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I Tried Cameron Diaz’s Diet

Courtesy of The Body Book/Harper Collins

By her own admission, Cameron Diaz was one of those people who ate and ate and ate and never got fat. “I used to eat fried food from morning to night when I was in my twenties,” she told USA Today. Then for some reason she began to feel that it wasn’t “fair” to her body to keep eating with abandon, so she started eating much healthier foods that were stylish and tasteless, like quinoa and kale. For my part, I don’t understand it. If I was skinny no matter what, I would eat a Burger King Rodeo Burger every day. But we are all different and special people, etc., etc.

In honor of her newly changed eating habits, Diaz wrote something called The Body Book, a kind of holistic nutrition manual that also apparently details Cam’s diet and exercise routines. And unfortunately, where a new diet book emerges, I also am there, a kind of shadowy personage looking to capitalize on it! Avanti, dear readers!

Related: Can You Diet Your Way to a Celebrity Body?

Preparation

Preparation for this diet is pretty easy. Aside from actually buying the tome, I also decide to check out Cameron’s press tour for The Body Book. I watch a particularly nervous appearance on The Dr. Oz Show. Cam says something nice about women being the most powerful force in the world and Dr. Oz sort of cackles derisively and then Cam spends most of the time on the show drinking water because apparently she drinks an entire glass when she wakes up every morning. It is very nerve-racking.

When I finally get the book in the mail, I realize it’s rather less of a diet book, per se, and more of an Our Bodies, Ourselves experiment on how to be healthy. It has a long treatise on the skeleton and an even longer treatise on something Cameron calls the “lady body” that really is about getting your period. (How about we discuss something? No one should ever use the words “lady body” or “lady parts” or “lady problems” or “lady.” There is enough horrible folksiness in America today without this particular branch of toothless feminist appropriation. It makes us sound so hokey. Never say “lady” again! It’s “vagina”; Jesus Christ.) As a result, there is not much on her specific diet plan—it’s more about the basic tenets of combining protein with carbohydrates and eating salmon for dinner and nuts as a snack. This is actually kind of nice—and certainly more normal for young impressionable “ladies” (No! Never!) to read about than a lot of these diet plans—but it leaves me in a bit of a spot. I have to delve into Cameron’s nutrition another way. Her interviews! Unfortunately, one of the things I have to learn about Cameron is that her favorite meal is savory oatmeal. My lord, really?

Related: Diary of a Juice Cleanse

Day 1

Today, I am trying to eat like Cameron before she became the healthy little Goop-let she is right now. I am going to revel in the old days, the salad days! The days of Justin Timberlake. I start the day off with a hearty breakfast—granola and a pancake—with my friend. This is not very Cameron, as she rarely ate breakfast in her younger years (a topic discussed in The Body Book at length), but whatever, I’m hungry.

After breakfast, I tuck in to watch the classic Cameron Diaz movie The Counselor. Have you seen The Counselor? I have never laughed harder at a movie before. It’s a true ball of laughs. Is the movie about a drug deal? Who can say? At one point, Michael Fassbender utters the sentence “You have the most luscious lady body [not the term actually used] in all of Christendom,” but he is not even the only person to use the word “Christendom” in the movie. Everyone uses it! Cameron Diaz plays a drug- dealing mastermind who owns a lot of cheetahs and they prowl around her pool.

After that, and now completely starving because I skipped lunch to watch The Counselor (I do not regret it), I decide to eat the most pre–health food–Cameron Diaz meal ever, the thing she ate every single day for two years after school. I go to a Mexican restaurant and order a bean burrito with extra cheese. I also get nachos. They are both extraordinarily delicious things, and I have no idea why she stopped eating like this.

Day 2

Now, unfortunately, I am going to have to start eating like the actual healthy Cameron Diaz. I suppose I had to eventually. I start the day with a huge glass of water. Apparently the first thing Cameron does when she wakes up is drink a huge glass of water just like she did on The Dr. Oz Show! This is because in the night you are “dehydrated simply from breathing.” When Cameron drinks this water she goes “from being a wilted plant to one that has been rejuvenated by the rain.” I go from a tired person to a person who is tired and whose stomach slightly hurts because it is filled with water. On to breakfast! One of Cameron’s favorite breakfasts is “savory oatmeal,” which is apparently oatmeal cooked “al dente, with caramelized leeks, green vegetables and ponzu sauce.” Cameron describes it as “so good.” I make the oatmeal and chop up a leek I bought and try to caramelize it (I burn it). I also realize my local grocery store doesn’t sell ponzu sauce, so I make a version of it myself from a recipe I found online.

Finally, I combine the separate aspects together. You know what? It’s weirdly delicious! The ponzu sauce is odd-tasting—it has a sweet and very citrusy flavor mixed with a faint soy aftertaste—but it does go well with the leeks.

Next, I go to the gym, because apparently Cameron is a workout fiend. Remember when she was dating A-Rod and she got so buff and then she fed him popcorn at the Super Bowl? They worked out together all the time. 

I do a workout from her trainer that I found online and printed out beforehand. It’s incredibly hard! You have to toss a medicine ball, do several lunges, and even deadlift something—a big, heavy bar in the style of a nineteenth-century bodybuilder. I don’t have those kinds of muscles! I’m sore the rest of the day.

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Day 3

Another day, another savory oatmeal, this time in “cake” form. It’s another favorite breakfast of Cam’s. I have to take a portion of yesterday’s oatmeal and “sear it on high heat with a little olive oil” and then top it with egg whites. I thought this was going to be particularly bland, but it isn’t that bad. It just seems like something a nineteenth-century bodybuilder would eat.

For lunch, I continue on the boring-food train with a recipe Cameron concocted of brown rice, lentils, quinoa, and kale mixed in a bowl. This may sound easy, but I screw it up terribly. I invite a friend to my apartment for lunch because audiences are really better for feats of spectacular healthfulness. After we talk for a while, I dump the rice and lentils into a pan and proudly leave the room to take a phone call. When I come back, the rice smells sort of awful, like it’s burning. “Do you think the rice is burning?” my friend asks. “No,” I say, and go over to check on the rice. It is burnt so badly I have to open a window, throw the rice in the trash, and take out the trash. Eventually, however, I remake the dish, and the end result is a bland bowl of rice with lentils. I do put Cholula Hot Sauce in it because Cameron is a big fan of Cholula Hot Sauce. My friend seems rather unimpressed by that.

Later, however, I am very productive at the gym. I dead-lift far more weight than I did the day previous, and by that I mean I actually lift weights this time as opposed to just the bar.

For dinner for my final night of the Cameron diet, I decide to get Cuban food. It’s Cameron’s “ideal comfort food.” I have shrimp tacos. They are unbelievably delicious, and again the magnitude of what Cameron gave up appears before me. How could she end all her years of eating delicious stuff for all this kale? Merely for muscle?

Still, you have to admire her; Cameron is trying (gamely) to be actually healthy and not propagate some odd gospel of weight loss. In fact, after the Cameron Diaz diet was over, I had actually gained weight, but I felt stronger and my skin was better. I guess life is all about small victories.

This is an excerpt from I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING by Rebecca Harrington. Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Harrington. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.