Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (21 page)

If you “starve” your body
long
enough for vital supplies and cram it full of gook, you can develop a severe vitamin, mineral or protein deficiency. Then being single really does seem a good reason to hop off the roof. (You’d feel just as lousy if you were married!)

I became a health nut one Saturday morning about four years ago. I’d been working at the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant in Long Beach, California, for two weeks, helping with the television show. My job was to get information from the contestants about their families, hometowns and aspirations, so the emcee could pre-plan his questions for the show.

Have you ever been connected with beauty contestants of this caliber? There were fifty from the fifty states, thirty from foreign countries—all pretty high-powered dazzlers.

Back home in Los Angeles I had a small group of admirers who thought
I
looked nice. In Long Beach I was the invisible woman.

I would get into the hotel elevator with the girls (I had to track them where I could find them), shorthand book and pencil in hand, pressing for news of dating at Keokuk High or water-skiing in Helsinki, only to be hurled against the bell captain’s desk when the door opened and the autograph hunters went after the girls. (I never could figure what they wanted autographs for. Nobody had swum the English Channel or anything.) Anyway, I
had
to be invisible because people would walk right through me clawing to get at the girls!

Fourteen invisible days after it all began (Miss Japan won the crown), I was free to go home; and, driving up to Los Angeles, I passed Gladys Lindberg’s health food store. It’s hard to miss Gladys’ if you’re anywhere in the neighborhood. Wired with neon, it would look right at home on the Las Vegas Strip. Gladys doesn’t think health foods have anything to hide their heads about.

Friends had suggested I see her years before when I complained of feeling lower than an earthworm. (Who
isn’t
badgered by health nuts in her time!) I
did
telephone one day to see if she’d send over some vitamins, but she wanted to know what I’d had for breakfast. I didn’t think it was any of her business and the conversation ended. This morning her store looked like Mecca and I would have told her Miss Guatemala’s real bust measurement or
anything.
I parked and went in.

Since Gladys holds court sort of like Gandhi—too many people to see and too few hours to see them in—I explained to a cast of about thirty that I was suffering from an acute case of jealousy as well as symptoms of disappearance. Gladys had me stick out my tongue, which she said was purplish, heavily coated and had a deep groove down the center. Since these were the first words of a personal nature anybody had spoken to me in fourteen days, I started to cry all over her blood sugar manuals. She said what I was really suffering from was acute fatigue and probably a vitamin deficiency brought on by years of lousy eating habits.

I went home with the makings of Serenity Cocktail (recipe in a moment), several whole-wheat grains to cook with, the Varsity Pack (a Technicolored collection of vitamins and minerals Gladys feeds athletes) and pounds and pounds of soy pancake mix. Health nuts always placate you with something that
sounds
like what you used to eat that actually bears no resemblance to it.
Delicious
, though!

I won’t bore you with my deficiencies and how they didn’t grow after that. Just suffice it to say I used to spend half my life in doctors’ offices, which
is
very expensive on a secretary’s salary, and I don’t anymore.

I later became a guinea pig for a biochemist in Pasadena who is studying the correlation between diet and mental illness. I’ll call him George because that’s his first name. He works with schizophrenics and paranoids mostly, but has let down the bars to a few run-of-the-mill neurotics like me! George has had fantastic results rehabilitating people who were hopelessly at odds with their families, jobs and society just by giving them large doses of whatever they were missing in their systems. I’m not at odds with society except that I can’t stand baseball, but his super-vitamins plus Serenity Cocktail
do
give me the energy to hold a pressure job from nine to six every day, drive more than an hour in heavy traffic to get to it and back, work all day Saturday and most of Sunday writing this fascinating book, go for a five-mile walk every Sunday morning with David as well as amuse him at other times, manage a large house and gad about a bit.

Never mind about me. The possibilities of what good nutrition can do for
you
are equally impressive.

You have some very real and special problems. Being
one
in a world of twos is a bloody bore and lonely at times. Combine this vexation with the everyday problems life hands
everybody
and throw in a possibly half-starved body (even though it’s ten pounds overweight), and no
wonder
you have the blues!

People like the doctor in Pasadena and Gladys Lindberg fervently believe that when your body is properly fed and gets into peak running order you can cope with problems quite efficiently. They don’t get
to
you as much.

I’d be arrested for prescribing for you and certainly not everybody’s body is undernourished, but, subject to your doctor’s iron whim, I believe the following rules might change your life—and certainly won’t end it.

The Build-Up

1.
Try to get at least 51 grams of protein into you every day.
More would be better but try for at least 17 grams a meal. Here are approximate protein values: you’ll need a big helping of
one
of these at every meal.

Nutritionists say the protein in gelatin, beans and vegetables is an incomplete kind, missing in important amino acids (whatever they are, but we need them), so you can’t count them in your 51 grams.

It’s silly to say you can’t afford protein! A cup of cottage cheese (40 grams of protein) is 25 cents. Add some fresh peaches, and that’s dinner. A quarter pound of ground round steak (24 grams of protein) is also about 25 cents. Slice some tomatoes—
another
dinner. You can eat beautifully and healthfully from your icebox in impeccable single-girl fashion if you eat the right things!

2.
After protein
,
fill up with fresh fruit
,
raw or lightly cooked vegetables
,
a little oil every day
,
and that’s about
it. Whole-grain breads are fine if you make them yourself or get them at the health-food store. Most breads are pretty starchy in spite of being labeled “Enriched.” That means they only put back a
fraction
of the food value they took out in milling the flour. The natural carbohydrates in fruits and vegetables take care of
that
department, so don’t go kidding yourself you need candy bars for a pick-up … or rolls
or
macaroni to round out your diet.

3.
Eat breakfast like a king
,
lunch like a prince
,
supper like a pauper
(
except on a date
),
not the other way around.

4. Eat
breakfast, you idiot
! Coffee and a cigarette is no way to break a fast between a night’s sleep and lunchtime. Get your crazy blood sugar up with protein, and it will stay up. A Danish jacks it only a little while, then
kerplunk—
back to the cellar.

Maybe you can’t face a raw egg so early in the day! Drop two eggs in the
shell
in boiling water and four minutes later fish them out … butter a piece of whole-wheat toast. Breakfast is ready and the eggs are now
cooked.

You can also fix breakfast in a Waring blender. Throw in skim milk, a raw egg, a fresh-chopped orange with skin barely peeled off, Sucaryl for sweetening, vanilla, powdered protein from a jar (you get it at the drugstore). Tastes like an orange milkshake. Put in instant coffee if you like. You can drink breakfast while you do your face.

5.
Don’t ever go too long without eating.
That’s when you start shoveling in junk.

6.
Keep things in your desk to nibble that are not your enemy
: raw carrots (don’t peel or scrape—just wash them), a few peanuts or walnuts in the shell, celery stalks, an apple, an orange. To eat a whole orange with just the orange color peeled off is
brilliant.
If you can heat water in your office, Romanoff MBT instant soups are calorieless and luscious.

7.
Go for high-powered vitamins and minerals.
While I’m not qualified to diagnose you and maybe it’s mental, I
think
they did worlds to chase
my
single-girl blues. With half the health stolen from foods by overprocessing, being picked green and ripened in warehouses, being cooked improperly (by other people, of course), could some vitamins and minerals
hurt
you?

They only work with other food, so don’t take them in
place
of. And don’t bother with cheapies. The dollar variety are so priced because the
expensive
vitamin components are left out.

8.
Drink a Serenity Cocktail.
If you have a pretty good idea you’re beat inside and would like to fortify bones, blood and beautiful outlook, here’s the recipe no purplish coated tongue could hold out against. Take a pint of Serenity to work every day in a thermos inside an ice-cream bag to keep it cold. Thirty-five grams of protein right
there
! Have half mid-morning, half mid-afternoon. A jar of yogurt or wedge of yellow cheese could be lunch. Of course, you’ll have to find something else to do during lunch hour. What about a juicy novel or a nap?

Put into blender
¹
/
₂
cup chunk pineapple, 2 tablespoons soybean oil, 1 teaspoon calcium lactate (from druggist or health-food store), 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 cup milk (preferably raw certified). Start motor and add
¹
/
₂
cup powdered skim milk (not instant) and
¹
/
₂
tablespoon brewer’s yeast or dried liver powder (from drug or health-food store). When well blended, add mixture to remainder of quart of milk. Banana, frozen orange juice, berries or other fruit may be used instead of pineapple. Gradually increase the yeast or liver powder from
¹
/
₂
tablespoon to 1 or 2 tablespoons.

9.
Fresh fruit is best.
Buy
fresh
fruits and
fresh
vegetables even when just cooking for yourself. Learn to habitually by pass the neatly packaged frozen and canned goods.

10.
Cook with a light touch—
to the point of having things almost underdone … meat, too. This was the devil of a rule for me to learn. Anyone raised on Southern cooking thinks meat slightly pink is
alive.
Use less water for vegetables than recipes call for; then drain it off in a glass and drink it yourself. That’s where half the vitamins are!

11.
Make these substitutions in cooking
: Use stone ground whole wheat, soy, cottonseed or peanut flour instead of white. Usually you can’t tell a scrap of difference in the taste. Try soy pancake mix if your health-food store has it. The pancakes are luscious. Use spinach, artichoke or whole-wheat noodles instead of starchy white ones. Use brown sugar instead of white. Use honey instead of either. Try Kellogg’s “K” cereal in place of cornflakes. Make salad dressings and sauté foods with soybean oil exclusively. Soybean oil has tremendous amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids which every cell of your body cries for. Buy sweet (unsalted) butter. (If this has turned rancid, the fact can never be hidden by salt.) Whip two softened cubes with 3/4 cup of soybean oil and store this in the refrigerator. That’s the only butter you ever use. Cook with powdered skim milk from a box (just add water) instead of milk from a bottle. Make this substitution every time you can. Cook what you please for company—reputations are still made on the indigestibles—but no guest is ever going to detect these replacements.

12.
Read a couple of good books on nutrition.
This brief discussion doesn’t begin to cover the subject. You could start with
Let’s Eat Right To Keep Fit
by Adelle Davis (Harcourt, Brace). Mrs. Davis is the firebrand of food circles and infuriates doctors, but she’s fascinating.
She’ll
start you thinking nutritionally, all right. Bob Cummings has shared his stay-young secrets (mostly about food) in
Stay Young and Vital
(Prentice-Hall). Very readable. As you may know, Bob Cummings is a fantastic fifty or more. Some girls from my office saw him at the Brown Derby the other day and said he is indeed a man to make you all hippety-hop inside.

13.
Keep your lip zipped.
If you decide to go the health route, don’t talk about it on dates. Think how cleverly Dracula concealed his vampirehood. Quietly order the least gooped-up entree on the menu, skip rolls and butter, leave the fried potatoes on your plate (you’ll soon be revolted by anything greasy or fried anyway), eat your baked potato without tons of butter
or
sour cream, have melon instead of seven-layer Napoleon. Nobody is even going to suspect you for the health fiend you are.

14. Yes,
you can drink in moderation.
Drink a real cocktail when you wish … just like normal people!
But
… if you even
think
you tend toward alcoholism—the for
-real
kind—read
Body
,
Mind and Sugar
by E. M. Abrahamson, M.D. and A. W. Pezet (Holt). Diet may even be of help for
that
.

15.
Don’t be any nuttier than you have to.
Don’t fret if you eat “impure” concoctions occasionally. If you’re food-wise most of the time, you’ll stay more than radiant.