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every food! It is not Mayumi’s fault. She is doing the best she can with tofu tartar sauce, but there is just not all that much you can do.
     
Day 7
    Back on the diet, I have to make tofu cheese for a quinoa salad I will consume in three days. Why do I have to make this cheese now? Because the tofu has to be spread with miso and kept in a sealed container for three days so that it rots a little, not unlike cheese! Spreading this tofu with miso is actually hard. I am so hungry I eat a little of the raw miso.
    Later, I decide to go out to (macrobiotic!) dinner with a friend who notices I keep really cleaning my plate on this diet in a compulsive way I never do normally. “It’s like you are starving!” he says. I feel like I am starving, but I am definitely not. I am eating food. I am just hungrier than I have ever been. I mean, as old Madge once said, “How can you be
like
a virgin?” So how could it be
like
I am starving? I am not actually starving, I don’t think.
     
Day 8
    Today, I decide to have a macrobiotic dinner party. I invite all my usual friends, who seem decidedly unhappy about this new theme. I make Mayumi’s sweet-and-sour tempeh and brown rice with almonds on it, with a side of sauerkraut. Guess what? Everyone loves the sauerkraut, which I bought from a store. It is universally acclaimed as the best dish there.
     
Days 9 and 10
    It is the end of the diet! And in celebration I do my last
Addicted to Sweat
DVD, called
Jaw Breaker Chair: Dripping Wet
. I was so scared of this DVD the whole week that I actually hid it in my couch. Finally, I find it in my couch and play it. It is so hard! It involves doing push-ups with your feet on a chair.
    I saved the tofu cheese for my last meal on the diet. It has been rotting in my fridge relatively unmolested for three days and now it is time for its moment in the sun. I combine the tofu cheese with quinoa to make a gross salad. The tofu cheese tastes surprisingly like tofu, yet combined with quinoa it has an odd granularity. I am supposed to finish the diet with a tofu scramble, but I can’t even do it. I have some fried chicken instead.
    So, in conclusion, is Madonna’s diet hard? You bet your ass it is. Is it fun? No! Do you have to eat sauerkraut? Yes! But what I really realized is that Madonna is a feminist revolutionary and it’s hard to be on a revolutionary’s diet. She danced in a wedding dress! She called David Mamet a chauvinist! She made a sex book called
Sex
! Paul McCartney may have suspiciously brown hair, but no one says he tries too hard to be young! I guess the question is this: Did Susan B. Anthony eat sauerkraut every day? Probably she did.

I Tried Greta Garbo’s Diet
    I n the thirties, famously reclusive actress Greta Garbo met self-described “doctor of natural science” (i.e., doctor of nothing) Gayelord Hauser, nutritionist to the stars. They reportedly hit it off, which is saying a lot, because Garbo had very few friends, hated going out, and once refrained from speaking a single word during a dinner with Mae West.
    But Garbo and Hauser were bonded by their love of calorie restriction. Garbo had begun shedding pounds in 1924, after Louis B. Mayer told her, “In America, men don’t like fat women,” and she dieted continuously throughout her life. She particularly loved fad diets, which made her a good disciple for Hauser’s science; he had written several books about nutrition, including
New Health Cookery
and his most famous tome,
Look Younger, Live Longer
, in which he suggested eating raw yeast and drinking buttermilk as a fun treat.
    Garbo was an adherent of the Hauser regimen, which emphasized the glories of vegetables, nuts, and yogurt, for many years. Some publications even speculated that the two were having an affair based around their shared love of disgusting food. They often cohabitated, and a neighbor of theirs in Palm Beach once complained of their exploits, writing, “that skinny Swedish actress and her fancy