“Eighty-five is an unnatural num-ber.” Sweet was thinking about weights and measures. She wasn’t in the kitchen at the time (and though it will pain a culinary talent like Mama Cakes to hear this, her little Sweetikins is more a take-out kind of girl, anyway). Still, food was very much on Sweet’s mind. Of course, at this point in the year, before resolutions drop from the psyche’s surface the way adhesives loosen from the rough-spackled walls in Sweet’s Workplace, many people occupy their free time with thoughts of slimming.
La Cake has always taken more of an active approach to figure control—she prefers to add activity (a long, gossipy walk with one of The Girlfriends, especially the charmingly accented Hat Czech, for instance) rather than subtract nourishment when she wants to shed
a few pounds. Everything published in Important Med-ical Journals lends endorse-ment to this method.
Unfortunately, many get their dieting tips not from the annals of science but from the chronicles of inanity, by which Sugar-pie means celebrity tabloids and the syrupy style sections of certain Sunday newspapers. There, one is destined to find Really Bad Ideas for Dropping the Pounds Quickly.
Drugs, coffee, hormone treatments and, of course, starvation occupy honored places among celebrity reduction fads. And the current poster girl for Destructive Means to Get Skinny is Nicole Richie. Sweet knows she has hit this note before, but in this particular case Candy-honey hopes her readers will grant her forbearance. Eighty-five is an unnatural number. Any of Sweetie’s lovelies who wants to shrink to that brittle poundage a la Richie is urged to see a specialist (and possibly to swing by Bel Air Market for a sandwich on the way). The Hollywood pixie seemingly will stop short of nothing, including rumored resumption of her drug addiction, to retain her prepubescent form.
Mere mortals too will trash common sense and risk their health to lose weight fast. And that brings Sweet to something called the Master Cleanse. With its promise of hygiene, this quick weight-loss fad is taking hold on the coasts. The regime is cloaked in pseudo-science (something about intestinal health and the benefits to the bloodstream that come from a 10-day diet of lemon juice and cayenne pepper). But it’s about as scientific as bulimia, if you ask your darling correspondent. Message boards abound with exclamations of delight from those cleansed souls who have literally flushed nasty unwanted pounds practically overnight. Despite standard-issue warnings from the “doctors” behind the fad that the only safe way to lose weight is through long-term lifestyle changes, the Master Cleanse wins converts for its rumored promise of instant skinniness.
The message boards grow considerably more quiet, Sweet observes, when the topic turns to how rapidly the weight is regained.
Dearest readers, you know your Honey-baby to be a girl who celebrates all that is pretty and silly and chatty. You perhaps think you should take her tone of caution and admonition with some reserve. Sweet is grumpy because she lost a button, you figure. La Cake sounds like La Scold because she ate one fudge drop too many.
Not so!
Sweet’s embrace of life’s diaphanous pleasures has always been firmly grounded in principles of Taking Good Care of Oneself (and here, one more time, let’s praise the ever-sensible Mama Cakes). Let us laugh and swing with the joy of finding a well-priced knock-off of Carolina Herrera’s metallic cotton tweed shirtdress. Let us gaze admiringly at the Balenciaga high-heel Mary Janes showing up in all the magazines. But let us never confuse frivolity for stupidity.
Starvation is stupid. Bulimia is stupid. Fad diets are stupid.
Any questions? Good, because Sweet needs to head out now and hit the treadmill!