Dare: Going Fruitarian for a Week

This seems like a great idea! Next stop HEALTH!

Apr 2, 2012 at 9:00am | Leave a comment


First of all:
I got a new haircut and it's totally awesome. Remember all that tormented brooding I did about wanting short hair but not doing it because I was afraid I wouldn't get laid? God, what a total first-world nightmare I am. I should have to drink a cup of giardia-laced creek fluid from one of those countries where they don't have clean drinking water.

Turns out I love my haircut and I don't even care if my features are too round for it. Seriously, go get a short haircut! Fuck the male gaze! The breeze on my neck is better than a million penises in my face.

Okay, now on to the meat of this post. Or rather... the non-meat: fruitarianism. (Sorry. I will drink another cup of giardia water for that.)

You know that part in "Notting Hill" where Hugh Grant goes on all those bad dates to get over Julia Roberts? Shut up, of course you do. One of those bad dates is bad because she's FRUITARIAN. The Bad Date says that Fruitarians only eat things that have fallen off of trees, and believe that food that's been picked or harvested has been "murdered." Ha ha ha, hippie jokes. Fresh and new!

I don't want to devastate you if,  like me, you amass the bulk of your science knowledge from Hugh Grant films. But this is not a strictly accurate definition.

Fruitarianism is more like veganism, if veganism did a sweet BMX flip on a dirtbike made of cobras. Which is to say: extreme and hardcore. There are no animal products, whatsoever, but nor are there grains or even certain vegetables. 

Why would anybody do this? Let's ask. HEY WIKIPEDIA! WHY WOULD ANYBODY DO THIS?


Haha, "seed dispersal."

OK, well, sure. But why would I decide to go Fruitarian for a week? I'm not religious and my idea of a "healthy lifestyle" is driving with my feet while chewing whole packets of Sweet'n'Low.

Well! Because

1) I am ALSO extreme and hardcore, and I got a fad diet email entitled "Unlimited Fruit" right when I was trying to think of a cool dare to do for XOJane.

2) I have a wedding to attend in two weeks and I'm still feeling kind of puffy and sluggish from a long winter of hearty foods. My mom was in town again last weekend, and we went to Mario Batali's place and got the Pasta Tasting Menu. I think it was 900 courses of pasta capped by a pudding IV. It was either Extreme Diet for a week, or convert to some Seventh Day Adventist-y religion as penance.

3) I hadn't done anything stupid to my body recently that necessitated use of the macro I made when I Master Cleansed. Sometimes I just need an excuse.

Anyhow, this Fad Diet. Let's talk about it.

Let's make a twee little  McSweeney's style list about it. Won't that be fun?

Things "Unlimited Fruit" Sounds Like:

- an essay collection about my kooky family.
- the title of my alt comedy standup special.
- off brand, poorly translated Russian cereal.
- any number of gay jokes we are too enlightened to make.

Alas, Unlmited Fruit is actually one in the long tradition of severe, witch-doctor-y fads that circulate on the Internet and pretend to be healthy. Remember those old Angelfire pages and Comic Sans heavy emails? That Cabbage Soup and that one diet people pretended was from the Mayo Clinic where you basically eat a thousand eggs and nothing else like everybody at the Mayo Clinic got drunk and during "Cool Hand Luke"?

Maybe not. Maybe you are not super old and don't remember Web 1.0.

And what diet won't I try? I don't know, maybe not one with barbecued ribs, because I think they are gross. Really, ribs and American cheese are the only two foods I don't eat, because the process of tearing meat from A RIBCAGE has always felt grisly to me, and American cheese is not a food.


OK, so what are the rules of Unlimited Fruit? It's pretty easy.

Breakfast: (say it with me) UNLIMITED FRUIT, with the exception of bananas and apples. Who knows why? Because they're starchy?

Lunch and Dinner:  UNLIMITED FRUIT, with the addition of undressed vegetables and a protein. The protein can be a cup of greek yogurt, half an avocado, twenty nuts (hahahahahah), an egg, or a 4 oz portion of lean meat.

But because I'm goin' FRUITARIAN, I'm going to be hardcore and just do fruits, nuts, avocado. Accordingly, I bought a bag of raw almonds, a bag of raw cashews, a couple avocados, and a LUNATIC AMOUNT OF FRUIT. Look at this!


The woman at the grocery store asked me if I was training for a marathon, but that might have been because of my toned gams and general air of somebody who is super disciplined.

As of yesterday, it's not so bad. It kind of feels like the food you'd eat if you were at the beach. But I was briefly vegan as a teenager (oh, like you never had a phase) and quit because I was having borderline pornographic dreams about fettucine alfredo.

But it's just a week! Didn't John Malkovich live off of Jell-O for like a month once? (This is how I live my life, incidentally: politics by Hugh Grant, medical advice by the guy who played Lennie in "Of Mice and Men.")

Well, this should be fun! Or horrible. One of the two? Anyhow, BUCKLE UP, intestines. And buckle up, reader friends! I'll weigh back in next Friday.