Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (42 page)

But I’d never finish all of it, or even close to all of it.

“Have you tried the fries?” I’d ask Alessandra, my McPartner from Atlanta to Dallas, who had replaced Kerry (New York to Atlanta) and would later be replaced by Barbara (Dallas to L.A.), the friend who had helped me with my
Ambling
photograph.

“Fries: check!” Alessandra would say, and I’d transfer the paper sleeve from the dashboard to a bag we were using for garbage, even though most of the fries were still in it.

“The super-duper double-trouble whatever burger?” I’d ask after about a quarter of it was gone.

She’d nod again, and the burger would go into the garbage, too.

A third of the way into the chicken sandwich, we’d throw that away. And then we’d toss the basic unadorned cheeseburger, a sandwich small enough that fully half of it was gone, each of us having eaten a whole quarter.

“Taste and trash,” I’d remind Alessandra, restating our method for managing all of this food without having to loosen our clothing.

“Taste and trash,” she’d repeat, then glance longingly at the frozen custard dessert with crumbled Oreo cookies that she was holding. She wouldn’t want to stop at the three spoonfuls she’d had, just as I hadn’t wanted to stop at the four I’d permitted myself. But there was no justification for more than that. She’d sigh and dispose of it as well.

Soon the dashboard would be clear and the garbage bag full and we’d pull out of our parking space in the restaurant’s lot, swing by the nearest trash can or Dumpster and be on our way.

It was an extreme example of my job survival mechanism, of what I did to a lesser extent at elBulli and in Atlantic City and on most nights in New York. I’d abandon the double-cut pork chop after two bites from its edge, where the meat had a band of fat attached to it, and three bites from its center, which was the best gauge of whether the meat was over- or undercooked. That was all the pork chop I needed, and afterward just a half of one of the three large profiteroles would do. By the end of a given evening I’d have eaten a full meal—really, a fuller than full meal—but I hadn’t staged the kind of bacchanal a less frequent diner often does in a serious restaurant on a big night out.

I approached the most wildly caloric days and potentially ruinous meals as dares, challenges, my task to get a fair sense of everything without pushing the ultimate tally of calories—which I couldn’t, and didn’t, actually count—any higher than I had to. It wasn’t exactly easy, but it wasn’t all that hard, because I knew that another big meal, probably a good one, maybe even a great one, would come along the next day and again the day after that. I didn’t experience the old panic:
eat all of this before someone else does, before you lose the chance, before you consign yourself to a fast or a juice cleanse or swear off carbohydrates or banish all fat.
Forced to eat a certain amount, I developed an ability not to eat too much more than that.

I now had something other than massive volumes of food to reward and satisfy the eating-obsessed part of me. I had an incredible variety of food. I had that Italian pleasure of lingering at the table, of dining at length, nibbling on this, sipping that. And I had the challenge and diversion of coming to conclusions about everything I tried.

“I love the caramelized surface of these scallops, but they’re undercooked inside,” I’d say to my friend Charles, who would note that the kitchen had been sloppy with his foie gras, stippled with tough, ropy veins. I’d try it and concur, then move on to the gnocchi, and wonder if they’d been doused with too much butter.

I’d pause almost as soon as I thought that and I’d marvel:
Too much butter?
Had there ever been such a thing as too much butter for me in the past? Now there was.

 

 

 

 

This mulling over the nuances of what I ate helped keep the weight off, at least according to the yardstick I’d long used in lieu of scales: my pants. When I’d returned from Italy, I wore a mix of 36s and generously cut 34s. After a year in New York, I wore only 34s. After another year, I actually found a few 33s I could squeeze into. The 36s were deep in the back of the closet.

But making my eating life about quality instead of quantity was only part of the answer. An equal part was rolling like a ball, crawling like Spider-Man and going through all the other paces to which I let Aaron and the trainers after him subject me.

On my own I wasn’t so shabby about exercise, and often pushed myself harder than I’d been able to in the past. In Dallas, midway through the fast-food odyssey, I took a long morning off, drove about fifteen minutes from my hotel downtown to White Rock Lake and ran—slowly, and with a sad little limp toward the end—the entire trail of more than nine miles around it. In Barcelona, on the day before elBulli, I spent ninety minutes in a gym, using the treadmill and the elliptical and lifting some weights.

And at home in New York, I exercised an average of two out of every three days, and I usually exercised hard: a solid eighty minutes. Half of that time would be spent running on a treadmill at the Reebok club or on the trails in Central Park. The other half would be devoted to some mix of weights, mat exercises and stretching.

But my feeling about exercise was that if I wanted to keep at it with the intensity and steadiness that I had to, given how much I wound up eating even when monitoring my portions, I should outsource some of the responsibility and get others to fill any gaps in my motivation and help make working out as interesting as possible. I should schedule firm appointments. I should pony up the money for trainers.

My success with Aaron had persuaded me of that, but Aaron himself couldn’t last. About four months after I started making my Wednesday train trips to D.C., I stopped, the commute becoming too monotonous and costly. While I was lucky enough to be able to afford private training, its expense offset largely (and poetically) by my low food bills as a professional eater, I couldn’t keep up with both the training
and
the train tickets. So at Reebok I connected with Cathy, a Pilates instructor.

Pilates, according to Cathy, would give me actual abdominal muscles, as opposed to whatever lay dormant beneath the pudding of pink flesh that was my stomach, even now. Cathy said that in time I’d be able, from an outstretched position on my back, to hinge all the way upward from my waist, my upper body and my stiffened legs becoming two halves of a V that would narrow and narrow until I was staring at my shins. She called this maneuver a “teaser.” Teaser, I guessed, because it was an unattainable goal, and I and most anyone else who hadn’t medaled in the pommel horse or uneven parallel bars would never quite accomplish it.

Pilates was a brimming dictionary of loopy terms that cunningly cast exercise as something else, something more like charades. In addition to the teaser there was the “elephant” and the “saw” and the “monkey” and the “tower”: each a different elongation or contortion of the body, none of them all that accurately evoked by its nickname, the sum of them designed to give me a solid “core,” which I now understood to be not just a spiritual asset but also a physical one. With a solid core, Cathy assured me, everything else fell into place. She made it sound like a trust fund, or like Prozac, without the narcolepsy and the sexual frustration.

It was during our fifty-five-minute Pilates sessions that she told me to bring my knees to my chest, hug them with my arms, bend my head forward and “roll like a ball,” an activity supposedly helpful in hollowing my stomach.

When Cathy wasn’t telling me to roll like a ball, she was telling me to “clap like a seal,” which was basically rolling like a ball but with my legs pretzeled around my forearms—or were my forearms pretzeled around my legs?—so I could bang the soles of my feet together as if they were flippers.

These were exercises done on a mat. When I was exercising on the “universal reformer” or the “Cadillac”—contraptions with pulleys and harnesses and little leather ankle cuffs that seemed designed for something more salacious than a solid core—Cathy would insist that I “leave room for the ladybugs,” which meant I should keep my tailbone and lower back flat but not
too
flat against the surface of the machine.

“You’re killing the ladybugs!” she’d protest if I pressed my back too hard against it. Could she really hear herself? I hoped not, because all of this semantic nonsense succeeded in distracting me somewhat from the pain in my overworked, underdeveloped midsection and in making the fifty-five minutes go by faster.

But Pilates seemed to be almost exclusively about that midsection—er,
core.
What about my outlying regions? Amid all this monkeying and towering and seal-like flipper-clapping, shouldn’t I do some exercises that just tested and developed my arms and legs? Like squat thrusts or bench presses?

I found Ari, and added a weekly session with him to my weekly session with Cathy. He worked out of a Spartan two-room exercise studio downtown. While Cathy was a font of the chirp and chatter on which dental hygienists once maintained a monopoly, Ari was a wellspring of the imperturbable calm associated with Buddhist monks. When I cursed him the way I had always cursed Aaron, he didn’t shout back at me. He just shook his head slowly, radiating regret over the negativity that coursed through me, over how it separated me from the nirvana I might otherwise know.

He talked incessantly about the value of a good deep breath and told me to feel things in the backs of my eyes. Sometimes he made me do exercises while keeping a mouthful of water that I was forbidden to swallow. It was a way to prevent me from panting—from wasting all of that precious breath.

But I was there for more than a respiration tutorial, and Ari obliged.

He made me pretend that I was Spider-Man and that the wood floor was the side of a skyscraper. I had to make my way across it on all fours, moving sideways and fleetly, my knees never dropping, my upper arms and thighs tensed, my butt held high. This supposedly tackled some half dozen major muscle groups at once.

He made me pretend I was a frog, crouched but not
too
crouched, leaping in a forward direction for the length of two rooms. This supposedly worked wonders on the “glutes.” I wasn’t entirely sure what or where “glutes” were, but I trusted that mine could use significant improvement.

For Ari I jumped rope, about two hundred times per session. At first I could accomplish this only in 50-jump segments, but I eventually worked my way up to 125 jumps in a row on a good day. I’d be winded at the end, and sometimes even dizzy. I relished dizzy. Dizzy, I figured, was worth three to four ounces more of a lamb shank than I really had to eat. Dizzy was my get-out-of-love-handles-free card.

For Ari I also did push-ups: on a big soft ball; on a small hard ball; with each hand wrapped around one of two handles placed three feet apart; with my feet elevated on a short stepping stool; with my feet elevated on a taller stepping stool.

Sometimes I even smiled while I did them, or laughed.

“That’s not the usual reaction,” Ari said to me once.

I guessed not. But was the usual person as stunned as I was that I could get through twenty push-ups and be ready for another twenty just a minute and a half later? That I had made it to this point?

A whole wall of one of the rooms in which Ari and I did our workouts was mirrored. I couldn’t avoid myself. But that was okay, because I didn’t really recognize myself, either. The man staring back at me wore a light gray tank top, which left his shoulders and upper arms exposed, and it didn’t look ridiculous or pointless on him, because his triceps and biceps had some minor definition. The tank top was perhaps clingier than wisdom would dictate. It did nothing to hide the way his midsection quivered when he jumped rope. But his cheeks and his chin—they didn’t quiver, not even when he whipped the rope around and pushed off the floor as fast as he could.

I put Ari in charge of the
Men’s Vogue
photo shoot. I knew a few of the top editors at that now-defunct magazine, and to my amusement they had asked me to write about staying fit while eating for a living. They had also asked if, to illustrate the article, they could photograph me while I exercised. They promised to obscure my face or crop it out of the picture, so that I wasn’t giving chefs and restaurateurs an easily accessed up-to-date picture of me.

Ari and I prepped for the shoot, devoting a half hour of one of our weekly sessions to figuring out which of the many exercises we routinely did would give me as streamlined a silhouette and as seemingly winnowed a waistline as possible.

“What about the one where I put my feet on the ball, my hands on the bench, and make a bridge of my body?” I asked Ari.

“If you can finally get your body into a straight line, that’d be good,” he said.

There was a twinge in my memory. All of this reminded me of something, but what?