The Calorie Chronicles: The Scarsdale Diet

The 1980's left us with a lot of really horrifying memories, ie. leg warmers, Voodoo Economics and "Thriller." It also left us with a really screwed up sense of eating and body care, but of course we didn't know it. Scores of women sunning their oiled butts on the beach, smoking cigarettes and sucking down Tab sodas for breakfast, lunch and dinner. No SPF, no corporate tobacco conspiracy theories, and Nutrasweet deserved the Nobel Prize. Fashionably anorexic, we counting calories with German efficiency, yet turned our noses at the protein, sugar and carbs that followed on the label. As for fat, it only came into the equation if one was to comment, "that's fattening."

The salad days, my friends.

It was in this world that I became a model. Calm yourselves, kittens, I was only 12. Some nimrods spotted tall me in the short world and decided that I photographed well. Five minutes later I had an agent and was strutting down a catwalk in four-inch heels with a dictionary on my head.

Modelling and me were a bad mix. Think "The Princess Diaries" without Julie Andrews, and a huge lack of patience on my behalf. I didn't want a makeup bag, I wanted Converse All Stars. I wanted to ride my bike and play baseball, not learn how to give myself an express manicure in ten easy steps. I didn't want to sit in front of hot lights posing like a trained monkey, or stare at the mirror with the other primadonnas chanting, over and over, that I AM a model, I AM the best, and I AM the fairest of them all.

Presiding over this magma of feathered bangs and misdirected esteem was our Fuhrer, an ex-model in her golden years whose first name, I kid you not, was a mispelled version of a well known fish. I'll call her Salmon.

Salmon was the undisputed dictator of our agency, presiding over hordes of girls with an iron fist. She had overbleached hair, swizzle stick legs, and a seriously high-pitched voice that would make your eardrums buzz. She pronounced it "Maw-dell" instead of "Model", and just adored using those perfect, blood red nails to pinch many a non-existent love handle. Pre, post and in between shows and shoots you were subject to the screeching of Salmon, and lord help you if you were unlucky enough to be at the agency on a Saturday morning, a.k.a. Weigh Day. Salmon would militantly march us to the scale in groups where we were amply weighed, berated and threatened. If it wasn't your life's ambition to be a waify crack whore by then, believe me, it would be after experiencing this. I've seen plenty of girls run out of the room in tears or hysterics after a weigh-in with Salmon.

Me and Salmon did not get along one bit. I thought she was an overstuffed, pretentious drama queen; she thought I was a tomboy and didn't give a shit. She was right. As you can imagine, this didn't make my life any easier, as she never lost an opportunity to showcase me as the Bad Example. Once Salmon made me show over 40 girls my bitten fingernails, tsk-tsking all the while and saying things like, "A maw-dell never has hands like these. Only maids have hands like these," or, "As every good maw-dell knows, the body is a temple, and your hands are the welcome to the door."

Miserable witch. I made faces behind her head when she wasn't looking. I'm sure good maw-dells never did that either, but I had plenty of fun doing it.

Soon after my christening as a reluctant glamazon, I experienced the glory of Weigh Day. I was now 5'9, 131lbs and therefore, completely satisfied. Until I looked over at Salmon. Her eyes were popped out, Pug style,
and she was white to the roots of her albino blond hair. Worst of all, she was SPEECHLESS. Il Duce had nothing to say. This was bad.

Salmon fanned her face and cleared her throat several times. Then she asked for some water, while I snorted and rolled my eyes. I knew what was coming, but oh please. She was acting like I couldn't fit through the door. The episode finally over, Salmon pointed one long, bony finger at me and exclaimed, "If you want to be a good maw-dell, you cannot be FAT."

Well la-dee-fucking-da. I was a lousy model. And I did not think I was fat. I played plenty of sports at school and was even on a swim team. I was a size five, for crying out loud. Despite my protests, stupid Salmon would not be appeased until I made plenty of effort to shed plenty of weight. She even had it out with my agent, who did two things: she booked me in for every future Weigh Day, and dipped into a file folder labeled DIET with a quickety quickness.

Hello, Scarsdale. Primo 80's regurgitation, still alive and kicking in the kitchens and minds of those who want a quick fix. The Scarsdale Diet is a two-week low carb, low calorie, low taste and low energy plan that promises the loss of one pound per day. Uh huh. Three square meals with the usual meat, vegetables, fruit and water water water. Here's what I can remember from my time with Scarsdale: Lots and lots of cold cuts, corned beef mainly, the whole millimetre of fat trimmed off with the utmost precision. There was a day where you got two eggs for breakfast, oh glory hallelujah, but the rest of the time I was pretty grumpy with all that water and protein in the almost solitary form of cold cuts.

Here's the other thing that stuck out with the Scarsdale Diet, at least according to my agent. Treat yourself, she said. If you're going to be eating next to nothing like a good little model, treat yourself with something sweet at the end of the week.

Of course, under her breath she also suggested extra exercise to work that sweetness off.

And that's just what I did. I ate my fat-trimmed cold cuts, drank my water, and walked to the plaza every Sunday afternoon for a Skor. In total, a two-mile walk for a fucking chocolate bar, what kids my age were devouring everywhere, guilt-free, and I didn't even have a weight problem to begin with.

I lost a few pounds, but Salmon didn't let up. I didn't expect her to, I mean I wasn't exactly her favourite person to begin with, and she didn't cut slack for anyone else anyway. But I didn't really care. By this time I was bored of her ranting, bored of the other girls, bored of flashbulbs and clothes hunting in mouse-hole changerooms, walking up and down, up and down, turn left, turn right, up and down the runway again and again.

Little by little, I phased maw-delling out of my life until it was dead and forgotten. There was no fuss. I was starting high school and getting busier with academics, to which my parents had no complaint. I was more of a loner in grade school and very few people knew what my free time had been dedicated to; I liked it that way, and kept the silence when I started ninth grade. Word somehow got out though, and I was taken aside a few times by students wanting to know, "Is it true that you used to model?"

I could have had my five minutes of high school fame, but I was not that girl. So I told them No.

What have I learned from this? First, to always reward myself, and you should too. If you have been a shining example of physical excellence for a week, it's okay to have a chocolate bar, no matter what the meal plan says. It's what keeps you human.

Second, enviable though they may seem, every beauty queen has a Salmon to answer to. And perfect though she may look, that beauty queen usually sees herself as fat. Don't you ever forget that.