Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [97]
As someone who’s been eating too much all his life, I think I’m as qualified to write a diet book as anyone, and as a writer I’m twice as ready to get rich. Not only that, I have an idea. My book would be called The Andy Rooney Upside-Down Diet Book.
My theory is based on the idea that the average overweight person has to change his eating habits drastically. The overweight man or woman has fallen into a pattern of eating that is making him or her fat, and the only way that person is going to lose weight is for him to turn his eating habits upside down.
The appetite itself (I’ll say in the Foreword to my book) is a strange mechanism. Our stomach often signals our brain that it’s ready to have something sent down when our body doesn’t really need anything yet.
As I understand it—and you don’t have to understand things very well to write a diet book—the appetite is depressed as the blood sugar
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level rises. The trouble is that the blood sugar level rises slowly as your digestive processes start taking apart the food you’ve consumed, so that you can still feel hungry for quite a while after you’ve had enough because your blood sugar level hasn’t caught up to your stomach.
So much for theory. Here, in brief, is my diet. You’ll want to buy the book later, I imagine.
Basically, what I’m suggesting you do is reverse the order in which you eat things at a meal, and change the habits you have in regard to what you eat for what meal.
Forget cereal, pancakes or bacon and eggs for breakfast. We’re going to start the morning with a bowl of chicken soup. Chicken soup will serve a dual purpose. It’s nourishing, not fattening, and because it’s a hot drink you won’t need coffee. If you don’t have coffee, you won’t need sugar. No one is going to be tempted to put sugar in chicken soup.
The beauty of my diet—and I want them to make this clear on the jacket of my book—is that you don’t have to deny yourself anything. Eat absolutely anything you feel like eating. The magic of my diet is in making sure you don’t feel like eating much.
Before dinner many of us consume what we call appetizers. Don’t take appetizers off your diet if you like them, just don’t eat them first. In our Upside-Down Diet Book we’ll be laying out more than one hundred weight losing model meals. A typical breakfast might consist of half a grape, a bowl of chicken soup and plain butter, no toast.
Lunch might consist of ketchup, a Fig Newton, two Oreo Creme Sandwiches and lukewarm Ovaltine. In other words, Eat All You Want, but Change What You Want.
Your main meal will be dinner. Classic cuisine has called for an appetizer first, soup, a fish dish, meat, vegetables and potatoes, followed by cheese and then dessert. We’re going to ask you to shake that up if you want to lose weight.
Each of our Upside-Down Diet meals will start with a bowl of ice cream or a chocolate eclair. Follow this with a small fish dish or oysters, clams or shrimp with a chocolate sauce. This will have the effect of raising your blood sugar level abruptly, and by the time the main course of oatmeal, corn flakes or Fruit Loops with buttermilk comes, you may not want any at all.
I don’t want to be greedy, but after the book is published I have high hopes that it will be made into a movie.
Thin for Christmas
I’d buy a new suit if I wasn’t about to lose weight. There’s no sense buying a new suit and then having it hang on me after I’ve lost twenty pounds. That’s about what I’ll probably lose, twenty pounds.
Unlike some people, I know how to lose weight. I’m not going in for any crazy diets. I weigh too much because I eat too much. It’s that simple. I’m not going to count calories or watch carbohydrates, fats and proteins. I’m just going to cut down on food.
It’s time I did something. All my shoes seem a little short and not as wide as they were when I bought them and I think it’s because I have more weight on my feet. The extra weight makes my feet longer and wider.
The only thing I’m going to cut out completely is ice cream. I may