Diet Book Deep Dive: “How To Take 20 Pounds Off Your Man”

Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that wants you to be the best you you can be.

It's like a self-help phrase.

In the context of this show, that sounds very nefarious to me.

Your hackles are up.

I'm like,

I don't know.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

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And today,

Michael Hobbs, we are doing a diet book deep dive.

We are.

I learned this like three minutes ago because we were supposed to record something else.

Yeah, I have changed topics for this episode twice.

I am the freshest.

So today, we're actually going to talk about a diet book that our listeners probably haven't heard of.

Okay.

It was not a bestseller.

It didn't have a bunch of celebrity devotees.

The diet itself is not an innovation.

It is a straightforward, low-fat, low-calorie diet, but

it is an absolutely fascinating encapsulation of a bunch of cultural ideas about dieting, about being fat, and about gender and sexuality.

God, is it like the Phyllis Schlafly diet or something?

Where are you taking me?

You're honestly, you're so fucking close.

There is a bunch in this book that I think Phyllis Schlafly would greatly enjoy.

We're in good hands.

The book is called How to Take 20 Pounds Off Your Man: A Life-Saving Guide for the Man You Love.

No, this exists.

This exists.

Its Its

stated intended audience is wives who think their husbands should lose weight.

The sort of central claim of the book is that the author says she facilitated her husband's weight loss of about 35 pounds.

Does he know about this?

Does he know that she wrote a book?

He wrote the afterword.

What?

And his doctor wrote the foreword.

It's not often on this show that I get offended on behalf of straight men.

Like, this is offensive.

I mean, it is.

And what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to send you a picture of the cover of this book and you are going to describe it to our listeners.

Okay.

This has to be 80s, right?

Given the font?

It's 1984.

So, okay.

First of all, it's like a fuck ugly traffic light yellow, just like a bright, offensive yellow.

And then it says, how to take 20 pounds off your man.

And then there's a photo of a couple, and they chose like a suspiciously attractive couple.

Like they look like Barbie and Ken.

The photo on the cover is stock footage, Sears photo, magic.

And then it's her, she's behind him and like putting her hands around his waist, and she's got a tape measure.

And she's measuring his waist.

And I'm trying to see, I'm zooming in to see what is the actual measurement.

It says 19, but that can't be right.

This man does not have a 19-inch waist.

No, I think they're using this measuring tape as a prop.

I don't think they're actually trying to get a measurement of this dude's weight.

He really looks like he should be on LA Law.

Oh, and I just noticed, okay, and then there's a tagline on the photo, like a little caption that says, surprise him with a felt new body, his.

Yes, that's right.

I am also going to send you a little bit of copy from the front flap of the dust jacket.

How does this exist?

Oh Michael.

I'm so offended by this.

Here is a quote from the dust jacket.

Okay, good God.

If his health and actual lifespan are being threatened by his weight, and your Mr.

Wright has done little or nothing to help himself or keep you from premature widowhood or re-emergence on the single circuit, women, it's time for you to take charge.

You don't want to have to take out the garbage yourself when you're 65, do you?

You don't want to start worrying about getting a date for New Year's Eve.

This witty, waist-shrinking book tells you how you can get your lovable teddy bear under control.

Oh, God, so it's also like deeply stigmatizing.

100%.

And what we'll see sort of throughout this book is she, the author whose name is Susie Coulter, and this isn't really an episode about her.

I think I'm much more interested in this book as an encapsulation of ideas about weight and gender.

Right.

I've decided you need to lose weight and I'm going to take charge of your size is a repulsive way to treat people.

And also, to be super real, it is our default way of treating fat people, especially very fat people.

As a fat person, if I go out to eat, it is very common for at the low end for people to like stare at me while I'm eating and at the high end for people to say something to me about what I'm eating.

I have definitely had people take food off of my plate and be like, you don't need that, right?

Like, so like, this is both totally beyond the pale.

And I think for

many fat people, it's also still the way we get treated now.

Yeah.

Right.

I am going to be sleepwalking through this entire episode until we get to the part where he talks about this.

I am so curious.

So basically, I'm going to skip to what he says about it because his afterword is half a page.

What?

Yes, it's tiny.

What?

Here's the meat of it.

He says, my wife's amazing.

She's totally determined.

She set her mind to something and she did it is sort of the vibe.

This is

the quote, this is fully half of the afterword is what I'm about to read you.

When I found I was still able to eat my homemade blend of cold cereal, I began to understand fully that it's not what you eat, but rather how much.

When this revelation came, I felt like Einstein, relatively speaking.

What?

In fact, reading this book has stiffened my resolve.

Stay tuned for Making Mike Marvelous, Part 2, and hang in there.

You can do it.

I did with a little help from my friend.

Thanks, Suze.

Mike, blink twice if you're okay.

Show me today's newspaper, Mike.

So he's just like, thanks, you did it.

It's terrible.

His voice, even her recounting of his voice, is almost entirely absent from this book.

It's because they won't even let men speak anymore.

It's wokeness gone mad.

Political creatures.

PC cultures got overboard.

My God.

So, just a little context.

We're going to do a little context about the author.

We're going to do a little context about the diet.

And then we're going to dig in for most of the episode on sort of like what are the core messages of this book, right?

Yeah, what is her fucking deal?

Jesus Christ.

So the author of this book is Susie Coulter Gershman.

She's published here as Susie Coulter.

She was a career writer and author.

She wrote for People Magazine, for Ladies Home Journal, for Cosmopolitan, for Travel and Leisure.

In addition to her sort of magazine writing, she wrote a ton of books on a ton of topics.

Perhaps her most popular series is a series of travel shopping guides called Born to Shop.

Hell yeah.

In those travel guides, she tells you like where to find the best shopping finds in Hong Kong or Paris.

Okay.

And it's like, here's how to be a smart shopper when you're traveling.

Back when journalism salaries allowed you to go places.

Oh, God.

Imagine.

And do things.

It's very carbon dated to the 80s.

It is also carbon dated to the 80s in that, in addition to this diet book, she wrote two other diet books for which she is credited as a co-author, Never Say Diet and the Never Say Diet cookbook with Richard Simmons.

I like that they're already doing the thing of like, it's not a diet.

Never say diet.

That's not what this is.

It's a lifestyle.

They're just trying to help you lose weight through lifestyle.

She talks throughout the book about how she's a naturally thin person who has had weight gain plans in the past and has struggled to gain weight.

She talks about how people used to call her olive oil growing up, like from Popeye, because she was so skinny

and that that was like a hurtful thing for her.

She says all of that totally uncritically and doesn't do any reflecting on.

Also, I wrote three diet books, a thing I've never had to do.

Oh, yeah.

And specifically have tried to do the fucking opposite of it, but I'm definitely an expert in weight loss.

Yeah, it's like, it's like taking financial advice from somebody who like won the lottery or something.

Yeah.

It's like, oh, you don't actually know how to scrimp and save.

So you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be giving people advice on this.

You know what it is?

It's every one of those like, how I bought my first home before 25 articles where they're like my parents gave me a half a million dollars.

That's your advice.

Be born to a wealthy family.

Thank you.

Great.

Good job.

The diet itself is a very straightforward, low-fat, low-calorie diet for the purposes of losing weight.

That's it.

Oh, yeah.

There is a bunch of stuff in here about logging your weight every week.

There is a bunch of stuff about making like healthy swaps.

So eating like fish instead of red meat or brown rice instead of of a baked potato.

It is also sort of straightforwardly about calorie counting.

She recommends wives cutting their husbands' calories to 1,500 to 2,000 calories a day.

Okay.

Like I say, like this is like a very straightforward low-fat, low-calorie, whatever.

The difference in this book is that it's not written for the dieter.

It's written for the dieter's wife, right?

She advocates throughout the book repeatedly

that

the husband should not know that he is on a diet.

Oh, so she's explicit about it.

She's very explicit about it.

This is a wife project.

This is not a husband and wife project.

This is like you imposing something.

Absolutely.

So I am going to send you a short quote from the back of the dust jacket where she talks about this.

Forget prayer, hypnotism, biofeedback, nagging.

Here at last is the book which shows how, using stealth, subterfuge, trick, and treat, you can painlessly save the man you love from unsightly and unhealthy pounds.

Why is sneaky better?

This weight loss plan works because it requires almost no effort from your man.

In fact, if perfectly executed, he will never suspect he's on a diet until he realizes he's got only one love handle left.

One love handle left is a very strange image.

But, okay, so this is literally like, don't bother talking to him about it.

Just like do it behind his back.

Yes, absolutely.

I, like you, I assumed that she advocates for telling him in the end.

She doesn't.

She advocates for telling him sort of midway through

after you've seen some progress so that when he observes like, oh, my pants are fitting a little looser, she's like, you're welcome.

I did that.

So when he has like one pack out of six, you can be like, don't you like this?

Just one lone ab.

If we're doing one love handle, a pack of one.

This is like how

this is how you would treat a dog.

I mean, yes.

You know, when your dog has to take medication and you like put the little pill into its kibble or whatever, like this, this is what she's proposing.

Yes.

This is what she's proposing.

The audacity not only of doing it, but like writing a book, bragging about it is kind of incredible to me.

Look at this, look at this dope thing I did.

And it's just like awful.

Truly fucking wild.

So she talks about, she's like, look, you don't have to do this my way.

You can tell him.

You can read the book together.

You can do what you want.

But for my husband, in my case, I knew I had to lie to him.

The exact phrase she uses is, I knew that being sneaky was the only way to make this work.

Look, some of you might be in healthy, functioning relationships, but for us, this worked a lot better.

For us, where we're in a constant game of cat and mouse in our marriage, like fucking marriage.

Our marriage has zero trust.

So then she talks about why she did it this way.

She has like a point where she just straight up lays out like, here's why.

So I'm going to send you that quote.

Okay.

She says, here's why.

I definitely thought the ends justified the means.

I clearly remember my mother saying that sometimes it's kinder to tell a white lie than to tell the truth.

I'm very big on kindness.

I wasn't at all sure Mike would cooperate if I laid my cards on the kitchen table.

He'd been violently opposed to other weight loss methods and I had no hope that he might have changed his mind.

I thought we'd both have something to be proud of when we had some results and nothing to motivate us until there was progress.

It's so gnarly.

I love it.

So she's basically like, I brought it up with him.

And he was like, I don't feel comfortable.

And then I did it anyway.

Yeah.

And she's like, look, you might think this sounds really horrifying, but if I didn't do it, I wouldn't get what I want.

I knew he wouldn't say yes because he's said no in the past.

Because he doesn't know.

So I needed to override his lack of consent and his specific rejection of this specific idea.

And I needed to force him to be thinner.

So she does talk about the stages that she went through while her husband was not losing weight.

Oh.

And then she lists out a series of fucking direct interventions that she has attempted with him.

Okay.

So one is she straight up nagged him and then called his parents until he was like, can you get my parents off my back about my weight?

She called his parents?

Yes.

Then, when that didn't work, she called his doctor.

What?

Then, when that didn't work, she took him to an exercise class, quote, but the instructor made fun of him, so we quit.

So like everyone in his life is like, this isn't a big deal.

And she's like decided to make it a big deal.

She's organizing around him.

She is making this inescape.

She is engineering the entire environment around him

to indicate that he is fat and that he needs to lose weight.

She starts initiating fights with him.

She says, that was the end of our sex life.

It's like one of the things that she says when she starts fucking fighting with him.

And I'm like, what are you doing?

She starts blaming herself for his size.

Then she goes into a phase that she calls the Zen phase, where she sort of lets go for a while and she's like, actually, it's his decision.

And you're like, oh, maybe she's landing in a place.

And she's like, no.

The final stage of these sort of six stages is, quote, fury and determination.

Okay.

Quote, Zen was bullshit.

If he couldn't do it, I could do it for him.

I love that she reached a point of maturity of just like, it's his body.

It's his autonomy, and then she just breathed right past it.

Then she was like, just kidding, burn it down.

She's like, I'm in charge here.

Why would I respect his boundaries when I could not do that?

Unbelievable.

So much of the book is about how do you keep him in the dark?

She has this whole section where she talks about like, okay, you're going to be serving him less food.

It's going to be slightly different food, but you don't want him to feel like it's different.

And you want him to feel like it's a real treat, whatever meal he's getting.

So like you should like focus on your food presentation and you should like jazz up the dinner table and like set it really nicely.

I'm going to read this whole quote.

It's a little bit long, but like it's wild.

Quote, if your husband does ask what the hell's going on, you can tell him any number of truths or half-truths and then in parentheses or lies.

You're taking a cooking class and are doing your homework.

You saw the dish in a magazine and wanted to try it.

You got bored with your lifestyle and wanted some cheap thrills.

Your fantasy is to run a restaurant and you're trying the art of presentation out on him.

I went for the I'd like to run a restaurant routine combined with our life is so boring.

He fell for it and now our life isn't quite so boring because he's slimmer and divine looking.

Okay, that's all of that is gross, but I'm stuck on this thing that her actual plan, because we know that the reason why diets don't work is because people can can maintain it for a little while and they go back to their previous habits and then they go back to their previous weight because that's how bodies work.

What she's proposing here is that for the rest of his life,

you decide to like make fancy meals for him and like, you know, you're like chopping chives to sprinkle over top of you know the chili with the sour cream to like make it look nice forever.

Yeah.

Her thing that she tells him she has a fantasy to run a restaurant.

You have been married for how many years?

Yeah, I don't.

And now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you're like, you know what?

I've always wanted to be a chef.

That feels like a bonker's lie to reach for.

There's no way he didn't understand what was going on.

There's simply no fucking way.

If it's your husband, he's going to notice that, like, we used to have dessert at dinner every night.

Now we don't have dessert.

He's going to notice something like that.

Like, you can't, you can't cover that with chives.

This is like a masterclass in lying, but it's not.

Sorry, I should say, it's not a masterclass.

It's not good enough to be a masterclass.

It's not good.

It's totally parent trap shit.

She talks about a whole section that she calls the great kitchen lockout.

Oh, no.

That whole section is about how to restrict your husband's access to food at home.

She talks about, hey, you might have kids and you might have to have some kid foods in the house.

If you do,

Hide those in a separate part of the house.

Tell your kids where they are are and make it clear to them that those foods can't leave that area of the house so your dad doesn't find out wait what tell your kids to lie to your husband yep there are like different strategies for how you control what your husband eats she talks about a woman who quote took weight off her husband by actually locking him out of the kitchen

She put padlocks on each of the cupboards.

While I find this expensive, troublesome, and indecorative, it did work work for her.

I prefer the modified lockout, which operates with words rather than hardware.

I told my husband we were beset by some kind of grain fly.

What?

So she's like, we have an infestation.

We have to get rid of everything in the cupboards.

We have to replace it all.

Again,

you can only pull that trigger once.

You can't just maintain that forever.

Oh, grain fly infestation again.

Also, I mean, the other thing about the green fly infestation thing and the like completely wipe out all your cupboards, get rid of all of your food and replace all of it.

That is so expensive.

What are you talking about?

And also, like, you're presumably going to restaurants together where like he presumably orders what he wants to eat.

Oh, and I'm assuming this man has a job and he probably eats whatever he wants for lunch.

The only way to do this is to like prevent him from consuming food in all of these other venues too, which again, just does not, it seems like if you're feeding him less at home, he's going to be like more hungry and he's going to like have, you know, an extra slice of pizza when he's out with his friends or whatever.

Michael, you're saying all these things like she hasn't thought about them and given you contingency plans for what to do when he goes to the office.

That's so dark.

That's so dark.

It's, I am, this is discomfort laughing

because it is so

ridiculous and ghoulish and fucking horrible.

I'm so excited for the details of this plan.

She says that

if

you have told him she has this whole thing where she's like notify him a few days ahead of time that he's going to be going out to eat so that he can quote hoard a few extra calories okay he's like essentially like undereating or eating fewer calories in the lead up to this so that he can sort of She talks about calorie budgeting

in the book quite a bit.

So she's like, he just needs to budget some more calories, which means eating less.

She also suggests getting a copy of the menu from the restaurant.

Remember that this is 1984, so this is pre-internet.

Get a copy of the menu from the restaurant and then mark it up and rank the top low calorie choices so that he has a list of what he can order.

Utterly deranged.

This is, I thought it was going to be like order for him, which is super patronizing, but it's way less work than this.

This is like a part-time job at this point.

Hang on, let me find this.

Let me find this fucking quote.

Oh, no.

Earlier, you mentioned like, what happens when he goes to the office?

Here's her advice.

She says, if you need assistance observing during office hours, enlist a little help.

Does he have a secretary or office chum?

A woman will be a better help to you than a man, and for heaven's sake, don't make it look like you're asking her to spy.

I mean, you are asking her to to spy.

Tell me everything my husband eats in a day, but don't worry, you're definitely not spying on him.

And this is certainly not crossing any boundaries.

And then what are you supposed to do with this information too, right?

Right.

So like, say your spy says, well, he had three pieces of pizza for lunch or he had a hamburger and fries or whatever.

What do you do when he gets home?

Even if you want to keep it secret, do you just like not give him dinner?

Right.

It's, it's just going to be carrot sticks again tonight, sweetie.

It's just awful.

And I I mean, like, I think, here's the other thing.

Again, enlisting a coworker to monitor your partner is a thing that abusive partners do.

Yes.

We have talked before on the show about how oftentimes when I hear things that morally offend me, my like involuntary response is laughter oftentimes because like my emotions don't know anywhere else to go.

The problem I'm having throughout this episode is that like this is, this is straightforwardly abusive behavior.

Yeah.

But there's something about the combination of this utterly reprehensible behavior, the total lack of self-awareness in describing that behavior, and bragging about the behavior in like a how-to book that is genuinely challenging my brain and my body to know how to react.

Because everything, I mean, everything we've talked about so far is like completely indefensible, but it's fascinating to me that it's packaged as like, here's a self-help tip, life hack, call his office and spy on him.

Like, there's something

so not funnily funny about it.

Right?

So, like, all

of these solutions, you're going to manipulate and control what he eats.

You're going to enlist his doctor, his parents, and his coworkers.

You're going to disregard what he specifically tells you about this specific thing because you know best, because you're the thin one.

This a type of abuse that happens in intimate partner relationships.

It happens in parent-child relationships.

It happens all over the place that people think that it is like a loving act to restrict the food and try and manipulate the body of someone that they say that they love, right?

I can't tell you the number of fat people who have written into me and told me about their parents putting padlocks on the refrigerator or kitchen cabinets when they were growing up.

Or a partner getting them a pair of jeans that's two sizes smaller to like motivate them.

I absolutely had a friend in high school who thought that the supportive thing for her to do would be to keep a log of what I was eating.

No.

Yes, absolutely.

She was like, I'm helping.

Right.

It was also like the late 90s.

I'm in high school.

There is zero counter messaging.

And also

that friend of mine, her mom had modeled some of that stuff.

Yeah.

This is a real hurt people, hurt people kind of moment.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like it feels very cliche to say, but is also like many of the people who are enacting this kind of abuse have also been abused themselves, which is true of lots of abusive dynamics.

It's part of the former fat people dynamic that we talk about, right?

Do you remember what you said to your friend at the time?

Like after she told you she had been tracking your habits?

At the time, I really felt like, oh, she thought she was helping and it wasn't.

I think if someone did that to me today,

I feel like I would hit the fucking one.

If somebody did that to me, I would be able to hear you yelling, fuck off from Berlin.

Yes.

From an ocean away.

Yes.

You would be able to hear my fucking unhinged wail.

But I mean,

I think one of the misconceptions about anti-fat bias is that the worst forms of it come from strangers.

Yes.

You know, we've all heard these stories of fat people having someone yell at them from a car or say something horrible to them in like a restaurant or a grocery store.

But when you look at the actual survey data, what actual fat people say is that the most hurtful forms of discrimination come from loved ones.

It comes from family members.

It comes from romantic partners.

It comes from friends.

Yeah.

And I think one of the lessons from this form of abuse is that like when you're close with somebody, you have to be more careful rather than less careful.

Yeah.

This is a book that is enlisting women in policing the bodies of their partners.

And sort of throughout the book, you get a real sense that she's like, also, you should probably do this for everybody.

Right.

She talks about like your duty as a mother is to not let your kids grow up to have quote unquote weight problems.

It is truly like, I think part of what makes this book so interesting to me, right?

And we'll get into this later is like, there is this belief that thin women sort of pay the ultimate price for anti-fatness.

That's how we treat it culturally.

That like the worst thing you could do is call a thin woman fat, not treat a fat person like shit, right?

You can see this in like the amount of media that we get when Lizzo deals with anti-fatness

versus when like someone calls Britney Spears fat.

Right.

We collectively center thin women's experiences.

So thin women center themselves, but they do that in a way that is totally uncritical of this shit, which is the ways in which they are actively policing other people's bodies, actively judging other people and trying to manipulate them.

These are absolutely abusive things to do.

These are not things that you do when you respect someone's boundaries.

These are not things that you do when you fucking love someone and want to treat them as an autonomous person.

This is like girl boss fucking diet abuse shit.

Did he write a book called like what to do when your wife is trying to kill you?

It reminds me of, you know how there's Munchausen syndrome where you sort of fake having illnesses and then there's Munchausen syndrome by proxy where you fake the illnesses of someone else like a child or a friend or whatever so that you can spend more time with doctors.

Yes.

This feels like eating disorder by proxy.

Totally.

You don't have one yourself, but you're like imposing them on other people and you're appointing yourself the fat police yes absolutely for people in your life and especially for people in your life whose food you control it's just wild in this book i found i would say six core messages the first core message of this book which is just false is being fat will kill you

from the intro She is very clear that like being fat will kill you.

She says, quote, sure, my husband lived for 35 years before he met me and possibly could have gone another 35 without my help, but frankly, I was worried about him.

I thought he was a walking case for general hospital, a living dare for Heart Attack City.

I figured he'd kick the bucket if he didn't lose some weight and keep it off.

You've got the same worry about your man, right?

Probably with good reason.

It's time to take charge, woman.

Weird ending, but okay.

It's so weird.

Um, she's talking about a 240-pound man, she's talking about about that guy just like dropping dead before 65.

Those are the terms that she keeps using.

Does she use any statistics at all, or it's just like the assumption that obviously he's going to die?

So, one of the statistics that she uses, this is, oh, we're going to get into some Michael Hobbes catnip.

Are you ready?

Zombie stuff.

I want to hear zombie numbers.

Quote: I read an unnamed survey in the Health and Fitness Handbook that announced these shocking figures.

Only 50% of the overweight women surveyed realized they were overweight.

Only 25% of the overweight men realized they were overweight.

Only 10% of those surveyed were planning to reduce.

I don't know if this means that women have better eyesight than men, but it is a dramatic commentary on why your husband is overweight.

Oh, but that's some bullshit BMI stuff.

That there's like...

Technically, lots of people are overweight according to the BMI, but it's like you wouldn't look at them and be like, there goes a fat person.

I mean, this is just like the BMI being bullshit.

I think you might be going too deep on this.

The opening of this sentence is, I read an unnamed survey in the Health and Fitness Handbook that announced these shocking figures.

It's garbage.

It's just like, man, half of fat women don't know they're fat and most of them aren't even trying to die.

Yeah, just a, it's a BuzzFeed quiz.

Right.

And there's no citation.

There's no footnote.

She doesn't say who wrote the health and fitness handbook.

I tried looking around for a little bit and then I was just like, this is from 1984 and I don't know what she's talking about.

It's not, you're not going to find out.

And like, why am I fact-checking this thing that is so clearly like absolute bullshit and she doesn't want you to fact check?

But then I think that what she's doing here with this death obsession is her husband's weight is giving her ammunition for this like level of judgment about his looks.

Yeah.

I think she just wants a thinner husband.

And like this is what this is the rhetoric that she's using to make herself not feel like a huge piece of shit for like lying to her husband about this.

Yes, I think that I can totally see that.

And also

she does not mention at any point in the book, oh, we got to come to Jesus with his doctor.

Right.

Here's what his risks were for heart disease or he had a family history of X and such thing.

She does recommend, by the way, gathering your husband's medical history surreptitiously.

Great.

I don't even know how you would do that, but okay.

I don't either.

Even if she does believe that he's going to die as a result of being fat, this is a wild way to deal with that.

And it's probably not fucking true.

She has offered us no evidence.

Right.

Everything in this book is just like, I noticed my husband behaves in this way.

And I think that means this.

So I'm going to change it by doing this.

She talks about like one or two conversations with him in the entire book.

But also, yeah, because even if his health markers were like objectively bad, that would obviously be a conversation that you would have with your husband about his own health.

Yeah.

What lifestyle changes are you interested in making?

What are you able to do?

How can I support you in that?

People's health is pretty personal, and people get to decide this sort of stuff for themselves.

So just like deciding that your husband is like a terminal case and you're going to fix it even after he's like, no, thank you, is a move in a marriage.

There are a few times in the book where she tries to bridge this idea and sort of acknowledge the idea that actually like your husband is his own person.

So I just sent you a quote about her approach to that.

Okay, she says, your job is not to run your husband's life.

If he's interested in being in prime physical condition, that's his business.

Your business is feeding him low-calorie, healthful foods and keeping his weight at a safe level.

I know you can mind your own business and help your man live longer.

None of what she's talking about is minding your your own business.

It's just pure contradiction, like sentence to sentence.

It's like, that's his business, but your business is meddling in his business.

His business.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So that actually gets us to the second sort of core message of this book is that fat people's narratives of their own bodies are lies.

She writes extensively in this book about like, oh, your husband's going to give you all these excuses.

She has a whole section where she talks about like typical male excuses.

He's going to tell you he's deeply uncomfortable with the act of manipulation that you're doing.

Typical husband behavior.

Oh, typical male excuses.

So like the typical male excuses, quote unquote, are things like, I'm not overweight, you're skinny.

Or this is protection against the cold.

Or that old favorite, I have big bones, a thing that I've truly never heard a fat person ever say.

Yeah.

She does like a little bit of, you and I have talked about this, that I'm like, you know, if you want to make a compelling case, part of the way that you do that is by acknowledging what other people might say, and then you sort of rebut it, right?

So here is her attempt to do that.

Actually, I would like to say that my husband's body is none of your business, but that's not really the case.

Because if your husband's body is anything like my husband's, then you too have a problem.

My husband is built like his parents, which is to be expected.

Genetically speaking, he could never look like Abraham Lincoln or Ichabod Crane.

But still, he could look like a thinner version of his parents and be a lot healthier.

Oh, so he comes from like big folk.

And he said, like, I'm just like supposed to be big.

And she's like, no,

you're not.

So she also has, I just sent you.

So I just.

I just sent you, there's a chart.

So throughout this book, she has a number of worksheets where you're filling in.

She genuinely has one for like for a couple of weeks before you start, write down everything your husband eats.

Oh my god,

you're like monitoring your husband.

We have not even scratched the surface of how much you're monitoring your fucking husband.

So, it's so rough.

In the chart that I just sent you, she's got a weigh-in, like a weight charting thing over the course of the diet, over the course of 12 weeks, is what she lays out.

It's called chart his progress.

Chart his progress.

And it says day one, guesstimate his current weight.

And then I guess the end of this, she's calling the tell-all day,

you confess he weighs in.

I'm imagining how to tell my boyfriend that I've like surreptitiously been feeding him less food to change the way that he looks without his consent.

How I break that to him and also get him to step on a scale in the same conversation.

The whole book is just a roadmap to disregard whatever objections your partner has and proceed regardless, right?

There's no point at which she says, actually, if he says this or if he objects really strenuously, then you should just drop it.

Like there's no point at which she even acknowledges maybe this isn't the right plan for you.

Even like perfunctory.

Nope, nope, nope.

Do it no matter what.

Incredible.

There's one point at which, well, actually,

there is one moment where she acknowledges that, and it is in our next section.

Okay.

The next sort of core message of this book is that if someone looks too fat, then they are too fat.

At least she admits it.

It's like, this is about physical appearance.

Yeah.

It's not about how people look.

She says repeatedly throughout the book that if someone is quote unquote cosmetically overweight, then they are quote unquote medically overweight.

What even are these terms?

Fully making shit up.

So here is one of her suggestions when she's like, how do you figure out if you're too fat or if your husband is too fat?

Oh no.

I just sent you the quote.

She says, I've also heard of the mirror test, which is simple enough.

You stand in front of a full-length mirror naked and take a cold, hard look at yourself.

If you are cosmetically overweight, you need to lose weight.

This test does not work for anorexics, please note, because no matter what they weigh, they still think they are fat.

But I must assume you would not have bought this book if your man was anorexic.

Besides, most anorexics are women.

Okay.

Right.

Okay.

In a fucking suggestion to get naked and stare at yourself in the mirror and list your flaws and decide if you're too fat.

She's like, oh, also, you probably shouldn't do this if you're anorexic, but I assume you're not anorexic because you bought this for your husband and you wouldn't buy this if he was anorexic.

Come on.

People with eating disorders famously never buy diet books.

Honestly.

Now that you and all the people with eating disorders are gone, we can have a nice romp through this diet book.

That's her logic.

The message here is if you, a thin person, think that someone looks too fat for your taste, then not only do they need to lose weight, but you need to manipulate their behavior to make them thin.

Right.

It's a license.

I would say a core underlying message of all of this is that a good partner manipulates their spouse.

Nice.

Like a core tenet of what she's arguing is manipulation is critical to this and you're doing it because you love him, right?

So she advocates throughout the book for monitoring your partner's food without telling them.

Yeah.

I paid attention and I noticed my husband always had a snack at 10 a.m.

with his coffee and then one before bed.

So when I was building out his diet plan, I made sure that he had snacks at those times.

times, but I just made sure they were other things.

She's also like, I always made sure he had dessert.

And then you look at the list of desserts and it's like a Weight Watcher's frozen dessert thing or a half a pound of cherries.

Half a pound.

I will say also the other recipe that really stuck with me.

I'm just going to tell you about the recipe now because it's really something.

Most of the recipes honestly look fine.

They look like sort of standard issue, low-fat diet shit.

There is one in particular where I was like, absolutely not.

And that recipe is a recipe for Cornish game hens.

You roast the Cornish game hens whole.

When they come out of the oven, you take the skin off because it's the 80s, right?

Oh, my God.

And then you top them with a sauce that is made of two ingredients.

Those two ingredients are canned cherries and grape juice.

Wait, what?

No.

You warm up some canned cherries.

Aubrey.

You drain the canned cherries and rinse them off so they don't have the goo on them.

Don't go.

That's my fucking typo.

Aubrey.

That can't be real.

You put them in a saucepan.

That can't be real.

Some creaso gross.

It's like a melted popsicle on top of a fucking pigeon.

Anyway, get out your cam cherries and grape juice.

I was like, no.

Because the other thing is, this is all 80s diet foods.

So there is 100% a recipe in here for like enchiladas that you make in the microwave.

And she's like, you'll be amazed at how fast it cooks in the microwave.

Oh, no, sweetie.

You're not going to run a restaurant like that.

One of the core messages also is that it is women's job to make sure that everyone is thin, including their own husbands, right?

There is a section where she talks about the header says, man-fat as a feminist issue.

I'm dying to know what she says here.

She talks about how feminism was supposed to liberate us, but now most of us have jobs and then we also have to come home and do all this work.

And she says life is hard but it's harder still without a husband oh no that's like her angle that's her angle

somebody missed the entire movement

she in this book is talking to ostensibly straight ladies who are married to ostensibly straight men uh and is talking about sort of how women are responsible for men's weight because women do the cooking and serve up the food she talks about how at one point she says she gives him larger portions of food because that's what you do with men.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

And she says, quote, I cater to his food needs because he's the king of the castle.

Even independent women make sure the cabinets are stocked with their husbands' favorite foods.

Why does this feel like this was written in like 1937?

She has a job.

She's a magazine reporter.

It's weird that she's just

accepting the fact that it's her job to treat him like, again, a dog that she's like supposed to have all of his favorite treats in the house.

I would say overall, this book is as much a treatise on heterosexuality as it is on weight loss.

Like genuinely.

You love it.

Oh my God, I fucking love it.

You get to use the word heteronormative in your notes like three or four times.

Oh my God.

The number of times that I typed out compulsory heterosexuality, Michael.

You're like queering the diet book.

I sure am.

This is my undergraduate thesis.

Here we go.

This whole book is about this author's husband, but she does talk quite a bit about how it's a mother's job to make sure that their kids don't grow up to have quote-unquote a weight problem.

She talks about how when she met her husband, she liked what they both describe as his quote-unquote pudgy body.

She says, quote, I found his weight rather appealing.

And just as some women like to marry alcoholics and then, quote unquote, cure them,

I was certain that under my tender tutelage, Mike's weight would either remain stable or be reduced.

She thought she was getting into like a fixer-upper.

Yes.

She talks about being attracted to him, and then she's also like, and I was going to fix him.

I was going to make him look different than the person I'm attracting.

I was like, this is so weird.

Every part of this is so weird.

To stage the closest thing to a defense of her, as I am comfortable doing,

one of the like extra layers of toxicity on top of this is the fact that like women are blamed for the size of other people.

Yes.

In a way that is like extremely gross, right?

That like mothers will be blamed for the size of their, especially daughters.

Yes.

But like she's just internalized this and been like, and that's why you have to make them skinny, right?

Yes.

Yes.

As opposed to all the other ways that she could have reacted to that.

I love my husband and I married him when he looked like this and I like how he looks.

Right.

And if anyone gives you shit, be like, fuck you.

I love my husband.

I think he's cute cute the way that he is.

Yes.

I love my curvy husband.

Write an Instagram post, Susie.

Put it on Instagram.

Yeah, I mean, like, there is no world in which she's just like, hey, maybe your husband's fine.

Yeah.

No, she's articulated this whole thing as this incredibly high stakes venture where it's like, if you don't succeed in manipulating him, he will die and it will be your fault.

And then your life will get harder because you're going to have to take out the trash.

Right.

She frames basically

like almost all of the husband's eating that happens off the diet as binging.

Well, it probably is.

He's probably hungry all the time, this poor guy.

Right.

So like, yes, binging is a very natural response to restriction.

Like he is having a normal, natural response to like,

you are restricting how much food he has.

He is accustomed to consuming a certain amount of food.

He's not having that fucking amount of food.

Of course he's going to eat more.

Yeah.

He might be hungry and eating to the point of satiety and she might be horrified at him eating enough food to feel full.

We just don't know.

But she has decided that this is self-destructive, that it's a death wish, that this is gonna like lead to his untimely demise.

It is awful, and I hate it.

It seems like it would be like living in a prison living with somebody like this, because one of the most belittling things you can do to a person is like criticizing their eating as they're eating.

Yeah.

Are you sure you want to order that?

Or like, like, um, are you going to eat all of that?

Really?

Those comments stay with people for a really long time.

They're incredibly hurtful.

Yeah.

She's setting up a regime where it's just like this poor guy is just under 24-hour surveillance.

You mentioned earlier, like, you know, especially if this person has an eating disorder, this is like extra ghoulish.

And what I would say is, even if they don't have an eating disorder, this is a pretty fucking good way to give somebody one.

Yeah.

When you comment on other people's foods, what you are doing is installing disordered eating practices and installing a bad body image for that person, right?

What you are doing is you are doing the work of creating destructive patterns for them.

You are deciding for them that their eating is actually not disordered enough, that they're not thinking enough about what other people are thinking about what they're eating.

They're probably focused too much on, like, am I hungry?

And what sounds good to eat?

And other bullshit measures like that, right?

Like, it is a thing that because we have these really strong cultural scripts around like allowing for, and in some cases, encouraging people to comment on other people's food choices, you don't really think about like you are very actively creating issues for that person.

And I would say, even if you don't have an eating disorder, even if you're not at risk of developing one, even if those comments don't create all of that shit for you, if you are a fat person, they follow you everywhere, regardless.

Yeah, like the number of fat people who I have talked to who are like, oh, I've started eating at drive-throughs, not because I want fast food or I like fast food, but because I can eat it in my car where no one can watch me and stare and say anything.

Yeah.

And I have totally fucking done this, that you go to a drive-thru again, not because you're like, ooh, that sounds good today, but because you're like, I can't fucking deal with somebody giving me shit about eating a meal right now.

I just need to be able to eat the meal.

Right.

Right.

When people pipe up about like, we're eating this thing.

I don't think that they have any fucking sense of the fullness of that picture and about how deeply dehumanizing it is to treat everyone with one kind of body type as your personal project, as your personal fixer-upper, as you said earlier, right?

That's a horrible way to treat people.

But what if you wrote a book about it afterwards?

Wouldn't that, then does it make it okay?

What if you bragged about it to the Hulk?

Oh, what if you're a bookman?

The central message, I would say, the core fucking message at the end of this book is: thin women, your judgments of people who are fatter than you are correct.

And your core failing is that you haven't acted on them enough, right?

Your bias is correct.

Your judgments are correct.

If you're grossed out by somebody, that's like an important instinct to listen to.

If you think somebody's too fat, and like it's your job to make them thin.

Right.

So there is a complete displacement of any actually fat people in this book.

There's a complete displacement of men, which feels weird.

Like, in a book about men, she's like, don't listen to what he has to say.

You just listen to you.

As a way to be in the world, that is a horrifying way to be.

I like that she's treating men the way that male writers treat women.

What are their thoughts?

I'll just use some generalizations.

It's fine.