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

always ultimately judged on your tomato sauce. I decide to make Sophia’s marinara tonight. Sophia’s is pretty darn good, if a little less flavorful than what I am used to. It’s very simple – just fresh tomatoes, herbs, and a little sugar. I myself am partial to gravylike sauces because I’m a philistine from Rhode Island.
     
Day 3
    After a hearty (but small) breakfast of spaghetti carbonara, I decide to make a three-course Italian feast for dinner made entirely from the Sophia cookbook. I am going to make
pasta
all’amatriciana
and veal saltimbocca. Unfortunately, the grocery store is out of veal, but as Sophia says, “Neapolitans live by instinct,” so I decide on the fly to change my dish to chicken saltimbocca. Also, Anthony Quinn once aggressively kissed Sophia while she was eating a lamb chop, so I feel that she would appreciate the lack of red meat in the meal.
    Luckily, the dinner is fantastic. The
pasta
all’amatriciana
(which has bacon and pepper) is especially great. At the beginning of the meal, I decide to have the small helping of pasta the diet allows. But then the baby-fist-size portion just looks so sad and I remember when I went to a wine-tasting class in Italy and the instructor said, “There are no rules for wine!” and that was the whole class. “Oh screw it,” I say, and help myself to a more American-size portion. I am off the diet. It’s over!
    So what did I learn? I learned that sometimes, the best things are terrible when they come in small packages. Better to live like a health nut and then the goodies of life aren’t always right in front of your face. Sophia, for your moderation, I salute you! What a woman!

I Tried Pippa Middleton’s Diet
    T he public is very fickle in a stupid way, and Pippa Middleton is an excellent example of this. One minute you (Pippa Middleton) are wearing a beautiful dress at a wedding and everyone loves you and thinks you have a nice bum. Then, the next minute, you are in an extraordinarily small car with a group of handsome Frenchmen and one of them is holding a toy gun and suddenly you are the object of censure. What is a woman to do in such circumstances but write a reviled book about celebrating called
Celebrate
and then later pen an exercise column in the
Telegraph
? The public drove her to do it.
    I, for one, have always been a fan of Pippa’s lifestyle journalism and of the can-do spirit that allowed her to take her bum and turn it into a brand. I very much defended her when she was in that car with all those Frenchmen. They were all so handsome, and she had just gone to a historical ball with them.
    Thus, it was with a particular pride that I decided to take up the diet and exercise regimens that fueled Pippa’s rise to the top ranks of lifestyle journalism. If the
Daily Mail
is to be believed and the Middletons really are relentless social graspers and achieved their current position through hard work and patience, then I want them to teach me their dietetic secrets. Because I know nothing about any of those virtues, and I would like to marry a king.
     
Preparation
    My diet will trace the life cycle of a Pippa Middleton, as that is truly the only way to understand how she has reacted to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I will start my diet with the diet that Pippa followed right before her breakthrough appearance at the royal wedding: the Dukan Diet, a bestselling French program (the French –
always
the cause of one’s rise and one’s downfall!). I go ahead and buy the eponymous book at the bookstore. It looks both cheerful and scary at the same time. But I am not done! To complete my Pippa transformation, I buy her four-hundred-page book,
Celebrate
. This I will use to throw one of my famous dinner parties. I also discover all of Pippa’s coverage of health fads for the
Telegraph
–
a partner in arms! I will attempt every single one of these exercise fads, even though Pippa is definitely a better athlete than I am.
     
Day