The Adultery Diet*

I recently finished reading The Adultery Diet by Eva Cassady and wanted to share some of my favorite passages with you.

• husbands want their wives to look good, but they hate it when we diet...they like to feed without consciousness. Dieting is an awareness of cause and effect: cause-food; effect-gross, unsightly fat, and have the closet off-limits...They prefer to live in a world in which beer leads to supermodels, and the game can be won by a miraculous catch. If their wives stop eating, it's as if we've withdrawn the breast. Then there's sulking until you let them drag you off to Ray's for pizza, where they sit smiling happily at you as you swallow their little diet hand grenade.


• Diet books always sell well. It's the perfect product: when one doesn't work, it just creates a market for the next one. Hope springs eternal. So all you need is a marketing hook and a supermodel to endorse it. It's like porn for women.


• There's only one way to lose weight...Food is fuel. If you burn more than you consume, you lose weight. So work out and watch what you eat. But you can't sell books telling people that. Everybody wants a secret for losing weight without having to break a sweat. So we publish these books telling them to eat all one thing, or stay away from something else, when it's really pretty obvious: eat green stuff instead of gooey stuff, and get some exercise.


• You need a catchy name, or it doesn't qualify as a diet...You should call it 'The Martini Diet.' You eat like a monk all day long, and then in the evening, you get to have a martini to fulfill your minimum daily requirement of languid grace.


• ...no woman ever goes on a diet for her daughter. The only reason women lose weight is to screw a man or to screw with a woman...Ask yourself why all the single women you know are skinny...married women gain weight because they can. They don't have to worry about impressing men. And if you see a married woman who's suddenly obsessed with her weight, that means one of three things: she's cheating, she thinks her husband might be cheating, or there's a wedding coming up and she wants to stick it to the cousins from Philadelphia by looking fabulous.


• I am proud of myself. I've become a gym regular, there every morning at six and back on my way home from work. I'm still not the most graceful gazelle in the herd, but I no longer feel like everyone's staring at me.


• Who knew it could be easier to lift weights than to shoulder all these feelings? No wonder I'm losing weight. It's a daily workout.


• We're animals, built to desire. Hunger and sex, that's what keeps us going. Happiness isn't built into the design, except as a temporary reward. A good meal, a satisfying f*ck, a moment with your child when it all seems worth it. Desire has become a habit, stronger than exhaustion or hunger. It pushes me out of bed into the bitter January morning, so that I'm at the gym long before the first hint of light in the cold, gray sky.


• What's nice about the gym is that you can make the numbers go up. Minutes on the treadmill, rate on the stair climber, and weight on the Nautilus. More weight on the machine equals less weight on me; my body's changing faster than the numbers on my scale.


• Gym mirrors aren't instruments of vanity or self-loathing, like those in our bathrooms; they're reality checks. You work up a fierce sweat and your muscles feel like they're carved from stone, so you study yourself with almost technical self-assessment as you catch your breath. The mirror in the gym shows you that what you feel is only an illusion: your muscles may feel cut from granite, but you still look like Gumby.


• I wish I could hibernate: crawl into bed for the next three months and live off my stored body fat as I sleep through the winter months. Wake up in April, skinny and starving, ready to build that layer of body fat back up for next winter. It's a great system, if you think about it. No StairMaster or treadmill, no brutal self-denial. You lose weight as you sleep. And when you wake up, you can have pancakes.


• People don't get fat because they eat: they get fat because they eat the wrong things-huge amounts of fat and sugar, the endless Happy Meal of American abundance-and then fail to burn it off. We're built to survive even when food is scarce, and fat is the body's savings plan.


• So the trick isn't to starve yourself, or to find some magic formula of foods. It's finding the right balance of food and sweat.

WOW...I'm not even halfway through the dogeared pages so I'm just going to stop here and tell you to go out and get a copy and read it if your interested in hearing more. This is not really a "diet" book so if you're looking for a "how-to" plan, this isn't it.

The thought of being naked in front of someone for the first time is a great incentive to lose weight. I remember being embarrassed when I ran into an old boyfriend and it made me really think about why I cared what he thought. He wasn't the man in my life now so why the hell did I give a second thought to what he thought about me. Shouldn't I be more concerned with how the people in my day to day life see me? I know tons of women who made themselves crazy trying to fit into their wedding dress for that one special day and then let it all go once they got that ring on their finger. I wonder why we let ourselves go when we get comfortable in a relationship. Shouldn't we love ourselves enough to stay healthy and fit?

*Disclaimer: This isn't really a "diet" book. It's the story of a woman who lost herself after getting married, having a baby and getting lost in her day-to-day life. I wouldn't encourage or condone anyone to step out on their marriage or relationship but if you are unhappy in your relationship you should take whatever steps you need to take to make it better or get out of it if it can't be fixed. Luckily, I've never been tempted to cheat but can understand why some people do.

Cheaters have been all over the news and blogs lately. If it's not the pro golfer, the actor or the spouse of an award winning actress, it's a friend, a friend of a friend or a family member. I recently wrote a post about those dirty dogs here if you want to know what I really think about these cheaters.