Greek coffees and crullers just like everyone else. New York’s famous indifference meant I could eat when I was hungry and stop when I was full without feeling scrutinized or even noticed. In a city of so many people, nobody gave a damn about one chubby Seattleite gobbling pizza from a sheet of greasy wax paper.
And I started getting thinner.
All that fat—all that flavor —and my body could finally relax and stop hoarding miserly calories, tricked by my own willpower into believing I was starving to death. My skin bloomed, and the extra weight I was carrying fell away, and at first I just thought my pants were getting “stretched out” because they were old and losing elasticity. Soon it became clear that my fat-enhanced diet was responsible for my loss of what was eventually six dress sizes.
You’d think this would have changed my life. Most people are conditioned by a lifetime of Before and After pictures —showing first, a lumpen, ashy mound of a woman and, second, a maple-brown fitness model posing in a thong—to believe that massive weight loss results in a better, happier, sexier life. But in reality, it only meant that none of the clothes I wore before I moved fit anymore —and that the Italian men in my neighborhood stopped making kissing noises as I walked by with my new, sleeker build. I bought two new pairs of pants and three new shirts. I didn’t buy anything else to wear because I was still spending most of my money on food. I was pleased by my shrinking girth, but I didn’t feel like I owned it. I kept waiting to balloon up again once my body finally figured out how much food I was actually consuming. I felt like I was getting away with something but feared getting caught and punished. I was sure that after six months of unbridled eating, I’d wake up resembling the six-hundred-pound man who had to be airlifted through his own ceiling for medical intervention.
Eventually my size stabilized. I had become a perfectly reasonable size 12—morbidly obese to the fashion industry, it’s true, but medium-size to the rest of the world. I remembered being fat and miserable in Seattle, feeling hungry—no, starved , my hunger lighting up every moment of every day like a flashing neon DANGER sign—and I found I vastly preferred the alternative: eating freely and joyfully in a city I loved. They say you are what you eat, and that if you feast on fat you’ll become fat—but the diet industry’s economic interest lies in keeping us fat through misinformation so they can sell us more weight-loss products, and I never wanted to eat another cardboard-flavored confection in my life. Gnawing on a black-and-white cookie in a deli in lower Manhattan, I realized the diet experts had been lying all along.
So now I eschew anything labeled “diet” or “lite,” and I eat when I’m hungry, and I try to make sure that everything I devour is as delicious and whole as it can be. And I’ve worn the same dress size for more than twelve years.
Who says diets don’t work? Of course they do. The ones that involve deprivation, hunger, obsession, displeasure, and calorie counting will result in inexorable weight gain, self-loathing, and depression, just as they’re designed to do. But the diets dictated by our own appetites—the ones that nourish us with flavor, fat, and deliciousness—will result in us being the size we’re meant to be, whether that’s 2 or 12 or 20.
Ladies, call off the hunger strike. Real -women eat fat.
RED GRAVY
SPAGHETTI SAUCE IS THE RORSCHACH TEST OF THE CULINARY world: What’s telling in the details of any recipe isn’t about which ingredients are included and which are left out; it’s about what each individual cook thinks should be in it, and shouldn’t .
Nearly everyone who prepares food, amateur or professional, believes their spaghetti sauce to be the best—whether they spend all day dicing organic hothouse tomatoes, mincing fresh basil from their own herb gardens, and
And I started getting thinner.
All that fat—all that flavor —and my body could finally relax and stop hoarding miserly calories, tricked by my own willpower into believing I was starving to death. My skin bloomed, and the extra weight I was carrying fell away, and at first I just thought my pants were getting “stretched out” because they were old and losing elasticity. Soon it became clear that my fat-enhanced diet was responsible for my loss of what was eventually six dress sizes.
You’d think this would have changed my life. Most people are conditioned by a lifetime of Before and After pictures —showing first, a lumpen, ashy mound of a woman and, second, a maple-brown fitness model posing in a thong—to believe that massive weight loss results in a better, happier, sexier life. But in reality, it only meant that none of the clothes I wore before I moved fit anymore —and that the Italian men in my neighborhood stopped making kissing noises as I walked by with my new, sleeker build. I bought two new pairs of pants and three new shirts. I didn’t buy anything else to wear because I was still spending most of my money on food. I was pleased by my shrinking girth, but I didn’t feel like I owned it. I kept waiting to balloon up again once my body finally figured out how much food I was actually consuming. I felt like I was getting away with something but feared getting caught and punished. I was sure that after six months of unbridled eating, I’d wake up resembling the six-hundred-pound man who had to be airlifted through his own ceiling for medical intervention.
Eventually my size stabilized. I had become a perfectly reasonable size 12—morbidly obese to the fashion industry, it’s true, but medium-size to the rest of the world. I remembered being fat and miserable in Seattle, feeling hungry—no, starved , my hunger lighting up every moment of every day like a flashing neon DANGER sign—and I found I vastly preferred the alternative: eating freely and joyfully in a city I loved. They say you are what you eat, and that if you feast on fat you’ll become fat—but the diet industry’s economic interest lies in keeping us fat through misinformation so they can sell us more weight-loss products, and I never wanted to eat another cardboard-flavored confection in my life. Gnawing on a black-and-white cookie in a deli in lower Manhattan, I realized the diet experts had been lying all along.
So now I eschew anything labeled “diet” or “lite,” and I eat when I’m hungry, and I try to make sure that everything I devour is as delicious and whole as it can be. And I’ve worn the same dress size for more than twelve years.
Who says diets don’t work? Of course they do. The ones that involve deprivation, hunger, obsession, displeasure, and calorie counting will result in inexorable weight gain, self-loathing, and depression, just as they’re designed to do. But the diets dictated by our own appetites—the ones that nourish us with flavor, fat, and deliciousness—will result in us being the size we’re meant to be, whether that’s 2 or 12 or 20.
Ladies, call off the hunger strike. Real -women eat fat.
RED GRAVY
SPAGHETTI SAUCE IS THE RORSCHACH TEST OF THE CULINARY world: What’s telling in the details of any recipe isn’t about which ingredients are included and which are left out; it’s about what each individual cook thinks should be in it, and shouldn’t .
Nearly everyone who prepares food, amateur or professional, believes their spaghetti sauce to be the best—whether they spend all day dicing organic hothouse tomatoes, mincing fresh basil from their own herb gardens, and
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