Dieting is not for me. Meal planning is not for me. Keeping food in my fridge that doesn’t come with a spigot and an alcohol percentage content label is not for me. After 20 years of trying everything under the sun to force my body to eat something other than the slurpy syrupy greasy fried crap it desires, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s a losing battle. I’m Napoleon and my body is my freaking Waterloo.
But every so often a link on Facebook or woman on a daytime talk show tricks me into thinking that after all these years of living off of frozen burritos and Cheetos I’m finally going to change all my ways.
That’s how I ended up signing myself and my fiancé up to try the Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen diet for five days. The notoriously fit and fabulous couple eat a very strict diet maintained by their dietician and personal chef, one that they swear has made them the über-couple the rest of us losers long to be.
When I told Chris, a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan, that he’d be eating like Super Bowl champion quarterback Tom Brady for a full five days, his first response was to blow it off like no big deal.
“I’m guessing since it’s Tom Brady’s diet I’ll allowed to cheat anyway,” he said.
You’d think Tom and Gisele, two people with such exciting, enviable lives, would come up with a better diet than one with all the personality of a pamphlet on the benefits of aluminum siding. You know how it feels to drive down a road with your grandfather and have him point out all the places that used to be apple farms? That’s this diet.
The diet excludes just about everything, including dairy, mushrooms, gluten, caffeine, tomatoes, peppers (even hot peppers), potatoes, MSG, salt (SALT!), olive oil, white sugar, flavor, and fun.
OK, I made up the last two, but I’m definitely not that far off the mark. This diet is essentially the culinary equivalent of watching corn grow in Iowa.
Everything about this diet is awful. You could get better nutritional advice from the Hamburglar. If you’ve ever longed for a diet that closely resembles a lengthy timeshare presentation, this is for you. It’s a diet that’s slightly less exciting than having your Great Aunt Mabel slowly read to you from the 1974 Sears furniture catalogue.
I had to break the news to Chris that pretty much every food he enjoys would be off limits for five days, including beer. He looked like a heroine in a Jane Austen novel who just found out Mr. Darcy left her for a cocktail waitress in Reno.
The hardest thing is coming up with good ideas for what to make out of the foods that are left on the list. I looked at this list dumbfounded, like a caveman trying to build a superconductor.
If they don’t give out MacArthur genius grants for figuring out ways to make kale interesting, they really should start. Staring at all the restrictions, I felt like the scientists in The Martian trying to solve complicated mathematical formulas to figure out how the hell to keep us from starving to death.
For breakfast on the first day, we had banana smoothies, one of the only foods with actual flavor allowed. They were filled with the aftertaste of longing and regret, and had the texture of the sand you find in your bathing suit after a long day at the beach. These smoothies were like what you would feed a baby if you hate babies.
One of the guiding rules of this meal plan was that pretty much everything had to be put in a bowl. Grain bowls. Kale bowls. Steamed fish bowls. Apparently when you’re beautiful and wealthy, plates are perpetually offensive to you. Chris suggested I put a box of Oreos in the bowl and call it day, but I persevered.
Chris was on his own for lunch, and throughout the day I received a series of increasingly angst-filled messages, bemoaning his lack of caffeine and cursing Tom Brady in a way I would not repeat for delicate ears.
On the second day of the Gisele and Tom Hate Yourself For Being Attractive and Successful Diet, I decided to make soup. The soup had the flavor profile of a dreary Emily Dickinson poem. I called it Sadness Soup. At any moment, I expect the soup will storm off out of the shelf in the refrigerator and sulk off to its room to listen to some Dashboard Confessional, while complaining on its Tumblr about how life is meaningless and devoid of all passion.
On the third day, we made brown rice with salmon and kale. It was the best thing I ate all day, mostly because I pretended it was a bacon double cheeseburger. This meal is like being forced to watch a four-hour PowerPoint presentation on the important differences between various shades of beige. I would kill my own mother for a bag of Doritos right now. Chris stopped talking to me altogether and just stared at his bowl of tomato-less food with a resolved expression of defeat and self-loathing.
After the fourth day, I found myself periodically slipping in and out of a dream state, due to a severe lack of caffeine and wine. I was with Gisele, frollicking on a beautiful beach at sunset. You can do it, Rebecca, I heard her calling out to me. You can give up flavor and all those evil white sugars! As I reached out to accept a high five from her, the picturesque scene fell away and I found myself sitting in front of another bowl of sad wilted kale greens, staring up at me, mocking my very existence.
Chris promised me he was sticking to the Tom and Gisele’s Wipe Flavor From the Face of the Earth Diet when I wasn’t around, but in my heart I suspected he’d fallen in with a bad crowd from work who frequent Jack-in-the-Box as a show of silent rebellion against me and my oppressive whole-grain dictatorship.
On the last morning I consumed nothing but banana smoothies and nihilism. For lunch, I made another batch of leftover Sadness Soup. What did it taste like? What does it matter? Taste was gone from this place. I don’t know what else I consumed. Bitterness and envy of others who eat normal food, I suspect.
I was so delirious from a lack of caffeine that I transcended the need for the consumption of flavor and entered into an alternate dimension where all matter in the universe is contained in a bowl. I am pretty sure I am the Super Bowl and Tom Brady lives inside me.
A few days ago, I heard a rumor Chris was last seen in the parking lot of his work, stripped down to his underwear, running in circles with a bushel of tomatoes over his head. I pray that he finds his way back to a Taco Bell soon.
Rebecca Rose is somewhere plotting her revenge against Gisele Bündchen. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.