My (Brief) Life As Chowzilla

My mother was horrified. Horr-i-fied. She’d just watched me chew through a Carnegie Deli-size sandwich like it was a canapé and then dig into a pile of supersized potato pancakes.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’ve eating like you’ve never seen food before. Look how much weight you’ve gained!”
Now, my mother measures calories with the precision of a diamond cutter, and tracks weight gains and losses the way day traders track the mercurial ups and downs of the stock market. Only in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way -- down is good; up is bad; very very bad.

See, weight has always been an issue -- the issue -- in my family. Not that I was ever heavy. But my mom was . . . well, let’s say she wasn’t a thin child. Some moms fear their kids will end up on milk cartons. Mine worried I’d be so fat I’d never get a date. I was 12 when I went on my first diet to lose 5 pounds. The Just In Case Diet. Of course, to truly get how utterly ridiculous that was, you have to understand that except for the time when I was 16 when I became addicted to Cadbury-style chocolate bars -- I ate two a day for a whole summer -- for the vast majority of my adult life, I have rarely ever weighed more than 100 pounds. Now you’d hardly call that a candidate for Corti-Slim.

My secret? Being vegetarian. And a pretty strict one at that. For years, I not only eschewed all meat, fish and fowl, but eggs and dairy too. Going out to dinner was an exercise in what I couldn’t/wouldn’t eat.

And then I got pregnant.

For my husband Stewart, a diehard carnivore who still talks wistfully about the $25 cheeseburger stuffed with foie gras that he devoured on one of our trips to New York, that was like Christmas, his birthday and our wedding night/honeymoon all rolled into one. He gleefully soaked up tales about friends’ vegetarian wives who’d turned into insatiable meat-eaters once they got knocked up. He immediately made reservations at his favorite steak joint. Just in case I had a sudden urge for Kobe beef.

Initially, I’d meant to stay the vegetarian course. After all, I’d been eating vegetarian for nearly 10 years. And old habits die hard. But the baby clearly had other gastronomic plans. And apparently they involved a smorgasboard. Lots of pregnant women complain that they miss their sushi and brie, they want their coffee and martinis. Not I. Sure I was off those things too, but a whole new world of gustatory delights beckoned. Suddenly it wasn’t what couldn’t I eat, but what wouldn’t I eat?

Turns out, not a whole helluva lot. First there were the buttermilk pancakes that I absolutely had to have at 2 AM. Days later at a diner it was a tuna sandwich, which got woofed down in three bites and was promptly followed by another. I polished off Buca di Beppo’s “small” spaghetti marinara, which normally can feed several hungry frat boys, as a single serving. I dove into eggplant parmagiana, bagels with cream cheese or whitefish salad, French toast, shrimp cocktail, turkey clubs and cheesy omelets. Even junk food like Big Macs and Egg McMuffins, which disgusted me even before Morgan Spurlock, became must-have menu items. I rediscoverd the joys of full-fat mayonnaise. And thousand island dressing. But when I cut across four lanes of traffic to pull into Tony Roma’s, ordered a full rack of ribs, then picked every last bone clean and sucked out the marrow, I knew I was definitely off the wagon. When they asked me what I wanted for dessert, only decorum kept me from ordering a whole other slab.

I’ve never been so food obsessed. I was eating like a had a Delta force division in my belly -- not a baby, barely 2 centimeters long. Halfway through my blueberry pancakes, I’d be thinking ahead to what I’d want for lunch and dinner. It seemed our unborn child had pumped my appetite full of steroids. But I was getting a little self-conscious about my piggy appetite even before my mother pulled me aside to warn me about the 80 pounds she gained when pregnant. “Don’t let it happen to you,” she cautioned as I stuffed my face with reheated Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Yeah, I knew the more I put on, the harder it would be to take off later. And that excessive weight gain could bring on all kinds of pregnancy complications, like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, a very dangerous condition, involving high blood pressure and excess protein in the urine, that could endanger me and my baby. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

An old college pal Rich, who works as a producer at Comedy Central, gently helped me off the hook. “The first trimester,” he explained with the authority of someone who watched his own wife morph into Chowzilla when she was expecting, “is so critical to the baby’s development you need to consume about as many calories as climbers require to get to Mount Everest’s base camp one.” That did make me feel like scarfing down Reubens slathered in Russian dressing ultimately served some higher purpose beyond giving me some extra cushion in the seat.

Strangely, though, once I hit my second trimester, those weird-ass cravings vanished like freeloaders when the check comes. I lost my taste for BBQ ribs. And that double quarter-pounder with cheese once again went from seeming incredibly appetizing to incredibly disgusting. It was like I suddenly got sober after a meat-eating bender.

But for one brief shining moment I ate whatever I wanted.

And I loved every bite.

(A version of this essay was originally published in Las Vegas Life)