The Diet

I’m so excited. I’m going on a three-day cleanse followed by a six-week detox and eating protocol which involves removing Lectins from the diet to decrease inflammation. This repairs the gut, detoxes the cells and nourishes the body. I don’t know who cares about all that. I just need to lose weight. As soon as the Superbowl is over, then Valentine’s Day is behind us and I get back from my trip to Nashville, I’m going to dive right in. I might make an exception for Omar’s birthday cake on the 22nd and would, of course, need to take St. Patty’s Day and Easter Sunday off. 

For my sixtieth birthday, my friend, Thomas gave me a gift, one that he bought for himself and loved – a digital wireless smart scale with weight and body composition analyzer that syncs with bluetooth on my phone. What this means is that this scale will not only inform me that my weight has skyrocketed, but will also give me an indication of body mass index and tell me what percentage of my weight has gone to fat. When I opened it, I cried, “Noooooooooooo!”

Since things are opening up here in California and there is a possibility that I will need to wear actual clothing, I finally drummed up the courage to step on it this morning and was appalled to see a number in the one hundred and mid-thirty range. I can’t even say the number. Although only five or six pounds over my pretty standard weight, not only can I not button my pants, now my bra is tight and a little bit of fat bulges over the top. If you have not experienced this, let me tell you, it is disturbing. 

So this settled my decision about whether to join my friend, Ted in the cleanse and 6-week program he proposed. He called last week, all excited about a book called The Plant Paradox, so I immediately ordered it from Amazon. “I ran across it while surfing the web,” Ted told me. “I started going down the rabbit hole of dog rescue videos, which led to plastic surgery gone wrong – worst celebrity surgery before and after photos, which led to Dr. Steven Gundry’s infomercials on the hidden dangers in ‘healthy’ foods that cause disease and weight gain.” While Ted has never needed to worry about his weight (he was so thin when we were kids that his mother made him drink milkshakes when we got home from school), he has realized that he is at an age where he should be taking better care of his body. I think he means cutting down on the Cheese Whiz-sprayed Fritos that he and his farm crew wash down with Shiner Bock beers every afternoon. But he has surprised even himself by ordering the book and reading about the metabolic paradox of vegetables’ benefits vs. dangers hidden in your salad bowl. “It’s very interesting reading,” he says. “And I’m not even science-y.”

Ted is the one who talked me into going on Keto a couple of years ago. “I’m so faaaatttttttt!” I whined to him on the phone. “How can you be fat with all that dancing you do? Shouldn’t you weigh, like, four pounds?” he replied. “You’re right, I should! I’m teaching or dancing five days a week. But I can’t stop eating.” “All the ladies around here are on the Keto diet and the weight is just melting off. And you can eat pounds of butter and bacon all day long apparently.” I did go on the Keto program and luckily my friends Thomas and Dave joined me soon after. It’s always more fun when you have a partner in crime. And Keto was very successful for me. I lost a perfect amount of weight, felt good in my skin and my clothes and felt like I was no longer a slave to my sugar cravings. Could I finally put my food issues to rest?

Then the pandemic hit. Since May of 2020, I’ve been joking about gaining the “Quarantine Fifteen.” Due to the fact that I had worn nothing but sweats (I mean Loungewear) for so many months, I didn’t actually realize that my clothes were becoming tight. Or maybe I realized it but was in denial. At any rate, I counted on the fact that everyone was in the same boat, giving me a few months free from worry about my appearance, my weight.

But when my belly starts lapping over the top of my jeans, I know I’m in an unhealthy place. Time to get back on it.  Fortunately I love, love, love starting a diet. I guess we call them “programs” now, but come on, who are we kidding? All are new versions of the “diet.” And I’ve been on every diet since 1981. I was in college when I was forced to start worrying about my weight. In my sophomore year, I earned a spot on my college Dance Company where passing out from hunger and malnourishment was prized. Then that summer, I found employment as a dancer in an outdoor drama in North Carolina. The choreographer required all dancers to weigh in every Friday. Our solution to staying light was to stop eating or drinking anything (including water) on the Wednesday before. I recently found my application for the Southeastern Theatre Conference where I auditioned for this job. Name: Leslie Riley, Age: 20, Hair: Blonde, Eyes: Hazel, Height: 5’4”, Weight: 113 lb.

The Grapefruit Diet was my first official diet. Before that, I usually just skipped meals until I couldn’t take it anymore and then gobbled as many M&Ms as I could find. I stopped eating those when I learned that you have to run the length of a football field to burn off the calories in one M&M. My sister, Stacy agreed to go on the Grapefruit Diet with me. All you had to do was eat eggs, bacon and salad and have a grapefruit with every meal. You could lose 10 pounds in a week, which was hopeful because Stacy said she would kill herself if she ever had to buy clothing sized in the double digits. We did great the first day. The second day, I walked in our living room to find her watching tv with an ice-cold drink in her hand. “What are you drinking?” I asked. “Grapefruit and vodka,” she answered, not even looking up.

After college, the low-fat trend had kicked in, so I lived mostly on bagels and yogurt and popcorn with cake or Entenmann’s donuts thrown in for variety. My favorite food was individually wrapped caramels in a little brown bag from the bodega around the corner from my apartment in NY. I ate them like a squirrel. When I met Nick, he told me I ate like an 11-year-old whose parents are out of town. He was right. There was a sense of belligerence in my style. 

I started dragging Nick into my weight loss programs. He wanted to be an actor and everyone knows that the camera adds ten pounds. I wanted to be helpful, so I helped by telling him he needed to lose some weight. Our first foray together was Weight Watchers, which worked well for Nick, but at which I was a complete failure. After calculating my daily goal at 25 points, I racked up a whopping 18 points by breakfast and was still starving. 

I eventually went back to school, studying health and fitness and began learning about nutrition. I loved buying books written by doctors or nutritionists, reading the research and promises and implementing a new program for Nick and myself. Each book seemed to present us with a clean slate, a new start, with lists in black and white laying out a clear and simple method of living. I made him try The Blood Type Diet, The South Beach Diet, The Ornish Diet, “Eat More, Weigh Less.” (What could go wrong?) We went on The Pritikin Program for a year, which had us eating 60% carbohydrates. All I remember is downing bowl after bowl of Grapenuts. The Rotation Diet, Sugar Busters. The Nutrarian Diet centered around eating two pounds of vegetables a day, one pound raw and one cooked. The Weigh Down Diet proposed the whacky approach of waiting until you’re truly hungry to eat and then eating less. I downloaded the instructions for The Paleo Diet and we followed it half-heartedly. Nick gave me a book called You On A Diet. He crossed out the word You with a sharpie and inserted Nick. 

More recently, my college roommate, Deb has stepped in as my perfect diet buddy. A former beauty queen (Miss Louisville), she also battles societal expectations, body image and food. She once talked me into doing a three-week detox with her which involved eating only fruits and vegetables for a week, then a week of only raw food, then a week of juicing. Fun, right? What is fun is all the time we spend on the phone complaining about our bodies, our diets and how to keep our nightly wine in the line-up. I go on and off Keto, she goes on and off the Fast Metabolism Diet. “I’m starving,” she says on the phone. “I’m eating a whole cup of blueberries right now.” “I can’t have fruit,” I say. “But I can have an avocado. Can you have an avacado?” “Jesus Crist!” Rob yells in the background. “You two spend more time bitching about food than actually eating!”

Deb and I got together for a walk last week and I began detailing my disappointment with my condition, knowing she was struggling too. “How long do we have to do this?” Deb asked, striding with purpose two feet ahead of me. “I am so sick of this! When can we stop worrying about our weight and just be okay with how we are?!” 

Good question. It’s all so confusing. Low-fat, high-fat, low-protein, high-protein, fruit, no fruit, whole grains, no grains, meat, clean meat, no meat, one glass of wine, no wine, fast, don’t fast, on and on and on. Yes, we battle societal pressures, skewed body image, ageism. But we also battle industrialized foods and the billions of dollars spent on advertising which lead us all down the path of addictions to salt and sugar and fat and alcohol. How can we get off this merry-go-round? There’s the pull to be attractive and thin in order to be worthy on one hand, but on the other hand, there’s a comfortable, healthy body. 

Maybe Deb will want to join me and Ted on our three-day cleanse followed by a six-week detox and eating protocol. Or maybe we just need to be more like my little sister, Heather who once responded to my lecture on the dangers of eating high-fat and unhealthy food in her dry, understated way, “Skinniness ain’t everything, Leslie.”