BONUS: The Conservative Diet Books of Yore

I have one.

I have an appropriate one.

When does either one of us ever come in with one and be like, I got it?

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that believes diets are a matter of personal response to bootstraps.

I wonder where we're going in this episode.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

If you would like to support the show, you're already doing that.

Thank you so much.

And today,

we are combing the shelves of Aubrey's diet book collection.

This is going to be the first of many such combings.

And according to a text message you sent last night, we're today talking about conservative diet books.

Yes.

We're talking about the G-O-P, but it stands for Go on a Plan.

No, that wasn't that good.

That wasn't that good.

I really liked it.

The challenge here is I don't think anybody calls a diet a plan.

Yeah, I know.

Get in time to work at that.

I'll come back.

So, we're normally doing a diet book deep dive.

I'm calling this a diet book buffet.

A little smorgasbord.

You had this great idea of just doing a tour of the diet book collection and picking out a few that, like, didn't have quite enough there there to sustain a whole episode, right?

And as I started to look at the collection, like, hey, that's a lot of the diet books.

A lot of the diet books are like, it's not enough for a whole episode, but it's very funny and silly.

And let's talk about how funny and silly it is.

As I started to look through the collection, it became clear that there were these little like sub-themes.

Like, there are a bunch of diet books that are just about like the wine diet or the pasta diet or the popcorn diet or the junk food diet.

There's a bunch of celebrity diet books written by people who have absolutely never been fat.

Why does Cher have a diet book?

Okay.

So there are all these little subsets.

And I thought for today we would start out with one of those subsets,

which is politically conservative diet books.

And straight up, some of these people are politicians.

Some of them are political actors.

Either way, they are folks who have been like upfront about their political conservatism.

Get out the paleo.

I'm going to keep doing these.

Out.

It's going to have the paleo.

Going to have more throughout.

So for this one, I pulled more diet books than I used.

There were a couple.

There's one that I pulled that was called A Diet Plan for Uncle Sam.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's get into this.

And then it was just about like federal budgets and like obliterating the social safety net.

Oh, I thought it was going to be like roast bald eagle and shit.

Unfortunate.

No, it was a bummer, but it was not the kind of bummer I was looking for.

Oh, a fun bummer.

I was looking for a fun bummer, and it was just a straight up bummer.

There was another one that I was like, I think this might actually be a whole episode as a sort of like an episode in two parts.

One of them is the Boston Police had a very popular diet book.

What?

Yes.

What?

Yes.

Yes.

If it was popular enough, which it definitely was not, I would have been like, we should do this on if Books Could Kill.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, hang on, I'm coming over.

We're doing this one because it's garbage.

So today we're going to look at three different diet books.

It is a classic maintenance phase crescendo.

So brace yourself for things to get wilder as we go along.

The first diet book that we are going to look at, hang on, I got a

close out of everything and open up the folder of pictures of these diet books.

And then I'm going to send you one of them.

Garbage obstructing progress.

Is that one?

I didn't see it coming.

That one has a verb.

Okay, Mike, I sent you a picture of the cover.

No fucking way.

I got you a present.

What?

Okay, so good God.

Okay, so it's the i Heart America diet by someone named Phyllis George and Bill Adler.

And the cover is like this bright Rubik's cube red with like a nice, like swirly wedding invitation font and it says i heart america and the heart is like an image of like a barbie doll woman it's like a woman like blonde white gleaming teeth yeah my whenever whenever i see like republican imagery like this i'm just ready for a fucking horror show i'm sure she's nice it's like this is a red flag the barbie doll woman is Phyllis George.

It is the author of the book, ostensibly

not nice.

Her career started as the winner of Miss America.

She went on to become a sports reporter and a news reporter.

Okay.

And at the time that she published this book, it was her last year as the First Lady of Kentucky.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

She has a sort of Miss America, news anchor lady kind of look.

Technically, the title of the book is the I Love America diet, but every time they do the heart, so I'm only calling it the I heart America diet.

Yes, obviously I I feel about this like I feel about, like, so I live in Portland, Oregon.

There are Nike

bikes that you can use all around town.

Many cities have like, just like bikes that you can, like, pick up and use.

Ours are provided by Nike.

Nike has a store in town called Nike Town, as it does in a number of places.

On the side of the bikes, it says Bike Town,

but my brain always reads it as Biky Town.

Biketown, same.

Whenever I'm in Portland, I'm like, I guess it's a Biky Town bike.

And I feel similarly about this, which is like, look, I could try to rewire my brain to read that as the I Love America diet, but it's always going to be the I Heart America diet with the Barbie doll lady in it.

Also, a ton of people, you know, TSA Pre-Check?

How it's like pre-dash and then like a Czech emoticon.

But everyone ignores that, so they'll just say, like, I have TSA pre.

This is where I fully turn into that like fucking TikTok.

about us where I'm like, this week I thought we'd go light and I ended up with 11 pages of notes.

I think about that TikTok all the time.

I really, I'm like, they really

nailed it, and I know because of the amount of personal embarrassment I feel when I catch myself doing those behaviors.

They're called out.

Called out.

So lovingly, but absolutely called.

I know.

We appreciate you.

And we're wildly self-conscious now.

And we're mortified.

Okay, so Phyllis George with this book joins the pantheon of lifetime thin people with the goddamn audacity to write a diet book.

Oh, yeah.

Look what I did.

Miss America wrote a diet book.

Okay.

This is how I became symmetrical.

Wow.

Thank you.

Shit.

Her co-writer, and I would guess the main writer of this book is Bill Adler, whose bio just says, like, he's a literary agent and a writer.

And he co-authored the iHeart New York diet, which I also have.

Is that just a bunch of like pizza slices and sewer rats?

Step one, former rat king with other rats.

Future maintenance phase bonus app.

This book was published in 1983, so it's exactly as old as I am.

It was published again in her last year as First Lady of Kentucky, and it was blurbed by like 1 million med school professors.

Interesting.

We will get into why that is momentarily.

The main

thing that we are going to focus on for this book in particular

is

the description on the flap of the book jacket.

Okay.

Because it really does encapsulate.

Like, I skimmed the whole book and I was like, no, actually, I think the strongest text to look at is the actual pitch that they're making to readers.

So I'm going to send you, we're going to go through bit by bit.

We're not going to do the entire thing because it's longer than it needs to be.

But we are absolutely going to talk through the first couple of paragraphs of it.

Okay, putting on my bifocals.

There you go.

It says, this is a diet for sensible Americans, like you and me.

It's safe, it's sound, it's sure, of course, it works because it's based on the official recommendations of U.S.

government agencies.

It's like no other diet you've ever been on or heard of before, doubtful, because it's not just a diet.

It's an integrated three-way program that permits you for the first time in your life to take control of your weight destiny.

It tells you what to eat.

It tells you how to eat.

It tells you the ways, all caps, to beat fat with workouts.

Anybody can do.

It's not just a diet.

It tells you what to eat.

It tells you how to eat.

It tells you what workouts to do.

You're describing a diet.

It's just like such God.

It's such boilerplate this stuff.

It's like, this is like nothing else.

We're going to tell you to eat less and move more.

It was really striking to me to be looking at something, again,

that is my entire lifetime ago and be like, oh, this is new marketing.

Right.

Every diet is doing this same thing, which is just like, they're all like, we're not like the other girls.

We're different.

It is fascinating how like five minutes after the first diet, there was the first diet being like, we're not a diet.

Yeah.

We know diets don't work.

Are you ready for our next chunk of the description?

Give on

programs.

No, and that one doesn't really work.

Sorry.

Yes, I'm ready.

Sorry.

Okay, so I'm sending you the next chunk of the description.

All caps, and there's a fabulous bonus.

Sentence case.

You can be healthier than you are.

You can live longer with increased vigor.

That's because you'll be following the U.S.

federal dietary guidelines for Americans.

The recent scientific breakthrough praised by doctors everywhere.

The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports asks, a strong, vital America depends on physically fit Americans.

Can we depend on you?

If you love America, the answer is yes.

It's patriotic to be trim and healthy.

Woo!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Problematic through lines in this little paragraph.

Well, I picked this one out because I was like, ooh, cameos.

We've got

the president's physical fitness test.

We've also got the U.S.

Federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which came up so much in our food pyramid episode.

They are the basis of the food pyramid.

Food triangle, but yes.

Also, we've got those guidelines being praised by doctors everywhere, which like they weren't even really praised by doctors within the USDA.

The guidelines doctors everywhere said

about.

And then we've got this absolute fucking bananas shoehorning in of like real patriots are thin.

Yeah, dude.

It's weird that they're saying it this explicitly.

Usually it's like between the lines.

It also just like I was reading this one and I was like, this is pure camp.

Yeah, I know.

This is the problem with this is it's hard to be offended by it.

It really is.

It looks so weird and surreal.

This

description also lists out the things that you can do on this diet, which also felt really reminiscent of diets that we have heard about, talked about, all that kind of stuff.

This is a list that should have bullet points in front of it, but it doesn't because I'm texting it to you.

Is the exercise plan just standing up and saluting the flag and sitting down over and over?

It's actually just like joining the military and going to boot camp.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just push-ups.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

It says: lose up to 11 pounds of fat a month, not water, as on fat diets.

Eat the kind of foods you've always loved, even ice cream.

Never, never diet foods.

Make the switch to lifetime stay slim habits easily, pleasantly, deliciously.

Learn how to transform your favorite recipes into scrumptious, nutrition-packed, slimming delights.

Oh, this is very similar to the Scarsdale diet thing, where In general, when it talks about the diet like in the introduction, it's like, you can do anything.

Don't worry about being hungry, bestie.

And then, once you get to the specifics, it's like prisoner of war camp rations and like hours of exercise, and they just like coexist peacefully.

Here's the thing that I would say about this particular diet: normally I'm like, yes, that is the pattern.

In this case, it is USDA and FDA guidelines that they're sort of operating off of.

So it's less of that, just like you get one ounce of cheese every week, enjoy it savor it while you can like it's less of that it reads much more like kind of any number of 80s low fat or low calorie right diet meal plans like a bunch of the meal plans they're like most nights for dinner you're getting a whole baked potato plus a protein plus a cup of vegetables right because it's essentially a diet book that was created to popularize public nutrition guidelines right right So it's not like completely off the rails.

The fascinating thing to me is that they like include a small number of recipes and the recipes that they include seem fine.

They don't seem like bad recipes to me, but I am confused as to how these ones made the top of the list.

Okay.

So they have like a few dinner recipes.

They've got a couple of soup recipes.

They've got some dips, that kind of thing.

They have a lot of recipes that seem very time-limited for your use in the year.

So they have a recipe for gingerbread.

Okay.

They have an eggnog recipe.

Festive liquids.

They have a recipe for something called cottage cheese dip.

Oh, no, the cottage cheese in the 80s.

It was so much.

I have,

listen, it's Stockholm Syndrome has been debunked, but I have it with cottage cheese.

I continue to enjoy cottage cheese.

I have tried to get into cottage cheese so many times.

I've tried.

I'm like, I want to like this.

It seems fine.

And every, every time I do it, I just, it's like opera.

It's not for you.

Yeah.

Aubrey, what if we wrote a diet book?

A diet book?

We've talked about this.

Yeah.

We like did the same intros, like, you can eat anything on this plan.

You can move however you want to.

You don't have to be hungry.

And then like, we actually did it.

We just like provided a bunch of like bomb ass recipes.

And we were like, you can make these, you cannot make these.

You can eat

literally anything else.

Any whatever portion makes you feel full and happy.

Like, what if, and then we just call it a diet book, or like it's a diet book, but it's literally just like physically eat anything what you want.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh my god, listen, any excuse to get, I have this recipe for like uh shrimp that's poached in coconut milk and like ginger, and a button, like it's fucking killer.

I would get that out into the world.

Yeah, the last thing I will say about this particular

is that, so they've got the front spread and the back spread of the book covered in blurbs.

Okay.

Then you open the book and the first 13 pages of this book are blurbs that they absolutely should have cut.

Okay.

As someone who just released a book, there's like you are thinking really strategically about blurbs when you pull together a book, right?

Or are you?

So they got blurbs from killer names.

One of them is from Walter Cronkite.

Oh my God, really?

I just sent it to you.

Okay.

He says, I know too well how difficult it is to reconcile good eating habits with the demands of the hectic workday.

And this book appears to me to provide a practical guide that tackles this very problem.

Oh.

So like,

I didn't read it.

Like, Shirsty told me about it.

And like, that's what she's trying to do.

I have a hard time with like managing my eating habits.

And I understand that this book says that it will teach me how to do that.

This is what she's asking you to do.

This is like when I get asked to blurb books and I'm just like, I will not be reading this book,

but

I can provide like a factual quote.

This was emailed to me in PDF form by John.

John seems fine.

Wait, have you ever blurbed a book?

No, because I don't have any time to read because all I do is read terrible books and then like one fun book a month for book club.

And all those are already like out in the world so those people don't need blurbs anymore.

She also got a blurb from Ed McMahon.

Oh really?

Just sent it to you.

It just says the most comprehensive diet I have ever read.

What does that even mean?

Comprehensive?

That means it's I don't know if it's comprehensive because I definitely didn't read it.

I'm tired of these fragmentary diets.

I need a comprehensive diet.

Anyway, that's the iHeart America diet.

That's all I wanted to do is just be like, this is very goofy.

This is sort of the theme of the episode.

Like, we talked in the goop episode about like dunking on things, but making it nutritious dunking.

There is no nutritional thing.

No, you're not learning anything.

You're not growing as a pain.

You're not getting thiamine out of this.

Book two.

Michael, are you ready?

Book two.

Gimme.

Book two

is called

The Love Diet.

Oh, the Love Diet.

Another heart cover.

Another heart on the cover.

This one's written by someone named John Dobbert.

John Dobbert has written a number of other books.

Titles include How to Improve Your Child's Education, Give Yourself a Chance Finding Your Role in a Competitive Society,

John Dobbert's First Aid for Marriage.

Okay.

And

If Being a Christian is so great, why do I have the blobs?

That one actually sounds good.

I also have the blas.

Maybe he has tips.

This one was published in 1977.

The tagline for this one is how to diet successfully using that most powerful of all motivators, love.

I'm intrigued.

I'm going to send you the description from the back of the cover.

Get ready.

It says, a simple but complete explanation of the catalyst which can make any reasonable diet a resounding success.

The catalyst is love.

Everyone has a capacity for it.

Everyone has seen evidence of its universal appeal and power.

John Dobert shows how to harness the enormous power of love to benefit dieting.

The writing.

Yeah.

The goal is to build a deep-seated, unified inner attitude that controls the dieter's behavior.

An attitude motivated out of love for the dieter himself, his friends, his family, his career, and his self-perceived purpose in life.

The author shows not only how to use the love we have, but how to obtain all the love we will ever need to get slim and stay that way.

Is this chat GPT?

I'm actually motivated out of love.

You're right to be confused by this.

Use the love we have how to obtain the love we need to get slim.

Why would I need love to get slim?

I need self-hatred of the way that I look and feel.

Mike, I'm going to tell you what.

This is the one of the books that we're talking about today where I read the entire thing cover to cover.

And I am no more clear on any of the answers to any of the questions raised by this description.

God, the real, I feel like Jordan Peterson is the one that really cracked this code.

The trick to these books is to write something totally incomprehensible.

And then if anyone is like, oh, this doesn't make any sense, then you could just be like, looks like somebody didn't get it.

I guess you don't understand these intellectual concepts.

You might be wondering, Michael, why this is on our list of books written by conservative political actors.

Please enjoy the cover.

Oh, wait, what?

Oh, it took me a second.

Okay, so it says, I mean, first of all, this graphic design is on point, as usual.

It is Microsoft Word 95.

They figured out the arch function.

So it says the love diet, and there's like a little tagline by John Dobert.

Small font, forward by James Dobson.

Yeah.

The infamous focus on the family prime minister, whatever the fuck he is, but like he's this like, this anti-gay, anti-everything fun ghoul.

Absolutely.

If there was gremlin shit being said about queer people in national politics, it was either being said by James Dobson, furnished by James Dobson, or like parroted by people who were close to him.

Like he is like the nexus, right?

Like if you're like mad about Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, you're also probably mad about James Dobson, right?

Like, he is, again, like the beating heart of a lot of this stuff.

But also, very, very trim.

People are always talking about his six-pack.

His neck veins.

We'll get there.

Just a trim little man.

At the point that this was published, he was an associate professor of pediatrics at USC.

At the time, he was best known for his book, Dare to Discipline,

which advocated for the use of corporal punishment by parents on kids.

I love it when they try to present this as like as like a bold new idea.

It's like finally beating kids.

It's like yeah, that's what we've been doing for like thousands of years and it's bad.

Also, it's 1977.

So this isn't necessarily even an idea that has like gone out of vogue in the way that it has gone out of vogue.

When I think of love, I think of beating children.

I think of the guy who's like, gay people are all going to die and it's going to be their fault.

Also, beat your kids more.

The love diet.

Yeah, I just want to make literally everyone's lives worse.

This was also the year that he founded Focus on the Family.

So he had his eyes on bigger things, right?

It was either become a lifestyle influencer or become an anti-gay grifter.

If only Instagram had been around back then.

Chapter titles for this one include Born Again and Obese.

That's an absurdity.

Oh, no.

Your diet must be self-imposed.

Okay.

Group pressure is great, but at midnight, it's only you and the refrigerator.

Okay.

Tithing food for health?

Giving away 10% of all my food.

That's the key to losing weight.

I look at a meal and I cut off 10% of it and I put it in the collection plate.

I just save the potatoes just in my little hand.

The last one is absolutely, unquestionably the darkest, which is, am I important enough to live longer?

Oh, God.

Right.

It gets so dark so fast.

This is the one unproblematic chapter that every diet book has.

It's the conclusion of Elizabeth Taylor's diet book.

Maybe everything else I say in this book is like not going to make you happy.

So one of my big questions in picking up this one is just like, what the fuck does James Dobson have to say about weight loss and dieting?

Yes, I am desperate to know this.

Yes.

Okay, so I read the whole foreword.

There is absolutely no there there.

Oh, really?

His foreword is basically just like, I'm writing this because I'm really good at setting goals and hitting them.

I'm very accomplished.

But even accomplished people struggle with their appetite.

Setting goals and reaching them, James Obergefell?

Did you say that?

Is it that one that you dedicated your entire life to?

So he has this introductory paragraph where he's talking about like, I'm a very accomplished person, but even accomplished people have a hard time with this thing.

And then the rest of the foreword is just like...

two pages and it's just like here's what readers can expect to find in the rest of this book the end oh wait really that's also like a factual factual Walter Cronkite one.

I think there's a decent chance that someone wrote most of this for him and he wrote the introductory paragraph where they were like, you have to write about YU.

Send me the introductory paragraph.

Okay, so I just sent you a picture of the first paragraph of James Dobson's foreword.

I'm so excited.

As a person who has worked long hours and carried heavy responsibilities through the years, I am well acquainted with the rigors of self-discipline and self-control.

Why then am I such a patsy when it comes to control of my appetite for food?

And why are millions of Americans struggling with the same ridiculous weakness?

The answers, according to John Dobert, lie in our inability to marshal the proper motivation to get thin and stay thin.

Ah, this is boring.

Yeah, it's super boring.

And

so that genuinely like the hook of what makes this like such a sort of like notable conservative diet book is like the most boring part.

There's no like evil genius stuff in here.

It's like, don't, don't you have a Thanksgiving to ruin, James?

Yeah, he doesn't name check like Jerry Falwell or anything.

Like, it's like, it's a real bummer.

The other day, as I was shoving a child back into the closet against their will, I thought about the exercise that I needed to be stronger.

Yep.

Boo.

Okay, so.

Another one of my questions was just like, what the fuck does it mean for it to be the love diet?

Yeah.

The argument for the connection between love and dieting in this book is so unbelievably tenuous.

Okay.

He just keeps saying, Love is the greatest motivator, so harness love as your motivation to diet.

Is it, I don't even understand what his fucking argument is.

Is it like, get thin so that people will love you?

Like, you'll be more successful at dating?

Oh, Michael, you are, that is the thinking of someone who's operating on love level one.

I'm just like, yeah, I'm just like, I paid a cycle 50 for this book.

I want like some useful advice, but I guess it doesn't even do that.

Let me tell, this is, I found the clearest passage that I could where he's like spelling out what love has to do with motivation to diet.

What's love?

Okay.

He's stacking another metaphor on top of his already try-hard metaphor.

Yep.

He says, Love levels can most readily be compared to gears in an automobile.

It is necessary to get the diet rolling, just as first gear gets the car rolling.

First gear, however, cannot meet the demands and conquer all types of driving, and love level one cannot meet the demands and conquer all impediments to dietary success.

Traveling in first gear for a long duration is impractical and may cause mechanical failure.

Jesus Christ!

That's the end of that paragraph.

Oh,

that's as good as it gets.

That's as good as it gets.

I'm so sorry.

It is so funny to me to think that, like, I'm like, did any editor ever?

Because, like, it doesn't even make sense.

This is such like Michael Scott vibes where he's like, look, I'm going to break it down.

A business has to make more money than it spends.

And then, like, draws out this extended metaphor on this like extremely easy to understand concept.

Yes, like oh, in levels.

So, can I walk you through the three love levels?

Oh, yeah, because now I'm I've been in first gear and I'm experiencing mechanical failure.

I, this is normally where you would say something like, I'm intrigued, and I appreciate that you didn't because you're not, because there's nothing to be intrigued.

I'm not, there's nothing here, but I love empty verbiage.

I love empty verbiage, so take me with you.

According to Dobbert, according to this author, when he's writing about love level one, he's talking about dieting from a place of love using your motivation.

Love is your motivation to diet, right?

It's sort of his overarching thing.

And he says that love level one is about dieting from a place of love of yourself.

Okay.

His version of this sort of like love of self is just really similar to the concept behind Chloe Kardashian's Revenge Body.

Oh, yeah.

That show.

Do you remember that show?

Only from you talking about it.

If you are dieting on love level one, if you are dieting for a love of self,

here are his tips for how to get yourself more motivation.

Okay.

He says that you should undress in front of a full-length mirror, jump up and down, and quote, count the seconds until the rolls settle.

Oh my God.

Motivation tip number two: ask an honest friend to tell me how I really look.

Oh,

these are mean, Aubrey.

Motivation tip number three, Mike, if those were too dark for you, hang on to your fucking butt.

I can't because it's jiggling too much.

It's still, it's still vibrating for me.

I was chipping right here.

Picture yourself confined to a nursing home as a result of sickness caused by overweight.

What?

That's not even a useful tip.

Just imagine myself in a nursing home.

Also, it has the weird like 60s, 70s language of like caused by overweight.

Oh, yeah.

It's just such a weird turn of price.

I know.

It should be overweightness.

People with overweightness, Aubrey.

We're using people first language.

Michael, are you ready to hear about love level two?

Love level two.

Is this like caring for my family or something?

And then like level three is like caring for my community or some shit?

Stop trying to skip ahead because you're not going to guess level three.

I'm trying to impose like some form of coherence onto this book, which is clearly just incoherent.

Love level two is about love of sort of the collective.

He calls this the group theme.

He talks about like teachers being motivated by love of their students, pastors being motivated by love of their congregants, doctors being motivated by their love of patients, so on and so forth.

So he is sort of like thinking and talking about like, okay, what does it mean to diet from a place of love for other people?

He has some motivation tips for people who are dieting at love level two.

Okay.

I'm going to send two of those motivational tips to you.

Motivate me.

He says, even a small weight loss causes your attitude to be one of confidence since you know how many lives you're affecting through your dietary compliance.

Aubrey, maybe this is just because I just read your book, which is like...

coherent and like nicely written, but

causes your attitude to be one of confidence.

Like, why do you just say even a small weight loss gives you a more confident attitude?

It's the writing is so bad.

Is he being paid by the preposition?

Look closely at each child as he sleeps and examine how much he means to you and what he would be facing if you, your love, and your earning power were suddenly gone.

This is so weird.

I'm gazing at myself jiggling in the mirror.

I'm gazing upon my small children.

It's just like think in the most negative terms possible at all times.

Right.

And it's like, think about what a failure you are and will be.

This is the Jane Lynch meme.

I'm going to create an environment so toxic.

Like that is what is happening here.

Right.

Uh, Michael.

Are you ready?

for love level three.

I think I figured it out.

I think it's gonna be God.

Ah, fuck.

God damn it.

Is it?

It's love of God.

Dobson clued me in.

So he offers some examples of what dieting at love level three looks like.

Okay.

I'm sending those to you.

Okay.

He says,

if my weight is controlled and I'm healthier, I'll live longer, which gives me more time on earth to serve my master.

If I'm successful in setting an example of results in my diet, others will ask me how I succeed and I'll witness that my God assisted me.

My witness may result in a convert to my beliefs.

Oh,

so I'm recruiting people to Christianity with my like rippling abs.

People are like, yes.

Like, wait a minute, Mike, none of you is jiggling in the mirror.

Yeah.

I'm like, thanks, Bible.

He created everything and he's also like, man, on this planet full of like, you know, billions of people.

Right.

John's getting a little fat, huh?

The funny thing is, as a former Christian kid, I actually think that like New Testament morality is like pretty lit, but nobody actually implements it.

Jesus talked all the time about like how, you know, rich people can't get into heaven and you should care the most for like the weakest among you.

But there's just a whole economy of fucking grifters who are like, no, no, no, no, no.

Jesus said the opposite of what you think he said.

He wants you to be rich.

He wants you to be thin.

It is really wild that in, you know, some setting somewhere, somebody read the Bible and out the other end of whatever machine creates these people came like Joel Osteen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, the Bible, yes?

I just want you to be hot and shitty.

That's what Jesus wants.

Would you like to hear some motivation tips for people at love level three?

He says, pray periodically during the day to seek assistance to overcome temptation.

Pray before each meal, asking assistance for appetite control.

Nurture the belief that failure to adhere successfully to your diet displeases God.

Yeah.

This is like maybe false idol territory.

It's wild as fuck.

I've been doing some reading lately about spiritual abuse.

Is this a term you've come across?

Ah, it sure is.

It's like a lot of church leaders will use your sort of sense of morality and, like, you know, your entire worldview through religion to basically get away with terrible shit, right?

For like sexual harassment or exploiting you for money.

Sure.

This honestly feels like a form of spiritual abuse, right?

Where it's like he's explicitly invoking your like moral and religious worldview to sell a book.

Absolutely.

To me, the good parts of religion are just a weekly invitation for people to think about things larger than themselves and like, how am I doing good in the world?

How am I affecting other people?

And he's explicitly like clawing that back.

He's like, no, no, no, no, no.

Sunday morning.

is to think about like how many sit-ups you did this week.

And like, if you don't do more, you'll die and your children will never forgive you.

Yeah, exactly.

It's very strange for anyone with even passing familiarity with the Bible.

Yeah.

But at the same time, there is an entire cottage industry of evangelical diet books, evangelical weight loss programs, right?

Like, there's like a million of these.

They are legion.

It's also very funny the idea that Jesus would want you to adhere to like conventional modern beauty standards because of course beauty standards have changed over time.

So like why would Jesus be like, oh yeah, in the 1990s, I want everyone to have like a long skinny torso.

And like right now, Jesus wants you to have like thick hips because like that's where the, that's where the fat is.

Look, Jesus reads In Touch Weekly.

He pays attention to who wore it best.

He has some thoughts.

Jesus says boot cut is out.

Skinny jeans are in.

Oh, oh, buddy, I think you're behind the times now.

Is that not?

That's out.

We're out.

We're old.

I ordered a pair of skinny jeans on the internet the other day, so that's why I'm like, I'm on trend.

I'm a 40-year-old man.

I know what people are doing.

This is what having a 15-year-old niece will do to a person.

Oh, see, you actually know what the kids are doing.

Because I get corrected on it.

Yeah.

What are you doing?

Why are you wearing that?

You're at my school and that's what you're wearing.

She's like, Kaigo has a whole song about this.

You're wrong.

Okay, Michael, are you ready for our third and final conservative diet book?

Problematic Level 3.

This one is not actually a diet book.

I will set it up that way.

This one is just straightforwardly a cookbook.

There's no calorie counting, there's no weight loss rhetoric, there's no nothing.

This one is just, I thought it would be fun to yell about the existence of this book with Michael Hobbes.

Yelling about recipes, our favorite thing.

I am sending

you the book cover to look at and to describe for the listener.

Oh, yeah.

I feel like I will hear when you get it.

Oh,

what?

Yeah.

Wait,

what?

This exists?

This exists, and I own it.

I'm so sorry.

Holy shit.

Okay.

Where to begin?

Wow.

There's so much happening on this book cover.

There's so much happening.

Okay, so it's a man and a woman.

Like, facing the camera with their backs to each other, like leaned up against each other, like two news anchors or something.

They're both wearing sleeveless denim vests.

He is holding a rifle, and she is holding some sort of like terrifying-looking fucking knife.

I think it's a hunting knife, yeah.

Oh, like a hunting, like stab a deer knife.

And

the name of the book is Kill It and Grill It, and it's by Ted and Shimaine Nugent.

A guide to preparing and cooking wild game and fish.

So this is like how to fucking kill animals and eat them, basically.

It says, includes a recipe for deer, elk, wild boar, rabbit, bear, wild turkey, duck, and more.

I feel like bear is the odd man out there.

Everything else I can get at Costco.

Absolutely.

There are definitely bear recipes in this one.

Mike, what do you know about Ted Nugent?

Oh,

wait, did he do know when to hold him and know when to fold him?

No, that's Kenny Rogers.

That's Kenny Rogers.

Could not be more different.

All I know is that he's like a right-wing gun dude now, but I don't know what he was like

before that.

He's like an Elizabeth Taylor figure, where it's like, I know her from the perfumes, but not from like the main thing that she's known for.

Yeah, you know him from his appearances on Fox News.

Yeah, it's like he shows up, and I'm like, this is, I guess, a famous person, but he's like famous to other people for reasons I don't understand.

We are going to listen to the opening riff of this song, which I think will get you oriented to who he is.

Bammy.

I've heard this.

Yeah, that's him.

Wait, let me.

Let's wait till the beat drops.

Damn it.

Oh.

Yeah.

So you get the idea.

Ted Nugent official YouTube has 192,000 subscribers?

Yeah, it's both higher and lower than I would expect.

There's like Pokemon Reaction YouTubers who have like more than that.

I mean, listen, he's a 74-year-old man from Michigan, you know?

So he's like a 80s rocker guy, like hair.

It sounds like hair metal, but then the cover of the album does not look hair metal-y.

He is reliably described as like a hard rock musician.

That's sort of how folks describe him.

70s, 80s was sort of his high point.

Okay.

Since then, he has really seemed to make most of his career out of being sort of like a personality.

Yeah.

Which for him means like astonishingly regressive,

outspoken racism, proud racism, big gun advocate.

He is a full disaster.

Wait, to go back to my acronym, he's a geriatric obstructing progress.

Okay, there we go.

I thought that one was good.

He...

was and is an extremely outspoken Trump supporter.

He refused to get vaccinated for COVID and then got COVID.

And when he announced that he had it, he only referred to it as, and I quote, the Chinese shit.

God.

Right.

Jeez.

He called President Obama, quote, a subhuman mongrel.

Oh my God.

I mean, he is like next

level.

Here's my question for you, Mike.

What year do you think this cookbook came out?

Whoo

Graphic Design says, I want to say 90s, actually.

Like, it looks late because there's weird, there's gradients

in the color.

And then the background of the image looks like one of those fucking magic eye things where you'd blur your eyes and it would be like, oh my God, a dolphin.

It looks like that.

Like, that's the aesthetic.

And then, God, the lighting is terrible.

There's like weird, like, just like a random pink light that is like lighting up his hair, but not hers.

I think that's to be like, doesn't it look like stage lighting?

For like a hard rock musician, perhaps?

It looks fake and weird.

And then

I'm going to say, I'm going to be wrong, but I'm going to say 1996.

Ooh, you are a lot closer than I was.

I assumed this was like late 80s, early 90s.

Okay.

This book was somehow published in 2002.

Wait, really?

Yes.

I guess conservative aesthetics are a little a couple years behind.

Sure, sure, sure.

There's no Helvetica here.

The blurbs on this book are fully unhinged.

Is it like Ted Cruz?

No, no, no.

You're not going to guess.

It's wild.

They're so wild.

They're unguessable.

Oh, no.

I'm sending you a blurb, and then you're going to read it.

Okay.

We're going to talk about it, and then I'm going to tell you who it's from.

What can I say about Ted that he hasn't already said himself?

Ted is a true original.

Whether you love him or hate him, agree or disagree with his philosophies, side with or oppose his politics, you always know where you stand with good old Uncle Ted.

He means what he says and he says what he means.

Hillary Clinton.

Oh, interesting.

Well, it's a twist.

Not Hillary Clinton.

No.

So first of all, just tell me your take on this blurb.

Like, this is a blurb for a cookbook.

I mean, it's just the whole...

thing of like, well, he says it like it is.

And like, well, just because he's wrong and bad, he's being authentic, though.

It's like, right, but I don't, like, the wrong and bad part is what I object to.

I don't think that he's being disingenuous.

Yeah, totally.

These are the things that you say when you can't say anything else about someone who is an asshole, right?

Yeah.

That blurb, by the way, comes to us courtesy of Joe Perry from Aerosmith.

Wait, really?

Yeah.

That's also a bit of a, like, I didn't read the book blurb, but I'm doing this as a personal favor.

That's all of these.

Get ready.

Yeah.

I sent you another one.

I've known Ted for years, and I can't say I always agree with him.

I can't even say I often agree with him.

He's just a huge asshole.

But I respect him for this reason.

In a world where fame makes people fat and satisfied,

Ted continues to fight for his beliefs.

He loves nature, and as this book proves page after page, he feels that living without passion is not really living.

That I agree with him on wholeheartedly.

Barbara Walters.

Mitch album, the dude who wrote Tuesdays with Maury.

No.

There's a cameo from the Tuesdays with Maury guy?

This is also so chicken shit.

To just be like, well, I don't always agree with him.

I can't say I always agree with him.

I can't even say I often agree with him.

Right.

But I respect him for continuing to fight for his beliefs, which I ostensibly find abhorrent.

This is like such fucking fucking like brain disease among like people like us, like overeducated liberals.

It's like, well, I don't agree, but at least he's fighting for his beliefs.

Yeah.

Like his beliefs are bad.

He's fighting for things that make the world worse.

Yeah.

It's weird to be like, oh, I like it when people fight for their beliefs regardless of their beliefs.

No.

I mean, listen, right now today, Pete Evans is fighting for his beliefs, right?

Like there are plenty of people who really believe the stuff that they're talking about that we have talked on this show about, right?

Right.

Oh, God.

Mike, I'm getting so much worse at putting together sentences.

I think I've been infected by the love diet guy.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, now I only know how to say things in confusing ways, question Mark.

You have an attitude that is out of confidence or something.

There's one quote that says, Ted Nugent is beyond argument one of the good guys.

Attributed to Charlton Heston.

Look, as a piece of shit, I respect the fact that Ted Nugent is a a piece of shit as well.

There's a page inside the book where the header is just praise for Ted Nugent.

Oh, nice.

And it includes quotes from George W.

Bush and Tom Ridge.

Why are politicians blurbing a wild game cookbook from a guy who...

From like a total weirdo.

Like a deep weirdo who, again, is just like proudly shouting his racism from the rooftops.

Yeah.

And his biggest hit was at this point a solid 20 years ago.

Right.

Better suited to be a VH1 I Love the 80s commentator than to be like anyone's presidential endorsement or what, like, it's just weird.

It's just weird.

Right.

The introduction has a title.

That title is Celebrate the Flesh.

Oh, oh, God.

Other notable chapter titles include Rock and Roll Hogmando.

Hogmando?

I like my pork pissed off.

These don't even make any sense.

I like my rare, but not that rare.

And a chapter just called, this is two words.

It's going to sound like four words.

It's two words.

First word.

No, god damn it.

The first word is sex fried.

What?

What?

Sex fried?

You've melted down.

We lost Aubrey.

It's so...

It's so ridiculous.

Okay, okay.

I'm pulling it together.

What kind of sex are they having on the ranch?

Uh, sex-fried fish slab.

Sex-fried fish slab.

It's like one of those things they say as like a vocal warm-up before you go on stage.

Sex fried fish slab.

New York.

You need New York.

Yeah.

Red leather, yellow leather.

Sex fried fish slab.

Man, I'm trying to piece this together backwards.

So it's like I have a slab of fish and instead of frying it, I'm sex-frying it.

I don't know.

There's a whole note on language.

that the book opens with.

It's like, you know, two sentences that's like, hey man, this language has been nugentized or something where you're like, okay, I get it.

Content warning.

This book contains total gibberish.

He has some recipes in here.

Mostly it's like little like essays or whatever.

Like he does some writing and then each chapter, there are so many chapters.

Each chapter has like one to three recipes in it.

We're like, this is not a great cookbook.

This seems like one of those books that's just like very blatantly a cash-in.

Absolutely.

Where like he probably wasn't meaningfully involved.

And it's just like, put him on the cover, people will buy it.

No one will actually read it or engage with it in any way.

After all of those chapter titles, my notes just say, I get it.

You're straight.

Like, fucking Jesus.

Message received.

Chapter 16, vaginal intercourse with my wife.

Like, all right, Ed.

All right.

We already got it with sex fried.

So he does have recipes in this cookbook.

There are not a ton of them.

The first one that I want to talk about is a barbecue sauce.

The recipe title is barbecue sauce for Javelina.

And then in parentheses, good for all piggage.

All right.

Maybe he was involved.

This seems like the kind of like sub-literate, like quote-unquote wordplay that he would be doing.

A ghostwriter would have reigned it in at some point, and he is not reining it in at any point.

The ingredients for this barbecue sauce are tomato sauce.

The quantity listed is just lots.

Oh my god.

Tomato sauce, brown sugar, vinegar, garlic, onion bits, pineapple juice, lemon juice, and prickly pear fruit juice.

The instructions for this recipe are to mix the ingredients together, quote, in amounts to your own taste, and then simmer it.

It is very funny of like, sorry, can you stop performing masculinity now?

I'd actually like to get the amounts for the recipe.

Totally.

You're like, weird toxic bullshit is like making the recipe useless.

There is also a recipe that they note is contributed by Chimaine, his wife, called Coca-Cola Stew.

Oh, God.

For Coca-Cola Stew, you are supposed to season and sear off some venison.

You then put that venison in a slow cooker with potatoes, carrots, onion, two cans of Coca-Cola Classic,

and a jar of sweet chutney.

Sweet, like jarred sweet chutney that you can get in the U.S.

is like jam.

Yeah, that's too much sugar, I feel like, for braising.

Right.

It's just like simple syrup, basically, that you're braising this in.

It would be great if you had some vinegar or some lemon juice or you had some red pepper flakes or you had like something.

Before we had those TikTok fetish content recipe videos, quote unquote, we had Ted Nugent's recipe book.

What?

Have you seen the fucking TikTok videos?

I don't know what you're talking about.

I mean, I've seen TikTok, but I don't know what videos you're talking about.

But you've seen those like deranged ones where it's like, I'm going to make this in the sink.

And it's like, you take all this pasta and then you pour like a whole thing of pasta sauce on it and you get in there with your hands

and you mix it up and it's like then you add a bunch of slices of American cheese and then some like peanut butter or like it just gets like aggressively more demented as it goes along.

And it's like these things exist only to be shared on Twitter for everybody to be like, ew, gross.

But then the current theory is that these are actually just like fetish content.

And it's like women getting into food with their hands and getting like really dirty and sort of talking about it.

You know, they're like, oh, just go in and get really slimy in your hands.

And it's like, you know, there is an audience for this, but it's not home chefs.

Once again, you and I are on different parts of the internet.

Learning about different people and different things.

I should say there's also like a middle section that are just like one million pictures of Ted Nugent and his wife and his kids.

There's a picture of her posing with like a bow and arrow.

I find it totally plausible, Aubrey, that you are one of the only people who actually read this book.

This does not seem like an organic grassroots like uprising of people who are like, what can I do with this venison and my six pack of Coke in my pantry?

I will say, I'm flipping through the book right now.

I'm on page 57, and so far all of the recipes have been for venison.

I'm livid about the lack of bears.

That's why we're here.

It's a real bummer.

There was one bear recipe in here at some point.

There's a recipe just called Big Game Meat Cakes.

Oh God, tone it down, Ted.

Jesus Christ.

It's just meatloaf.

Oh.

Salt, pepper, ketchup, which he spells catsup.

Chopped onion, and one pound of ground lean meat.

The insecurity is just just like leaping off of the page.

It's astonishing.

It's like it's okay to eat meatloaf, Ted.

You don't need to be like,

it's my man-fried meat slap.

It's like this is just a normal meal, Ted.

That's all I have for Ted Nugent.

Do we have any wrap-up thoughts?

What have we learned?

I think the interesting thing about this is that...

Pretty much every diet and every diet book has like an extraordinarily conservative logic to it, which is like personal responsibility.

You got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

And I think what was interesting about all of these books was that when asked to fill a book full of wisdom related to that worldview, the first book that we looked at just reprinted the USDA guidelines.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the second one couldn't do it.

It's like a very short book and it's all gibberish and nonsense.

So it's just very interesting to me that like when asked to expound upon these already very conservative views about dieting,

you can't go much more conservative than just like dieting to begin with, right?

Also, the phrase conservative diet is like kind of a pleonasm because the whole thing is like instead of changing a social hierarchy, right?

Where like fat people are poorly treated in society, the way that you respond to that is not by, well, let's treat fat people better.

The way you respond is, well, I don't want to be fat.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's kind of impossible to not write a conservative diet.

Absolutely.

I mean, like, listen, this is the same impulse behind sort of like looking at a person who's fatter than you and going, at least I'm not that fat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we don't really think about our opportunities to like reject the entire fucking premise.

Right.

That's why our advice in the show is get out of these programs.

I'm out of them.

I'm out of them.