The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [49]
The problem is I am not allowed to eat any of them. And any minute now I expect my skull to implode in a nightmarish spasm of pain from a caffeine-deprivation headache.
But the pain never comes. I have made the transition to a caffeine-free lifestyle without catastrophe, though I miss the happy rush of mental vitality that real coffee has brought to mankind for centuries. My mind feels at half-mast.
Montignac allows you to eat two kinds of breakfast. The first consists mainly of good carbohydrates—dry whole-grain bread (the only kind of bread he ever allows you to eat at the only permissible time of day), whole-grain cereals, skim milk, artificial sweetener, low-fat cottage cheese, and decaffeinated coffee. The other breakfast is full of proteins and fats—eggs, ham, sausage, bacon, cheese, and decaffeinated coffee, with cream if you wish. Cream is dietetic in the Montignac Method.
I am not fond of motel-quality whole wheat bread. So every morning before meeting with the Bread Bakers Guild, as soon as room service opens up, I order the biggest American breakfast it sells, plus various side dishes, throw away the toast and the home fries, and feast upon the rest. (You may eat whole fruit—not juice—twenty minutes before a carbohydrate breakfast or an hour before a protein-fat one. Bananas are banned. There are lots of little rules.) Then, at our communal breakfast, I take a bite of Professor Calvel’s bread, chew it awhile, and discreetly spit it out into a paper napkin. Under other circumstances I would kill for a loaf of Professor Calvel’s bread.
Keeping to the Montignac diet at lunch at Acme Bakery is easy because a caterer brings in enough cold cuts, cheese, olives, and salad to distract me from the tables piled high with Acme bread, the best in America. I take dinner at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Lulu in San Francisco, a dramatic new restaurant where everything is grilled or roasted over a huge open wood fire. At Lulu it is child’s play to follow Montignac. I have artichokes with Parmesan cheese, just a little bite of the excellent bread, a few sips of red wine, a plate of eggplant and peppers, and gigantic portions of rib steak, chicken, and lamb. The potatoes look scrumptious, but I follow Montignac’s admonition to “look upon the steaming potato in your neighbor’s dish with the utmost contempt!” For professional reasons, I eat a quarter of a teaspoon of each of five desserts. My friends can hardly tell that I am on a diet.
One evening I have work to do in my motel room. I have heard about a new Chinese restaurant in Berkeley, so I telephone to ask about its specialities, order twice as much food as I can eat, and spend the next half hour in a taxi searching for the restaurant. Back in my room, I dine alone in front of the television on Emerald Prawns, Mandarin Pork, Tofu Hunan Style, and Lemon Chicken—nothing battered and deep-fried and no white rice. Montignac’s book contains all sorts of lists and charts of bad and good foods. But he lists only foods that French people eat, with scattered concessions to American products, and provides no guidance at all for lovers of Asian food. Most Chinese sauces contain cornstarch, which must surely be an extremely bad carbohydrate, and sugar, which is almost as bad as white bread. I wonder why the Chinese are so skinny.
Japanese food is easier to figure out. Sashimi yes, sushi no.
If Montignac is right, then the distinction universally used by American nutritionists between complex carbohydrates (like pasta, potatoes, and bread) and simple carbohydrates (like sugar and sweets) is not only misleading but possibly harmful, at least to dieters. Traditional nutritionists prescribe a diet low in fat, low in protein, and high in complex carbohydrates. But even complex carbohydrates like bread and potatoes have a high glycemic index and trigger a rush of insulin, while simple carbohydrates like fructose do not. Of course, Michel Montignac is neither a nutritionist nor a doctor. Michel Montignac was director of personnel for Abbots Labs in Europe