Free I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting by Rebecca Harrington

elegant affairs. Play the rhumba next!

I Tried Sophia Loren’s Diet
    A ccording to legend, when asked what her beauty secrets were, famed Italian actress Sophia Loren was characteristically pithy: “Everything you see,” she famously said, “I owe to spaghetti.” In our current antigluten moment, such a sentiment might strike the modern ears as odd. “Pasta?” a modern woman might say while typing a code into her iPad. “Pasta can only lead to scurvy and an early grave. What of quinoa?”
    Of course, in the modern era, Sophia denies actually saying that awesome thing about spaghetti. But it is true that Sophia has heavily extolled the magical healing powers of pasta. She wrote two pasta cookbooks. She wrote a book on beauty and mentioned pasta a lot. When people asked her, “Why did a twenty-eight-year-old Matt Damon hit on you at the Oscars?,” she just smiled, but you knew she was thinking something about pasta. So the message was clear.
    Sure, recently pasta has been demonized as fattening, sad, upsetting, and mean – but what if it’s not? What if pasta is the greatest weight-loss food known to mankind? It would be impossible to know that without trying it, and this, dear readers, is what I will do for you. Because the public needs to know!
     
Preparation
    There is actually quite a bit of information on what Sophia Loren ate. She produced two cookbooks herself and even wrote a self-help book called
Women & Beauty
, which is about beauty, nutrition, and fitness and is full of backhanded compliments about other actresses, like, “Take for instance Elizabeth Taylor or Barbra Streisand. The way they dress could not be described as conventionally elegant, yet they both have a unique sense of how they want to look.”
    I buy the self-help book, a book called
Sophia: Living and Loving: Her Own Story
, and the pasta cookbook entitled
Sophia Loren’s Recipes & Memories
.
    “Almost from the beginning, interviewers have asked me what diet I follow to stay in shape,” said Loren in her cookbook. “It amuses me to see their expressions when I answer ‘pasta.’ It is only a slight exaggeration. I adore pasta and eat it almost every day.” According to
Women & Beauty
, Loren really did eat a serving of pasta for lunch and dinner, followed occasionally with a lean meat or fish. I plan to do the same.
    To be honest, I am kind of excited about this diet because it doesn’t sound like a diet. Pasta for all meals? What could be better! Pasta is my favorite food, which I realize is not particularly original.
    The problem is that recently, through no evidence at all, except for the Phantom of the Opera rash I had running down my face after I briefly cut out gluten on the Gwyneth diet, I have convinced myself I have a gluten allergy. Can I still eat pasta with my fake gluten allergy going on? It seems hard.
     
Day 1
    Today is the day that I start the diet. I’m unusually excited, not just because I love pasta but also because I’ve always been a big fan of Sophia Loren. In high school I rented a movie that happened to be very influential on me called
What a Woman!
It starred Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and was dubbed in English. The whole movie is Sophia Loren getting mad at Marcello Mastroianni and then doing absolutely psycho things to show Marcello Mastroianni that she is mad. Then after that he yells, “What a woman!” and forgives her.
    I start the diet off by making Loren’s famous “Salsa Sophia,” which I will spoon over whole wheat pasta per Loren’s instructions (Loren says that whole wheat pasta is the healthiest pasta). It does seem to be a recipe that Sophia Loren actually made up (once you start reading her cookbook you realize a suspicious number of recipes actually originate with her cook). “Salsa Sophia” is similar to a pesto – a combination of anchovies, pine nuts, and a lot of parsley ground with a mortar and pestle. It’s pretty delicious, and I have always especially liked