It is the consummate, diet-related cliché: “you can stop drinking, or
smoking, but you can’t just stop eating.” You can, of course, stop
eating; Ghandi used that strategy to magnificent effect. As a method of
reaching a healthy weight, however, it’s frowned upon. What you have to
do to lose weight is not to stop eating, but to stop eating the way you
used to eat. I’m doing it, and it’s working, but it complicates the hell
out of my life as a cook.
I’ve struggled with weight all my life, losing and re-gaining the same 30+ pounds several times. I established a pathetic pattern worthy of a medieval tapestry: the large woman stops eating (anything, carbs, second helpings and fast food), exercises (incorrectly, so intensely that she gets shin splints, until she abhors the sight of her Nikes) and becomes smaller. She buys tinier clothes, and basks in the admiration of all of the people who want to know her “secret.” She gets busy, stressed, cocky and inattentive and starts to eat like she used to, she becomes larger again, and in the final tableau she is folding her smaller clothes and putting them in bags to donate to Goodwill, and then pulling the larger versions from the back of the closet where she saved them for the inevitable.