Crash Diet - Life on the Fourth Floor
This is actually something that somebody I knew once did, down to the ingredients and the consequences. Years have passed since then, but it still resonates with me. The older we get, the more we obsess over our weight and the greater the lengths we’ll go to to change ourselves. Not me, you understand (the inside of my body basically looks like what they put inside a stuffed crust pizza) but people I know. A colleague of mine is trying a diet that does not allow her to eat tomatoes. She’s on a diet and she can’t eat salad. I thought that’s all people on a diet did.
When I asked why she told me they make you fat, in a matter-of-fact kind of way. What are you allowed to eat? Root vegetables, legumes, anything you can dig out of the ground with your own two hands, and meat. Yea, you may eat of the beasts that walketh upon the earth. So big slabs of meat are okay. No way a ten ounce steak is going to make you fat, but make sure you don’t have any big fattening tomatoes with that.
I feel like blaming any one food for being fat is like blaming your parents for everything that went wrong in your life. Yes, of course they were a factor but on balance that doesn’t tell the whole story. And I’m no more willing to cut pizza out of my life than I am my parents, even if under the healthy melted cheese and nourishing processed meat there lurks a sauce made of sugar and fattening tomatoes and beneath that — gasp! — carbs. Whisper it… carbs.