work in nutrition. For example: after she had her son, she confessed she didn’t believe in breakfast for women over forty. I honestly thought the nutritionist at the Daily Mail was going to jump off a bridge.

  I plan on doing several of Liz’s most famous diets, and deploying white jeans, blonde men that look like they could kill you and dinner parties where appropriate.

  Day 1

  The Daily Mail, in its infinite wisdom, recently reported that Liz was on the “flapper diet” – more commonly known at the Hay Diet – which was invented by Dr. William Hay in the 1920s.

  Dr. Hay was a paunchy man with tiny wire-rimmed glasses, who lost a lot of weight with a system that he made up. He preached that what you ate was less important than the combinations of food you ate together. In the Hay framework, you eat vegetables with proteins, starches with vegetables and melons all by themselves. He also glommed onto the idea that some foods are essentially acidic and others are basic, and if a person eats the correct combination of basic substances (and avoids acidic foods) then they can reduce indigestion and heartburn.

  The actual Hay diet of the 1920s seemed delicious. For example, this was a “Saturday Meal Plan”:

  Breakfast of wholewheat muffins, honey, butter, and black coffee. Lunch was cream of carrot soup, steamed celery, and a salad of pineapples, pears, and grapes. Salad was served with mayonnaise dressing. Dessert was lemon fluff. Dinner was broiled lamb chops, steamed cauliflower, steamed kale, and a salad of grapefruit and sauerkraut with mayonnaise dressing. The dessert was fresh peaches with unsweetened cream.

  I really wanted to know what lemon fluff was, but unfortunately, Liz Hurley is on the modern Hay diet which focuses mostly on more normal, unadorned food combinations and advises waiting four hours before you introduce a new combination. So if you start the day off with protein you’d better wait four hours before you break into the pasta.

  To that end, I start the day off with some melon and then, several hours later, snack on some yogurt. By the time lunch comes around, I’m very hungry. I have beans with kale. But what’s the point of beans without the satisfying crunch of bread?

  Later, for happy hour, I decide to have a glass of white wine, even though that is not strictly a Liz thing to do. She used to drink wine all the time, until she realized that it often gives women over forty stomach bloat. At that point she stopped and started drinking vodka sodas exclusively. “Initially it’s like medicine but I’ve got used to it now” is an encouraging thing Liz Hurley once said about vodka soda. The other day she tweeted she was only going to have a vodka soda for dinner.

  For my dinner I have steak and asparagus and, in a nod to the earlier generation of Hay diets, a peach (although not fluff). It’s pretty delicious, but I’m still hungry at the end, which makes me feel full of journalistic integrity, since Liz says she goes hungry to bed every single night.

  Day 2

  Today I decide to do one of Liz’s most draconian diets: the watercress soup diet. Here is the watercress soup diet – you can have as much gross cold watercress soup as you like and you can sometimes have yogurt. That’s it.

  In the morning, after a yogurt, I make the soup. I “sweat” (I don’t know what this means but it was in the recipe) some onions in chicken broth, boil one potato and two whole bunches of watercress and then put it all in the blender. The soup is supposed to turn a “brilliant green colour”, but instead turns sort-of brown, with what look like bits of lettuce floating in it. I’m then immediately supposed to put the entire blender jug in ice to cool it, but that seems very time consuming, so I just stick it in the fridge. An hour later I eat a bowl of lukewarm, bitter soup. It’s so bitter, it’s almost extraordinary. According to legend, Liz actually once served this soup at a dinner party. I wonder if that’s how she and Shane Warne fell in love.

  In the meantime, I decide to read more about Liz’s current love life. She’s now dating a hedge-fund manager who once made a naked collage self-portrait out of Financial Times articles about himself. He is blond and wears very unbuttoned shirts, which seems to be a type of look she enjoys. I should find a man like that and invite him to a watercress soup dinner party.

  Later, I have another cup of soup. Now that it is colder, it is still bad. More bitter even. I also ask my friends over for a watercress soup dinner party. I tell them that Liz Hurley has them all the time, that’s how she met Shane Warne, but they say they are all going to another dinner party where someone is serving roast chicken. It’s very dispiriting. They urge me to come to the other dinner party and even to bring watercress soup in a small thermos for myself, but I don’t do it. I just sit in the house.

  Day 3

  I wish I could stop finding diets that Liz Hurley has done. Then I could stop this nightmare. Unfortunately, I find another diet Liz espoused for which she ate only one meal a day, drank mugs of hot water and snacked on things like six raisins at a time and the occasional oatcake (they don’t have those in America, so I substitute digestive biscuits). She did this to regain her figure after her son, Damian, was born.

  This one is really killing me. After so much hunger, one more day of no food seems like torture. I’m rendered completely useless. I can barely listen to any music except for “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck, but honestly, it’s making me nervous.

  For my one meal I have a cottage pie from a very expensive natural foods store that sells so many different flavors of kombucha I try never to go there. I buy it because Liz once submitted a recipe for organic cottage pie to a celebrity cookbook. I was planning on eating it with a child-sized fork and plate. This is something that Liz does to trick herself into eating less. But I don’t have a child-sized fork and plate, and there are no cutlery stores near my house. I eat the whole thing. The entire cottage pie. I was not planning on doing that.

  Day 4

  I’m off the diet. My GOD it’s very hard to be a model. Even harder than being an actress, or a singer. For a woman with such good taste in men, she really does have bad taste in diets.

  And Now, a Slice of Pizza

  W

  ell, it is finally over. The dieting and depravity of the famous has at last been done, and I can’t say I’m particularly disappointed. It was hard being on a diet at all times. I’m actually eating a piece of pizza as I write this, and it is a great relief to me.

  But I started this journey of dieting with some specific questions in mind. Namely: Was I going to have any friends left at the end of the diet-athon? (No, the quail broke them.) Was I going to permanently change my body? (No! I weigh exactly the same as I did when I first started dieting. I don’t know why this is. Every time I would diet I usually lost weight, but I almost immediately gained the weight back after eating one slice of pizza. I am probably gaining weight right now.) Which celebrity would I like the best? (A three-way tie between Liz Taylor, Karl Lagerfe
ld, and the inimitable Gwyneth. Liz because she was so glamorous, Karl because we both think childhood was a time of endless stupidity, and Gwyneth because she is the best at dieting and that’s very fun.) Which celebrity would I like the least? (Greta Garbo, because what? She is crazy.) And what did I learn about dieting? (I don’t really know. Put eggs where they don’t need to be. Make seeds into falafel. Just do it!)

  I think the main thing I realized is how terribly hard it is to be an “ideal” woman at any time in history. I can’t even believe how many articles I have read in my life where someone argues that the Golden Age of Hollywood had more realistic body standards for women. And although technically our ideal woman has gotten skinnier, there was no time that was particularly great for women and dieting. Even classic movie stars ate like insane people. In fact, no time in Western history is necessarily safe from diets since the Greeks basically made them up.

  Really, instead of derision, these celebrities need compassion! Their lives are horrible! They can literally lose all their friends in one day because they made quail and then they have to fight to get them back. And there is intolerable pressure for them to look a certain way and there is intolerable pressure for us to look like them. It really is a cold war. But it really shouldn’t be! What we should all know is that every woman’s life is hard and we should be united in our trudge toward second-class citizenship and hunger forever. I mean, sure, some men diet too, but it’s just to wear the slim suits of Hedi Slimane. And they get paid better! That’s really not the same thing.

  Honestly, I was surprised at how much insight I gained about my favorite famous people when writing about them. I never quite imagined I would understand so much about the women I profiled through their food. Jackie Kennedy was very refined. Liz Taylor just wanted to drink! Gwyneth is great at everything, even healthy eating. Posh Spice has an almost devilish sense of humor. Cameron Diaz seems very sincere. I had a certain affinity for all of them after a while.

  So, are you what you eat? Well, it’s hard to say. I think you can gain tremendous understanding and almost an odd compassion for someone when you eat like them. You learn their vulnerabilities and little oddities and obsessions. You fully enter their world and you don’t judge it. So, no but yes, as with most things.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I have to thank my editors at New York magazine. Maureen O’Connor, Kurt Soller, and Molly Fischer were completely invaluable to this project. These columns wouldn’t be anywhere without their encouragement, hard work, and creativity. Thank you all for being such fantastic, patient, encouraging people. I should also acknowlege the excellent and talented Stella Bugbee for her endless kindness and support.

  This book would not even exist without my editor at Vintage, Jenny Jackson. I would be nowhere without her general brilliance and tireless work ethic. Her vision for this project was so clear and intelligent, and she worked with me at all hours of the day and night to get it finished. She was integral to the tone, shape, and vision for this book. Plus, she’s just hilarious and awesome! Thank you!

  I also have to thank the team at Lutyens of Rubinstein, especially Jane Finigan for being a fantastic agent, and David Forrer at Inkwell, who did a great job putting this all together.

  Finally, I need to thank my family – my mother, the first person I ever bounce anything off (for her invariably correct opinion), and my grandfather, who is basically the brains behind this entire operation. Thank you to William and Allison for their tremendous promotional skills and to my father for his courage in bookstores of all stripes. My friends, of course, need no introduction. I keep torturing them with horrid food and they keep coming back for more. They are the real heroes.