Leslie Landis' The Art of Overeating

A Sumo knows how to overeat.  It makes him big and strong.  Happy New Year!

And coming in 2010:

“The Opposite Diet”

from Leslie Landis and The Art of Overeating

The holidays are here, and with them, family, friends, and food.  There couldn’t be a better time to elaborate on a point made in The Art Of Overeating, “Food Is Love.”  That concept is really what inspired me to write the book.

I’ve always believed that food and love are intertwined.  Food is one of the most popular ways in which we express how much we care about someone.  Our very first taste, after all, is mother’s milk.

Then, growing up, we are encouraged to have second helpings of “love” in the form of more pot roast, an extra helping of creamed spinach, another dollop of potatoes au gratin.  Women are told, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

My husband Martin, to whom The Art Of Overeating is dedicated, is a world-class overeater.  He was an only child raised in a food-loving family.  Every Sunday night, his mother asked him to write down his “wish-list” of menus for the coming week.  She made it all for him.

Trained by the best, he became a champion.  I thought his overeating exploits were so amazing, that I began to write them down.  Compiled together, the book was born.

Since The Art Of Overeating is more about universal truths than any particular person or occasion, the stories about Martin aren’t spelled out…so I thought I’d share a few with you now:

• Once, we went on a cruise with my parents.  Every night, Martin ordered and ate all five of the available entrees.  Finally, my dad—who worried about how Martin’s overeating would affect his health—asked him to please just have one dish.  Martin agreed.  Unbeknownst to us, he spoke to the waiter before dinner that evening.  When we sat down to eat, the waiter brought Martin all five entrees—on one very large dish.

• Martin once asked me to help him lose weight by telling him when I thought he was eating too much.  The next time we went out to eat, he ordered—as usual—two dinners.  I pointed this out to him, but he argued that it was okay because he wasn’t going to eat all the vegetables.

• Martin looks in the refrigerator every 5 minutes.  I asked him why he does that since there is no more food in there than 5 minutes before.  He said he just likes to look!

• The supermarket is Martin’s favorite store.  He loves to go grocery shopping.  He piles his cart high with food—no paper towels or laundry detergent for him.  When he is finished, he always tells me that he has enough food to last for the whole week.  By the next day, he has eaten everything.

• I am forced to put my name on certain foods or they won’t be there when I want to eat them.  Living with Martin is like living with an office staff.

• I constantly give Martin articles about the right way to eat and how doing so will increase his life span.  I’m always reading food labels to him.  Sometimes I throw out the unhealthy food he bought and tell him it went bad.  Nothing I do deters him.  One time, I put scary words—death, insanity, sugar-shock—on candy bars he’d just gotten.  I found a pile of candy wrappers, with the words still stuck on them, all around his TV chair.

Like many people, Martin yo-yos between overeating and dieting.  Right now, he is in his diet phase because he doesn’t want to be the poster boy for my book!  We’ll see how long that lasts.

Well, have to run right now—there’s some holiday cookies I need to go write my name on!

Until next time,

Happy holiday dining,

Leslie Landis

It has been fun getting notes from readers and friends about The Art Of Overeating since it was published last month.  Tipping the scale on overeating is such a universal indulgence—I had a feeling that most people would see a bit of themselves somewhere in the humor and have a good laugh.  I’m happy that seems to be the case.

Just the other day, an old friend wrote, “I have been very suspicious of you—have you been peeping at me through the peep-hole?  Because you drew a perfect image of ME! It’s making me very conscious of even looking at food, not to mention that I’ll never be able to binge again! You destroyed my life.”

I know she’s kidding, but she really “got” the book and that was great.  She also wrote:  “Leslie, I guess people that don’t know you will be shocked to realize that, in spite of having that voracious appetite, you are able to keep that spaghetti figure. May I suggest that as the theme for your next book: How to look like a noodle when you eat like an elephant?”

Maybe not a whole book, but definitely a future blog post.  What really made me laugh about it, though, is that when I was a gawky teenager, I read that Sophia Loren attributed her amazing body to eating spaghetti.  So, for years, I ate tons of spaghetti—but all that happened was that my figured looked like a spaghetti noodle.

Buon appetito until next time,

Leslie Landis