The Philosopher's Diet. Richard Watson

better. The heart of one of Henry Miller's best books, Remember to Remember, is an attack on white bread. For him white bread symbolizes America, a place so uncivilized that people would put something with the consistency of cotton and the taste of cardboard into their mouths, masticate it into a dough ball, and swallow it. How can civilized human beings eat Wonder Bread? You and I were raised on it. We spread margarine and artificial grape jelly on it and smeared our faces. We didn't know any better.

      Before I tell you when you can go off your 90o-calorie diet, I have to distinguish good food from bad. Your ordinary fat person does not eat good food. Oh, the fatties start with good ingredients: potatoes, chicken, apples, fresh vegetables. But if you chop up the potatoes and vegetables and fry them; smear a paste of dough on pieces of chicken and fry them; cut up the apples into a paste made of water, sugar, and cornstarch and bake that glop in a shell made of white flour and Crisco; salt the chicken and french fries heavily and dip them in tomato jam; put on your apple pie a big dip of ice cream made from air, sugar, vegetable oils, and stabilizers that never saw the inside of a cow—if you eat all that, then you have destroyed your appetite. And your palate.

      Nobody denies that you like this food. You can eat other things, but you prefer meat and potatoes. In my childhood in Iowa, shrimp was a smelly mess the local butcher sold for catfish bait. Then french-fried shrimp swept the country. Now you can get chicken, ham, or shrimp in every small town in America. Even my mother will eat shrimp if she has to. Besides shrimp, I can remember the first time I ever tasted pizza. I gagged. So did my sister and brother. We learned to eat pizza. My mother still won't touch it, can't stand the smell.

      Innovations in food can be survived. You can even learn to like most vegetables. Food habits are indeed strong, but they can be changed. Shrimp and pizza were pretty wild for country kids raised on ham, chicken, and minute steak, but we got our arms around them.

      Just how was the move made from fried chicken to fried shrimp and pizza? Through salt and sugar. French-fried shrimp taste much the same as french-fried potatoes if you forget the smell and dip them in sweet ketchup. People eat french fries for the salt, anyway, and if they eat something salty enough, they can even drink American beer. As for the pizza, the dough base reminds you of apple pie. (The first time I ever heard of pizza was when Dean Martin sang about his mamma's pizza pie in a movie with Jerry Lewis. I assumed that it was pie.) Pizza is salt pie. Where I live some of it is also sweet because they mix sugar with the tomato sauce and the pastry shell. Even so, Americans were not easily converted to shrimp and pizza. Most still prefer hamburgers and french fries, with ketchup, of course.

      Human beings will eat anything if you just put enough salt or sugar or both on it. Salt and sugar stimulate your appetite while destroying your taste for anything but salt and sugar.

      When you cut out processed foods, don't use sugar, and go easy on the salt, all that fresh food tastes flat and bland at first. You will learn to eat and crave it, but it won't be as easy as learning to eat french-fried shrimp and pizza. Soon, however, your taste buds will recover from the heavy salt and sugar insult, and you will begin to taste other things. Some people never experience the variety of tastes in the foods of this world. The philosopher's diet opens a new world of taste.

      It's punishing at first? Did Maurice Herzog complain about losing a few fingers and toes when he became the first person to climb Annapurna? He did not. Don't complain.

      This time, let's consider an adult male 5'8" tall who weighs 170 pounds and wants to weigh 145. I put the 5'3" woman on a 900-calorie diet, but a 5'8" male can start with a 1200-calorie diet. Assuming that his maintenance diet is between 2000 and 2400 calories a day, how long will it take him to lose 25 pounds? Fat weighs in at 3500 calories a pound. Thus, with water-balance adjustments and exercise and metabolic variations, on 1200 calories a day, our subject can probably lose a solid pound about every three days. At that rate, allow for two and a half months, seventy-five days, to lose 25 pounds.

      Don't you believe it for a minute. You have to go to dinner with friends. If you don't have a drink when you go on a business lunch, your client may think you are some kind of kook. You honestly forget and have your usual coffee and sweet roll when the wagon comes around. Monday night: football, beer.

      What to do? Bear with it. Keep track of the calories, and when you go over one day, cut down to less than 1200 calories the next day. It won't hurt you—if you are a normal, healthy adult—to go one or even two or three days without any food at all. Fasting makes you feel weak and gives you a headache? It sure does. I don't recommend it. But it is an interesting experience for someone who is obsessed with food and has always had enough to eat. Dick Gregory says that after a week or so you lose all your appetite, and then it is easy to continue the fast. Perhaps. But unless you are on a hunger strike for a very good cause, forget fasting for more than a day at a time.

      Let's eat; after all, that's what God put us here for, isn't it? Try to stay off processed foods, and try to stay on 1200 calories a day. Unless you go into hibernation, it is not going to take two and a half months to lose 25 pounds. It may take a year. Slow loss is better for you, anyway. Only if you are impatient enough to crash it can you do it in two and a half months. If you do crash, it will then be harder to keep your weight down than if you took a year to get there, because crashers bounce.

      If you keep at it, eventually, eventually, you will begin to be able to handle the diet. It is hard to turn down desserts, but people do and you can. The worst thing may be that nobody particularly notices your heroism. You can also learn to nurse a drink.

      Why learn to nurse a drink? Actually, I am now fairly certain that it is not true that alcohol, as my Grandma Penwell taught me, is the surest sign of Satan on this earth. Like sugar, however, alcohol is full of shamelessly naked calories. Sugar, white flour, and alcohol are so refined that they either fill your energy needs by burning up quickly so your body converts the other food you eat into fat, or they themselves convert at once to fat. It takes your body longer to embrace decent calories dressed up in fruit and vegetables, but if you eat enough of them, they will go to fat, too.

      Now you begin to establish a routine of eating some foods and not others. At first you may feel uneasy about having a salad at a business lunch. Don't worry: nobody notices today. Oh, some people may still make tired remarks about rabbit food, but we've come a long way in this country. People are more tolerant about what other people eat than they used to be. Of course, if you want to cut down your appetite by smoking, you may have to go outside to do it.

      Even after you have established the salad routine, you have to expect setbacks. There may come a time when you say the hell with it and go back to your old ways for a month. It would be, in fact, a lot easier for you to maintain this diet if you could live in a monastery cell where exactly 1200 calories—no more, no less—were provided each day for seventy-five days. It would be easier because the monastery would impose a nearly total change in your way of life. Suppose you did it. Once you got back to the office you would not last a day. Slow changes in your ordinary world are best. Determine in the depths of your being that no matter the setbacks or relapses, you will reach your weight goal and stay there.