Sara begins dieting to lose weight

Sara Goldfarb’s decision to diet turns her anticipated television appearance into a daily program of restricted food, water, and imagined transformation. The regimen begins with an ordinary diet book, but for Sara it quickly becomes bound up with a much larger hope: to appear slim in her red dress, win public admiration, and step into a brighter life. The widening gap between that imagined future and the hunger of her actual days marks the beginning of the diet’s damaging hold over her.

The Television Ideal

Before choosing a diet, Sara has already learned to see herself and the future through television. After reclaiming her set, she chains it to the radiator, adjusts the antenna, and watches commercials and soap-opera scenes. Their clean homes, polished surfaces, thin-looking wives, and contented couples supply images of domestic happiness against which she measures her own life. A detergent commercial turns a spotless kitchen and a smiling couple into a picture of effortless fulfillment; Sara imagines that her son, Harry Goldfarb, might find a nice young Jewish girl like the wife on screen.

Television also gives Sara a language for her own hoped-for transformation. She imagines herself with the curves she remembers from her marriage to Seymour Goldfarb, in the red dress she wore at Harry’s bar mitzvah, introduced to an applauding audience. She pictures more than weight loss: perhaps television will lead to a regular show, or even make her a Ziegfield girl. The screen’s imagined applause and public recognition give the diet a promise far beyond appearance. Losing weight seems to offer Sara access to a new version of herself and a life in which she is seen and celebrated.

Choosing a Regimen

Sara’s first practical step is to seek a diet book at the library. On the way, she stops at a bakery and buys a danish. She tries to sustain a game of pretending not to know what is in the bag, but the pretense gives way: she eats the pastry slowly, taking tiny bites that make it last until she reaches the library. The episode places appetite beside intention from the outset. She is already thinking about weight loss, yet the food in her hand remains difficult to resist.

When the librarian shows her the diet section, Sara distinguishes weight-loss advice from books on nutrition, health, and disease. She wants a thin book because she has little time to read and little time to lose weight before appearing on television. The librarian selects a straightforward guide that promises losses of up to ten pounds a week, or more. Sara welcomes that prospect. The speed of the promised result suits her urgency: she is not pursuing a gradual change for its own sake, but trying to become television-ready.

At home, Sara reads while watching television and rationing chocolates. She skims through explanations of proper weight, charts, disease, and the claimed superiority of the book’s method before searching for the actual menu. Its account of chemical balance and fat-burning sounds encouraging, but the long introduction tests her patience. When she finally reaches the first week’s plan, she studies it closely, looking between the lines for additional information. The promise of a simple, clearly laid-out program meets an instruction sheet that, on inspection, offers no hidden abundance.

The First Days of the Diet

The menus make the restriction concrete. Sara discovers that the first week’s plan remains the same, while the second week substitutes a broiled four-ounce meat patty for an egg at lunch and the third substitutes four ounces of broiled fish. She responds to the small portions with disbelief and sadness. Against the spare menu, her imagined self appears on television: slim, trim, and sexy in the red dress, with applause and wolf whistles from the audience. That vision persuades her that the limited food is manageable. She will drink water, think thin, and watch the weight melt away; she even wonders whether her appearance might win her a regular television show.

Sara finishes the chocolates rather than let them go to waste and looks forward to beginning the diet the next morning. Her anticipation is buoyant. In bed, memories of Seymour and Harry mingle with thoughts of television, her red dress, and the hair Ada is fixing for her. The hoped-for diet is attached to those memories and plans: it promises a renewed self, but also gathers force from Sara’s longing for family happiness and for the imagined occasion on which her life will be publicly affirmed.

On the first morning, Sara follows the menu: grapefruit, an egg, and black coffee. She drinks an eight-ounce glass of water and tries to visualize the pounds disappearing. Breakfast is over quickly, leaving much of the day still ahead. She washes and puts away the dishes, makes the bed, and straightens the rooms, trying to occupy herself while waiting for lunch. The effort exposes a basic mismatch between the diet’s schedule and her experience of time: a meal that is small and brief must somehow carry her through the long hours that follow.

By lunchtime, Sara has added extra lettuce, reasoning that compressing the leaves into the measuring cup makes the portion acceptable. She drinks two glasses of water but recognizes that the water does not make her full. The book assures her that hunger should subside after a day or two as the body feeds on its own fat; the promised relief remains in the future, while her hunger is immediate. She tries the book’s advice to visualize her perfect weight, sees herself again in the red dress and gold shoes, and finds that even the imagined transformation does not make her less hungry.

Hunger, Television, and Escalation

At the end of the first day, Sara sits in her viewing chair with her tenth glass of water and thinks about losing weight. She replaces the chocolate box with a pitcher, reasoning that sixteen glasses would be twice as effective as the eight the book recommends. Yet she also knows that drinking more will keep her awake. Meanwhile, the refrigerator becomes an increasingly insistent presence in her thoughts, recalling matzoh and herring in sour cream. Sara tells herself that preventing food from spoiling is the refrigerator’s job, not hers, and returns her attention to the screen. Her repeated effort to think thin is set against the food she refuses and the appetite she cannot make disappear.

The diet’s intended outcome remains entangled with television rather than with an independent measure of health. Sara repeatedly pictures herself in the red dress, her hair red and her figure slim, walking across the screen. As the delusion intensifies, the imagined audience and television figures cross into her apartment: a little red riding-hood figure and an announcer inspect its shabby furnishings, while Sara feels exposed to the disapproval of millions of viewers. The fantasy no longer offers only applause and transformation; it turns her home and body into objects of public judgment.

The diet continues beyond its first day as Sara keeps refusing food and rehearsing the television future. She wears the red dress and gold shoes, has Ada touch up her hair, and insists that her expected appearance will still happen when friends suggest that something may have changed. Although flesh hangs from her upper arms, she continues to think of herself as slim and declines pastries, lox, and bagels brought by visitors. She studies quiz shows so she can answer questions, imagining the applause, gifts, newspaper photographs, and television-news coverage that will follow her performance. The beginning of the diet thus establishes the pattern that defines its significance: bodily deprivation is endured in the service of a television identity that grows more vivid even as it becomes further removed from Sara’s circumstances.