Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (23 page)

When it comes to deciding what to eat and how to eat it, personal preferences, culture and family, daily routine, and medical history all help define the approach that is best for each of us. Many people need structure to lose weight and keep it off: rules that tell them exactly what they can eat. David Kirchhoff calls it “going on autopilot.”

“If you talk to anybody who has successfully lost weight and has kept it off, one of the things that they’ll tell you is that, over time, they’ve learned to develop certain habits,” he says. An example is “having the same healthy breakfast over and over again, so that it really doesn’t become a decision anymore. You go on autopilot, and those habits allow you to fundamentally shift from an impulsive eating style to much more of a reliable, healthy eating lifestyle.”

But the rules need to be of your own making, and they should make sense for your lifestyle. For example, Nancy Snyderman believes one of the biggest food myths is that you should not eat after 7:00 p.m. “It really doesn’t matter, even though I know everyone thinks that’s a no-no,” she insists. Ultimately, the timing of your meals matters a lot less than what’s in them. “Our bodies are a factory and you must run on a debit system. You’ve got to balance calories in and calories out. People metabolize things differently, diets are different, but
at the end of the day, you have to know what you burned, and you’ve got to figure out what to put in the engine.”

For Frank Bruni, learning to control portion size was the key. “I knew that where I’d always gone wrong around food was with kind of compulsive binge eating, and with taking a normal meal and upsizing it out the wazoo,” he admits. When he became the Rome bureau chief for the
New York Times
, he conquered his big appetite by eating like a native.

“Italians eat portions that are much, much, much smaller than ours, and there’s no similar embrace of junk food,” he recalled. “Their pasta portions—in complete contradiction to the sort of American mythology of the big, big bowl of pasta with all these meatballs—are very, very restrained, and they just don’t eat the volume of food we do.”

Small portions, Frank said, “really do tug you into a more restrained place. This whole American fascination with getting more food for your money and that having its own intrinsic value? Italians don’t share that. They really don’t see that kind of gluttony as something to be embraced.”

I asked Nora Ephron about her lifetime eating plan, since she had managed to celebrate the pleasures of food without becoming a slave to them. After gaining what she called “the freshman twenty-two” in college, she had an “aha” moment that set her on a new course. “I went over to see one of my fatter friends because I had a date, and I didn’t have anything to wear, because none of my clothes fit me. I put on a pair of her pants and I couldn’t zip them up. She started laughing at me in a way
that just really pissed me off. I had her image in my head for the entire next year as I lost the weight and changed my eating habits forever.”

How did she do that?

Long before the Atkins Diet had gained so much attention, Nora’s forward-thinking doctor thought that high protein was the way to go. He said, “Protein, protein, protein. Protein burns fat.” The same doctor also told her, “After you lose the weight, you have to diet for six more months so that you change your eating habits forever.”

Another strategy in the Ephron household, and one that I applaud, is to dedicate your calories to food that tastes good. Nora said one difference she noticed between thin people and people with weight problems is that the folks who struggle with weight “don’t know the difference between a piece of cake that is worth eating and a piece of cake that is
not
worth eating. We call this ‘NWE’ in our house—not worth eating.”

Like Nora, Diane prefers a diet that emphasizes protein, and has in the past managed to lose a lot of weight on Atkins. Although its critics have been legion, a series of studies in recent years seems to vindicate that approach. The
Harvard Health Letter
called the diet “an antidote to the dumbed-down anti-fat message”
¹
and recent studies
²
funded by the National Institutes of Health found that dieters burn more calories and maintain weight loss better with an Atkins-like program.

Susie Essman has taken a slightly different approach. “I’ve gone Paleo,” she told me. The Paleo Diet, also known as the Caveman Diet, is built on a return to the days of our early ancestors. The idea is to give up most foods added since the agricultural revolution of ten thousand years ago, including dairy
and grains. The diet is built instead on the traditions of hunter-gatherers and emphasizes fish, pasture-raised meat, vegetables, and fruits.

After thirty years of abstaining from meat, Susie’s Paleo Diet has put meat back on her plate, and she says she feels “fantastic.” Although Susie doesn’t struggle with weight control, she does need to maintain her health and stamina to perform live onstage, and the Paleo approach works for her.

A protein-centered approach is not right for everyone. Christie Hefner is one of many people we talked to who believe the key to maintaining a healthy weight is simply fresh, healthy, and reasonably sized meals. “What we tend to do more than anything else is eat too-large portions and too much protein, as compared to vegetables, fruits, and grains,” Christie says. “I haven’t eaten red meat since 1974, although I don’t believe that it’s inherently unhealthy. I eat fish and chicken and a lot of fruit and vegetables and grains.”

Christie’s diet is built around unprocessed foods, eaten in moderation. “There really aren’t any magic bullets,” she emphasizes. “On the other hand, it’s within all of our grasps to be pretty healthy if we are educated about what to do and are willing to make the effort.”

Jennifer Hudson came to the same conclusion. She made a commitment to learning about nutrition after her son, David, was born. “My fiancé and I realized we didn’t have that education as kids,” Jennifer told us. “Food was always put before us and it was ‘eat everything on your plate’ and all of that. We didn’t learn about a healthy lifestyle until we were in our mid-twenties. So we wanted to make sure we set an example for our son. And that’s what really kick-started it for me.”

Jennifer lost eighty pounds after signing on as a spokesperson for Weight Watchers, and is now the smallest she has ever been as an adult. “One thing Weight Watchers taught me: if you don’t eat what you want, then that’s when you tend to overeat. Before, I would think, I’m going to deprive myself of eating this, this, this, and this, but that only lasts for so long. Then you’re going to go right back into it, and you’re going to regain the weight, and you’re back at square one. Now I can have cake, I can have pizza, I can have ice cream. But I know
how
to have it now. I used to order a stack of pancakes; now I have one.”

Jennifer says she no longer feels that she is actually dieting. “I look at it now as my lifestyle. It feels like it’s a part of me. You have to stick with it, and that’s just the life choice that I decided to make.”

Several people talked to us about getting someone to hold them accountable for their weight loss. Senator McCaskill is in the public eye anyway, so that made sense to her. “I’ve had a lot of cruel things said about me,” she acknowledges. “You like to think you’ve heard it all and none of it bothers you, but there have been dozens of times that it’s been very hurtful to read online comments where people say, ‘She’s got six chins,’ or ‘She might be vice president someday except she’s too fat.’”

The senator took time from her heated 2012 reelection campaign to talk to us about the incident that changed her life. It was Mother’s Day, and Claire was in her St. Louis home, helping her diabetic mother with her insulin injection. “One of my kids walked into the room and said, ‘I better learn how to do
this, Mom, because maybe someday I’ll be taking care of you like this.’

“It was one of those moments that hits you like a ton of bricks,” Claire recalled. “That this isn’t about what size you wear. This is about physical health.”

This isn’t about what size you wear. This is about physical health.—
Senator Claire McCaskill

Soon after, the senator embarked on a weight-loss journey that she shared with eighty thousand followers on Twitter. “I knew my weight and my appearance are part of the public domain anyway, so if I was looking for accountability, then it seemed to me it would make sense to turn to the public.” One McCaskill tweet:
I’M TIRED OF LOOKING AND FEELING FAT. MAYBE TALKING ABOUT IT PUBLICLY WILL KEEP ME ON TRACK AS I TRY TO BE MORE DISCIPLINED. OFF TO THE GYM
.

I thought Claire was very courageous to put herself out there like that. She explained why she had. “I knew that if I went back to my old lifestyle, not only would I be accountable to myself for my own health, but I was going to be putting my public failure out there for everyone to judge.” Besides, she got a lot of encouraging feedback from her tweets. “Thank goodness—for every hater out there, there are multiples of people who lifted me up and said, ‘You go, girl’ and ‘You can do this.’ So it turned out to be the right call.”

Senator McCaskill called on weight-loss coach Charles D’Angelo to devise a simple eating plan for her. “I didn’t do anything other than eat good food and use the treadmill five days a week,” she says. Her mornings begin with a healthy fruit protein
shake. Lunch is typically a Subway turkey sandwich or a salad with some kind of protein on it. At night she has a piece of fish or chicken with some green vegetables, and a fruit popsicle before bedtime. She snacks on raw almonds, and one night a week adds a few more carbs to her dinner meal “to give me a little boost.”

The biggest change and the senator’s best piece of advice: eat regularly throughout the day. “I was in the habit of thinking, oh, I’ve been good all day, I have eaten hardly anything. It’s five o’clock, I’ll go to this function and nobody will even notice if I’m having the raw vegetables with fifteen hundred calories of ranch dressing on them. Or I would decide, a pizza is okay because I haven’t eaten all day.”

I notice a big difference between Claire’s first appearances on
Morning Joe
and how she acts now when she walks into the studio. In the early days, I thought she seemed tentative, almost defeated. “You know what I used to think about when I arrived?” Claire explained to me recently. “I was wondering which chair they’re going to put me in, and then I’m thinking in my head where the camera angle is, because I want to make sure that my back shot won’t reveal that roll of fat when I turn. Now I just think, oh, good, I get to come in and shoot the breeze with Joe and Mika!”

Like Claire,
New York Times
reporter Brian Stelter turned to Twitter to support his weight loss efforts, sending a tweet every time he ate something. For a media reporter, it just came naturally to alert the world about what was going on. “On the days where
I ate what I should eat, I felt really good tweeting my diet. On the days where I made mistakes, I felt bad about it. That told me that the Twitter diet was working.”

Sometimes it seemed like the “humiliation diet,” Brian admitted. “On the days where I’d have two or three cookies, I was truly embarrassed to tweet it, and I would write that on my Twitter feed. I would say how embarrassed I was. But on the days where I was doing the right thing, which was basically just this fifteen-hundred-calorie-a-day diet, I couldn’t wait to tweet it.”