Hubby’s Diet Begins to Weigh a Tad Heavy

I opened the refrigerator door last week and 14 containers of yogurt fell on my foot.

“They’re only 100 calories each,” said my husband, Morty. Which is true. What seems to escape his attention is that if you eat eight of them in one day, that’s 800 calories. But there’s no reasoning with him: He’s on a diet (which is as torturous to men as bikini waxings are to women).

Some men begin dieting if anyone they know under the age of 97 has a heart attack--including people they read about in obituaries. On the other hand, the women I know diet if it’s raining in Honduras.

Morty’s litmus test is getting into a tuxedo--a scene combining Steve Martin wrestling with his jacket in “Father of the Bride” and Spencer Tracy struggling with the whale in “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Morty regularly announces that he is on a diet. Lest anyone forget, he says, “Oh (sigh), you’re eating a banana. I can’t have that . . . “ as his voice trails off wistfully. Mahatma Gandhi didn’t have as wistful a voice after a seven-day political fast.

He will not go to a diet group. Why? I mean, after all, did real men eat quiche? Did Tarzan stand on line to get weighed behind a screen every week? He gets diet books, photostats the foods he needs and refers to the list occasionally, as in 17 times a day. He reads the labels on foods in the casual way that nuclear physicists read the instructions for assembling the neutron bomb.

Every day he comes home from work, opens the door and says: “I was good today. For lunch, I only had turkey--dry--and a diet soda. For snack I had an apple. For . . . “-- as though someone were actually interested.

(By contrast, my friends and I don’t really talk about our diets. When out to dinner, we merely say we’re allergic to anything on the menu containing more than 17 calories.)

Morty will not, he says, eat in restaurants because they won’t prepare the food according to his specifications. He’s right: How many restaurants serve chicken cordon bleu without the butter, the sauce or the skin--and let the patron weigh it on a scale at the table?

Morty does not cheat. He can’t; he has no time. He’s too busy weighing himself. The only problem is that it’s difficult to read his weight without his glasses, which, he says, weigh at least seven pounds. Of course, he’ll never know for sure; if he were to put his glasses on the scale, he couldn’t read the weight.

And the diet works!

“How do I look?” he says after a week in which our mirrors were suing for time-and-a-half. “I came down two notches in my belt.” And I offer the encouragement only a veteran of observing 72 diets in 25 years can offer: “In one week? You must have changed belts!”

(But usually I am supportive. When he says, “See that guy? I don’t look like him, do I?” I do not say, “No, sweetheart--because he’s 20 pounds lighter than you are.”)

He tears himself away from the mirror long enough to say, “You should go on a diet. It’s amazing that when you eat three meals a day, you’re not hungry,” staring at the opened refrigerator as though it contained the secret of life.

In a restaurant, he says: “How can you eat that? Do you know how many calories are in that sherbet?” (110, I’m told--plus about six for the strawberry garnish--by the person who, the week before, demolished an entire quart of Haagen-Dazs chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream.)

“I won’t eat that. This time I’m going to lose weight,” he says. “Of course, if I lose 30 pounds, I’ll need a new wardrobe.” Translation: The diet is already, pardon the expression, dead meat.

I know this by the sound of cabinet doors slammed in the middle of the night by a person licking the labels on rice cakes for nourishment. The hunger is doing strange things to his mind, like thinking that anything labeled “lite” contains zero calories--even if it’s a brownie. Or suspecting sabotage. “Are you sure you didn’t make this with fat?” asks a man still eating yogurt for lunch--but now with a sandwich.

After eating a dinner of salad, fish, four vegetables, two fruits and diet Jell-O, he calls to me from the depths of the refrigerator fruit and vegetable bins and says, “There’s nothing I can eat in this house.”

This means only one thing: The next day, I’ll open the refrigerator and 14 cartons will fall out. Fourteen cartons of Haagen-Dazs cookies-and-cream, that is. And we can all get back to normal.