Coco Chanel is credited with saying, “Elegance is refusal.” For a long time, I used that as my diet mantra. Elegance was refusing the calories, the carbs, the coca-colas, or whichever alliteratively delicious item I was self-denying. Elegance was the idea of sashaying into some fantastic ballroom scene in a shimmering column, looking like Cate Blanchett. A young Sean Connery usually figured in there somewhere. He was wearing a tuxedo. I would refuse his advances. After all, I am a married woman, and elegant.
I am a big fan of the word no. No has a power to it that yes only wishes it had. Some of my favorite moments of personal history figure around a refusal. Gracious. Southern. Why thank you, kindly, but I mustn’t. (That’s a fantasy, too. Most of my refusals have been made with a red face, either sputtering with rage, or tittering with the flattery of the offer. In my fantasy world, my graceful-necked, long-limbed, balletic self simply inclines her fair head and declines her proposals with serene meekness. I think the real me looks much more like the Depression Era dervish my grandmothers bred into me.)
Shani Davis is my new favorite Olympian because he said no to Oprah. No one says no to Oprah. I have another fantasy (I have a lot of fantasies–I tell myself bedtime stories) that for whichever reason, Oprah calls me to be on her program, and I politely refuse. Because I have no desire to live so public a life, to expose my family to the spotlight of fame, and, of course, because I am elegant.
I started thinking about this as I tucked into my Breakfast Jack this morning. I hadn’t eaten since 7pm last night, fasting for blood work. It was nearing 10am, and I was hungry and abused, and right next to a Jack in the Box. I haven’t had a Breakfast Jack since college, and since I could eat that as I drove in to the office, I indulged.
“Elegance,” my inner critic sniffed, “would be to refuse that trashy food. In fact, you could stand to skip several meals.” My inner critic was serious. “Elegance is thin. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, Kate Moss said so.”
“Not sure how she would know,” my stuffed mouth countered. “Girlfriend probably hasn’t tasted anything other than cigarettes since 1992. Anyway, elegance isn’t about refusing food for the sake of it. Elegance is also about refusing to conform to ideals imposed upon you by them. Elegance is about eating when you are hungry, stopping when you are full, and refusing to let anyone make you feel bad about the fact that you are short, and that the phrase sturdy as a little French horse resonated with you even as a child.
“Elegance is refusing to be diminished by fashion designers, magazine editors, mean girls, or frat boys. I recognize that vanity is a vice as surely as gluttony, and to starve myself to match an impossible ideal is as ridiculous as it would be to stuff myself. Elegance is refusing to overeat, but refusing to eat in order to have an appearance of elegance? Well, that’s just stupid. Hashbrown?”
That gave my inner critic pause.
What I am still learning, when it comes to food and eating habits, is that eating is good. Overeating is bad. Undereating is bad. Either of those things make me feel as sick as eating bad food. But eating is good, and the elegance in my diet is this: Refusing to over- or undereat.
By the way, the 3/4s of that Breakfast Jack that it took to fill me up? Delicious!
Love it! I try to do the same, eat what fills me. Some times I fail, but I keep trying. I do feel guilty about the food I waste though, those starving children I’ve heard about since childhood would cry out at my wastefulness. I am learning to tell them to shush.
Comment by JamieAnne — February 23, 2010 @ 9:14 pm