Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (24 page)

Nearly three thousand people followed his Twitter feed and encouraged him as he lost a hundred pounds. One California woman, whom Brian has never met, cheered him and scolded him—and lost fifty pounds of her own along the way. “People celebrated when I ate right and chastised me when I ate wrong. I needed to talk about what I was trying to do, and talk about my feelings about the food I was eating,” he said. “It was helpful to talk about my suspicion that some of this food had an addictive quality to it, to make sure I wasn’t the only one that felt that way. It’s surprising how social the weight loss effort is for me.”

People celebrated when I ate right and chastised me when I ate wrong. I needed to talk about what I was trying to do, and talk about my feelings about the food I was eating.—
Brian Stelter

While Senator McCaskill and Brian Stelter put their struggles out to the public, Jennifer Hudson and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand kept them within the family. That proved to be another terrific way to get some support. When Jennifer started
on her weight-loss journey, so did more than a hundred of her relatives. Together, they lost almost fourteen hundred pounds! One of her techniques was to write down everything she ate so that she was fully aware of what was going into her body.

Senator Gillibrand did much the same thing, keeping a food journal that she shared with her sister, who was also trying to shed pounds. The senator lost her baby weight, dropping from a size 16 to a size 6.

With my incredibly hectic schedule, I know as well as anyone how hard it can be to eat well at work and on the road. But Padma Lakshmi might have me beat in the challenge department, because as a host of
Top Chef
, she gains weight every single television season. Known as the first Indian American supermodel earlier in her career, Padma is also a cookbook author and an actress.

Diane caught up with her during a break in taping her reality TV show, which pits chefs against one another in culinary challenges. “I need to taste everything that these chefs have put their hearts and souls into in order to render a judgment that’s fair,” Padma says. “I have to eat whatever is put in front of me, so I put on about ten to fifteen pounds a season.” It usually takes her about six to eight weeks to gain that weight. “I have a very talented wardrobe stylist who gives me clothes in two to three different sizes, so often I will go from a two to a six or a six to a ten.”

While she is on the set, Padma says, “I don’t think about calories. I enjoy the food. Then, when the show’s finished, that’s
the time to concentrate on my health and the way I look. I don’t try and do those at the same time, because it’s impossible. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

So what’s her recipe for getting slim when it’s over? “Make sure there’s a balance in your life. If I’ve just spent six or eight weeks on the show, eating everything under the sun, the next six or eight weeks will be about really cutting back on fried foods, on cheese, on red meat, on alcohol, on starches, on processed foods. Eating healthy is like a bank account. If you spend your calories by eating a lot of them in one case, then you have to save your calories later by eating better. You know, it’s just basic arithmetic.”

Padma is one more voice touting the benefits of whole food. “Eating food as close to how nature made it is always a good idea. The more you process food, the less nutrients you get, the less natural inherent flavor you get from that food; to me, the less pleasure you get. If I eat a cucumber, I want to taste that beautiful green herbaceous flavor that smacks of the garden. If you eat processed food you don’t really understand food, and I don’t think you understand what you’re putting into your body. And I want to know what I put into my body. My body has to last, you know?”

I want to know what I put into my body. My body has to last.—
Padma Lakshmi

Charles Barkley, the outstanding NBA power forward known as the “Round Mound of Rebound,” offered us a story about the
influence of culture on eating habits and how we can model change for others. Barkley always cut a bulky figure on the court, but at six foot six and 250 pounds, he played brilliantly. After he retired in 2000, Barkley gained about a hundred pounds. “I had gotten up to three hundred and fifty pounds, and my doctor said, ‘There are three things that are going to happen. You’re going to die, you’re going to have a stroke, or you’re going to have diabetes.’

“I said, ‘I’m going to go out on a limb. None of those three are good.’”

His biggest mistake was continuing to eat during retirement as he had during his playing days. “I played in the NBA for sixteen years and I never worried about my weight. You’re training for a few hours every day and you’re playing games, so you can eat whatever you want.” Weight Watchers came calling, asking Charles to be the spokesperson for its “Lose Like a Man” campaign. Charles agreed, but quickly came to his first hurdle: learning to eat fruits and vegetables. He had never eaten much of either one, unless he was ordering potatoes or corn.

Learning to eat pears or apples instead of potato chips was a major lifestyle change. But it’s something he decided to do, not only for his own health but to serve as a role model for his home state of Alabama, which has the nation’s fourth-highest obesity rate, and for the African American community. “We’ve got too many fat black people out there, plain and simple. We’re trying to reach that demographic,” says Charles. “Black people eat way too much fried food, first and foremost. I don’t think we do enough exercise, to be honest with you. But the fried stuff is really the biggest problem.”

The Charles Barkley Foundation hosts an annual gala in Alabama every year to raise money for health facilities for minority patients. “We started six or seven years ago, and we raised about twenty million dollars,” he says. “We just opened up our first free clinic last year, actually, and my goal is to open up twenty of them around the state.” The event organizer called him about the menu for the dinner they were planning for a thousand guests. “She complained, ‘Even the vegetables are deep fried down here,’ and I told her, ‘Welcome to my world.’”

The dinner menu is starting to change, part of Charles’ effort to approach overweight and obesity not just as an individual issue, but as a community issue. I really applaud his efforts, and I expect that he’ll look great in the smaller tuxedo he’ll be wearing at his foundation’s next black tie fund-raiser.

Whether it is protein or Paleo, vegan or vegetarian, the emphasis on minimally processed whole foods seems to be a core component of maintaining a healthy weight. Structure and accountability are important, too, but you’ll have to design a strategy that suits you: there is no single approach for everyone. Weight Watchers is “diet agnostic,” says David Kirchhoff. “What we really provide is support to help people change their habits and their outlook,” rather than advocating for one particular food or system over another.

What we really provide is support to help people change their habits and their outlook.

—
David Kirchhoff

As usual, Nora Ephron offered the wisest bottom line:

It’s one of the great passages to adulthood when you understand that if food means something to you, you have to watch what you eat every single day.

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hanging how you move is every bit as important as changing how you eat. In fact, the two habits work closely together. According to the American Council on Exercise, if you diet without exercise, 25 percent of every pound you lose is lean body mass. When you lose lean muscle, your metabolism slows down, making weight loss even more difficult. On the other hand, the higher your percentage of lean body mass, the faster your metabolism—and the faster your metabolism, the more calories you can burn.
¹

I used to think of this as my antidote to bingeing. I would stuff myself with junk food and then exercise so compulsively that some people called me “an exercise bulimic.” I’m not sure that’s an official diagnosis, but it did seem like a good description of my manic ability to calculate exactly how far and how fast I would need to run to burn off a pizza or a pint of ice
cream. I spent so much time obsessing over this in college that I barely managed to study, or even attend class. The same thing happened when I got into the work world. Early in my career, if I wasn’t at the TV station working, it was a pretty safe bet that I was out running someplace.

I am no longer doing those internal calculations, and no longer spending all of my free time running. My attitude toward exercise is a lot less compulsive now, and a lot healthier. It’s still a big part of my life, but in a very positive way. Honestly, exercising is how I keep my sanity and reduce my stress.

It’s also how I maintain my health. Research tells us that regular exercise lowers the risk of early death, coronary heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and even some types of cancer. Unfortunately, not enough people are paying attention to that message: the federal government’s
Healthy People 2020
report estimates that nearly 80 percent of adults aren’t doing enough aerobic or muscle-strengthening exercise.
²

My strategy for fitting physical activity into my life is to make sure to keep moving, no matter where I am. Washington, DC, is the center of the political universe, so I’m there a lot for
Morning Joe
, and no matter how busy my day is I find a way to squeeze in some exercise. Every time I head to Georgetown for lunch, I go first to the “
Exorcist
steps,” made famous by Father Karras’ headfirst fall in the movie, and run them up and down. So far, at least, my head hasn’t started spinning, and it hasn’t caused projectile vomiting, but I have burned some extra calories.

I prefer to run outside whenever I can, rather than limit myself to the gym, and that allows me to exercise almost anywhere. My friends, colleagues, and business associates know that I often return phone calls while I’m out running. I can get a lot done on that four-mile daily run, although I sometimes use it just as a “time out”—a chance to clear my head.