I decided to go on a diet.

Well—let me rephrase that.  Actually, I decided to terminate a marathon argument with “you-know-who” over how much I eat-- by playing the martyr card.  It was one of those arguments.  “Fine!  I’ll never eat anything I like… ever again!  I’ll go on a 1200 calorie diet.  You win!”

And so it was that I stumbled onto this masochistic, self-righteous, road toward skinniness.  I drove to Meijer Grocery and bought a food scale.  In a pique I filled my cart with cottage cheese and peas.  

But I’m not entirely stupid.  I knew that I had to keep up my fiber (30 grams) and protein (70 grams). I wish though, that I'd have thought of that before angrily announcing that I would limit myself to 1200 calories (which, by the way, was loud enough for the neighbors to hear.)  

I had backed myself into a mathematical challenge.  Fitting all that fiber and protein into 1200 calories a day is like trying to solve Rubik’s cube.  I hate Rubik’s cube.  Now, every meal starts with a pencil and notebook, a calorie chart from the internet, and food I would never choose off the buffet.  Breakfast? two minutes chewing and eighteen minutes working out the math.  Lunch:  same.  Dinner:  same.

To make matters worse, I accidently threw my little fit the week before Thanksgiving.  But I’m a stubborn cuss when I have to be, and when the holiday arrived, I didn’t even relent for corn pudding, dressing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. I had a little turkey, of course, for it is low in calories and high in protein.  Turkey is one of the few things that fit mathematically into my diet. I've been having it every day, even before Thanksgiving.

I kept to the diet strictly, and believe it or not-- lost two pounds in just two days.  Then I flat-lined for the next five days, no compliments from my scale, even though I was toeing the line perfectly.  

This lack of progress left me really honked off: at “you-know-who,” at myself, at all the turkey…  I was even mad at my deceased grandparents, three of them who were round; only Grandma Haworth was thin, and she wasn’t the one who bequeathed me her belly-shape genes. 

I was also keeping up my normal exercise routine:  walking every day, going to the gym thrice a week, tennis, etc.  But when it came time to read every night (as I am wont to do), I kept falling asleep.  The brain uses more energy than any other organ in the body, and with insufficient calories, it slows down.  Trying to be helpful, Jie started looking up memory and brain supplements on the internet. But that just made me madder. “This diet isn’t making me stupid!  It’s just making me tired.”  

After almost a week of the pointless diet, I had a talk with my gym coach.  Corey is an expert on what I’d call “gerontology gymnology.”  In other words, he spends all his time learning how to renovate old, overweight, arthritic-ridden bodies like mine—that is, when he’s not watching every Louisiana football team he can find on TV.  If you want to go to Corey (he works out of Mattoon) it won’t cost all that much, but you have to listen to him brag about LSU or the Saints all the time, even when they’re losing.

Corey has the rare ability to tell you you’re wrong without making you feel guilty. After he bragged last Tuesday about how LSU is going to win the National Football Championship, he let me brag. So I did. “I’m finally serious about losing weight.  I went on a diet.  Twelve hundred calories a day.”  

“Bet you’re not losing any weight.” he said. 

“How’d you know?”

 “When you cut down that low, your body thought you were starving.”  (True.)  “So, it reacted by starting to change your muscles back into fat—to store energy.  And it slowed down your metabolism.  You’ll lose weight eventually on that many calories, but the pounds will go right back on as soon as you sneak more calories some evening.”  

He told me to up my calories to 1800-2000 a day, to stimulate my metabolism, appropriate for a person of my activity level.  It will be slow going, he cautioned, but I will be healthy, able to stay awake and read at night, able to sustain my weight when I reach the desired number, and able to keep turning fat into muscle.  

After his advice, I followed his directions and lost another two pounds in the next week.  He warned me, however, that anyone who sees me all the time will not know I am losing weight.  It will take a year or more, imperceptible ounces at a time. 

This of course does not solve the problem of my impatient life-partner.  She only allows me to go to Corey because he is six feet four and a stud, flat as a board.  Muscular flat.  I begged Corey: “What am I supposed to tell Jie?  She’s only putting up with this diet because she thinks I’ll look like you in a few weeks.”  But for all the geriatric problems Corey can solve, he can’t handle the ones involving a wife who is frustrated with her over-the-hill husband.  Plus, I don’t pay him enough to come up with an answer on that one.

So, my sudden exit onto Calorie Road 1200 didn’t do me any good physically, but it did evoke some thoughts (before my brain shut down, due to lack of energy.) How we eat is the product of many cultures, intersecting within each individual.  

Jie learned to eat in China, being born there just five years after the great starvation that killed 50 million people.  I learned to eat in the United States in the 1950s, influenced by German and English cooks who tried to put on body fat for cold European winters. Jie won’t let me throw an eggshell out until I have scraped every bit of the egg white from inside it.  My Grandma Smith would hand me a buttered roll to “sop up the grease” from the fried chicken she’d just fed me.  Culture.

There are multiple cultures that we unwittingly obey in our eating.  The culture of the “sexy, thin, body” governs the diet of many.  The culture of eating to relax, at the end of the day, governs others.  Holiday culture-- what to eat at Thanksgiving, Christmas, for birthdays, for Sunday dinner-- is hard to ignore when you are trying to count calories. 

When I travel south, I can seldom resist Waffle House culture. When I’m at a baseball game, I can no longer lay off a hot dog than the batter can lay off that outside curve ball.  Food is part of how I culturally honor my elders:  Grandma Haworth’s date pudding, Grandma Smith’s fried okra.  In my religious culture, enjoying a potluck dinner is right up there with saying my prayers every night.  In seminary, my friends and I developed our own little culture, one that included a Mexican restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington D.C. every Thursday night, followed by a trek across the street to the Baskins Robbins.  I always got Rocky Road.  

People like my cooking.  It is fun, creative, and tasty.  I bake bread, host holiday parties, fix international dishes, specialize in southern soul food.  My daughters, all good cooks, check with me regularly for kitchen advice.  I lose my place in the community if I cut back to 1200 calories.

We all have a culture of comfort food.  And who doesn’t need constant comfort in this world?  

To diet is to step away from all these cultures.  It is to become a migrant, leaving all our “homes” behind and venturing to a new place.  Abraham was 75 when God called him to migrate to a new place.  Moses was 80 when the Lord jerked him out of his comfortable culture and routines.  

In other words, I’m facing more than math at the dinner table.  I’m facing letting go.  My faith and hope is being tested:  my attitude.  My flexibility:  is my lifelong resilience and capacity for gratitude in all things still strong?  

Some of this is luck:  not everyone has a Corey, who’s smart, caring, and truthful.  Pity the poor souls who only have the internet, or diet plans, or no-discipline food supplements.  

So, in conclusion.  Two weeks into this, I’m still round, like my two grandpas.  Jie will never have the hunk husband of her dreams, although all who know her know that she will never give up working on me. I will not look any different the next time you see me.  And if you don’t see me for a year or two, I hope I look different, but you probably won't notice.  

And don’t ask me for advice.  I only know how to make mistakes.  That I am alive and healthy at all is only by the grace of God.  And if you want me to cook something for you, I promise I will soon figure out how to make something enjoyable and healthy… so the culture of our friendship can flourish.