Читать книгу Fat Chance - Deborah Blumenthal - Страница 11

Don’t Worry. Be Happy. Weigh Less.

Stress. I’m an expert, aren’t you? Isn’t everyone? Does it make you eat more? Duh.

Who doesn’t walk, zombielike, into the kitchen for comfort as soon as the world gets too much to handle? Well, now the scientific community weighs in (ha) with this news and I hope it helps rid you of some of your guilt because, dear hearts, it’s not just a matter of willpower: Your body chemistry is partly to blame.

Stress does make you eat more—especially sweets—because it causes the body to produce more of a hormone called cortisol. And not only do you eat more, but the fat that you put on as a result, is the “deep-belly” stuff that’s associated with a higher risk of health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke and cancer.

And while some women experience elevated levels of stress and cortisol periodically, depending on what is happening in their lives, others suffer from “toxic stress,” in the words of Elissa Epel, Ph.D., a health psychology researcher at the University of California at San Francisco. “Toxic” or long-term stress is associated with feeling helpless and defeated. It leads to perpetually high cortisol levels that invite deep abdominal fat to be deposited—and that can happen whether you’re fat or thin. So bottom line: It’s a lot more complicated than just blaming your paunchy gut on the fact that you can’t resist that second or third Krispy Kreme.

What to do?

* If stress is long-term, ditch the lousy job, or the lousy husband, or at least think about therapy to change the dynamic.

* When you’re tempted to pig out, try to steer clear of the refined, sugary stuff that causes insulin levels to soar and then drop, making your urge to eat even greater.

* Try to counteract the urge to eat by doing something physical—sweeping the floor works and so does scrubbing the bathroom—at the very least, get yourself out of the house, and particularly away from the refrigerator.

* Next time you do head to the refrigerator, stop and ask yourself: Why am I eating? Better yet, needlepoint those words onto a pillow that you can stare at every time you get up off the couch heading for the kitchen. If the answer, honestly, isn’t hunger—assuming you remember what that feels like—get yourself into another room.

“So you’re heading home?” I look up from my column to see Tex carrying his briefcase. He looks like he could be a poster boy for my article on stress.

“Mitchum’s on the late movie,” he says, as if that explains it all.

Tex, the movie buff, worships Mitchum. I’d heard it all before. Mitchum, the sadistic ex-con in Cape Fear; the American destroyer skipper in The Enemy Below; the cool American up against Japanese gangsters in The Yakuza. The heavy-lidded, laconic Mitchum.

“No one came close,” he said. He had seen every one of his movies three, maybe four times. “That swaggering stride,” he says, “the great laid-back antihero. So completely his own man, no matter what the role. And so cool.”

I bought Tex Mitchum’s biography and we laughed over the part about the end of his life. When Mitchum’s emphysema worsened, he had to be put on oxygen. His droll comment: “I only need it to breathe.”

When Tex walked into the office the next morning, it was clear that his moviefest had included a six-pack, maybe two.

“You okay?”

“If you don’t count the fact that the back of my head feels like it was slammed with a brick.”

Before he opens the mail, he reaches into his bottom desk drawer and shakes out two extra-strength Excedrin. He grabs his University of Texas mug, and goes over to Metro’s Mr. Coffee and fills it too full. Coffee starts to flow over the rim.

“Shit,” he says, trying to sip it down, failing miserably, not to mention scalding his tongue. “What a piece of shit this is,” he says, slamming the coffeepot.

Tex puts on a good show. I sit down to enjoy it. I consider telling him he’s cute when he’s mad, but decide against it.

“With Brauns, Toshibas and Cuisinarts, what MORON spent the company’s money on a Mr. Coffee?”

The secretary’s back becomes his target.

“Not that nine-tenths of the idiots in this office know the first thing about good coffee anyway.”

He picks up a coffee can bought at the supermarket and looks at it mockingly. “I should shove the poor excuse for a coffeepot—and the swill that’s in it—off the shelf, but as sure as day follows night, it will be magically replaced the next day with another one, a clone, that makes the same weak, lousy, piss-poor excuse for coffee.”

The moment he sits down at his desk, he reaches for his prop: the black cowboy hat that he wears when he wants to disappear. He pulls the brim down, nearly covering his puppy-dog eyes. It looks good, actually. What is it about the cowboy mystique? He glances at the slew of mail that always greets him.

“Releases, releases, more releases,” he mumbles, tossing a pile of them in the garbage. They land with a thwack that makes the secretary turn and give him a stern look.

“What a job it is to sit in an office all day and write pumped-up garbage about your client and their great new innovative product. NEWS. EMBARGOED UNTIL…” He laughs weirdly. I should be going, but I stay.

Larry Arnold, the number two man on Metro, sits down at the desk next to him and peers under the brim of the hat. “So, who are you doing? What news from down under?”

Tex massages his temples. “Actually, I feel like complete shit.”

“PMS?”

“Caught it from you, sucker. What’s goin’ on?”

“The mayor’s holding his press conference at eleven to put the rumors to rest about his affair, so now we’re more convinced than ever that he’s getting it on the side…. There’s a school board meeting tonight that we have to cover because it’s rumored that the chancellor’s going to be ousted. The police commissioner is holding a press conference this afternoon about the police brutality investigation in the Bronx. The Lion King is opening in yet another theater, a murder in Brooklyn and your mother called to tell you her ‘dawg’s’ vomiting.”

Tex closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Get somebody down to hammer the mayor. Payback time. And send someone to get a quote from his wife. See how she’s reacting to the mess. Let’s do a man in the street, too. We’ll give it a full page.”

“Boy, you really are in a pissy mood,” Larry says, heading back to his desk. “Sharon dump you for a fatter guy?” Sharon was Tex’s latest flame.

Tex pulls the hat down lower. That’s my cue to get to work.

Instead of research, I do something that shows my true colors. I log on to Google, opening one after another of the Mike Taylor entries. I want to see the pictures, read interviews, hear his words. I can’t help looking over my shoulder. Not a smart move to be caught by the publisher while gawking at movie-star pictures when all of America is waiting for my next column. I open up one of “Melanie’s pages,” a picture gallery of “gorgeous Mike.” There’s a shot of him in a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket at a movie premiere; hair gelled back, dark eyes sparkling, dressed in a tux at the Emmy Awards; shirtless in a tight bathing suit playing basketball at the beach. I enlarge it.

In another, his arm is locked around the waist of his current flame, French model Jolie Bonjour. Clearly, she is having many bon jours these days, thanks in large part to the fact that she’s probably the one broad who fits into those stupid size 0 clothes, or worse still, 00, that always piss me off because they’re made to fit only anorexics or eleven-year-old adolescents, in which case they belong in the children’s department. To boot, Miss Bonjour is barely drinking age, and has luminescent blue eyes, and poreless skin. Was there even a word in French for zit? And that platinum hair. No wonder hair color manufacturers offered five hundred shades of blond that were used by more than a third of the women in the world. Now, brown hair, on the other hand, came in something like three shades. Light brown, medium brown and dark. End of story. Dullsville, really.

The plastic-Barbie image of perfection never died. No matter that if Barbie’s body were translated into human scale, her measurements would be 38-18-34. So what if no one on the planet had those proportions, women still wanted them.

At least, to their credit, Barbie’s manufacturers were now giving the dolls wider waists, smaller busts and closed mouths, a far cry from “Lilli,” the prototype for Barbie—dating back forty years—who was a German doll based on a lusty actress who was in between gigs.

This poupée smiles widely in every shot. No wonder. Mike Taylor’s arm was hooked around her waist.

I open up interview after interview with Taylor. Thank God for the Internet. Actually, his life was an open magazine—just this past month the six-page cover story in Architectural Digest with the headline: “Perfection in Pacific Palisades.” It began with a double-page spread showing the cobalt blue of the Pacific as a backdrop to the bright Southern California sun glinting off the polished steel of the Nautilus machines in his sprawling home gym. Fifteen behemoths in all, each with a precise function, either to tone and strengthen a specific muscle group, or offer an aerobic challenge. A trainer visited as often as the postman, the story said, to take him through the routine.

Sotto voce, Taylor admitted that he loathed exercise, but his romantic roles made it mandatory that he stay in shape. Legions of fans just waited for the moment when they would glimpse his contoured physique as he pulled off a snug T-shirt and fell into an embrace with a lush-lipped nymphet.

“Part of the job,” he said.

According to the cover story, Taylor had been in Los Angeles for twelve years, but had quickly gained fame and fortune after a TV pilot based on the lives of a group of elite NASA astronauts was picked up for a regular series on CBS.

In The High Life, he played womanizing Scott Bronson, a rocket scientist who joined the space program and rose to become one of its top advisors, a job which had come to define who he was. His exalted standing didn’t hurt his appeal to the nubile NASA recruits—whom he had a reputation for quickly bedding—or the thirty-million fans who watched—captivated by Mike’s work—his long-term relationship with a curvaceous fellow astronaut, his secretive one-night stands, and all the bizarre twists and turns that his life took on this earth and beyond. In addition to the show, he told the writer that he spent weekends and vacations making films.

“Exhausting? Sure, but my career’s on a roll, and that’s not something you take lightly in Hollywood. I started out doing some awful TV work, and now, finally, at age thirty-eight, I feel that I’ve hit my stride.”

“Where would you like to see yourself in the next five years?”

He shrugged. “No clue, man. I just take it from day to day, and I’ve no idea where this frantic roller-coaster ride is headed. All I know is that I’m holding on tight, and enjoying the ride.”

His day started at sunrise, and his bedroom, the story showed, was a marvel of simplicity—a gray granite floor and a king-size bed covered in gray linens. He worked out in the gym, showered in a glass-walled bathroom with a panoramic ocean vista and had coffee in a cavernous granite, concrete and stainless-steel kitchen. The story followed him through the gardens outside the house, where he chatted with the writer about his future projects. One of them, he said, was a movie called Dangerous Lies.

My stomach is growling. It’s almost one o’clock. I bookmark the site.

“How about some lunch?” I call out to Tamara.

“What’s your pleasure?”

“Greens,” I whisper pathetically.

“Can’t hear ya.”

Would she hear beef goulash? Fettucini Alfredo? It reminds me of the painful day that I went to buy my first bra. The hearing-impaired saleswoman walked to the back of the store toward the stockroom and yelled out for every New Yorker to hear, “What size bra did you want again, honey?”

And my pained whisper. The trainer, 34 triple A. Was that how it felt for a guy who bought his first box of condoms?

“Hey, big guy, you want the ribbed for extra stimulation? And what size? Small, medium? Behemoth?”

I get up and go over to Tamara’s desk.

“A double order of gale-force greens,” I mouth, “with balsamic vinegar and a large mineral water.” Then I can’t stop myself and shout, “Ahh, screw it, put an order of potato salad on top.”

Wilhelm’s sandwich shop. I adore it. Never a wait. Never a tie-up. It’s run with military precision by a highly trained staff of beefy Bavarians who stand elbow-to-elbow behind a thick wooden cutting board where they prepare football-size sandwiches. German heroes, as it were. Despite the long line snaking around the glass-covered counter, there’s never more than just a moment’s wait, the piercing cry, “WHO’S NEXT?” serving as a cracking bullwhip that keeps patrons rhythmically goose-stepping up to the counter.

Wilhelm’s has become an institution in the East 40s, and I am one of their cherished patrons. Who else but yours truly is intimately familiar with every one of their thirty-three sandwiches? Who else calls on them to cater parties? An autographed picture of me with my chunky arm around owner and sandwich meister Wilhelm Obermayer is mounted on the wall as if I’m a visiting dignitary. It says, “To Wilhelm, my hero.”

There is a reason for my devotion. A sandwich from Wilhelm’s isn’t a sandwich, it’s an indulgence. Who doesn’t wake up at night hankering for the smoked chicken salad, a marriage of white chicken, chunks of tangy blue-veined Stilton, ruffles of bacon and slivered red pepper, all lovingly dressed with a dollop of mayonnaise mustard sauce?

Or the Zeitgeist tuna salad blending white tuna with sun-dried tomatoes, mayo, fragrant dill and bits of sautéed Vidalia onions. Some prefer the Mediterranean version with chopped calamata olives, pimentos and anchovies.

In the mood for egg? Maybe the egg salad with caviar? The curried egg salad cradled in arugula and packed into a crusty French roll? Or the jalapeño egg salad?

For beef lovers there’s a hero, combining thin slices of rare roast beef, red onion rings and watercress, dripping with honey mustard and enjoyed with a side order of Wilhelm’s coleslaw made with thickly sliced green cabbage, chunks of carrots and a thick coating of mayonnaise.

Tamara’s face is familiar to the staff at Wilhelm’s, but when she orders the triple-size greens topped with potato salad, order turned to chaos. I double over, laughing in pain as she describes it.

“VAT?” Chief sandwich-maker Brunhilde Braun shakes her head in denial. “Nein, nein. Das is nicht for Maggie. Corned beef, eh? Das is guuuut.”

“You know you’re right. I got mixed up,” I told her.

Brunhilde shoots me a wide gold-toothed “I told you so” smirk, and I say, “It’s actually TWO orders of triple greens.”

According to Tamara, she was the only one smiling as Brunhilde attacked the luncheon board, lifting a lump of greens and looking at them disparagingly while shaking her head. Tamara stares at Brunhilde as she leaves. One sour kraut. It wouldn’t surprise me if she tries to right things by sending me a quart of fat-glutted chicken soup with a note, “Get Well Soon.”

So there we are, sitting on opposite sides of the desk, working our way to the bottom of the mountains of greenery.

“Damn this chomping. We sound like machetes cutting through jungle grass,” Tamara says.

“At least it’s high fiber. High-fiber foods are supposed to have high satiety value.”

Tamara gives me a blank look. “Like the movie, High Society?”

“They fill you up, keep you satisfied.”

She grimaces then smiles conspiratorially. “I have a bag of Doritos in my drawer. Want some?”

“Desperately, so would you please throw them out immediately.” Suddenly, I have this wellspring of self-control. But how long can it last?

“An unopened bag of Doritos, are you nuts?”

“Closet eating is not part of the plan.” Right.

“And what about this great potato salad?” Tamara asks.

From the corner of my eye I see the Gestapo. Justine, dressed head to toe in a bias-cut Donna Karan dress in navy blue velvet. Now I’m glad I ordered it. For camouflage.

“Cover the greens with it, quick.”

“Not MORE German potato salad. GIRLS, I swear you’re going to develop waistlines like the Hindenberg,” Justine says in her high-pitched, painful whine. She shakes her Frederic Fekkai–coiffed head. “Well, since no one’s going out, I guess I’ll head over to the park for a power walk. See y’all later.”

“Y’all? God, I hate her,” Tamara says. “I’d like to put fat pellets in her food.”

“She’s insufferable thin, can you imagine her fat?”

“What’s a power walk, anyway?” Tamara says.

“Something masochists do. Not bad enough they go on marathon walks, they shlep weights.” I consider stealing the running shoes she hides in her closet, so she’ll have to walk in stilettos, but decide against it.

“Never mind her, let’s dump this potato salad. It’s time to do the video.”

“Video?”

“Lose It with Lisa. For forty-five minutes, we’re going to work out in here.”

“Ugh, I’m getting indigestion already. We’re working out here?”

“Should I put on a thong leotard and breeze on over to New York Sports?”

“Maggie, how are you going to hide this whole thing anyway? It’s bound to come out.”

“I’ll cook up something. As you know by now, I’m a whiz at putting my spin on reality.”

She closes the door, and we turn on the video. The face that greets us looks like Britney Spears—three decades down the road. What should I expect when I pick up a fitness tape from the giveaway table at the used bookstore? I’m surprised I don’t have to crank up an RCA Victrola to hear it.

“Hi, I’m Lisa and I feel sooo good about exercising, sooo good about mySELF. That’s why I made this video. I used to be forty pounds heavier, imagine? I ate everything in sight. UGH! I felt down, depressed, all I wanted to do was sleep. Then someone told me about a system of doing aerobics with light weights. I tried it, adapted it to my own special needs and, girls, it forever changed my LIFE. I’m a CONVERT. Now I’m going to share my success with you, because YOU deserve it. Are you ready to work with me? Ready to develop the beautiful body that beautiful you deserve? You can do it, you know. All you have to do is stay with me. Give me a little itty bitty bit of time each day. Just forty-five minutes. Okay? LET’S EXERCISE!” The sound of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” pulsates throughout the room.

“I do not like her,” Tamara says, shuddering. “Something about her hits me wrong. Bitch,” she mouths at the TV screen.

“She’s thin, she did it,” I say, suddenly jumping to the defense of this baby-boomer Barbie. “That’s what’s so obnoxious. We have to show some tolerance, Tamara. We can’t victimize thin women. In their own way, they suffer as much as we do, maybe more. At least I hope so.”

“Right on,” Tamara says. “We’ll be PC. Equal opportunity haters.”

“Amen.” I wrap a pair of weighted cuffs around my ankles and wrists, then toss some to Tamara. We both start moving to the beat, ignoring the fact that outside the office door, someone is calling my name. There’s a lock on the door but I, of course, didn’t take the time to turn the brass knob, and already I’m regretting my carelessness.