http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/dining/19fat.html?scp=1&sq=fat+pack&st=nyt

March 19, 2008
The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party's Over
By KIM SEVERSON
THE bill came due for Jason Perlow in October.

Back before everyone with a fork and a laptop started nursing a food blog,
Mr. Perlow was a founder of eGullet, a pioneering online discussion forum
that helped obsessed food enthusiasts find one another.

It put him at the center of a community where no food was too fatty and no
field trip too extreme. Ferreting out the best place for an empanada or the
perfect way to braise pork belly meant tasting countless versions, often in
the same day. Being the first in the group to find it was golden.

In October, Mr. Perlow was in Denver on business for his day job as a
systems integration expert. He fell ill, and what seemed like a case of
altitude sickness turned into a three-day hospital visit. There he heard the
grim truth: He was diabetic. He weighed more than 400 pounds, his blood
pressure was dangerously high and his blood was thick with glucose and
cholesterol.

A doctor told him he would be dead in five years.

"I wasn't shocked but I thought maybe it's time the party's over," he said.

If 1960s Las Vegas had its Rat Pack and 1980s cinema its Brat Pack, early
21st century food has its Fat Pack. Mr. Perlow was a charter member. Now,
like some of his fellow travelers, he is learning what happens when the Fat
Pack's philosophy of excess meets the body's limits of endurance.

The journalists, bloggers, chefs and others who make up the Fat Pack combine
an epicure's appreciation for skillful cooking with a glutton's
bottomless-pit approach. Cramming more than three meals into a day, once the
last resort of a food critic on deadline, has become a way of life. If the
meals center on meat, so much the better.

Even to those who have been in the game long enough to have seen more than a
few cycles of food and diet fads, the Fat Pack culture is a shock.

"Most of us who are in this profession are here as an excuse to eat," said
Mimi Sheraton, the food writer and former New York Times restaurant critic
who has chronicled her own battle with weight loss. Still, she said, "I've
never seen such an outward, in-your-face celebration of eating fat."

Mr. Perlow, who has embarked on an aggressive diet and fitness overhaul,
believes that his online colleagues will soon realize that the time has come
for healthier eating.

"I do find it irresponsible that they have done nothing to address health
issues," he said of eGullet, which he left in 2006 after a dispute with
another of the site's founders, Steven Shaw.

"The whole foodie lifestyle and diet I used to participate in - I'm not
going to say it is unhealthy, but it is excessive," he said. "I think you
can still keep the food very interesting, but do it in moderation. That's
what the food community of the future is going to have to be."

To which many members of the Fat Pack say: Shut up and pass the pork butt.
Among a certain slice of the food-possessed, to suggest that indulgence
might put one's health in peril is to invite ridicule.

"I think enjoyment of food has never proven to be harmful to anyone's
health," said Mr. Shaw, who turned from practicing law to writing about food
in the late 1990s with an article for salon.com defending fat guys. He still
cultivates a persona in print and online as The Fat Guy, and at 5-foot-10
weighs about 270 pounds.

Mr. Shaw said he believes the genetic component of weight and health matter
more than moderation and exercise. Although his father died from heart
disease, he thinks that the state of medical knowledge on the relationship
of diet to health changes so frequently that it can't be trusted.

Some of his views about diet and health border on the extreme. "I think the
whole diabetes thing is a major hoax," he said. "They are overdiagnosing
it."

Josh Ozersky, the online food editor for New York magazine, once told Mr.
Perlow that they were the type of people who had their cholesterol tested
for blood. Mr. Ozersky used the pen name Mr. Cutlets when he wrote the
eating guide "Meat Me in Manhattan" (Gamble Guides, 2003), but uses his real
name on his new book, "The Hamburger: A History," due out next month from
Yale University Press.

"Obviously, my philosophy on gastronomy can be summed up by saying the fat
is the meat and the meat is the vegetable," he said.

Mr. Ozersky is 6-foot-1 and weighs about 240 pounds, with a build he likes
to describe as "ex-football player" - a favorite characterization among many
male Fat Packers.

Like Mr. Shaw, he believes one's health and size are largely a roll of the
genetic dice. "I'm a Russian Jew," he said, "so grease is mother's milk to
me."

Jeffrey Steingarten, the food writer, takes on the troubling issue of
genetics, food and pleasure in the April issue of Vogue. As an enthusiastic
eater long in search of a perfect figure, he agrees with the Fat Pack's
stance against mainstream diet and exercise advice and their belief in
genetic predisposition to heft. "But," he said, "that doesn't give an excuse
to the fatty to say O.K., I'm not even going to think about it because it is
just so hard to do."

So Mr. Perlow and other prominent eaters who want to lose weight find
themselves trying to forge a new kind of diet, one that rejects the
conventional strategy of denial and avoidance and embraces the pleasure of
really, really good food.

In other words, Fat Pack Lite.

Ed Levine, whose book "New York Eats" (Macmillan, 1992) could be considered
a prototype of the Fat Pack manual, is much trimmer than he was a couple of
years ago. Every Thursday at his Web site, seriouseats.com, he writes about
his attempts to find food that is delicious and healthy. And every day, he
said, he asks himself: "I love food and I draw so much pleasure from it. How
do I not have it kill me?"

Marlena Spieler, the author of dozens of cookbooks and a columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle, has lost more than 90 pounds in the past year. She
found that if she stopped eating food she didn't love, swam regularly and
walked more, she could still indulge in her beloved cheese, sausage and
pastries.

"I love the whole balance, yin-yang thing about eating and exercising and
choosing incredibly well what the next thing I put in my mouth is," she
wrote in an e-mail message.

Pam Anderson, a food columnist for USA Weekend, just published a cookbook,
"The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight and Eating Great" (Houghton Mifflin),
in which she sets out a plan that includes indulgences like sweets at
teatime and before-dinner nibbles of bar nuts and wine.

It's not only food journalists and bloggers who are having their healthy but
indulgent moment. Drew Nieporent, the restaurateur, has been playing the
diet game in many forms for decades. He's newly svelte, having trimmed more
than 75 pounds in a year. He remains completely obsessed with food, but he
focuses on eating more sushi and oysters and less bread and sugar.

"There is this machismo right now about what's wrong with fat, what's wrong
with big bowls of pasta or pork or whatever," he said. "Hey, there's a lot
wrong with too much of it."

No one has to tell that to Joseph Bastianich, who owns several restaurants
with the chef Mario Batali. People who haven't seen him for a while barely
recognize his newly lean body, a mere 215 pounds on his 6-foot-2-inch frame.

He's in training for the New York City marathon, and he offers two simple
tricks: run a lot and try not to eat after 6 p.m.

It's rubbing off on Mr. Batali, the High Priest of the Fat Pack.

"I exercise, I eat and I am a fully existing person in society," he said.
"But would I like to be 40 pounds less? Am I am sorry I'm not in better
shape? Yes."

So he is going to follow in his partner's shoes.

"Believe me, by the end of this year I hope to lose 40 pounds the same way
he has, by portion control and exercising two or three hours a day," Mr.
Batali said. "You can't eat a large portion of a pig and lose weight."

As for Mr. Perlow, with the help of a personal trainer, some used exercise
equipment and a completely new approach to eating, he has slowly begun to
turn the Good Ship Short Rib around.

He has taken about 50 pounds off his 5-foot-11-inch frame since last fall.
His blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels have all improved, he
said.

Just before Thanksgiving, Mr. Perlow told readers of his blog, Off the
Broiler (offthebroiler.wordpress.com), the truth about his health. Reviews
of chili dogs and videos of home tostone-frying projects gave way to
meditations on lentil soup and The Big Salad.

"I can't believe I just blogged about tofu," he said just after the change
began. But what a blog entry it was. Mr. Perlow prepared and photographed,
in smart, annotated detail, ma-po tofu and tofu skin noodles with spicy
peanut sauce.

And though he is still in mourning for his old loves, especially pizza and
burgers, he says his pleasure receptors are better tuned to the joys of
vegetables and legumes.

While the former eGullet partners don't speak anymore, Mr. Shaw said he
admired Mr. Perlow's latest venture.

"I've got to hand it to Jason," he said. "He's not part of the culture of
deprivation. He is really enjoying what he eats."