False Gods By Sue Ann Gleason

  Igor Spasic CC




False Gods

i
She’s seated at a table. Alone. Sunken eyes, protruding bones, gaze fixed on a tumbler of green juice.

One Lucky Duck is a small market cafe attached to the most renowned raw-food restaurant in New York City: Pure Food and Wine, a health-food haven. My classmates love this place. Raw food treats, freshly pressed juice, and organic skin creams fill our bags as we prepare for three days of lectures at the Lincoln Center.

We try not to think about the young woman at the table beside the display case. She’s seated at that same table each time we visit. And then, one day, she’s gone. We imagine all kinds of things, most of them dark.

ii
At the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, I bask in the amber glow of enlightenment. We study a different nutritional system each month: paradise for a lifelong diet enthusiast. An opportunity to build an altar to perfection. Perfect shape. Perfect size. Perfect diet. Obsession sanctioned by health-food gurus from all over the world.

The raw-food diet even promises perfect skin; I jump right in.

I’m primed for this moment. My mother had a lifetime membership to Weight Watchers, with Diet Workshop as backup reinforcement. She counted calories, points, fat grams, whatever the collective was counting at the time. She even got a doctor to prescribe diet pills for my dad because, according to her, he needed to lose some weight, too.

Eventually, I mirrored my mother’s food habits. I was nine when I decided I was overweight and began a deprivation-binge cycle that nipped at my heels for decades. I remember coming home from school to an empty house. I’d park myself at the kitchen counter and consume mounds of frozen waffles layered with butter, powdered sugar, and shame. And then, for days, I’d eat only cottage cheese and cantaloupe to punish myself for my transgression.

Dieting was an art form. Dieting was religion.

iii
In Grandma’s kitchen, food was love. She filled my childhood with the scent of Sicily. Lemon pie, lemon cake, lemon cookies.  While my friends ate Wonder white bread slathered with peanut butter and oozing grape jelly, I feasted on crusty loaves of homemade Italian bread topped with sautéed spinach and garlic. Grandma’s favorite word was Mangia (eat!).

On Sunday afternoons, extended family members gathered at her table to feast on pasta, tomato sauce made from sun-ripened tomatoes grown in the garden out back, meatballs, spareribs, braciole, all the meat she didn’t eat in the years of The Great Depression. Grandpa ate that meat with relish, leaving only the bones.  

iv
The sun is bright. Snow sweeps across the windowsill in swirls as we take our seats. The heat is on, but I still feel the chill of this dreary December day. My new client, a wisp of a woman, looks even tinier as she sinks into the folds of the overstuffed couch.

“So tell me, what would you like to accomplish in our time together?”

“I’m binging.”

“Are you binging on something specific?”

“Salmon and sweet potatoes. I can’t eat these foods, I’m on the 80-10-10 raw-food diet.”

The 80-10-10 diet. Ah, yes, I know this one: 80% carbohydrates, 10% healthy fat, 10% plant-based protein. I’d met the fruitarian who championed this plan. I’d even considered it. Until I saw the state of his skin. And hair. And the fanatical look in his eyes when he discussed his food plan.

The session lasts a full hour. I mention essential fatty acids, the beta-carotene in sweet potatoes, the merits of salmon. I talk about body wisdom and how we might work together to unravel some of her concerns—the body's desire to binge.

The session ends, but with very little agreement. My client isn’t ready to talk about body wisdom, protein, or cell growth. She believes that following an alkaline, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, raw- food diet will keep her from dying from cancer. Like her mother.
 
v
I try not to think about my best friend and colleague Alison. The day she discovered an app that tracked every calorie she consumed. I watched her shrink. Fellow teachers and, at one point, even the principal, filed into my classroom to ask me if she was dying. I told them no, she was dieting.

​I called her husband to express my concern. He said, “I have to trust she’s got this.” The pounds continued to drop. Her clothing hung like laundry on a walking clothesline. She no longer took lunch in the teacher’s lounge and outside, on the playground at recess, she walked in circles, counting steps as the children played Four Square, Hopscotch, Kickball, Catch.

Eventually, her husband realized she was in trouble, but by then the weight loss had affected her brain. When a body is starving or malnourished, the brain rewires. I tried to feed her creamy avocado soup. She refused. I tried to feed her brownies. By then, even her six-year-old daughter refused my treats. Try as I might, I couldn’t save her. Try as I might, I’m not sure I even saved myself.

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Sue Ann Gleason is a poet, writer, educator, and activist. Author of in the glint of broken glass and Pencil Man, her work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and several anthologies, including Kerning, A Space for Words, and The Wonder of Small Things, Poems of Peace & Renewal. When she’s not worrying over words, you’ll find her cooking up mouth-watering meals or conjuring craft cocktails. Follow her @SueAnnGleason (Instagram & Substack)