Learning Day: Eat Great, Lose Weight!

Diet books from the ’90s are a special kind of insane. They’re not quite as bad as the diet books of the 1950s that told us the best thing to eat was chicken broth and amphetamines. Instead, they try to present a diet which is fun, simple… not really a diet at all! Profoundly ’90s tome Suzanne Sommers’ EAT GREAT, LOSE WEIGHT begins with a chapter called “Diets Don’t Work.” You have wasted twenty dollars on this book, chump! Oh, no, wait, chapter two is called “Stop Dieting, Start Somersizing.” What is Somersizing? Because that sounds…a lot like a fucking diet, Suzanne.

I do agree with Suzanne that Somersizing is not a diet. It’s more like a pyramid scheme for your tummy or a conspiracy theory about your butt. I don’t think Suzanne thinks she is on a diet, but that’s because her experience with dieting is one of the wildest things I’ve ever heard:

I know those nine hotdogs are probably spread throughout the day, but I imagine a world where Suzanne Sommers shows up to her business lunch with a Tupperware container full of nine hotdogs and slowly eats them throughout the meeting while making direct eye contact with a studio executive. That’s how She’s The Sheriff got greenlit.

Suzanne thinks she’s enjoying this decadent diet when in fact, she’s simply not being force-fed nine hotdogs. Anything is better than a gelatinous intestinal cleanser and nine hotdogs. I’m happy Suzanne found a way to occasionally eat pasta; I really am. However, she then decided she must be a diet genius who should share her wisdom with the women of the world. None of Suzanne’s ideas about dieting have been run by a scientist, a doctor, or anyone qualified to do anything other than pretend to be a small-town sheriff who (get this plot twist) is also a woman. Sorry, I’m sure she’s in other things but I’ve only seen She’s The Sheriff.

A licensed dietician wrote the forward for EAT GREAT, LOSE WEIGHT, and the most positive praise she had for the program was, “It for sure won’t kill you!” I know that’s the first thing I would look for in a new diet program, but I think we should aim a little higher than that. Somersizing contains seven basic but extremely difficult-to-follow principles:

I’m sure you have a lot of questions, most of which will not be answered, but I can tell you what Funky Food is. Funky Foods include sugar, white flour, potatoes, alcohol, caffeine… mostly stuff that’s very normal to avoid when dieting. And I don’t know what carrots and beets did to Suzanne, but they’ve been declared funky as well. Dietkind had been searching for a catch-all category of foods you shouldn’t eat, but it took the star of She’s the Sheriff to vaguely define it and give it a name.

A lot of this diet is built around Suzanne’s absolute terror of farting. I don’t blame her; there was a time when if Suzanne Sommers had farted during a yoga class, it would have made the front page of the tabloids right underneath HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS ROCK INTO SUMMER or BAT BOY LEARNS TO SURF. She’s trying to prevent herself from having gas with the religious superstition of a baseball fan who won’t change their lucky underwear until the world series.

I don’t know how Suzanne came up with the alchemy of fruit turning to indigestible acid if it touches chicken, but she certainly didn’t consult with anyone else before publishing it in a book. This is the wild nutritional guess work of a woman who sometimes eats nine hot dogs. So Somersizing is mostly just a regular diet combined with eating foods in a special combination guaranteed to prevent the devil gas from exiting your sin hole. It’s what cost her the role in She’s The Sheriff Houston: Fart Jurisdiction.

Again, no source sighted. This came to Suzanne in a dream about digestion, and she published it. I once read a 500-page conspiracy theory about how aliens have taken over the Catholic church, and it was way less detailed than this conspiracy about foods touching in your tummy. It’s eating beef and pasta at the same time that’s making you fat, everyone. So put twelve steaks in a blender and drink them! If you stored them at least one meter (per moon cycle) away from the macaroni, it’s fine! Add a single noodle, and your small intestine will be shredded by the force of the explosion.

I know Suzanne promised this is definitely not a diet, but it’s a diet, and there are some other “bad combo foods” you need to avoid at rule level one. There are two levels of rules, but level two is just ignoring level one sometimes when you feel like it. It’s simple. These bad combo foods contain “both protein and/or fat and carbohydrates.” You’ll notice tofu on this list of bad combo foods, but if you’re a strict vegetarian or vegan, Suzanne will make an exception for you to eat tofu, and I guess so will your stomach? Maybe it’s not simple.

It almost seems like Suzanne imagines fat as a living thing that makes crafty little plans you have to defeat with puzzles. She’s constantly talking about her weight controlling her like she’s a fat-fighting samurai doing daily battle with her worst enemy, spaghetti near meat. Then she’ll turn around and say this diet “allows you to relax and enjoy meals and good conversation without guilt or deprivation.” However, if someone approaches you with an avocado, knock that shit out of their hands like a grenade and run!

She tries so hard to make this diet seem easy breezy. It’s not even a diet, you guys! You can eat whatever you want except for those few funky foods like white sugar, brown sugar, raw sugar, corn syrup, sucrose, fructose, molasses, honey, maple syrup, beets, carrots, white or semolina flour, pasta or couscous made from white or semolina flour, white rice, corn and popcorn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, pumpkin, winter squashes including butternut and acorn, bananas, nuts, olives, liver, avocados, coconuts, low-fat or whole milk, tofu, soy milk, coffee, caffeinated teas, caffeinated soda, cocoa, beer, hard alcohol, and wine. That’s the complete list of “funky foods” that are sprinkled throughout the book like a fine seasoning; wait, I’m being told seasoning is too funky.

There are photographs spread throughout the book that Suzanne says are “an honest representation of how I really live” and “give you a peek into a part of my life that I rarely share.” This is one of those honest representations of how she really lives:

I love how natural this looks. It’s like I’ve just broken into Suzanne Sommer’s home and found her taking her daily bath, with her full makeup and hair done, surrounded by hundreds of dollars of roses, while drinking a delicious glass of fruit soup (and only fruit soup). Never has a woman been less on a diet, yet by Suzanne’s account, everyone who tried this diet is absolutely shocked they’re able to lose weight while simply not eating most things.

She then goes on to absolutely not do that. It’s wild to me that someone would invent a diet and then say, “I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist,” so it’s hard to explain why it works. It works because you’re not eating anything fun. You’re not even eating beets, girl. The last two-thirds of EAT GREAT, LOSE WEIGHT are recipes for things like celery root puree and sugarless cheesecake.

So whole milk is a funky food, but heavy cream is not? Also, butter is not funky, but butternut squash is. Look, I don’t make the rules; the rules were made by a woman who once publicly claimed that she regrew her breast like a leopard gecko after cancer treatment. She also said that an extract made from European mistletoe worked better for her than chemotherapy, and the American Cancer Society had to release a statement that basically said, “Please calm down, Suzanne.”

So celebrities can really say anything, any combination of words, and publishing companies will pay money to deliver it to the public for consumption, as long as they consume it twenty minutes after eating any fruit, and not with a beverage because that dilutes your stomach acid. Somersizing was a hit; people read these ideas about fruit turning into acid and carbs needing a more basic environment for digestion even though we only have one stomach, and they thought makes sense. Who could know more about nutrition than an actress who famously plays dumb women in a way that makes everyone go, “Yeah, that seems right.”

And she kept doing this! Follow-up books included Somersize Desserts, Somersize Chocolate, Somersize Appetizers, Somersize Cocktails, The Sexy Forever Recipe Bible: A Cookbook, and many, many, so many more. This woman has to be one of the most prolific authors of whatever insane thought she’s currently having.

Her author bio describes Suzanne as a “symbol of fitness and health.” She’s basically a bald eagle for the diet book industry. A woman so full of ideas only a third of them could possibly be true. If you can just follow her basic rules that definitely weren’t concocted by The Riddler as a way to torment you, it might be possible to lose upwards of ten to twenty pounds of pure digestive juices, I think?

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