May 2002
GQ Magazine
40 Days
with the Diet Divas
What's the best way to drop pounds?
The gore of the Atkins diet? The loopiness of the Zone?
We put one man through the test:
Go on four of the most popular diets-in consultation with their authors. Then get all
the gurus together for dinner. The results:
Losing weight was easy.
The gurus were impossible
by JAMES O'BRIEN
Don't Touch That Potato Dr. Barry Sears, the force behind the Zone diet books, sits down with rival diet authors for a rare meal together.
THEY ARE GURUS, men who spend their lives making promises big and bold. You see their bibles lined up in bookstores across America-the Zone, the Code, the Revolution each one offering a way of life. A very narrow way of life. Dr. Robert Atkins sings with rival diet authors for a rare meal together. the praises of meat and the subversive dangers of pasta and fruit. His vegetarian arch- rival, Dr. Dean Ornish, preaches the homily of plant-based cuisine. Every camp in the diet wars is equally passionate, strident, mutually exclusive. And to what end? We spend a staggering $33 billion a year on the diet industry (that's twice what the U.S. will spend on homeland security in 2002), yet every year Americans grow larger, wider.
I ought to know. I'm one of them. I've never cracked a diet book-never been on a diet. In fact, the discordant racket of the diet gurus has kept me from seeking their help. That was before I realized how much help I needed.
For years I've considered myself an obese man in a fat man's body. That is, given my attraction to rich food, red wine, to utter stillness of body, I deserved to be more than, say, twenty pounds overweight. Still, twenty (OK, thirty) pounds, especially when half of it is in your face, is difficult to ignore.
Yes, there comes a time in the life of every fat man when a good haircut and a pair of black pants just aren't enough to maintain his denial. And so, portly and a little leery, I staggered into the fad-diet wilderness: I bravely spent forty days and forty nights following-for ten days each-four contrasting diets representing the spectrum of popular American nutrition, from the nearly vegan to the predominantly fleshy. I had a simple plan: I would speak to these gurus personally, get their advice as I went through their diets. Then I would invite them all to dinner.
It would have been easier to invite them to a prostate exam. These are not exactly low-maintenance guys. They are Diet divas. They are convinced their empires are constantly at stake. Some of them loathe each other. Trying to set up the meal, I encountered petty demands and bitter refusals. In phone calls and meetings and E-mails, I cajoled, I threatened, I begged. Finally, miraculously, dinner was arranged.
But first I had to lose some weight.
******
THE COLOR CODE
I BEGAN WITH the new and trendy: the low-fat, plant-based diet of The Color Code: A Revolutionary Eating Plan for Optimum Health. The idea of the diet is so simple as to sound silly: Eat plenty, but eat colorfully. The authors maintain that nutrients found in the pigments, in the very hues and shades of fruits and vegetables, hold the cure for obesity, cancer, heart disease. The more we ingest these protective nutrients, the stronger our body's defenses become. The book extols-with an unfortunate combination of geeky detail and linguistic chirpiness-the virtues of colorful food.
Eating by
color makes me feel light. I begin to feel a superiority I've always sensed in vegetarians.
We are given encomiums to the wonders of red food ("Heart-shaped and red, the strawberry is an obvious symbol of love").
Ditto the splendor of blue: eggplant, elderberry, plum, grape, blueberry ("Imagine...the azure blue of the sky meets the majestic blue of the sea...bask in the relaxing blueness of it all").
Lavishly interspersed among all this purple prose are exhausting lists of phytochemicals, the pigment-based compounds found in plants. These are, the book argues, the best weapon against free radicals-those unstable atoms found most copiously in fatty, processed foods and thought to cause human disease and certain ravages of aging like wrinkles.
I consult with one of the book's authors, Dr. Dan Nadeau, who tells me the blue- berry is the "brain berry." Being from Maine, Nadeau talks about blueberries as if they were an illicit drug. He doesn't eat them, he "does" them. "I noticed that when I started doing more blueberries," he tells me, "I was just so much more relaxed."
Nadeau instructs me to eat ten to kaleidoscopic day. I get ten points for twelve helpings of blue, green, etc., every each helping, and I'm to shoot for a daily total of one hundred. Right away, I score points easily. I consume soy-blueberry smoothies, sesame kale, roasted red potatoes.
I eat something called Crunchy Vegetable Burrito Banditos. At night my apartment resonates with the aroma of cumin, so disconcertingly reminiscent of the vegan armpits of a former coworker.
Soon I discover some hard lessons about dieting: If you want to lose weight and you have a full-time job, plan ahead. Even the lunch recipes in The Color Code require an hour of prep time. Dinner is a dull tour of chopping, chopping, dicing, mincing and chopping. The other lesson: Flavor is not a priority. The dishes you make on the Color Code are lovely to look at, like a painting, but flavorless, like, again, a painting. Yet there's something nice about following a point system. Midway through the diet, after light dinners of vegetable stew (red and green-twenty points!) and brown rice (no points), I begin to believe this is the healthiest I've ever eaten. Though I haven't lost any weight, emotionally, a transformation has begun. I feel light. And I begin to feel a superiority I've always sensed in vegetarians. Everyone I encounter on the street looks unhealthy. I see people eating cheesy burritos in the morning and I pity/despise them.
At the end of my ten Color Code days, I'm in mourning for butter. But I'm also strongly drawn to the promise of clean arteries, blood that flows like a rushing river, smooth skin, the nirvana of a trim waistline. I am almost convinced that “heart-shaped and red, the strawberry is an obvious symbol of love."
******
THE ATKINS DIET
I'M WATCHING MY weight and so I order the steak and eggs. I ask the waitress at the diner to replace the home fries with a strip of bacon and she looks at me knowingly. No doubt she's been on the Atkins diet—everyone has, and we all hang out at diners, eating eggs and leaving our fruit garnish unmolested. Indeed, the number of people who have tried Dr. Robert Atkins's carnivorous, fruitphobic prescription—as articulated in books like Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution—seems to be exceeded only by the number of people who attack it.
The often bruising assaults on Atkins's plan come not only from his diet-book rivals (Nadeau calls it "complete madness") but also from independent nutritionists. The American Dietetic Association has labeled the Atkins diet a "nightmare."Atkins, a cardiologist, maintains that overindulgence in vegetables and fruits has helped make America obese, that pasta is a pariah and that bread, my beloved. bread, is the fuse that has ignited this country's explosion of fat-building insulin. Our metabolic system, says
Atkins, converts carbohydrates-potatoes, fruits, vegetables, Twinkies-into the body's recommended fuel: glucose, or blood sugar. Spikes in blood sugar lead to overproduction of insulin. Insulin turns glucose into fat. Fat asses, fat faces, big buxom manbreasts.
The Holy Grail of the Atkins weight-loss plan is something called Benign Dietary Ketosis, a term coined by Atkins to mean a kind of purity of blood. Ketosis occurs when your system is cleared of glucose and in its absence your body begins burning excess fat for energy.
In the initial, most restrictive phase of Atkins, in which I spend ten days, one achieves ketosis by cutting out all but twenty grams of glucose-producing carbohydrates from one's daily diet. No fructosy carrots or apples, no cupcakes. You replace those sweet treats with filling proteins, such as meat and eggs. Eggs, eggs, eggs. I eat them—fried, scrambled, hard-boiled-almost every day on Atkins. I eat so much bacon that bacon becomes my bodily musk. I have roast beef for dinner, roast beef for lunch-wrapped in lettuce leaves to simulate a sandwich. Once, I have a Reuben without the rye bread, which really isn't a Reuben at all.
Atkins is 71, and despite having literally written the book on antiaging (Dr. Atkins' Age- Defying Diet Revolution), he looks every second of it. I think I see him age in the time be- tween our guru dinner and a visit I make the next day to the gloomy Atkins Center in New York. There is a kind of sweaty, noisome ghoulishness to the whole Atkins crew. Numerous exam rooms and much clutter suggest a medieval clinic fairly bursting at its seams.
Atkins's office is small and bright, but the doctor himself has a laconic, almost sullen presence. He's also surprisingly dapper. Atkins, who has been on his own diet for thirty-nine years, has beautiful gray hair and skin the shade of a fresh potato, and as I watch him lounge exhaustedly on a chair at the end of a long day, some of the better-dressed Draculas come to mind.
Can I Have That Without Flavor?
At dinner...
Talking with him about nutrition is similar, I imagine, to what it must have been like to talk to Nixon about Vietnam. When Atkins discusses the popularity of the opposition low-fat diet camp, he sounds just like Nixon talking about the Democrats or Walter Cronkite. "I mean, they're lying," he says. "It's unbelievable. I'm fighting people who don't tell the truth. And they've got much more clout than I have, and they've got much more money behind them." Thank you, Mr. President.
And the man never wavers. "No matter what you explore," he tells me, "this is the truth. I don't care what anybody says."
If Atkins is the truth, the truth is hard to bear: Early in my time on the diet, I suffer dehydration, thanks to my paltry intake of carbs, and so Atkins repeatedly demands I swallow eight 8-ounce glasses of water daily. By Atkins day four, I'm going to the bathroom with the frequency of a very old man.
Every time I pee, I have to pass a white urinalysis strip through my stream and pray for its tip to turn purple. The strip measures the level of ketones in my urine. The deeper the shade, the farther into ketosis I have journeyed. When on day five-after days of sienna and mauve-I finally turn the strip royal purple, I run into the living room and proudly shake it in my wife's face. She is mildly pleased for me, but mostly disgusted.
Then I experience full and alarming depression. On day six, I wake up with an incapacitating lump in my gut. I call Atkins's director of education and research, Colette Heimowitz, and ask her what's happening to me. Heimowitz says I am addicted to sugar and I'm now paying for my years of raging carbohydratism. "You're in sugar withdrawal," she tells me. The sadness will pass in a day or two, she says.
I tell her that the unalloyed-meat thing is getting to me, that I'd like an apple. A refreshing apple, She says, "Soon you'll appreciate vegetables more." I say I already appreciate vegetables. I want an apple. And anyway, it's not about withdrawal, it's about love. It's about the feel of the apple's skin against my tongue. It's about the apple's quenching juice chin. It's about the momentary pleasure of finding one last good apple bite down near the bitter core.
"If you want," she says, "you can add a sliver of apple to your diet today." That's very kind of you, Colette.
About the depression, Heimowitz is right. It is over in thirty-six hours. But then, on Christmas Eve, Atkins day ten, after denying myself Christmas cookies and eggnog, potatoes and champagne, I have a little breakdown. I spend most of dinner in a slow burn, watching my wife deliberately fluff up her baked potato in her quest for the perfect distribution of tuber, sour cream and butter. Finally, as she is literally gnawing on the potato's skin, I snap. I rise from the table, sending my chair reeling. My father-in-law looks up at me, a piece of bread suspended in his mouth. I point at her accusingly and shout, "Put the potato down!"
******
THE ZONE
BARRY SEARS IS the ultimate formula man, the diet guru who's gotten the art down to a science. Toweringly tall and well groomed, the biochemist exudes a Babbitt-like boosterism for the low-carb diet camp. His theories about carbohydrates and the evils of insulin are not unlike those of Atkins, but his energy level and aggressive salesmanship make the languid old man seem downright inert.
Here's the formula Sears has taken to the bank: Begin with a promising nutritional notion-stabilized blood-sugar levels. Isn't it true that unstable levels lead to mood swings and energy spikes and dips? Don't they lead to excess insulin production, and doesn't that lead to fat? It just might. Next step, find an angle. Don't those spikes and dips make a person mentally and physically compromised—"loopy," as Sears would say? Well, if we can prevent them through diet, staying on an even keel, then we will always be at our best, always in the Zone.
Now, last step: Write books with a Joyce Carol Oatesian fervor. Call them The Zone and A Week in the Zone and Mastering the Zone and The Soy Zone and The Anti-Aging Zone. The most important thing is to keep the angle a little vague. Sears's "Zone" is a free-floating abstraction, something that can never be clinically tested. At dinner in Manhattan, he claims that even if he conducted a clinical study, no one would believe him. So be it.
Sears is a gregarious man fond of folksy clichés, which he spouts so frequently that he clearly forgets he's already used them. With you. In the current conversation. "I want you to get the most hormonal cluck for the buck," he'll say, then Say it again ten minutes later when defending the exasperating math (the carbohydrate-to-protein-to-fat ratio) required to get "cluck," whatever that is
"I see dead
people, too," says Dean Ornish. "And they're on the Atkins diet."
Don't worry if you can't figure out your ratio for one meal. "Nobody's perfect, except Mother Teresa," he tells me a few times, "and she's dead." And anyway, there's no guilt in the Zone. If you fail at breakfast, try again at lunch. "You're only as good as your last hormonally correct meal."
Sears makes me some fairly bold promises at the beginning of my Zone days: "Within two to three days, you're going to see your mental acuity being maintained to a much greater extent because you stabilize your blood-sugar level. By day three or four, you're going to see a very great surge in physical energy."
I'd prefer a very great surge in flavor right about now, but I'll settle for energy. For the next ten days, I eat my specific, per-meal allotments, calculated with the help of a tape measure, a scale, a calculator and my physicist wife.
After five days, my energy level is normal, my mental acuity as questionable as ever, my craving for my own aromatic pasta carbonara almost constant.
Though Sears's dishes are unspeakably bland-an elaborate ginger chicken, say, that requires far too much calculus—the Zone is the one diet that is great on snacks. You're supposed to eat two every day, and among the ones I gravitate to- ward are apples smeared with almond butter, and deviled eggs in which you re- place the yolks with hummus.
Something does happen on day eight, though: A distinct but brief feeling puts me in a place that, for me, might well be the Zone. Or it just might be a good day. That's the brilliance of the Sears way. Who knows? It's a Sunday, and I am out running errands. With my stabilized blood sugar, I don't necessarily feel smarter, but I do feel in a remarkably good, fairly rare state of mind in which I find myself striking up conversations with people I otherwise might have ignored. At the supermarket, I voluntarily update the produce clerk on the score of the Raiders game. Together we lament their current stretch of poor play. The strange thing is, I hate the Raiders but still show compassion for the forlorn clerk. We discuss with hope their chances in the coming play-offs. Later, checking out, I notice the cashier's name tag reads IAN, and even though he is ignoring me, I announce that I always wished my name were lan, which is mostly true, although I haven't thought about it in years. He couldn't care less, but I keep talking. If I ever have a son, I tell him, I will lobby to name him Ian. Am I manic, or in the Zone?
******
THE ORNISH DIET
WHAT SEPARATES DR. DEAN ORNISH from Atkins and Sears is paperwork. Reams of it. Studies and clinical tests and published papers. Ornish never passes up a chance to point this out. "As you know," he says, "Dr. Atkins has never published a single study in any journal anywhere about anything."
There is a sleepy serenity in the cardiologist's hound-dog face that belies a bulldog streak. Ornish vows that his diet, outlined in the book Eat More, Weight Less, will solve almost everything: You can have more food, less flab, sparkling arteries and, most important, a clockwork heart. "Even people who were so sick they were on the heart-transplant list," he tells me, "often were able to get off it." That's quite a diet.
At first I think it's all harmless bragging and brinkmanship, but then I follow Ornish to a talk he gives in San Francisco. In a bright conference room above Market Street, Ornish talks up his plan with an impressive display of scientific charts and graphics. Then he flashes up a slide of the poster from the movie The Sixth Sense. He asks the crowd to repeat the famously haunting phrase from the film and they recite it in unison: "I see dead people."
"I see dead people, too," says Ornish. "And they're on the Atkins diet."
Ornish has the power of the scientific establishment behind. him, and in a way, his nearly nonfat, borderline vegan diet does make the most healthful, comprehensive sense of all the pop- ulist diets. But it's still no fun to eat. The one thing I can say in Ornish's favor is that he pays more attention to recipes, which is the diet gurus' fatal flaw. With Ornish, I enjoy the two best dishes I've had on this whole weirdly abstemious journey. One is an appetizer-roasted quesadillas with bananas, alfalfa sprouts, cilantro, jalapeño and (nonfat, of course) Monterey Jack cheese. The quesadillas are crunchy, sweet and earthy, a little spicy. The other dish is a main course, a comforting mix of winter vegetables and tofu cooked in sake, mirin and soy sauce.
Otherwise, the diet gurus, all of them, throw around the word gourmet with abusive abandon. Their promises of abundance mask crazy, selective denial of the good earth's bounty, and that's no way for me, for anyone, to live.
And yet, as my diet days wind down, I'm reluctant to leave this tournament of disciplined eating. Somehow I've lost seventeen pounds, and I can't tell you what a rush that is. Of course, the first stage of any diet is when you see the most dramatic results. (By the way, neither GQ nor any diet author recommends this insane plan as a healthy way to lose weight.) More important, I will soon be able to eat what I want, but...do I want to? I'm worried about that old, joy-inducing culinary rush of the senses, long absent. I miss it, but I know it helped make me fat in the first place.
My dinner with the gurus is my first major test of will.
******
THE DINNER
IT'S A DISASTER OF PLANNING. Sears and Nadeau say they're game, but Atkins and Ornish don't get along. The last two accept my initial invitation; then each changes his mind at least once. When I threaten to drop Atkins, his people reconsider. As time grows short, Ornish begins to claim scheduling problems. Ask me Tuesday, he says, ask me Friday. Finally, when I hear his merciless "I see dead people" joke, I know he and Atkins will never break bread (or, in Atkins's case, ribs).
Once Ornish pulls out, Atkins comes back to the fold, and I soon find myself sitting with him, Sears and Nadeau in at downstairs room of a West Village bistro called the Blue Ribbon Bakery. The room is elegant, low-ceilinged, candlelit, with brick columns and a wine cellar off to one side. The darkness tends to swallow up Atkins's complexion, but I can see his white hair and the flashing whites of his eyes. The imposing Sears sits next to him, and for once they peruse a menu together I want to know what they will eat, and I want to know this: How does each man help his followers-the overeating and unthinking masses-get beyond food, get over it? I'm not talking about addictions, I say, but about the profound attachment most humans, overweight and otherwise, have to the foods they love.
Atkins goes first. He is leaning back in his chair, sipping min- eral water. As usual, there is a Gary Cooperish pause between each word. "I teach them that when they crave something, that they can get a thing in a chocolate flavor, but sugarless," he says. "Like with sucralose or...glutamine, which is great for knocking out cravings." This is hardly the anodyne I'm seeking.
Sears moves to speak several times before Atkins is done—he is always dying to get his breath in-then tells us that "people need to be taught one thing: You have to treat food like a drug." Nadeau stammeringly mentions something about "carbohydrate metabolism."
*
Ordering with the Gurus
DR. ATKINS: First of all, I'm going to have a Caesar salad; leave off the croutons. Then I'm going to have a rack of lamb medium-rare, but what do they come with?
WAITER: Mashed potatoes and string beans.
ATKINS: Forget the mashed potatoes; can you give me a green vegetable instead?
WAITER: It comes with string beans.
ATKINS: How about something like a creamed spinach?
WAITER: We don't have-I can ask the chef.
ATKINS: I'll take it with either garlic and butter or garlic and oil. I'd love all three of them.
DAN NADEAU: I'll do the mixed greens with olive oil. And I'll do the barbecue shrimp, no style, with olive oil and garlic. You can take the heads off. The heads are probably too much.
BARRY SEARS: OK, I'll have the salmon. And on that salmon, if I could basically... It's served with mashed potatoes, but could I get extra asparagus?
WAITER: Sure. Now, are you a no-starch? Because it also has potato sticks.
SEARS: Yeah, we'll get rid of those.
While I listen to their unsatisfying but revealing answers, I think about how they have helped me lose so much weight, how I can almost see my once youthful, once handsome face. emerging from the usurping layer of fat. I'm grateful for this. But I know I'm on my own now. Dinner arrives. Sears has the salmon, lightly poached; Atkins the lamb, heavily roasted. But they agree on one thing: Potatoes are evil. Each asks to replace his with a green vegetable. Only Nadeau makes no fuss; he orders pink-the New Orleans-style shrimp.
Me, I indulge. After some private anguish, I order the barbecue-pork sandwich and a glass of zinfandel, and it feels like the first time I ever drank or cursed in front of my parents.
I listen to Sears dominate the conversation, to Nadeau, the new guru on the block, laugh at comments I know he finds absurd. He is happy; he has joined the fray. I watch Atkins gnaw on the bones of his lamb. And I savor my food, half of which I take home, as I am feeling rather full.