"By the time she was a teenager, she had anorexia and worried she would 'never be skinny enough to love,' she said."

"At 17, she weighed 88 pounds, and a doctor told her that if she lost any more weight, she could die. She recalls thinking that death 'sounded quiet, it sounded calm,' she writes. 'I knew that if I died, I could stop trying.' Thinness felt safe, she writes, but it was actually the opposite: 'I was dancing with death and getting date-raped and drinking to excess and popping pills like Tic Tacs and exposing myself to all kinds of delicious abuse just to feel something.' She has been in remission from her eating disorder for many years, she said... She writes about an exploratory visit with a fertility expert... [T]he specialist, who treats other celebrities, brought up weight gain: She could 'get away' with putting on only about 20 pounds during pregnancy, including the weight of the baby. That would mean a smaller child, the doctor added, but if she wanted her kid to be taller later on, there was always human growth hormone."

From "At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It/In her new book, the actress turns her acid wit to Hollywood’s darker side and her own personal struggles" (NYT).

"Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well…."

Tweeted Ted Cruz, quoted in "Ted Cruz is latest to defend Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad ripped as 'Nazi Propaganda'" (NY Post).

I already blogged Sweeneygate yesterday, and I wouldn't bring it up again — certainly not just because Cruz weighed in — but it resonates with this New York Times "Opinions" podcast I'm in the middle of listening to this morning:

"Thin, White and Right: The Ideal Christian Woman/How skinny became a conservative calling card."

That's a gift link that goes to the NYT page with the audio and a transcript. Keep in mind that there's an idea that there's something right wing/Nazi about beautiful white women. The NYT isn't quite saying that. The columnist Jessica Grose, interviewed at the link, is working on something (presumably) more sophisticated):

"When those on the creative side of fashion could be using their platform to share progressive values, it seems like many are acquiescing rather than pushing back."

"It’s frustrating to see the industry take a step back."

Said Sara Ziff, who leads a "models’ rights" organization. She's quoted in "Why Ultrathin Is In/When it comes to fashion models, the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end" (NYT).

Extreme thinness among models is “not really new — this kind of thing is cyclical,” she said. But this time around, she added, “it seems to echo the current political climate.”

Political???

"She talks about everything. Every pimple she has on her face, every rash she gets on her arm. So why hasn’t she mentioned this?"/"She completely altered her body, and she won’t cop to it."

Complaints of followers of a newly thin Instagrammer, quoted in "They Promoted Body Positivity. Then They Lost Weight. Do plus-size influencers owe their followers an explanation when their bodies change?" (NYT).

"While the runways featured many palettes, there were far fewer body types. Aside from at the Nina Ricci show in Paris, where people of different sizes walked the runway..."

"... models were as skinny as I’ve seen them in the more than 10 years I’ve been documenting fashion weeks." 

Writes Simbarashe Cha, in "Shades of Gray, and Then Some/During Paris Fashion Week, almost every color could be spotted on the streets and the runways" (NYT).

Look at these models. They all look famished and 5 out of 6 seem deeply depressed about it:

That's just part of the photo. I wanted to stress the evident starvation.

The whole photo — at the link — is something that deserves its caption: "Miu Miu’s latest collection included Speedo-style briefs in several colors. Only time will tell if they become as ubiquitous as its miniskirt."

The captions, by the way, are excellent. For example: "Feathers also appeared on the runway at Nina Ricci, where they protruded from this gown like acupuncture needle." And: "Walking with purpose can make a good outfit look even better." And: "Her crouched posture made the tiny bag seem that much bigger"... which I like to think of as small bag the size of a large bag.

Or... minuscule bag the size of a ludicrously capacious bag.

"You see adverts on television with models who are very thin, but the mermaid is like a tribute to the great majority of women..."

"... who are curvy, especially in our country. It would have been very bad if we had represented a woman who was extremely skinny."

Said the headteacher, defending his students, who were asked to make a sea-themed statue for their town. The teacher is quoted in "'Too provocative' mermaid statue causes stir in southern Italy/Art school headteacher hails ‘tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy’ amid social media uproar" (The Guardian).

Go to the link to see the statue, which has huge globular breasts and a giant ass. I'd never even thought of a mermaid's ass before, and now I'm trying to think of how the human ass converges with the fish tail in the mermaid anatomy. 

Is the teacher trying to say that because one alternative — "extremely skinny" — is bad, anything else must be good? That's a logical fallacy.

Anyway, what is a mermaid but a sexual fantasy? They asked students for a mermaid, and they got exactly what they asked for. 

"Before Ozempic, she’d hole up in her hotel on film shoots, juice-cleansing to fit into her costumes. Now, she says..."

"... 'you can eat one and a half meals a day and then you’re kind of hungry at night, but it’s not terrible. You can drink some tea with magnesium and maybe take a Xanax and get to sleep.'..."

I'm reading "Life After Food? A diabetes drug has become an off-label appetite suppressant, changing the definition of being thin and what it takes to get there" (NY Magazine).

"But what makes her an unusual star for the high fashion industry... is the fact that Ms. Kortleve is a U.S. size 8 to 10 — or 'midsize'..."

"... as the middle ground between petite and plus size is increasingly known. 'Straight' size, or under a U.S. size 2, remains, overwhelmingly, the fashion industry norm. Plus-size models, typically those above a U.S. size 12, have become better represented in high fashion. 'Curve' models like Paloma Elsesser, Precious Lee and Ashley Graham have thriving careers. For years, however, Ms. Kortleve has been one of the only midsize models of note.... [T]he ordinary has long been rejected by high fashion, a world that loves to shock through visual extremes. Bony ribs (ideally) or ripples of undulating flesh (occasionally) on a runway or campaign shoot somehow seem preferable to highlighting a body that’s reflective of a more 'boring' middle ground...."

From "The Mean Life of a ‘Midsize’ Model/On TikTok, a midsize movement is forming, but models like Jill Kortleve are rarely cast in glossy brand campaigns or on the catwalks. Why not?" (NYT).

Midsize last size they want to show you, and it's the healthiest, most reasonable place to be. People want excitement, but whatever happened to feeling good?

Reminds me of politics: People don't want to hear from the boring middle or to feel balanced and at ease. They want extremes and extreme emotions — glee and anger. 

Or so it looks on line. Maybe in real life, people are serene and midsize or trying to get to serene/midsize.

"How is it possible that a disease characterized by coughing, emaciation, relentless diarrhea, fever, and the expectoration of phlegm and blood became not only a sign of beauty, but also a fashionable disease?"

Asks Carolyn Day in "Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease," reviewed by Allison Meier in "How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19th Century/In Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates how the fatal symptoms of tuberculosis became entwined with feminine ideals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries" (Hypoallergenic).

It helped that the wasting away of tuberculosis sufferers aligned with existing ideas of attractiveness. The thinness, the ghostly pallor that brought out the veins, the rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, and red lips (really signs of a constant low-grade fever), were both the ideals of beauty for a proper lady, and the appearance of a consumptive on their deathbed. If you didn’t have the disease, you could use makeup to get the pale skin and crimson lips, and wear a dress that slumped your posture....

The perception of a medical problem as beautiful is not an isolated quirk of the Victorian age. We do it today. Look around.

I'll just quote an old post of mine, from 2004, my first year of blogging:

"You don’t like that kind of beauty?"/"Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?... In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build..."

"... we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity. We don’t appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don’t appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it’s not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren’t hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it’s necessary that a woman’s eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that’s completely useless.”

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

"[I]n an attempt to defend [Billie] Eilish — a sincere attempt, often from other young women — a new narrative is being formed around her body."

"Now, it’s about Eilish’s 'bravery' in having a body atypical for celebrities because she’s seemingly not a size 0. It’s a common refrain anytime a woman in the public eye is seen eating in public, having hips in public, or having rolls in public.... The goal of this kind of noxious positivity is to make clear that not being thin — either intentionally or not — is just as worthy of celebration as thinness has been since basically forever. But this is a false equivalence; we praise thinness because we think it tells us something about someone’s worth, their inherent beauty, their value as a person. The issue isn’t so much celebrating one type of body over another, but rather celebrating a body for its bravery, as if there’s something impressive about existing in the world even though your body doesn’t conform to narrow standards of beauty. Refusing beauty norms, or merely falling outside of them, isn’t that brave; it’s just an inevitability since those standards are increasingly harder to attain. Arguably, every woman in the world is brave in that regard because none of us are meeting every characteristic of perfection, whether we want to or not. Eilish has been vocal in the past about why she wears clothes '800 sizes bigger' than she actually is. 'It kind of gives nobody the opportunity to judge what your body looks like. I don’t want to give anyone the excuse of judging,' she told Vogue Australia in 2019. 'Anything you look at, you judge.'... Calling someone brave for merely existing in the body they have doesn’t take power away from thinness, and it doesn’t create any kind of equilibrium in culture.... The truth about Eilish’s body in those paparazzi photos — the truth about most women and their bodies — is really boring: It’s just a body, and you get the one you get."

 From "That Photo Of Billie Eilish Isn’t Brave. It’s Just Typical. In the pursuit of body positivity, we’ve tipped over into an absurd place — where merely existing in a body larger than a size 0 is considered courageous" Scaachi Koul (Buzzfeed).

First, I'd just like to say, the idea that there are beautiful celebrities who wear size zero is absurd. The chest measurement for size zero is 30 inches! Please point me to any adult with a 30 inch chest. This is not any sort of beauty ideal. But people say "size 0" the way people used to say "thin as a reed." Nobody is thin as a reed, and if they were, it would freak you out. 

Second, I'll say that women's bodies are not boring.

Let's be thankful for shaming the Thanksgiving fat-shamer Sarah Michelle Gellar.

The actress apologized for this, which actually really is pretty awful:

View this post on Instagram

I’m just going to pin these up all over my house as a reminder not to overeat on Thursday #thanksgivingprep

A post shared by Sarah Michelle (@sarahmgellar) on Nov 18, 2018 at 10:04am PST

As Breitbart (linked at the top of Drudge) put it:

The 41-year-old immediately buckled to the social media campaign against her, saying, “It’s come to my attention that some people think I was ‘fat shaming’ with this post. That could not be further from my intentions.”

“I love Thanksgiving and unfortunately my eyes are often bigger than my stomach, and I tend to eat so much I make myself sick. This was a joking reminder to myself not to do that,” she continued. “I’m terribly sorry that people were offended by my attempt at humor. Any one that knows me, knows I would never intentionally ‘shame’ any one on any basis. I am a champion of all people.”

I don't know if I'd use the expression "fat-shaming." But it is the sort of photograph that anorexia enthusiasts call "thinspiration." Ah, yes, here's US Weekly, "Sarah Michelle Gellar ‘Terribly Sorry’ for Offending Instagram Users With Thanksgiving ‘Thinspiration’":

“Buffy, please don’t promote diet culture. Not the kind of message we should be sending,” one [Instagram user] wrote. “Usually love your posts but I’m seriously against ‘thinspiration.’ It’s a core of most eating disorders.”

But, we're told, Gellar also "garnered praise" from some celebrities who said they might "pin the photos at her house, too." In other words, there is demand for thinspiration pictures. Twitter allows the #thinspiration hashtag. Here's what it brings to the top of the page right now:

That's a screenshot. I won't link. And I don't believe that Twitter user, even with that name, is critiquing anorexia.

I should be clear about what I personally find awful about Gellar's photo and caption. She just doesn't look happy. She looks like someone who's trying to look good for somebody else and is getting no pleasure from it herself. And she's wearing "pleasure" clothes. But she's wearing them for somebody else, not herself, apparently. It's sad. The expression on her face reminds me of Bender in "Breakfast Club." That's not joy, though she's at her rock-bottom low weight.

"There’s an argument to be made that subjecting straight men to the same objectification everyone else has long lived with is not only fair play, but in fact social progress..."

"... representing a new paradigm where no one identity group is overly centered. But in the Times 'twink' piece, it’s clear what the dangers involved are, too. Haramis writes of Sivan that there’s 'safety in his slimness,' and says his kind offers 'a new answer to the problem of what makes a man.' The implication is that skinniness comes with sensitivity, and maybe even—given the recent cultural accounting of male misbehavior—that it comes with a lower likelihood of being a creep. This is obviously nonsense: Small stature didn’t keep, say, Aziz Ansari from oafish behavior, according to his accuser. But the thinking echoes the way that physical appearance, when overemphasized, gets linked with moral virtue."

From "What 'The Age of the Twink' Actually Means/Are scrawny guys suddenly 'in'? Or are straight men just, finally, getting openly objectified like women and gay men long have been?" by Spencer Kornhaber (The Atlantic).

We talked about the Times "twink" piece yesterday, here.

The best example I have ever seen of a NYT article with the comments function disabled.

Here's the link to the article: "Welcome to the Age of the Twink," by Nick Haramis.

The pre-censorship of reader commentary is interesting and perhaps cowardly, but it raises the question why publish the article at all? Why the need to protect this article from criticism?

Now, it really turns into a style piece — not (ostensibly) about a manifestation of gay sexuality at all. There's talk of models and the repeated assurance that some of these men are not gay:

But the latest twinks — many of whom are straight — are what you might call “art twinks,” building upon an aesthetic legacy established by Ryan McGinley’s turn-of-the-millennium photographs of the sloppily skinny, or last decade’s leather-pant-clad Saint Laurent models chosen by the designer Hedi Slimane. And yet they are more culturally mainstream: a growing cohort of famous (and famously small) boys who stand in opposition to the lumbering, abusive oafs who have been dominating this year’s headlines.

Lumbering, abusive oafs... Apparently, according to "Notes on the Culture" — it's the "age of the twink" because we loathe so much of what comes in the form of a man. We're told of a popular music performer whose "whole mien [was] charged with sex" but whom we could nevertheless appreciate because of the "safety in his slimness."

Women, we're told, are "us[ing] their voices to undo [the] legacy of toxic masculinity," and this is changing the culture: "These twinks, after all, aren’t just enviably lean boys or the latest unrealistic gay fantasy, but a new answer to the problem of what makes a man."

Who is Nick Haramis, by the way? There's no biographical note at the page or clickable link on his name. I had to look him up on Wikipedia. He's Senior Features Editor, T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Did he made the decision to publish this in this form and to protect himself from comments?! The Wikipedia article is short, but it contains the line: "Haramis is also a regular on the downtown New York nightlife scene." I could also do a Google image search on him to see if he's a lumbering oaf or a man with a mien of safety and slimness.

"Every time I do your show, it's almost like I'm on a black station... There's a certain clairvoyance that black folks born with."

"We don't have as much as we used to, but that's always been there. And so, they can listen to you and know ain't no tricking going on, ain't no nothing. They don't even have to question. Very seldom you hear a black person talking about conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory is The New York Times and The Washington Post and NBC and CBS. And just thank God that all these radio stations like yours...."



That's just the first thing I ran into as I looked for old video of Dick Gregory — old in the sense of not things put together on the occasion of his death. That's Dick Gregory talking to Alex Jones.

Here's the obituary in the conspiracy theory New York Times:

Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84....

In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.

Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”

He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”...

There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.

And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.

Correction appended: "An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. They were in 2001, not 2011." Of all the dates to botch.

"But it felt like there was an invisible force blocking me from achieving my dreams. Sure, I'd think, is it because I'm fat?"

"But then I'd think, don't be paranoid. I refused to believe that people were that shallow. It had to be more complicated. I tried to put my finger on it, but I just couldn't figure it out. Once I lost weight [110 pounds], I realized, it was all because I was fat. It felt like that famous Eddie Murphy sketch on Saturday Night Live, where he goes undercover in whiteface and gets treated way better. He rides the city bus. And when the last black rider gets off, music starts. A cocktail waitress in a sequined dress hands out martinis. That's what I felt like — like this whole other world for thin people had existed alongside mine, a world they've been keeping a secret from me. When I was fat and I walked down the street, people would stare. I'd hear comments that I would ignore. Occasionally someone would shout something out at me. In this new world, when I walked down the street, attractive men and women would do something to me they'd never done before. They would look me up and down, and then they would nod their heads. Thin people nod at each other?"

From the "Tell Me I'm Fat" episode of "This American Life."

Children at St. Edmund's Academy in Pittsburgh pass the doll test.

They resist societal pressure and indoctrination....



... or do they?

(For comparison: The doll test that figured in the Brown v. Board of Education case.)

ADDED: My Barbie:

"Naked, what am I? A lank, skinny, spider-legged libel on the image of God!"

"Without my clothes I should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. Nobody could tell me from a parson, a barber, a dude. Then who is the real Emperor of Russia? My clothes. There is no other.... [W]hat would man be — what would any man be — without his clothes? As soon as one stops and thinks over that proposition, one realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing...."

From "The Czar's Soliloquy," which is Mark Twain riffing on — one might well say blogging — an item he read in the London Times Correspondence: "After the Czar's morning bath it is his habit to meditate an hour before dressing himself." Twain supplies the hour of meditation, which ends with the Czar deciding to put on his clothes:

"There is but one restorative — Clothes! respect-reviving, spirit-uplifting clothes! heaven's kindliest gift to man, his only protection against finding himself out: they deceive him, they confer dignity upon him; without them he has none.... Mine are able to expand a human cipher into a globe-shadowing portent; they can command the respect of the whole world — including my own, which is fading. I will put them on."

I ran across a quote from that yesterday as I was writing about the rocket scientist's sexy-lady shirt and expounding my enigmatic "In the broad span of human culture, fashion is more important than space travel."

AND: Let me add a few questions for the champions of Matt Taylor's shirt: Do you know whether Matt Taylor wants to be used as a poster-boy for anti-feminism? If you don't know — and certainly if he doesn't (and I suspect he doesn't) — are you supporting his self-expression or are you appropriating him as a device for your self-expression? He cried when criticized for wearing a pinup-festooned shirt, but maybe you are making him cry by prolonging the exposure of the image he himself rescinded and by using it to attack the women that he chose to appease. Now, excuse me while I write "Matt Taylor's Soliloquy" in the style of Mark Twain.

"By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor and police judge of the City of Medford, I hereby order and command all citizens of the City of Medford above the age of 10 years..."

"... to repair to Court Hall's ball grounds tomorrow afternoon, June 23, at 4 o'clock p.m. to witness the titanic struggle that will there take place between the Leans and the Fats. The Chief of Police is instructed to arrest anyone found violating this order. A minimum fine of the price of admission to the game will be imposed in all cases. The parade will start from the Natatorium at 4:15, headed by the band, which will play a funeral march."

When the Fats played the Leans in 1911.

Out-olding the nouveau old.

Buzzfeed has a listicle titled "20 Things New Yorkers Older Than 40 Did/And will never do again. It was a great time to be a New Yorker," and there's some pushback in the comments from the older than old:

May I humbly request that this be retitled to 20 Things New Yorkers Older Than 30 Have Experienced? Most of these are from the late 90's or close by and as a 33 year old New Yorker I've experienced...

There was this lovely camaderie between 81-year-olds:

My heart aches to know so many things about New York City are gone forever. My father was born in Yorkville and my mother on Wooster Street in the Village, which is now part of NYU dorms. Saw my first play, The King and I, at the St. James and realized, at 18, that Yul Brenner's baldness could be very sexy. Worked five years in the Woolworth Building downtown, which once was the tallest building in the U.S. For seafood you couldn't beat The Captain's Table in the Village, and for chicken pot pie, The Waverly Inn, also in the Village. Pork chops on an open grille? Peter's Backyard on Tenth Street. Ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza on Saturday mornings and then on to the Automat for those little brown pots of baked beans. I stayed at the Barbizon Hotel when it was still "women only." I have traveled around the world, working for four airlines, and New York City thrills me to this day when I fly over it (not sure if you can still do this after 9/11). Anyone care to guess my age? It is 81! Oh, and I was born, of all places, in Brooklyn!

And:

I'm also 81. Lived in Yorkville, the Village, East Village, finally Soho. Left in 1970. My favorite at the Waverly Inn was the veal ala marsala, $2.

Hey, they are contemporaries of Holden Caulfield! It was the mention of ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza that made me think of this. Caulfield is a fictional character, but we may say that he was "born," nonetheless, and calculate the year as 1933, which would make him 81 today, if he stayed alive. In "Catcher in the Rye," we see his New York City, presumably the city of those Buzzfeed commenters.

Would Holden Caulfield have read Buzzfeed... and commented?

Did Holden Caulfield ever eat the veal ala marsala at the Waverly Inn? What did Holden Caulfield eat in "Catcher in the Rye"? There's breakfast:

I had quite a large breakfast, for me — orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Usually I just drink some orange juice. I’m a very light eater. I really am. That’s why I’m so damn skinny. I was supposed to be on this diet where you eat a lot of starches and crap, to gain weight and all, but I didn’t ever do it. When I’m out somewhere, I generally just eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk. It isn’t much, but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.

Now, there's a thing New Yorkers did and will never do again: worry about being too skinny. And if you're worried about getting fat, consider the Holden Caulfield diet, just a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted. In fact, after that skating at Rockefeller Plaza, Holden Caulfield does eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted. Another Holden Caulfield diet idea is be depressed:

So I went in this very cheap-looking restaurant and had doughnuts and coffee. Only, I didn't eat the doughnuts. I couldn't swallow them too well. The thing is, if you get very depressed about something, it's hard as hell to swallow.