I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting (3 page)

I
n 1952, Marilyn Monroe gave an interview to the now-defunct
Pageant
magazine. To the gimlet eye of a serious journalist (not mine), it probably leaned too heavily on pictorials and subsections entitled “How to Feel Blonde All Over.” But it did have something interesting to report: Marilyn Monroe’s daily diet.

“I have been told my eating habits are absolutely bizarre,” she confessed, right next to a picture of her dancing on an ottoman while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “But I don’t think so.”

So, what were these famous habits? For breakfast, she would have two raw eggs whipped in warm milk: “I doubt any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry.” She would skip lunch, and then for dinner, she would broil liver, steak, or lamb and eat it with five carrots: “I must be part rabbit.” And then she would have a hot-fudge sundae for dessert.

Does this sound insane or “bizarre” even? Maybe it does. But then, with the gimlet eye of a serious journalist, wasn’t I duty-bound by the rules of my profession to try Marilyn’s diet for myself and see if this was really true? Sure, I was. And in this spirit I decided to go forth and prosper. Besides, trying the diet of the sexiest woman in history could probably help me, and I definitely need help.

My biggest worry with this diet is the raw eggs. How do you eat them and not get salmonella? To be safe, I go to Whole Foods and buy pasteurized eggs and discover that they are twice the price of normal eggs. I buy them anyway. I also go to the meat counter and ask if they have any liver. They do not. But they will have it in a few days. I make a note of it.

To dispel lingering worries, I call my grandmother. “Did you ever eat a raw egg?” I ask her. “No,” she says. “But it will put hair on your chest.” I nod into the phone.

This morning, I start my diet. I am sort of excited but also full of dread, like Anne Hathaway before she hosted the Oscars. I take out the milk and heat it up in a saucepan. Once it is completely heated, I pour it, rather delicately, into a mug. Then I crack raw eggs into the mug and they plop into the milk, like two round globules of mucus. I stir them. The yolk comes apart in dribs and drabs, and the milk slowly turns yellow. It looks disgusting. I take one sip. To my surprise, it is utterly delicious! Like bland eggnog. I drink the whole thing in less than a minute. “Maybe this diet won’t be too bad,” I think to myself.

Not eating lunch, however, is incredibly hard, since I drank my eggs at 9:00 a.m. and am starving for the rest of the day. By 1:30 p.m., I could eat dinner, but I don’t actually eat dinner until 8:00 p.m., when my friend and I feast on half a steak fillet and five raw carrots each. I am starving after dinner, as if I never ate it at all. Marilyn’s life was extremely hard.

On the second day, I wake up and know two things: I am hungry, and today is the day liver comes into Whole Foods. I am very excited because I have never had beef liver before. As I drink my egg milk, I imagine the liver awaiting me, quivering in its meat case. What should I do with it? Could it be good with ketchup?

After work, faint with hunger, I board a bus to the Whole Foods on Fifty-Seventh Street. I arrive, beaming, at the meat counter, where my request causes some confusion, nearly bringing me to tears in my fragile state. Eventually, a butcher emerges from the back room with several extremely bloody slabs of flesh. I immediately yip with joy and bring the liver back to my apartment. I wash the globs of blood off the liver and cook it. It is the worst thing I have ever had in my life. Such an odd taste, both bitter and meaty. I eat very little of it. In an effort to avoid waste, I chop it up and put it in the blender with a bunch of spices, old wine, and a stick of butter. I will make pâté, which I will save to reward myself when I complete the diet! It is very hard to pour the meat goo into a bowl and refrigerate it without eating it, but I do it.

Ravenous now, I go about making my sundae. Marilyn used to eat her sundaes at Wil Wright’s ice-cream parlor, which is a California ice-cream producer known for its product’s extremely high fat content. In the spirit of Marilyn’s original sundae, I got the ice cream with the highest fat content and most natural ingredients I could find, a chocolate and a bourbon vanilla flavor. They are sort of horrible when mixed together. I eat it all, though.

In order to do research for this project, I watch several Marilyn Monroe movies and discover an absolutely unwatchable farce costarring Yves Montand. Then I Google Marilyn Monroe’s name and discover a cottage industry surrounding how to affect Marilyn Monroe’s style and demeanor. There are a lot of forums and articles with tips like “Blink slowly” and “Use hormone cream to grow a downy hair on your face.” One forum advocates smearing Vaseline all over your skin at night to moisturize it. Because I am crazy from lack of food, I do this. The next morning, my skin looks great! But I wonder how long this can last before my pores are completely clogged.

I am so hungry that I eat a lamb dinner at 3:00 p.m. I feel very tired and heavy. Can’t tell if I am losing weight. I suspect this is a diet one can do only while also using recreational barbiturates.

Today I am invited to a homemade-pizza party. This is a special kind of torture. I buy some ingredients and heroically eat nothing but a Baskin-Robbins sundae. When I leave and am standing in the subway terminal, I am so woozy I almost stumble onto the tracks. I can’t sleep when I get home because my stomach hurts so badly. I think I need to get off this diet.

After yesterday’s spell, I take a break today so as not to die. I lie in my apartment the whole day recovering. I browse the Internet’s vast network of Marilyn lifestyle websites and decide to start a different Monroe diet – the diuretic diet – tomorrow. Breakfast will be cereals and fruit juice. Lunch and dinner will be fish, diuretic vegetables, lots and lots of parsley, and the occasional “skimmed natural yogurt.” It sounds like heaven in comparison.

This diet is so much more humane. I have enough strength to do Marilyn’s fitness regimen, which she described to
Pageant
as a “bust-firming routine.” It requires you to lie on the ground holding weights above your head, then lift them and then hoist them in circles until you “feel tired.” I can tell everyone at the gym thinks I look insane. I don’t care. I almost die.

One Marilyn beauty tip that is actually kind of great is her emphasis on face highlighter. Much like pasteurized eggs, I never even knew this was a thing! I go to Sephora, buy some, and apply it next to my nose and between my eyebrows just like the forums say to. It absolutely covers up the huge pimples I sprouted from the Vaseline.

Today is the last day of the diet. To celebrate, I sample my pâté. It tastes like decaying wine, but I put it on a cracker and eat it anyway. Yes, I have stayed basically the same weight and have a huge cystic pimple on my chin. But my breasts seem – slightly? – more firm, and I don’t have to drink raw eggs anymore.

B
y her own admission, Cameron Diaz was one of those people who ate and ate and ate and never got fat. “I used to eat fried food from morning to night when I was in my twenties,” she told
USA Today
. Then for some reason she began to feel that it wasn’t “fair” to her body to keep eating with abandon, so she started eating much healthier foods that were stylish and tasteless, like quinoa and kale. For my part, I don’t understand it. If I was skinny no matter what, I would eat a Burger King Rodeo Burger every day. But we are all different and special people, etc., etc.

In honor of her newly changed eating habits, Diaz wrote something called
The Body Book
, a kind of holistic nutrition manual that also apparently details Cam’s diet and exercise routines. And unfortunately, where a new diet book emerges, I also am there, a kind of shadowy personage looking to capitalize on it!
Avanti
, dear readers!

Preparation for this diet is pretty easy. Aside from actually buying the tome, I also decide to check out Cameron’s press tour for
The Body Book
. I watch a particularly nervous appearance on
The
Dr.
Oz Show
. Cam says something nice about women being the most powerful force in the world and Dr. Oz sort of cackles derisively and then Cam spends most of the time on the show drinking water because apparently she drinks an entire glass when she wakes up every morning. It is very nerve-racking.

When I finally get the book in the mail, I realize it’s rather less of a diet book, per se, and more of an
Our Bodies, Ourselves
experiment on how to be healthy. It has a long treatise on the skeleton and an even longer treatise on something Cameron calls the “lady body” that really is about getting your period. (How about we discuss something? No one should ever use the words “lady body” or “lady parts” or “lady problems” or “lady.” There is enough horrible folksiness in America today without this particular branch of toothless feminist appropriation. It makes us sound so hokey. Never say “lady” again! It’s “vagina”; Jesus Christ.) As a result, there is not much on her specific diet plan – it’s more about the basic tenets of combining protein with carbohydrates and eating salmon for dinner and nuts as a snack. This is actually kind of nice – and certainly more normal for young impressionable “ladies” (No! Never!) to read about than a lot of these diet plans – but it leaves me in a bit of a spot. I have to delve into Cameron’s nutrition another way. Her interviews! Unfortunately, one of the things I have to learn about Cameron is that her favorite meal is savory oatmeal. My lord, really?

Today, I am trying to eat like Cameron before she became the healthy little
Goop
-let she is right now. I am going to revel in the old days, the salad days! The days of Justin Timberlake. I start the day off with a hearty breakfast – granola and a pancake – with my friend. This is not very Cameron, as she rarely ate breakfast in her younger years (a topic discussed in
The Body Book
at length), but whatever, I’m hungry.

After breakfast, I tuck in to watch the classic Cameron Diaz movie
The
Counselor
. Have you seen
The
Counselor
? I have never laughed harder at a movie before. It’s a true ball of laughs. Is the movie about a drug deal? Who can say? At one point, Michael Fassbender utters the sentence “You have the most luscious lady body [not the term actually used] in all of Christendom,” but he is not even the only person to use the word “Christendom” in the movie. Everyone uses it! Cameron Diaz plays a drug-dealing mastermind who owns a lot of cheetahs and they prowl around her pool.

After that, and now completely starving because I skipped lunch to watch
The
Counselor
(I do not regret it), I decide to eat the most pre–health food–Cameron Diaz meal ever, the thing she ate every single day for two years after school. I go to a Mexican restaurant and order a bean burrito with extra cheese. I also get nachos. They are both extraordinarily delicious things, and I have no idea why she stopped eating like this.

Now, unfortunately, I am going to have to start eating like the actual healthy Cameron Diaz. I suppose I had to eventually. I start the day with a huge glass of water. Apparently the first thing Cameron does when she wakes up is drink a huge glass of water just like she did on
The
Dr.
Oz Show
! This is because in the night you are “dehydrated simply from breathing.” When Cameron drinks this water she goes “from being a wilted plant to one that has been rejuvenated by the rain.” I go from a tired person to a person who is tired and whose stomach slightly hurts because it is filled with water. On to breakfast! One of Cameron’s favorite breakfasts is “savory oatmeal,” which is apparently oatmeal cooked “al dente, with caramelized leeks, green vegetables and ponzu sauce.” Cameron describes it as “so good.” I make the oatmeal and chop up a leek I bought and try to caramelize it (I burn it). I also realize my local grocery store doesn’t sell ponzu sauce, so I make a version of it myself from a recipe I found online.

Finally, I combine the separate aspects together. You know what? It’s weirdly delicious! The ponzu sauce is odd-tasting – it has a sweet and very citrusy flavor mixed with a faint soy aftertaste – but it does go well with the leeks.

Next, I go to the gym, because apparently Cameron is a workout fiend. Remember when she was dating A-Rod and she got so buff and then she fed him popcorn at the Super Bowl? They worked out together all the time.

I do a workout from her trainer that I found online and printed out beforehand. It’s incredibly hard! You have to toss a medicine ball, do several lunges, and even deadlift something – a big, heavy bar in the style of a nineteenth-century bodybuilder. I don’t have those kinds of muscles! I’m sore the rest of the day.

Another day, another savory oatmeal, this time in “cake” form. It’s another favorite breakfast of Cam’s. I have to take a portion of yesterday’s oatmeal and “sear it on high heat with a little olive oil” and then top it with egg whites. I thought this was going to be particularly bland, but it isn’t that bad. It just seems like something a nineteenth-century bodybuilder would eat.

For lunch, I continue on the boring-food train with a recipe Cameron concocted of brown rice, lentils, quinoa, and kale mixed in a bowl. This may sound easy, but I screw it up terribly. I invite a friend to my apartment for lunch because audiences are really better for feats of spectacular healthfulness. After we talk for a while, I dump the rice and lentils into a pan and proudly leave the room to take a phone call. When I come back, the rice smells sort of awful, like it’s burning. “Do you think the rice is burning?” my friend asks. “No,” I say, and go over to check on the rice. It is burnt so badly I have to open a window, throw the rice in the trash, and take out the trash. Eventually, however, I remake the dish, and the end result is a bland bowl of rice with lentils. I do put Cholula Hot Sauce in it because Cameron is a big fan of Cholula Hot Sauce. My friend seems rather unimpressed by that.

Later, however, I am very productive at the gym. I deadlift far more weight than I did the day previous, and by that I mean I actually lift weights this time as opposed to just the bar.

For dinner for my final night of the Cameron diet, I decide to get Cuban food. It’s Cameron’s “ideal comfort food.” I have shrimp tacos. They are unbelievably delicious, and again the magnitude of what Cameron gave up appears before me. How could she end all her years of eating delicious stuff for all this kale? Merely for muscle?

Still, you have to admire her; Cameron is trying (gamely) to be actually healthy and not propagate some odd gospel of weight loss. In fact, after the Cameron Diaz diet was over, I had actually gained weight, but I felt stronger and my skin was better. I guess life is all about small victories.