Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (22 page)

It’s kind of a serious step changing your eating habits violently, and one you may have to creep up on. The closer you are to forty, or the farther past it, the more I’d recommend you step up the creep to a canter. It may take a whole year before you really feel and see fantastic changes in your body, depending on how deprived you were. But boy, will you love them!

Sexy Foods

I have been pestering George, the biochemist in Pasadena, for a list of foods that would increase sexiness in a person. I thought it might be fun to keep these aphrodisiac items in a cupboard just for special occasions, or merely for a conversation piece. (Your problem is probably in keeping everybody’s boiling point
down
.) Well, all I got from George was sneers. “You know very well,” he said, “that the only thing in the world that will give a man or woman more of a sex drive is to build him up nutritionally. A strong healthy body has all the sex drive it can handle. Of course, an individual could lack sexual potency because of a diet deficiency. Just correct the deficiency and you’ll get him back to peak performance.” On George’s theory, a girl would have to keep a food inventory roughly comparable to that of the A & P to be sure of having the copper, sulphur, zinc, potassium or whatever to counteract the specific deficiency a guest might have. She’d also have to be a biochemist to find it.

There are no real aphrodisiacs in drugs
or
food. Oysters got their aphrodisiac reputation because they were fed to somebody starved for zinc. Oysters are
loaded
with zinc. Chicken croquettes might do just as much for someone
you
know.

Alcohol seems aphrodisiac because it puts sex hormones into the blood-pulls them out of other tissue—to give you a temporary surge of sexual energy. But if you continue drinking, this trick won’t work. The tissue has already given its all.

Since there’s no other instant route to animal magnetism, eat your protein,
will
you?

If the man you love should happen to have a heart problem, aside from you, and has been warned to keep his cholesterol low, Ancel and Margaret Keys’
Eat Well and Stay Well
(Doubleday) will tell you how to feed him. It has text as well as lightweight, light-hearted recipes.

The Skinnies Have It

Would you believe it, we health nuts are never fat! And never have to crash-diet. The foods that make you sexy, exuberant, full of the
joie de vivre
are also the ones that keep you slender.

You almost can’t
get
too much protein. The excess you acquire over your daily requirements helps you burn up extra fat. But it must be
just
protein. Goop it up with gravy, Yorkshire pudding and sauce diablo, and you’ll enlarge like Paddy’s pig. You can eat tons of steamed broccoli or
any
vegetable without avoirdupois-ing. Hollandaise them and your ideal weight has
had
it.

Now if you are already mounds of pounds overweight, you must
Do Something
, or you can’t hope to be blissfully single.

You have only to look at two of the most beautiful women in the world—Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor—twenty pounds overweight (as they both occasionally are) and compare them to the goddesses they are when sleeked down to a size ten. Even
their
beauty can’t survive runaway fat.

The few men who insist they like girls plump are usually the ones who prefer cleaning rifles or exchanging jokes in the locker room to flirtation. They aren’t sure of their masculinity and appeal; so, of course, a chic, glamorous woman challenges them. They keep their wives encased in baby fat, so
they
won’t be a challenge too.

The glandular dodge is out. Doctors find that behind nearly every fat person lies a history of compulsive, secretive eating. A dear friend of mine who was supposedly “glandular” was actually bolting a quart of chocolate ice cream every day
after
work and before dinner.

Even women fresh from childbirth have proved
they
can be slim again quick.

Where
can
you hide?

Take it off and you won’t have to.

How To Diet

See a doctor. He can help with the emotional problems that drive you to wolf down the forbiddens and he can inspire you to make another serious reducing start. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve slid off a diet. One of these days you’ll stick. If by some chance your inordinate craving for sweets
is
organic (I think it’s called hyperinsulinism), a doctor will spot that too and put you on an anti-blood-sugar-starvation diet. Unfortunately, that means no candy, no sugar
ever
, so don’t hope
that’s
your problem!

I’d suggest you read cover-to-cover Ruth West’s
Stop Dieting
!
Start Losing
! (Bantam). Like a lot of other food literature, it’s written for
wives
to help their husbands reduce, but you’re worth saving too! This book tells you how to stay on a kind of painless diet forever and deliciously.

If you’d like to crash away six pounds in two days, here is a diet men like. Invite one to join you. Follow this plan only two days; then back to sanity!

Breakfast
: 1 egg any style, no butter, one glass white wine

Lunch
:
2
eggs any style, two glasses white wine

Dinner
: 1 steak, finish the bottle of white wine

I’d suggest the weekend for the crash. Sufficient nutrition is here, but you get fuzzy.

Stop thinking of diet as a case of measles to be gotten through with. Except for the fortunate freaks whose bodies can’t seem to turn calories into fat,
everybody
over age thirty has to change eating patterns to stay scrumptious. You can no more stoke the furnace with the trash you ate at twenty and stay yummy than you can go back to jacks and leapfrog as a way of life.

I weigh 109, and people are quite snooty when I try to join a diet discussion. “Go drink a milkshake,” they say. “Eat some pretzels!” Fatties never give skinnies credit for any will power. They prefer to assume you’re one of the freaks. Well, I diet every day of my life by willfully selecting health foods. Cookieholics, like alcoholics, are only arrested, never cured.

The health-nut kind of diet is a pretty easy one to live with, however. Once your body gets used to expecting and
getting
the good things, it stops craving sugar and junk as it used to. I swear it does! No longer do you sneak down to the lobby for a Milky Way at four o’clock.

If you
do
occasionally eat a forbidden goodie, which you almost certainly will at dinner parties (just
try
not to accept a freshly baked peach popove? from a determined hostess), it will seem kind of alien to you … like a friend you used to have everything in common with but haven’t anymore. And if you don’t get chummy again, you can fly right back to safe, sane eating and be perfectly happy.

The Shape of Your Shape

Do you remember early in the book when we said you could be an exciting single woman and attract like a magnet without doing anything show-offy—that you tunnel from within?

Well, there is one tunnel from which you will emerge so attractive, so sexy, so young-looking that you wouldn’t have to go through any other tunnels to get whistles, compliments and probably date invitations every day of your life.

Yet possibly a scant handful of women in any one city ever avail themselves of this sure-fire route to sexiness.

It’s exercise, of course—the brisk, your-body-knows-some-thing’s-happened-to-it kind—one hour nearly every day of your life for
life
! No wonder even the valiant throw in the towel—such monotonous, brainless, unpleasant business.

Yet that kind of workout could make you smooth and sleek and glossy … your tummy, flat enough to wear a bikini … your fanny cute and asking to be patted … your head carried like a swan. Yes … all that with
your
basic equipment. The “shape” definitely can do more than gorgeous clothes, a flashy convertible or an annuity to get you that “Come with me to Majorca on my yacht” look from a man.

There they are … the Incompatibles! The glittering rewards that accrue to girls with shapely shapes (even the make-them-yourself kind) and the total impossibility of staying with push-ups.

Maybe this is the answer. Create a teensy, weensy little exercise program you
can
live with—and then
live
with it. It’s worked for me for ten years.

All exercisers say it’s consistency that counts. A few rounds of tennis twice a year do
nothing.
The modified daily push can’t make you look re
-poured,
as would an honest hour a day, but it definitely is enough to keep the jungle from encroaching, if you know what I mean. You can never get really sloppy. As a matter of fact, the repetition can keep your hips quite patable.

The trick is to incorporate a five-to ten-minute exercise period with your regular getting-off-to-work chores.

Did you ever hear the original joke to which “Doesn’t
everyone
?” is the punch line?

A woman goes to her doctor for a check-up. He can find nothing wrong. He says, “Will you please tell me exactly what you do every day from the time you wake up in the morning till you go to bed at night.” “Certainly,” she says. “I turn off the alarm, get out of bed, go to the bathroom, wash my face, throw up, brush my teeth, take a shower—”

“Just a minute,” he says. “Will you repeat that?”

“Sure,” she says, “I turn off the alarm, get up, go to the bathroom, wash my face, throw up, brush my teeth, take a shower—”

“Young woman,” he says, “do you mean to tell me that every single morning of your life you throw up after you wash your face?”

“Sure,” she says. “Doesn’t
everybody
?”

That’s how morning exercise has to be—so automatic you could do it in your sleep, and you do usually! If you can get yourself in the habit of squeezing in some sit-ups and rollovers between brushing your teeth and taking your shower and if you do it
long
enough, you may even forget what you’re doing! Did Pavlov’s dogs know they were salivating?

I do one fanny-chipper, two tummy-levelers (my tummy should cave in like a cereal bowl by now, but it still doesn’t), a double-chin routine and some lifts with three-pound dumbbells. You really can do quite a lot in five or ten minutes. Longer than that and you may get that “let me
out
of here” feeling again. On the mornings when getting out of
bed
is too much of an effort, don’t scootch around on the floor. As a matter of fact, you can goof off for a week or two; but, if the exercise habit has been inculcated in you long enough, you’ll
scootch
again!

Do get dumbbells. A woman’s upper arms give her age away faster than slip-ups about remembering Kay Francis in
One Way Passage
(not on television). Also, hoisting your dumbbells even in a stupor, makes you feel so
en rapport
with the rest of the world’s athletes. If you don’t know a store that carries them, order from Terry Hunt, 50 N. La Cienega, Beverly Hills, California. Three-pound dumbbells are three dollars, five-pounders are five dollars. Add postage. Your post office will tell you how much it costs to ship them.

The rest of the exercise-program-you-can-live-with calls for a three-to five-mile walk every week. Go at a good pace but don’t bolt. This walking business is
fun.
Find a woodsy trail up a mountain if you can. I walk in Griffith Park and Will Rogers’ State Park—both woodsy places in the heart of a big city. Wear tennis shoes and as little clothing as possible.

Take a girl friend with you. You can usually find one who is also looking for painless exercise. A gossipy walk almost is. Or bring along a boy friend. The walk only takes from one and a half to two hours and is something you can ask a man to do with you that isn’t as serious as asking him to dinner or to be your date for a party. You can also take a married couple … you needn’t have the same companion every week.

If there’s nobody available, walk alone. One Labor Day weekend I walked three days in a row by myself. It sounds kind of pitiful, doesn’t it, but who
saw
me but lizards? By Tuesday I was tummyless, lean and feeling very smug about the whole thing.

A mountain climb is the
greatest
way to work off a rage at a man who has done something awful. Don’t take him with you, of course. When you get off the trail, you just haven’t the strength to hate until
much
later.

Walking won’t re-pour you either, but it does jangle things up nicely. Marvelous for your legs, your lungs, your fanny, your circulation; and you can eat
more
without gaining. Here’s a luscious treat you could have when you get home: fresh-squeezed orange juice mixed with half a bottle of ice-cold No-Cal orange soda, topped with a small scoop of vanilla ice milk. Who needs French pastry?

Try to walk every week without fail. Just get yourself out to the trail somehow. When you see the sun glinting at you through the trees, you’ll be so glad you’re there, hangover and all.

You may already be taking far more strenuous exercise than this, and that’s great. I’m sure your figure shows it.

As we mentioned earlier, prowess at sports is another tunnel to a man.

If you just know a man or woman who
looks
great because of exercise, that’s an inspiration. The friend who showed me the Griffith Park walk has the most gorgeous legs I’ve ever seen, and he’s fifty-two. If I could have legs like that at fifty-two, I’d wear Bermuda shorts all winter. If you haven’t an athletic friend to inspire you, one who’s stayed vigorous and glamorous through exercise, just get a load of Cary Grant in any movie.

Now
, I think, is the time to confess I’m just on the nervous edge of trying to increase my ten-minute exercise period for the thirtieth time in my life. There will probably be a thirty-first, thirty-second, etc.

This accursed book has fallen into my hands—
How To Keep Slender and Fit after Thirty
by Bonnie Prudden (Geis).

Now Miss Prudden is an exerciser from way back, with the figure to prove it. And her book describes about ninety-three hundred thousand things you
could
do if you had a rubber body, and the stamina of King Kong.