The Infuriation Diet


You mean only eating fruit is actually really bad for you?

Recently Ashton Kutcher “nearly died” (i.e. he got ill enough that he popped into a local hospital to get checked out) after going Method on his Steve Jobs portrayal. Jobs died of pancreatic cancer: he was a fruitarian. Kutcher went fruit-only for the role, and what brought him to hospital? His fruity diet. It gave him a dodgy pancreas. Yeah.

Can we just declare war on stupid diets?

Chatting with two European girlfriends of mine the other day revealed some fairly standard experiences for non-insane people.

Both of them have done gap years in America prior to which they never had a weight problem in their life. They agreed that no matter how they worked out, how frugally they ate, they gained weight while there. One of them, a Serbian girl, was horrified when by the end of the year “I gained, like ten kilos – seriously, I think the air in America makes you fat”. I was surprised – she’s super slim and I can’t imagine her having had any weight problem. She said she went from 50 to 60 kilos over the year, no matter that she was just having three meals and snacks, and actually bothering to go to the gym. (She’s 5ft 4, I know you’re wondering). I trotted out the usual chick reassurance line #1,432 “Maybe you added muscle?” and then we both laughed, because she’s the definition of an ectomorph.

We chatted about obesity in Europe. The conclusions are that Germans and Brits tend to be fat. The Irish are not as bad but you do see your share of really fat people there. However, there are still decent levels of normally sized people. There are regional obesity trends in impoverished areas of Mediterranean countries etc. (my Italian friend tells me the South of Italy has more fat people than the North, and now Italian children have an obesity problem). But obesity is still uncommon in continental Europe. I can’t recall the last time I actually spotted anyone morbidly obese that wasn’t either really old or seriously ill looking. Even in the gym here, it’s just regular overweight people you see. A dude might have a gut on him, but it isn’t in danger of swallowing up his head or arms/legs.

Most of my female friends and I have the same approach and experience: you have a weight you look and feel good at. You fluctuate a little. If it creeps up to a certain red alert point, you freak out, clean up the diet, crank up the exercise and lo and behold, no fruitarian madness necessary, you get back to your normal weight/size. This may feel like it takes forever, but it only takes a few weeks max because you never went beyond your red alert size. You might have had a brief dalliance with college puppy fat, but it was enough to scar you for life/inculcate some sensible habits later on. Weight is a range, not a fixed number. It’s something everyone has to manage, though people these days seem to have the mistaken belief that their bodies should be able to magically burn off the excess they throw at it and if it can’t, assume they must be ‘big boned’. Why don’t we know that people have always needed to manage their weight – especially since we stopped going down coal mines and putting wet clothes through a mangle for our day’s work, around a thousand years ago when computers were invented as our primary means of economic earning.

Then I read that this stupid woman posted on XOJane about how the gluten free diet was to blame for her psychological problems. You can read the article or just my summary: “If you have a mental problem that leads you to abuse food, your problem isn’t food”. Look at the state of her, does she look glowing with health? No, she looks like she just got done drawing on a wall with her own poop. She has “I cry all day for fun” written all over her.

I cry both while I make poop art, AND after. It helps me shed water weight.

Gluten free isn’t necessarily a fad if you have a diagnosed intolerance, but people who claim without medical intervention, or any possible science to be ‘intolerant’ are probably liars. There, I said it. Oh you kept a ‘food diary’? All on your own? Oh please, talk to me after you get done with medical school, Doogie Howser. Perhaps you had bloating and diarrhoea before going gluten free because you stuffed your face or your whole diet was shit and cutting out gluten led you to think about what you were shovelling. Maybe cutting out gluten in the form of pizza, pasta, etc. just stabilised your blood sugar and stopped the cravings. Maybe it’s not the fifty bucks a week you blow on assorted goji berries/coconut water/kelp tablets or diet sugar-fat-grain-free muesli bars, you ridiculous, precious person. Eat a bloody steak, knock back a whiskey and shut up.

These idiots I know with their “I have to eat eight small meals a day or I get low blood sugar” who have no diagnosed medical condition (other than being chubby), you’d swear they were going to collapse in the street if they didn’t get their ‘thirty grams of protein’ right at two o-clock on a Tuesday. “Yeah I eat 30 grams of broiled turkey steak with reduced fat soy sauce it’s awesome” and you know they’re going straight home to mainline a family size box of doughnuts later. For God’s sake. Humans evolved to walk long distances (seriously, that’s all we evolved for, plus to breed, obviously) and science has it that we ate maybe once or twice a day at most. Our bodies evolved to do without food sometimes.

I will say that I have a medically diagnosed wheat allergy: I get a lace-like red rash and digestive pain a day after I eat it and it takes about three days to pass. My doctor did a blood test and told me it isn’t a gluten intolerance, I’m not coeliac, it’s an Ig-mediated reaction to wheat itself, and it’s worse when I eat wholewheat. When I tried cutting out grains (Paleo style) I felt better. But you know why? Because I was eating unprocessed, natural foods and the balance was tipped in the favour of vegetables and meat. Not much to fuck you up there. But I do feel ridiculous calling it Paleo. I hate the crappy pseudoscience that goes with it, when the basic good sense mechanics of it (e.g. eat fresh, untainted food) doesn’t need reaching scientific debate to explain that not eating shitty food leaves you not feeling shitty.

Goddamn fruitarianism, it’s like the pussification of the entire First World. Bananas and fucking pineapple all day will send your blood sugar haywire, get a clue!! (And apparently, it’s seriously damaging to your pancreas). We should ship all fruitarians off to sub-Saharan Africa for a real taste of dietary hardship.

Fruit is for monkeys. Some monkeys sleep with their sisters. Say no to incest, and an exclusively fruit-based diet.

*P.S. I know I come across as a smug skinny person, I just don’t care. If it makes you feel better, I will add your hate spam to a list I keep, for a future post on awesome hate spam comments.

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