The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [54]
Day Twenty-eight. My weight is at a new low, 163.5 and 164. But in only ten days my wife has already lost six pounds. I travel uptown to my doctor’s office to have my blood taken. Results back in two days.
Day Thirty. No change in weight. Every newspaper you can think of has published an article or two about Michel Montignac in the past year. Everybody stresses the foie gras and wine part. Nobody investigates the science or tries the diet for very long. Today I do a computer search for newspaper articles about Montignac in the eighties, before he discovered the Montignac Method.
I come up with something disturbing. Back in 1987, when Montignac was a personnel consultant, the Financial Times reported that “he has resurrected, amended, and renamed the ancient study known as numerology.… Numerimetrics, Montignac’s name for his version of the arcane system, assigns a number to each letter. Added in various combinations, the numbers give totals that, he says, are clues to a person’s personality, strengths, weaknesses, and aptitudes.”
Late in the afternoon, my blood test comes back from the lab. The results are terrific! Despite the tons of highly saturated fat I have been consuming, my cholesterol is unchanged, my HDLs are improved by more than 10 percent, and my triglycerides, which had been in the abnormally high 400s, are now in the normal range! This is precisely the result that Aronne suggested might occur with people who are insulin resistant.
I walk down to Dean & DeLuca to buy ten pounds of cheese. As I enter the store, a feeling of deep sadness washes over me. All around me is a celebration of foods from around the world, baskets of bread, trays of tarts and cakes, rows of jams and condiments and olive oils, pasta in every conceivable shape, and the smell of dark coffee beans grown on four continents—a profusion that has never failed to bring me a rush of joy. But now, for the first time in my life, I feel completely apart from it. I buy my cheese and leave the store.
Day Thirty-one. This is the last mandatory day of my diet. My weight is at a new low: 163 and 163.5. Total weight lost: 6.5 or 7 pounds. Weight lost per day: 3.47 ounces.
My diet is over; my promise to Vogue complete. Now I am free to eat my favorite foods—pies, pierogi, pistachios, pizza, popcorn, popovers, potatoes, puff pastry—and that only covers the P’s. On the other hand, at 3.47 ounces a day, I can reach my ideal weight in 129 days.
I doubt that I will last that long. But I can surely stick to Montignac for just one more month.
January 1994
*I discuss the French Paradox in “Why Aren’t the French Dropping Like Flies?” in Part One.
The Waiting Game
Two brief months ago, you would not have regarded me as an authority on setting the table. I may have known that the fork goes on the left, but I can’t swear that I did. Then I enrolled in the New York Professional Service School, the only exhaustive training course for waiters, captains, and maître d’s in this country. And now I know the following things, which you probably don’t. I have a diploma to prove it:
• When you order wine and the waiter puts the cork down in front of you on the table, ignore it—you cannot learn anything by smelling or squeezing the cork.
• Serve women first, then the elderly, then children, and finally, if they haven’t died of hunger, the men. This applies even when a woman is the host and would have been served last if she had been a man.
• When you set a table, the tines of all forks should be level with each other; spoons and knives should be lined up at the base of their handles.
• Soup is a beverage and must be both cleared and served from the right like other beverages, an exception to the serve-from-the-left-and-clear-from-the-right rule. Speaking of beverages, coffee and tea cups are placed with their handles at four o’clock. The wineglass goes above the point of the dinner knife.
• One percent of all Americans are waiters.
Dinner parties are so much more diverting