Part 4

Exercise may aid and abet its con- or destruction, baths, massage, health waters and what not, be its handmaidens, but fundamentally, chemically, irrefutably, it is certain foods which make fat! And so it came about that the lesser me that corresponds to the one you see in reduction advertisements etched in dotted lines beside the before-taking silhouette, rose to the supreme heights of decision. Casting away the cluttering paraphernalia of the blue-enameled rolling-pins, the indoor bicycle, the five-foot Diet-book shelf, I decided to set out afresh upon the single supposition that in the normally functioning human being, food makes fat.

I sought out the most all-around wise man of my acquaintance. He, in turn, directed me to a man especially wise in the highly specialized field of dietetics.

There was little in this physician’s laboratory-like office to suggest what I had come to regard as part of the sumptuous adjuncts of slimming.

The address was not good.

I arrived there finally, to be received by a tall, rangy man with no manner at all, who promptly proceeded to take from me what had never been taken before, my metabolism.

Metabolism is something that you surrender with a clothespin on your nose and what seems to be the cork end-piece of a bicycle handle bar inserted into your mouth.

This walling up of the two major points of egress of what is known to the laity as your breathing, results in an inner panic which is recorded by an automatic pen attached to the apparatus which records the goings-on of your trapped breath.

You do not give your metabolism standing up. You lie prone, first thinking you are going to die, then hoping it.

The results of this sudden internal commotion, as recorded by the metabolism-machine, established my metabolistic processes as normal. This fact, in turn, established the further fact that there were no glandular alibis or pathological peculiarities to exonerate this case of overweight.

To put it bluntly, food in wrong selection, proportion, and combination was the root of the evil.

* * * * *

Now if the motif of my words seems to have chiefly to do with food and editorial we, please bear in mind that these words have chiefly to do with food and editorial we. The sum, substance and portent which give whatever justification I may be able to eke out of the penning of these pages of adjectives and split infinitives, being food and editorial we.

This, however, is neither the time nor the place to go into the details of this new post-metabolism regime, except to emphasize that after years of dangerous and rudderless experimentation, I had at last found a man who seemed to understand the science of food as it applied to my human envelope.

The lesser me (who now purchases her blouses in the misses’ department) has not got it left in her to display the behaviorism of your true hero. “It was nothing at all. I saw my duty and I did it.” It was something, let me tell you that. It was lean and rocky going, full of thorn. Rocky going and slow and uphill and torturous and to a dreadful sing-song rhythm that more and more frequently got into my way: What-of-it-what-of-it----

Neither is the transformation from my hitherto normal attitude toward food as a pleasant means of subsistence, pretty telling.

There were hours, there were days, during the long lean siege of the post-metabolism era, when part of a newly developed form of self-torture was to rise from the pickings of my table and retire to a solitude I sought chiefly in order to visualize, while the tortured saliva ran, the meal it might have been. Instead of the soulless and fatless broth, consisting of the water off boiled greens, creamed soup to cling warmingly to cold ribs; instead of the cube of boiled beef (three ounces, cooked), a filet of sole, lying tenderly beneath a velvety sauce and sprinkled through with capers, like the black tips of little ermines; hot rolls slit on the side and then pressed down again on a cube of sweet butter to fit into the aching void of no bread. A sweet, preferably souffléd, or even a lowly, a sugared and cinnamoned baked apple under cream, to take the place of eight gulps of water.

There was to come a time, fallen so low had I, when to stand with my nose plastered against the plate-glass windows of lunch-room emporiums, where flapjacks, later to be smothered under melting butter and golden syrup were being juggled, became one of my favorite outdoor sports.

Time has healed those aching voids. Alas! one of the cruel anachronisms of this whole cruelly anachronistic business is that deep within the lesser me nests regret that my palate, doubtless also leaner, has lost much of its fine gusty capacity to yearn.

Today a dish of flapjacks beneath a golden blanket of maple syrup; a Roquefort dressing flowing off the smooth red flank of a stuffed tomato, a soufflé, a marron glacé, a crêpe suzette, a marzipan, leave me cold and without zest. Before them now I stand bowed with a regret that I have lost my capacity to regret them.

But there is no denying the fact that there was that period when my secret absorption upon the subject of food (food denied me) became shamefully dominant. Not the fierce legitimate hunger pangs of one starving for lack of the ability to obtain food, but the flabby, rather shameful spectacle of one in the midst of the plentiful prerogatives of three meals a day, self-denied them.

Frightening, mental traits began to creep upon me.

* * * * *

Living chiefly upon myself, stoked on the low fuel values of lean meats and five-per-cent vegetables boiled in water, going through my pallid days always conscious of a catherine wheel of desire spinning somewhere within the center of my denied and shrinking anatomy, I began to take on a quite horrible and private pleasure in watching other people eat, or preferably, overeat.

Myself relentless in passing up a toothsome dish, often as not especially prepared by a gracious hostess, I showed neither mercy nor consideration. But let that same hostess sit down at my own board and I became sly and spider-like, luring my victim into my gastronomic den of rich foods.

Eat and overeat, something devilish within me seemed to shout. Eat, in order that I may all the more exultantly deny and work myself up into the ecstasies of martyrdom. How the saints must have learned to love their sweet agonies!

Nor were these macabre mental processes to remain unsuspected. Chilly laughter began to greet the dreadful might of my hospitality. Glances flashed between my guests as sawing away at a thin slice of especially prepared lean beef, fried in mineral oil, I importuned, nay commanded, my futilely resisting guests to more of this and that richly devised concoction; pressed upon them the au gratin potato, the sherry-flavored tart, while I tinkled ice water against denied but omnivorous teeth, dallied with my chaste unused dessert spoon and rammed persuasion and second helpings of pistachio Melba down my friends.

“Dammit,” cried one of my obese guests one night, goaded (and tempted) beyond endurance, “I won’t overstuff myself with another helping of this delicious bouillabaisse in order to enhance your lean inner spirit of self-righteousness! Dammit, I tell you, no! Well, just a little more--just a damn little more.”

Reader, as they used to say in the days when ladies “padded,” my friend, alas! spoke too truly. Hungry, whetted with a desire for foods that hitherto had never interested nor particularly tempted me, I schemed for the obesity of my lean friends and the greater obesity of my obese ones. Schemed, Reader! The sense of rising from my board, feebly stoked on lean meats broiled in mineral oil, five-per-cent vegetables (the ones that grow on the wrong side of the gastronomic railroad tracks; parsnips, cabbage, spinach, beets, greens, leeks, dandelions) brought me the strange sadistic martyr-like delights herein elsewhere described. I began to lose my friends.