Let’s get this out of the way: This is a diet story not about losing weight but rather about the lengths we go to feel prepared. As the Oscars, and its many related after-parties including ours, approached, my thoughts turned to my brothers and sisters in Hollywood who were preparing to be seen in public. This is the Olympics for the beautiful people. I, who was not attending the Oscar ceremony let alone invited to an attending party, decided to stand in solidarity in the only way I know how: with a wine diet.
The guidelines come from the swinging midcentury, first in former Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 and later in the Vogue Body and Beauty Book in 1977, which happens to be the year of my birth. The meal plan is short but strict and involves two beverages and two items of food. Breakfast and lunch are wine, black coffee, and hard-boiled eggs. Dinner subs a five-ounce steak for the eggs. The eggs and steak I could understand as pure lean protein. The black coffee was for energy without the added calories of milk, I guess. The real question, and what makes this diet so infamous, is the wine. A bottle would be around 600 calories but just a couple grams of sugar. Was that not a lot on the kidneys, with so little food? Maybe the idea was that time would pass quickly regardless of potential harm to internal organs. As a veteran of high-concept crash diets, I can say that the worst thing about the leek soup diet I once did was the sheer boredom of spending three days consuming it. Gurley Brown only mentioned that the wine diet would leave one “fuzzy” and thus to do it on a weekend. I stopped interrogating the diet because in three days it promised to rid me of five pounds. I didn’t last long.
“Do you want Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc?” asked my desk mate and occasional tormenter. It had been her idea for me (and somehow not for herself…interesting) to do this experiment in the first place, so I made her serve me my breakfast glass of wine, a hard-boiled egg, and a Starbucks black coffee around 10 a.m. For about an hour, tipsy and fully caffeinated, I felt invincible. I decided to tackle an expense report that was nearly overdue. I emailed a famed dermatologist I wanted to profile. I held court in a discussion of Australian politics that I only vaguely remember because I had neglected to eat my eggs. I have always hated eggs. I thought the wine and coffee would make it more palatable. Instead my body felt like a vat of acid.
Time moved quickly and soon there were two more eggs, two more glasses of wine, and another coffee to get through. I was not in the mood. I was literally jet-lagged from coming home from Australia and the diet was doing nothing to help find equilibrium. My body started to rebel. I said “audience” when I meant to say “office.” In the restroom, I walked into a table and still have a bruise on my hip from it.