CARPE MEDIA

by Emily W. Sussman

There is but one reaction that a thin person has upon seeing yet another Totally Predictable “Obesity in America” article (accompanied, of course, by unflattering mid-section shots of examples on the street).

“GOD, CAN’T THOSE PEOPLE JUST EAT LESS?”

Naturally, this is neither mature nor helpful.

Encouraging this oversimplified “it really isn’t that hard” reaction are articles like this one, in which a man (yes, usually always a man) wakes up one day and decides to start eating less, and drops the weight.

My theory, based on 28 years of painstaking research, is that women tend to go insane with deprivation after vowing to eat less, and predictably self-defeating mind games ensue. Either that, or they isolate themselves from society by eating only Jenny Craig mail-order meals, which not even a well-paid food stylist can seem to make appealing. (Ew, food from a box?)

Such an ugly cycle!

Dear reader: please bear in mind that I’m no nutritionist. I also have no kids, and I hate exercising unless at least two leashed dogs are involved, which miraculously amounts to about an hour a day. But I do have a seriously bangin’ bod, and I submit that you need ingest neither rice cakes nor fat-free poop yogurt to drop pounds. In FACT, I submit that those foods actually make people fatter, because they’re eating them in addition to furtively mainlining the candy stash.

For What It’s Worth: The Rich Lady Diet. This plan involves roughly the following: eight-dollar Gouda instead of Doritos; strained Greek yogurt with those wicked expensive dried cherries instead of 17 containers of Sugar-Free Jello; four dollar Haagen-Dazs instead of half-price Breyers. Yes, high-quality food leaves you more satisfied, ounce for ounce. But the bottom line is that your budget simply can’t handle buying two or three rounds of this stuff every week.

Surely, man cannot live on charcuterie alone! you say. I need a satisfying dinner!

Learn to love rice and beans. Cheap as hell, for one. But don’t forget to put a lovin’ spoonful of creme fraiche on it. Not only will it taste great, but you worked so frigging hard to make it, you’ll end up rationing it better. Look at you, all Epicurean!

Emily Sussman does what she calls Experiential Journalism. Basically that means first-person stuff with some universal meaning thrown in for good measure.