If It’s a Drink, It’s Not Dinner: Hollywood Diets and What My Mom Would Say

Now removed from my city, I spend a lot of time thinking about whether or not Los Angeles is a good home. Of course, when I write “Los Angeles” I mean my Los Angeles. It is not the only Los Angeles in existence, but it follows what I assume to be a certain widely accepted narrative rather closely. My parents met during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream nearly thirty years ago, my mom an actress and my dad the director. Their friends are creatives: screenwriters, set designers, casting directors, producers, other actors. I quite literally and figuratively grew up in Hollywood — my current residence is a few miles away from the Hollywood sign. In my Los Angeles, the casual celeb spotting was, well, casual. At dinner parties with my parents’ friends, it was shocking if at least one guest hadn’t been in an episode of Law & Order. My high school, too, was full of child actors as well as sons and daughters of industry mavens and lesser-knowns alike. People around me could afford — or tried to afford — the Los Angeles lifestyle people often read about.

Doing What it Takes

Los Angeles gets picked on a lot, and not without good reason. The L.A. I know is a ridiculous place, where reality is anything but. Los Angeles natives are held to crippling expectations, living in a culture that reinforces standards of beauty through a deadly combination of media exposure, which exists everywhere regardless of location; and the unique pressure of a competitive entertainment industry. I have lived in Los Angeles my entire life and can promise that the ratio of actual women to what Hollywood propagates as ideal women is scarily disproportionate, making it easier to forget that impossible standards of beauty are just that — impossible.

I believe that expectations surrounding ideal beauty persist in L.A. with particular (and unnerving) fortitude in part because they are our own creation, what our largest industry relies upon to make decisions. In a sense, beauty standards are a convenient codification, a way to easily and instantly dismiss half of the many hopefuls, actors and models vying for a chance to make it. With residents looking to achieve the impossible, Los Angeles becomes a mecca of sorts, not different with regards to what standards exist but rather with what frequency they are enforced. Doing what it takes to maintain an aura of effortless perfection becomes a necessary and encouraged habit. The ritualization of striving towards this perfection becomes a kind of worship.

And nothing is treated more dogmatically in Los Angeles than food — particularly, the restriction of food. “Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the latest wave in weight loss in L.A. borrows heavily from the religious tradition of fasting. An ancient ritual, fasting requires devotees to abstain from solid food temporarily in order to purify the body or attain enlightenment,” writes Janelle Brown for NBC News. Brown dedicates her article to the criticism of the popular juice cleanse. “These days, [the cleanse] is considered the absolute quickest means to shed a few pounds with the added benefit of spiritual self-justification.”

“[Los Angeles] ruined everything,” confirms Alida Nugent in her book You Don’t Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism, in an essay which holds the city culpable for the now-widespread dieting technique. “[It] couldn’t have done us more wrong than with the damn juice.”

The damage is not limited to juicing: other modes of glorified fasting are available. xTake Howard Flaks, M.D., a Beverly Hills physician who tells his patients to limit calorie consumption to between 800 to 1,000 a day, if and only if under medical monitoring. There is something intrinsically different about what Brown fondly terms “sip n’ starve” dieting when compared to Flaks’ approach. Herein lies the attractive quality of juicing: whereas restricting calorie consumption to an extreme that requires medical supervision is overtly unhealthy, the deterrents of juicing are more subtle and more difficult to determine.

The Facade of Healthy Eating

Juicing as a diet, carefully packaged as “cleanse,” is deceivingly justifiable for its advocates and participants, especially now that it is the new norm. And it is for this reason that cleansing is so popular. The “healthy-skinny movement,” as Brown refers to it, allows women (and men) to escape from the shame of dieting. A diet cannot be associated with weakness if it is no longer a diet. What’s more, such justification “goes down particularly well in Hollywood, a town where celebrities profess their love for french fries while secretly purging to stay wafer-thin, where everyone pretends to be inherently slim.”3 This is a town where submitting oneself to extreme beauty standards is expected and expected to be easy.

Roger Cohen, writing for The New York Times, makes a similar point in his piece, “This Column is Gluten-Free,” in which he identifies the trendiness of adopting an allergy. He writes, “Special dietary needs are all the rage. Allergies, real or imagined, multiply.” In the past few years, most restaurants across LA (and across the globe) now offer gluten-free substitutes. There are many reasons for this allergic upsurge. An aisle in the grocery store dedicated to gluten-free products, Cohen remarks, is going to make anyone stop and question the loaf of sourdough bread they just put in their cart. People get scared that they are doing something wrong.

The more pressing issue, however, is that adoptive allergies offer a justification for restrictive eating and provide the “allergic” party with a convenient guise. “Packaging a new restrictive diet as a health regime also keeps concerned friends from meddling,” Brown writes. Friends wouldn’t notice, for example, that you are actually turning down the bread at dinner not because you are allergic to gluten, but because you count calories. Los Angelenos, whether they are on a cleanse or newly gluten-free or both, have at their disposal what Brown deems an “acceptable quasi-anorexia to starve themselves skinny.” New diet fads are promoted by Hollywood and its faithfuls because of their grand, sparkly, juiced-out, gluten-free, veggie-covered facade. Now, easy beauty is easier than ever, because starving oneself is increasingly justifiable.

When I lived in L.A., I came to understand the unspoken rules of success, where “success” is defined as an empty stomach and a skinny, “beautiful” exterior. I offer a list, ranging from the old classic calorie counting method to the new and nicely packaged trends discussed above. I don’t know when I learned these rules, or how, but they are certainly a testament to the pervasive fear of food and idolization of dieting in my L.A.

This is how to eat like a true native:

1. Breakfast. Sure, it’s “the most important meal of the day.” But it is also a meal you are more likely to eat alone. Why waste the extra calories? Skip it! No one needs to know.
2. Drink water, all the time. Chug two to three glasses a meal. It will trick your stomach into thinking it’s full.
3. In the mood for a snack? Put down the potato chips. Chew gum instead.
4. Still hungry? Those fries your friend isn’t eating calling your name? No problem! Dump pepper on them or sprinkle them with soda. Bet they don’t look too tasty now.
5. Ice cream is the devil’s food. Frozen yogurt, on the other hand, is basically yogurt, so it’s basically healthy, so it’s basically the only dessert you should ever have. Plus it tastes (almost!) as good.
6. Candy bars? Unthinkable. Try a Kind Bar. It’s covered in chocolate and sold in the protein bar aisle at Whole Foods so, again, it’s basically healthy. At only 200 calories, it is also a great choice for lunch (if you are eating alone and want to save up those calories for later).
7. Going to the movies? Want concessions? Do it. Seriously, treat yourself. (As long as you haven’t eaten anything all day.)
8. Tempted to eat more than you should? Want that bagel so badly? No need to splurge. Just remind yourself (and your friends) that your doctor said you were allergic.
9. An 80 calorie container of juice is a legitimate meal substitute. No questions asked.

So, how do we escape the confines of these rules? How do we change to embrace food as sustenance — and not as the enemy, trying to make us “ugly” in a city of “beautiful” people?

Self-worship as Solution

The cliché solution to trend dieting or cleansing is often self-worship. “Love yourself just the way you are!” espouse the conclusions of countless articles written on the subject. Celebrities are applauded for stepping forward and claiming they are learning to love their bodies again. They have been resurrected from the persuasion of the cleansing masses, and the world is beautiful once more. They are the recovered image-addicts and we, the still-cleansing masses of Los Angeles, are so happy for them.

Yet, in spite of our jubilation, “we” — that is, those in L.A. not superficially committed to “loving our bodies again” — don’t stop. The solution that has been offered to us is a strange paradox, because didn’t we pick up the juice in the first place — under the guise of health, yes, but really in the name of self-worship? Didn’t we buy into the healthfulness of starvation to be able to worship at our own feet, to be celebrities in our own right? To love ourselves was always the goal, even if the means were ridiculous. How does a cause become the solution?

Not only that, but for anyone who has struggled with body positivity (and it is hard to imagine anyone who hasn’t to some degree), ending self-hatred is not as easy as this solution may promise. A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience on anorexia in women suggests that “the extreme dieting characteristic of anorexia may instead be well-entrenched habit — behavior governed by brain processes that, once set in motion, are inflexible and slow to change.” Much of the rhetoric surrounding eating disorders has already declared this a de facto truth. The study’s importance, then, is that it renders the cliché solution of positive self-affirmation null. Those with disorders such as anorexia don’t exhibit incredible self-control when they refuse to eat, nor can they flip a switch and choose self-liberation. Instead, they exhibit the signs of a habit designed to aid a quest for self-control. The solution cannot be just to stop, “to love oneself” once again — because “loving oneself” requires more than just a verbal commitment.

Dr. B. Timothy Walsh, the senior author of the aforementioned study, notes how it may revolutionize future approaches to treating anorexic patients. “Habits have to be replaced with another behavior,” he told The New York Times.6 Concrete shifts in behavior, as opposed to ideology, could include shopping at different grocery stores, eating at new restaurants, eating with a different dominant hand, or using different cutlery.

If we extend the same dialogue beyond anorexia in women, we see that in order to solve the damning quality of low-cal diets, adoptive allergies, and juice cleanses, a new behavioral norm must be implemented. Instead of learning to love ourselves, we need to learn to approach food as more than something that is just unhealthy or healthy, something that leaves us full or hungry, makes us fat or skinny. Food was never supposed to be the determinant for our greater failure or success in Los Angeles. To paraphrase Dr. Walsh, in order to replace that quasi-spiritual habit Brown spoke of, we need another of equal strength.

Family Dinner: My Real Los Angeles

Arguably, history has designed food to serve as a vehicle of social interaction. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are widely agreed-upon times of the day that signify the coming together of friends and family to partake in something special, a ritual. Why we are so quick to ditch this for a bottle of liquefied spinach and kale is certainly no mystery, but it is curious that I have not read the solution to the “healthy-skinny” movement as a return to the family dinner table. I offer an example, most definitely biased but also worthy of bias: my family dinner table. We don’t just eat dinner, we indulge in daily ceremony.

A staple is teriyaki chicken over a bed of sticky rice, served with edamame to start and sides of green beans, cauliflower, and maple-syrup-glazed carrots. My absolute favorite — and my mom’s specialty — is risotto. Mixed with chicken apple sausage, shredded chicken, peas, red peppers, broccoli, zucchini, yellow squash, sweet potato, and more, she leaves the thick rice to simmer for an hour in her homemade chicken-turkey broth. Everyone gets a steamed artichoke to the side. And, of course, every week has a pasta night — penne tossed in a light tomato vegetable sauce, served with warm garlic bread and half a roasted butternut squash with melted brown sugar and butter in the center. Then there is the Friday night classic, my sister’s favorite. My parents combine their culinary skills to make what is fondly known as roasted chicken dinner. Sautéed Brussels sprouts, green beans, corn, and roasted potatoes are piled atop our plates next to a beautiful rosemary-lemon chicken breast.

And, like any ritual, there are also rules:

1. You eat until you can’t. And even then, you keep eating.
2. Seconds are not suggested, they are expected.
3. Plates are overrated. As the meal winds down, grab the bowl of mashed potatoes and a spoon.
4. Dinner lasts for at least an hour.
5. And there is always room for dessert.

All this was largely the work of my mom. My mom grew up in Georgia as the eldest of three kids. Family dinner was a staple in their household, too. But with no money, food was a resource. Eating was the conscious consumption of money. Indulgence was never part of the equation. My mom describes her childhood dinners as confusing, specifically when juxtaposed to the cliché comfort of traditional Southern cuisine. Surrounded by the warmth of others’ ovens, my mom’s kitchen felt cold and empty.

“How I interpret it is that dinner was never cooked with love [in my household]. You can dilute that down: it was never cooked with intention. So it didn’t satiate me — it wasn’t enough,” my mom told me. “Add the family dysfunction to this lack of intention,” she said, and dinnertime became a source of frustration, a reminder of the family’s strained relationships. By the time her parents divorced, there was no love left to serve.

My mom said that creating a dinnertime ritual was a conscious parenting choice for both her and my dad. “When you are pulled hard enough in one direction as a kid…you are going to snap back.” She calls this the rubber band effect. “You were sitting at the dinner table with us from the moment you were born,” my mom laughed into the phone. And so, since birth, I learned how to eat well. When dinner rolled around, my sole purpose was to consume. It was an excellent time, all that unencumbered eating. No strings attached. Chicken was chicken; broccoli, broccoli; chocolate, chocolate. Most importantly, I grew up without judgements about food. There was no good or bad, at least when it came to health. Sure, I had flavor preferences. I hated ketchup, hated eggs, and was always a little creeped out by ground meat. But otherwise I ate until I was full, and then ate some more after that (see Rule #1). I ate until dinnertime was over, because dinnertime was a fact of life and I didn’t know what it was to go without my golden hour and a half of indulgence (Rule #4). I thought this was something every family did. All people ate like this. Right? Right. And so I ate mindlessly, and it was glorious. Innocence is bliss.

Around 15, I started to care, think, obsess over food because I, like my mom, got confused. I was caught between two homes: mom’s dinner table and my hometown. And I snapped back, after having been pulled for so long in the direction of indulgence. For much of my high school career, I too hid behind the facade of healthy eating. I tried to count my calories with diligence. I tried to be gluten-free. I sipped at juice and swallowed with pain (seriously, it is disgusting). I tried to separate myself from my familial ritual and replace it with another — that of Los Angeles.

“One time, your father said to me, ‘You don’t ever tell me you love me,’ and I was upset, because every meal I cook, every dinner, is me telling you guys I love you. I told him that, and he was shocked, like a light bulb had gone off,” my mom explained on the phone. At this, I realized then how deeply I hurt her during those years of trying to fit the ideal of the true Los Angeleno. Because I was not rejecting her cooking when I opted for whatever low-cal option was available — I was rejecting her love.

My mom never sat down at dinner maliciously hoping to fatten us up with her sides and double courses. As I said, I never thought about eating when I ate growing up. I thought about everything else that was happening around the food. My family ate dinner together every night for an hour and a half because we liked to tell stories and talk about our day. My mom’s big meals just extended the conversation, a conversation she never had access to as a child.

I now understand that healthy eating, despite what L.A. may say, is what my mom always constructed for us. It is eating a meal made with intention, served with love. Bottled juice or gluten-free rice crackers just can’t do that. They can’t make you feel loved. Certain dieting trends are dangerous not only because we need food, but because we need what food gives us — a welcome pause, a place to sit, a forum to share. I am a better, healthier person today because I can sit and eat and talk and be with my family for an hour and a half without hating myself for filling my stomach because I understand that it is full of love, not L.A.’s enemy calories. Los Angeles gets picked on a lot because, yes, it is a ridiculous place. But it can also be a wonderful home, if you choose to make it one.