Life is not made for counting calories

Rachel lives in Los Angeles, she is Jewish (but not religious) and has a serious problem with food. She cannot stand the idea of gaining weight and what she has experienced at home does not help her: her mother instilled in her the obsession with staying slim, so Rachel's therapist recommends that she cut all contact with her for a long period. Meanwhile, Rachel meets a shop assistant at a yogurt store (Yo!Good) and is fascinated. It's Miriam, who always insists on putting the maximum amount of yogurt and extras in her tub, when Rachel would prefer it flat and with calories counted. Miriam is also a woman of great anatomical splendor: she is fat, I mean, but that doesn't seem to bother her at all. The inevitable will happen: Rachel falls in love with Miriam. The frozen yogurt chain is owned by her family, which is why she helps out by working there as a sales assistant. The family: orthodox Jews, who rigorously celebrate the Sabbath, and where it is unthinkable to willingly accept a lesbian relationship. Rachel is not exclusively lesbian: she has had male and female partners. But with Miriam she has found a partner that allows her, at the same time, to let her guard down on the issue of food. Together they enjoy themselves equally in bed and at the table. Rachel begins to gain weight but, while she is with Miriam, this doesn't seem to bother her. Everything goes well until, at a dinner at Miriam's family's house, Rachel happens to make some political comments about the oppression suffered by Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. This opens a Pandora's box that will determine the entire latter part of the novel, which, naturally, I will not reveal. Ingenuity and pleasantness

To the reader who now wonders if they would enjoy reading a story with this theme, it will be necessary to explain that it is a text written with wit and pleasantness and offers a desensitizing view of eating disorders. One of the great successes of the text is relating food to sex. How can one, in effect, enjoy one without the other? “Love –writes the narrator– is when you have food in your mouth and you know it won't make you gain weight. Lust is when you have food in your mouth and you know it will make you gain weight.”But what happens when love and lust merge? A strange oasis, an unusual and absolute freedom: exactly what Rachel finds in Miriam. And the miracle happens: “Tasting its saltiness, I was struck by the feeling of eternity, as if it were all before us, lived by our ancestors in Russia, Lithuania, Poland, or Moldova. We were two Jewish women from the shtetl [Jewish village] reincarnated, two women who had met in a previous life and had loved each other. I had the feeling that everything that had happened before was happening now, at that moment, and that everything that was happening at that moment would happen forever. That love had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were spreading it. It radiated through the windows of my apartment, across the city, through the canyons, beyond the hills, into the night sky”.Being a collection of erotic literature, the sex scenes are good: “I lowered myself to her breasts and rubbed my face against her blouse firmly, so she could feel me well. Her nipples hardened under the cotton fabric”... and the rest I leave to the imagination of the readers.

As that old slogan from a past advertisement said, “this life is not made for counting calories.” But Rachel hasn't discovered this until she fell in love. Let's call it sex, let's call it love: the abysmal debauchery that brings lovers to the grand banquet of their own bodies.