The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [47]
The diet is La Méthode Montignac, and it is all the rage in France. Everybody there is on the Montignac diet. It was named after Michel Montignac, who invented the diet ten years ago, lost twenty-eight pounds, and to this day has gained none of it back. Montignac has written four books about it, all of them best-sellers in France; has opened a restaurant and two boutiques in Paris whose products embody La Méthode Montignac; publishes a bimonthly magazine called Montignac with a circulation of fifty thousand; and plans to open a Montignac spa in the Paris suburbs by early 1995.
I will skip breakfast today because I have read only three pages of Montignac’s book, and I want to avoid making even the teensiest mistake. The book, translated from the French, is called Dine Out and Lose Weight: The French Way to Culinary “Savoir Vivre.” Its original title was Comment maigrir en faisant des repas d’affaires, or How to Lose Weight While Making the Business Lunches.
Calories don’t count in the Montignac diet. You can eat as much as you like. This is what attracts me, because I enjoy eating large quantities of delicious food as often as possible. I am also excited by reports that you can drink wine and eat cheese and chocolate and foie gras. Montignac’s is a diet for gastronomes.
I spend the morning reading Montignac. It seems that I have already made a ruinous error. “Never skip a meal,” writes Montignac. “It is the biggest mistake you could possibly make, and the best way to upset your metabolism.” When you miss a meal, your body panics and stores away the energy from your next meal in the form of repulsive fat. This also explains why conventional, low-calorie dieting rarely works for very long. Exercise is irrelevant, he says; “sport has never caused anyone to slim.”
“For me, a handshake from a great chef is as sacred as a benediction from the Pope,” Montignac writes. “One does not gain weight from eating too much, but from eating badly.” Eat all you want but only the right foods and only in the right combinations. No potatoes, no pasta, no white rice, no corn, no sugar, no sweets, no caffeine. Ever. Just proteins and fats and lots of fiber from green vegetables. Fruits may be eaten in complete isolation from other foods, at least a half hour before a meal or three hours after. “The biggest mistake one can make is to eat fruit at the end of a meal,” Montignac explains. I could have sworn that skipping a meal was the biggest mistake one can make.
What about the wine, the chocolate, and the foie gras? They’re in Phase II, weight maintenance. This is Phase I, weight loss.
At noon I take a taxi to the airport, an airplane to San Francisco, and a late lunch in seat 23-C. Today Delta has achieved a new low in comfort and gastronomy. Are the seats getting smaller and smaller, or am I getting bigger and bigger?
I finish half a bag of peanuts before reading in Montignac that nuts are a carbohydrate-lipid, a very bad thing. I eat an unidentifiable chicken part from which I scrape a thick, sodden layer of breading; some pale green broccoli; and a salad with light ranch dressing. The leatherette dinner roll and the Land O’Lakes Classic Blend, whatever that is, are no temptation, and it takes only the barest restraint to avoid a cold wedge of chocolate cake that has hundreds of tiny marshmallows forced onto its surface. There is no cheese, the only dessert that Montignac allows. “Get into the habit of carrying individually wrapped cheese wherever you go,” he advises.
By the time the beverage cart reaches row 23, Delta has run out of red wine, white wine, and beer. They do not even apologize or refund a portion of the ticket price or hand out free headsets. But this does not bother me, because wine is pretty much out of the question in Phase I, beer is the worst thing you