E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% dim printurl printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Version

July 17, 2003, 9:25 a.m. The Ann Coulter/Strom Thurmond Diet Plan I’m signed up! By Jennifer Nicholson Graham

o, I'm barreling down I-95, on a 200-mile excursion, when yellow arches loom on the horizon, and I instinctively tap the brakes.

I have four kids, see, from 10 months to 10 years, and long car trips with them require multiple McFlurries. But this time, I'm traveling alone and have no good reason to stop. But I really, really want an ice-cream cone.

Then, from out of the blue, it hits me: WWACD?

What would Ann Coulter do?

Now, my husband and I, we're Catholic, and therefore not "What Would Jesus Do?" kind of people. I only occasionally encounter the phrase while idling behind aging minivans at busy traffic lights. (It's a cultural thing.)

But it's apparently seeped into my consciousness, as has the radiant visage of Ann Coulter, who is now — hair shining and teeth gleaming — flitting around my peripheral vision, like the proverbial tiny angel and devil dueling from opposite shoulders.

The arches beckon. The exit is here. What would Ann Coulter do? I look away resolutely and drive on.

Later, stomach growling, it occurs to me that I have hit upon a new and exciting weight-reducing plan, one that will rapidly dispatch my marshmallow tummy and propel me to diet-book fame. The South Beach Diet will be toast soon. It's time for the Ann Coulter/Strom Thurmond Diet, based on two principles: WWACE, and an egg.

The Ann Coulter part is self-evident. Dieters on my plan will receive a WWACE lapel pin or beaded bracelet, and when it's time to eat, they'll simply ask the question, "What Would Ann Coulter Eat?"

The answer, of course, most of the time will be "Nothing!"

No, Ann Coulter won't eat that McDonald's cone! No, she won't eat fried shrimp! No, she won't eat a slice of the birthday cake (butter-recipe yellow, with white frosting) that my grandmother just lovingly prepared!

Ann Coulter weighs maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. As far as I can tell, she eats only celery and flaxseeds. But it is a finely constructed 90 pounds, and I aspire to look like her. In this society of guiltless consumption — created, I think, by the recent decline in stern nuns — the specter of Ann Coulter inspecting our dietary choices can only do us, as a nation, some good.

We also can use Ann for positive-dieting imagery. For example, I can easily imagine Ann, on her next visit to Good Morning America, sitting around with Diane Sawyer, analyzing my latest article.

"Well, Diane," she'd drawl, crossing those pencil-thin legs, "her writing's O.K., but I think she has a 10-to-1 pound advantage over me."

The thought will keep me in line.

Part Two of the Ann Coulter-Strom Thurmond Diet is the egg. The late senator of South Carolina, from where my ample self hails, makes the pages of Hillary Clinton's Living History when she describes an encounter between Thurmond and first-daughter Chelsea. Among the tidbits of advice that Thurmond imparts: Never eat anything bigger than an egg.

Presumably, that — in addition to a rigorous exercise program and careful selection of young wives — is what kept the good senator alive for so long. It sounds bizarre, but the concept has some standing, since sadistic nutritionists now tell us that the ideal serving is about the size of a computer mouse, which is, of course, not much bigger than an egg.

Now, I wouldn't take hair advice from Senator Thurmond, but this egg business makes sense. Combining both ideas should whittle me down to Ms. Coulter's size in time for my next family reunion.

But meanwhile, as the miles pass, I am growing woozy from hunger. When I stop for gas, I wander through the Tiger Shoppe, but there's nothing there that Ann Coulter would eat. There appear to be no flaxseed products anywhere in the dark on I-95 South.

The arches, again, loom large. And the more I think about it, the top of a McDonald's ice-cream cone, the little mound of vanilla ice cream, is about the size of an egg, if I discard the cone. I pull in. Ann Coulter, she'd be so proud.

— Jennifer Graham is a freelance journalist who writes for the Boston Globe and has visited every McDonald's PlayPlace between Washington, D.C. and Charleston, South Carolina.