A Pox on Moderation

The worst cardio-fitness program in this century was that of Egypt's King Farouk. The King weighed around 300 lbs.; he looked like an immense, saturnine party balloon. Staples of the royal diet: a few tablespoons of caviar, lobster thermidor, slabs of roast lamb, a cubic meter or so of trifle, a pound of chocolate, a magnum of champagne. Workout: two or three dancers from the chorus.

An officers' coup deposed Farouk in 1952, but exile did not disrupt his opulent gluttonies. One morning in Capri, as Farouk consumed a breakfast that included 10 eggs, he told a group of newsmen, "You will smile at this, but any man who has considerably less than he has been accustomed to feels he is a poor man." A monstrous appetite proclaims a needy heart. Farouk died at 45, when his heart surrendered after a midnight supper and a cigar.

Experts today, as in the past, prescribe moderation. Noted. But you should consult Farouk's example in order to understand the weaknesses of moderation. When Farouk was dieting, trying to lose weight, he had 600 oysters a week flown in from Copenhagen. That was austerity--for him. Moderation tends to be subjective and loves to work on a sliding scale.

No one could possibly object to moderation. And yet, as we all know, moderation pettifogs and sniffs out loopholes, and has a tendency to live life one day at a time, in the wrong direction: "Oh, I'll have eggs Benedict, just this once." The truth is that moderation works only if you are an unblinking maniac about it. While admirable when rigidly observed, moderation is ultimately a thin creed, a sort of Unitarianism of diet, a deism of good intentions.

Doctors offhandedly counsel moderation as a holding pattern, something you do, cautiously and faute de mieux, until things go really wrong. But moderation is neither inspiring nor tasty. Most of us, lacking an urgent health reason to behave (e.g., recurring shortness of breath or pains in the chest), are liberals in the practice of moderation and harbor in ourselves the latent impulses of Farouk the Indulger. We revert to bad habits when the conscience naps, especially since the buildup of cholesterol and heart blockages occurs silently, invisibly, in the dark chambers of the chest.

In many of us, moderation even goes against human nature. Extreme case: a rancher friend of mine in West Texas, to whom I offered a beer at lunch, declined it, remarking philosophically, "You know, Lay-yance, I never have been able to understand one beer. If you drink one, you want to drink a case or two. And we don't have time for that today."

No, something more active, more comprehending than mere moderation is required. In the first place, the heart is not a BMW, not a motor that achieves optimal performance if given the right octane and motor oil. The heart is a mystic as well as a machine. It is irrational and unpredictable.

Mysteries and imponderables enter the picture--temperament, for example. In my own case, even my fecklessness as a habitually lapsing moderate (the steaks, the ice creams, the occasional cigar) would hardly account for two heart attacks and two multiple coronary bypasses by the time I had plateaued into middle age. Heredity is not the explanation either. Who knows? Perhaps the subterranean fissures of the Type A internalized--bad spiritual habits, no doubt. Angers, self-lacerations, demons and opacities of character.

The current cardio matter-of-factness--invaluable in itself--breezily ignores traditional dimensions that go back centuries. We used to apply a vast vocabulary and folklore to speak of the "mysteries of the heart," in a metaphor that suggested the heart not only as repository of human emotion but, in a larger way, of personality, identity, soul. In almost every religion, the heart has mystic meaning. The ancient Hindus believed the heart houses atman, or soul--the essence of our being that seeks divine revelation. The Aztec priest tore the pulsing heart from a sacrificial victim's chest and offered it to the sun. Christian love reposes in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And in the most primitive and immoderate version of the cardiac diet, cannibal warriors cut out the hearts of their valiant enemies and ate them, thinking to ingest the other's courage (a word that derives from the Latin cor, heart).

How to accomplish a real change of heart? An aggressively different diet, surely, not just a moderate pullback from the usual seductive junk. But also, just as surely, a clear eye focused on those demons and opacities that are imponderable and do not show up in your lab work.