Fat Chance

by Deborah Blumenthal

“No…I’m sorry, Taylor. I’m acting like a jerk. I’m tough on people sometimes, I don’t know why.”

  “You’re funny,” he says, levelly, “I like you, I mean it. I never met anyone like you.”

  “Too bad your luck has run out.”

  “I’m startin’ to figure you,” he says, nodding. I watch him slice off a triangle of rare beef and chew it slowly. The pregnant pause. Why do I feel as though his performance was rehearsed? As though he has the timing of a professional. I watch him chew. Even that’s sexy. The rhythmical way that jaw worked. The man should pose for the National Livestock and Meat Board. Never mind mad cow, hoof and mouth, or animal rights, turn the camera on that face, and a diehard vegan would beg for beef.

  He looks back at me. “It’s warm out here,” he says, as if in passing. “Maybe you should think about staying for a while. The house is big enough…you need a chance to chill.”

  thirteen

  We drive to the beach after dinner. The mist-covered moon casts an opalescent glow on the black water. As I walk, the damp sand massages my feet, and I’m aware of the light touch of Taylor’s hand draping my shoulder. My senses are elevated to a higher frequency whenever I’m around him as if I’m visiting some distant, more vibrant reality. When his voice breaks the silence, it almost startles me.

  “Tell me about the mind-set of the perpetual dieter. Give me a day in the life.”

  I tighten my jacket around me. “She—because it’s usually a she—is consumed with the idea of losing weight, but since her mind’s always on not eating, she’s obsessed—like a junkie—with her next fix. She has to eat, yet that’s the very stuff that’s killing her, so she has to develop a whole new framework for thinking about what food is, and what it does. Relearn behaviors that she’s known from childhood.”

  “Brain surgery,” he says, turning up the collar of his jacket.

  “Mmm, hmm, but on yourself. And aside from the brain, the body is working against you. You know what the set point theory is?”

  “No, but I think you’re going to tell me.”

  “There seems to be a certain weight that your body stays at when you’re eating normally and not trying to lose weight—the set point. The theory holds that there is an internal control mechanism tucked into the brain that seems to want your body to maintain a certain level of fat.”

  “Passport to survival,” Taylor says, picking up a stone and skipping it across the water.

  “Exactly. So when you diet and lose fat, the body adapts to protect you from starvation, and boom, your resting basal metabolic rate goes down—you require less fuel to keep the furnace going. Bottom line—especially if you’ve dieted a lot—is that you find that the same pathetic number of calories you’re eating on your diet isn’t meager enough to allow you to lose the kind of weight that you did before on that regimen. You’re confused now. Why aren’t you losing anymore? You plateau, get frustrated. Why diet anymore when it doesn’t work? Screw it, you’re angry and you start eating like mad to get back at yourself—”

  “Half of L.A.”

  “You hate your stubborn, uncooperative body and want to punish it, so you eat and eat out of anger and frustration, and become fatter than you were before you started the damn diet. One desperate approach to weight management is the bulimic route. As I’m sure you know, that’s when you eat and then clean out your system by regularly throwing up or using laxatives, enemas and diuretics, and sometimes, at the same time, exercising to excess. By continually abusing your lower GI tract, you lose the ability to eliminate normally, and if you throw up enough your esophagus becomes inflamed and your glands swell.”

  “Jolie can tell you about the throwing up.”

  I turn to him. Why am I not surprised? “I didn’t know.”

  “She’s over it now, but she went through that when she was a teenager.”

  We walk on for a few minutes without speaking.

  “In the worst-case scenario,” I say, “purging can lead to heart failure because you’re losing life-sustaining minerals like potassium. If the disorder is anorexia, you simply starve yourself to death. Although these women—and most are women—have a tremendous fear of food and gaining weight—they’re preoccupied with food, sometimes even hoarding it and making a great show of collecting recipes. A lot of these women are also depressed, irritable, withdrawn and have little interest in sex. When weight loss continues to advance, they may find it hard to concentrate, have memory loss and withdraw. It’s really like a slow death. And some women are bulimic and anorexic.

  “In some of the worst cases of anorexia, sufferers subsist on as little as a couple of hundred calories a day. Imagine eating nothing more during the day—and for days at a time—than a yogurt and a couple of bananas.”

  “Well at least my patients will love me, right?” Taylor says, trying to puff out his chest.

  “No, actually, they’ll be afraid of you and be distrustful. You’re the guy who’ll make them eat all of those fattening foods they’ve been avoiding.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Try to convince them that you want to see them grow healthy, not fat.”

  He weighs that one for a while, then shakes his head. “Don’t think I was cut out for medicine,” he says. “So what else is involved?”

  “You use your degree in psychotherapy in addition to bar-iatric medicine because this group needs intensive counseling first—individual and family counseling, lots of support and sometimes medication. The most serious cases end up hospitalized. Basically, all your women will feel so frustrated that they’ll sink into depression, or worse, feel as though they’d like to kill themselves.”

  I take an envelope out of my bag and hand it to him. “I thought this would interest you. She doesn’t have anorexia, but it’s typical of the kind of letters I get. This woman thinks she’s the only one in the world who feels this way.”

  Dear Maggie:

  This is hard for me, but I can’t keep it in any longer. You know the old joke about the fat girl with the pretty face? Well, that’s me, I swear. I hate the way my body looks, so all the clothes I buy are coverups. But the real problem is that I can’t hide my body from my boyfriend. Every time I get into bed with him, I dread the thought of him seeing me naked, so I resort to turning out the lights before I get undressed, and telling him that I like to make love in the dark. (I’m not the only one who acts this way, am I?) Otherwise, I wear a robe, and slip it off under the blanket. Can you possibly understand how awful I feel? I want to enjoy sex, but I feel so trapped by what I look like. Help, please.

  Taylor frowns. “They really let their hair down with you.”

  I nod. “Those are your patients. So what are you going to do to help them?”

  “I start by seducing them with my compassion, my understanding, my warmth—at least according to the script. A lot of their motivation to change comes from wanting to look good to please me.”

  That’s familiar. “How does it turn out?”

  “Four drop out, three make some progress, one kills herself, and one falls in love with me and becomes thin, turns into this dynamite dish and I fall for her. We leave the place together to set up our own clinic.”

  “Gee, how realistic. I can’t wait to see it.”

  Taylor raises an eyebrow. “Maybe they can give you a cameo role.”

  “As what, the stiff?”

  He half smiles. “Maybe the journalist who comes to do a story on me.”

  “Is she thin or fat?”

  “You tell me,” Taylor says.

  I don’t answer.

  “So is that your life?” Taylor asks. “Losing and gaining, anger, frustration?”

  “I’ve been there, but I hope not anymore.”

  “What’s your secret?”

  “I’m a Taurus—bullheaded. When I want something, I make it happen. At least for now, I’ve got the body beat. I worked out like a demon, I ate less and I lost the weight. I feel good about that.”

  “Do
you usually get what you want?”

  “How did the conversation get turned around to me? Why don’t we stick to the script?”

  He slips his arm under mine. “I want to know what makes you tick.”

  “You do,” I say mockingly. Not knowing what else to do, I imitate one of his crazed fans, madly pulling at my hair, “Mike, you’re so gorgeous, I can’t stand it…” I break into hysterics, pretending to stick a paper in his face. “Here, give me your autograph, sign this…PUHLEEZ!”

  “You want it right now?” he asks, pulling me toward him.

  “Taylor,” I say, pushing him away. “You’re in the right profession.”

  Secrets of Successful Weight Loss

  Thanks to an extensive new study on the secrets of successful weight loss, I now know exactly how those who have lost weight have managed—against the odds—to keep it off.

  Have I got your attention?

  Good. But now, dear hearts, I’m sorry to say that I’m not going to report on a herbal potion that comes from Katmandu, or a new diet drink or exercise guru extraordinaire. The secrets are enough to put you to sleep, but, here goes, anyway.

  The largest survey ever on long-term weight loss, done by Consumer Reports, found that those who had success keeping weight off didn’t credit diet drugs, special programs, supplements or even special diet foods.

  The survey polled 32,000 dieters and found that 83 percent who kept the lost weight off for more than a year didn’t rely on gimmicks. What most did rely on was exercise. For eight out of ten people who kept the weight off, working out three or more times a week was ranked as their number one strategy. While walking made first place as the most popular type of exercise to keep pounds at bay, almost 30 percent lifted weights to boost calorie-burning muscle mass.

  Want to know their other success secrets?

  * Control the spikes in blood sugar levels caused by eating refined carbohydrates by substituting complex carbs like whole grains and high fiber foods.

  * Get enough lean protein to help you feel satisfied.

  * Opt for high-volume foods to trick your sense of satiety—for example, pureed vegetables turned into soup, rather than the plain vegetable, or a whole orange vs. a glass of OJ.

  * Eat enough fat so that you feel satisfied. Allow up to thirty percent a day, just make sure it’s the healthy kind such as olive and canola, or from fatty fish and nuts.

  * Think nutrition on a daily basis. The dieters who were successful said they used these principles every day.

  It turns out the photo of Marcus Camby made the cover of the Daily Record: “DOWN AND OUT.” The picture credit: Tamara Brown. I make a note to send her a bottle of Dom. Ty sends roses. Everyone in her family called, she says in a voice that I barely recognize. The last time that happened, her uncle died.

  Just one picture, one flick of the shutter, and the photograph opens up the promise of a new life for her. That shot might have been a fluke, but from now, if I know Tamara, her shots will be informed, calculated.

  Valentine’s Day is coming up and at 6:00 a.m. L.A. time, Tamara’s in chat mode and brings me up to date. She complains that with me out of town, she had to go to the library for help.

  “So I ask the white-haired librarian for the section on aphrodisiacs, and she looks at me like I’m from another planet. ‘There is none,’ she says, and points me toward food science instead.”

  Am I hearing right?

  “Medicine comes from plants, so somewhere inside one of those books, there had to be tips for a cook interested in heating up romance.”

  I’m laughing so hard that I’m sure I’m waking up the whole house. I can envision her thumbing through books methodically, pausing to scan sections on cayenne pepper, rump roasts, and crème fraîche. Tamara’s idea, of course, was to come up with the ultimate seduction meal. The plan is for Ty to start reading her book that is set at a weight-loss center. And then…he could forget about going home.

  But he’s divorced. She has to go slowly. “He’s probably scared,” she says, “doesn’t want to be a two-time loser.” Then there’s the business of working in the same office. If it didn’t work out, it would be awkward to keep running into each other.

  But what to make? She decides on oysters to start, but then? “Listen to this,” Tamara says. She’s flipping through a book called Foods for Love, The Complete Guide to Aphrodisiac Edibles by Robert Hendrickson, and his possible main courses including phallic-armed octopi, the reproductive organs of jellyfish, scorpion fish and pickled beaver tails. And if those don’t fit the bill, Hendrickson describes other exotic and/or disgusting turn-ons such as salted crocodile semen, the orange-colored roe of prickly sea urchins, considered by the Japanese and French to be an aphrodisiac either raw or pickled, and swan’s pizzle, the immense elongated muscle of the four-foot tridoca clam, the tails of blowfish…

  Was it something in my drink from last night?

  “So what do you think?” she says finally.

  “Swan’s pizzle.”

  “What?

  “Just KID-DING. Let’s see…to fuel his carnal instincts, go carnal—steak. I never met a man who didn’t like beef. Creamy mashed potatoes, and maybe spinach for the token vegetable. And if you’re going to hell anyway, cheesecake for dessert or a fruit tart. Either you’ll turn him on or you’ll kill him.”

  “What about oysters to start?” she says.

  “Tricky, but if he likes them…lots of phosphorus.”

  “What would I do without you, Maggie?”

  “You started doing better the day I left.”

  “Pure luck.”

  “Fat chance.”

  She has her menu. Oysters, filet mignon, mashed potatoes and fresh spinach. I turn over and go back to sleep.

  fourteen

  I’m up hours later, mulling over the night before. There seems to be more than just a kinship between us now, but whenever I’m emotionally involved with someone, my vision is blocked and I can’t scope things out. Was Taylor coming on to me? Or is he just naturally flirty? He wants my help and being attentive can only help him secure it. Safer to feign disinterest, I decide, and continue playing consultant, rather than starstruck fan. It wouldn’t be the first time I was way off base.

  As I’m about to go downstairs for coffee, I open the door and spot a folded blue note wedged under it.

  Morning M.—

  Had to go to Houston for two days of exterior shooting—last-minute change in the sked. Enjoy house, take car—keys on kitchen counter near yogurt maker. We’ll pick up where we left off—

  M.

  Ugh! Two fewer days together. The gardener, the pool man, two maids, a security guard and Jolie would be my only company. What better motivation to work out. I grab my sweats and am about to change when I see the flickering red light of the answering machine—probably the office, a world that I was happier forgetting at the moment. I press Play and sit on the edge of the bed.

  “Mah name is Tex, I’m a big-time jerk in New York. I’m thinking about starting a new career as a food critic, but I don’t have friends at work to go out with anymore and damn, it can take forever to write a review if you’re only ordering for one. So I wondered now if you could help me get my buddy back. I’m not good at that kind of thing. I’m used to pushing around copy, organizing stories, not my own life. Have your people call my people.”

  Had Alan Barsky sneezed on him? The impersonation virus was spreading. Tex had always had a humorous touch. He knew how to tweak a situation, to soften it. He spent his days dissecting people’s work. If he couldn’t handle them he’d have been lobotomized by now. I dial his home number to answer his recording with one of my own.

  “Before I’d even consider helping you get your lunch pal back, I’d have to know more. What’s so special about long lunches out anyway? Think about brown-bagging it sometime.” I’d resist making a crack about Sharon preparing lunch. “Instead of food, splurge on an expensive haircut, say, or a well-cut Italian suit. Put yo
urself behind the wheel of a sports car. Live out your fantasies, Tex, and see if they hold up. Let’s compare notes.”

  I exercise for two hours. Muscle burns more calories than fat, and I worked religiously to convert.

  I have the jitters about taking his car. It’s only a car. But the alternative is to stay housebound and for what? I ease it out of the garage, lurching a bit at first, and head for Rodeo Drive, probably the world’s most exclusive place to shop. Behind the wheel I’m feeling like a Judith Krantz heroine, sans poodle.

  I stroll into Giorgio’s and examine a luscious pink cashmere cardigan with a matching camisole—but HELLO, the Manolos—then I drop the sweater like it’s hot. American Express has probably sent out a nationwide alert on my name. Instead, I pay cash for a pair of gorgeously obscene red ribbon string bikini panties, so scant that I can tuck them in the change purse of my wallet—probably just the point. Equally brief, I must say, is the measly Cobb salad posing as an entrée that I have for lunch in a salad boutique down the street.

  I eye the Rolls Royces as I walk. From close range, this world doesn’t look as crazy as it appears from New York. Could just two weeks out here distort my perceptions that way?

  I walk back toward the car, eyeing the passersby, when my eyes fix on a familiar sight. It couldn’t be. Absolutely not. Nuh-nuh-nuh. But indeed it is, and he’s waddling into Bijan with a curious look on his face. Bijan? Maybe the world’s most expensive men’s store where you shopped by appointment only?

  I stand outside and wait. Where was Tamara when I needed her? Forty-five minutes later, he emerges, hands clutching two glossy shopping bags. I’m on his tail, surreptitiously narrowing the distance between us. I’m inches from his back, about to tap him on the shoulder when Wharton spins around suspiciously.

  “Maggie, my word! I don’t believe it. What a coincidence.”

  “Bill!” I smack his shoulder affectionately. “I guess business is better than I thought. What are you doing in these parts?”

  “I took a day off from the editorial convention in Palm Desert,” he says, guiltily. “I decided against a lecture called ‘Catastrophes in the Newsroom.’ Too real life.” Proudly he opens the bag to show me ordinary-looking ties he has just bought in mottled shades of yellow and green.