Reclaiming rice cakes: How revisiting ‘90s diet staples is helping heal my relationship with food

I remember the taste of my first diet: milk chocolate and metal. 

That would've been the year or so after my body catapulted itself into puberty and I grew increasingly mortified by the ways in which it was changing. I made the decision in the locker room at the local skating rink as I gently ran my fingers along the elastic waistband of my glossy, putty-colored tights. 

The older girls had always joked about how one of the coaches — a five-foot-two blonde named Barbie whose voice had the distinctive rasp of a lifelong smoker — would threaten them with more cardio if she "could pinch an inch" of fat anywhere on their bodies. I felt the way the new soft curves of my body were constricted by the tights, especially around the stomach. 

I wasn't sure if there was quite an inch of flesh, but there was more than the year prior and that alone seemed like too much.

Falling into a crash diet was really easy. It was the late '90s or early 2000s, so I just raided my mom's stash of SlimFast shakes and used them to replace two meals a day, typically breakfast and lunch, just as the company itself recommended. The shakes were supposed to taste like chocolate, and they did — while I was drinking them. However, they left this film on my tongue that tasted like wet pennies, which I'd promptly cover by chewing sticks and sticks of sugar-free gum. 

Within a few days, I was running on fumes. I'd get woozy when I'd lift my head too fast and gasped for air when lapping the skating rink, but I noticed that both my tights and my plaid, pleated school uniform skirt were looser. So I finally let myself eat until my body felt full, confident in my newfound knowledge that I could just lose the weight again.

But then from that moment on, I was always losing weight for something — and there was always a new diet food to help me get there. 

My best friend's older sister, a volleyball player with her eyes on a college scholarship, doled out tips that she had picked up from sneak-reading supermarket tabloids. 

"Freeze grapes," she once sagely decreed. "It's what Posh Spice does. She eats them instead of candy." 

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When I was 15, I shifted from figure skating to ballroom dancing and was told I needed to "lean out" to look uniform with a more slender partner. I turned to plain cottage cheese topped with a ludicrous amount of ground black pepper, paired with hours of walking uphill on the treadmill, because that's what I had heard the contestants on "The Biggest Loser" did off-camera. 

When I was 17, it was lightly salted rice cakes, eaten so I could fit into a wedding dress I never actually wore. Then, when I was in college, it was dry, plain chicken breasts eaten under the guise of "meal prepping." 

When I finally got help for disordered eating in my 20s, there was a long list of foods that dieting had kind of tainted for me. As I healed my relationship with nourishing my body, I tended to avoid them. I mean, there are infinite options beyond rice cakes, so why bother returning to them? 

I didn't think there was a reason to do so until about a year ago when my doctor recommended I cut out certain foods to address a few health issues that had been nagging me. This left me in the bread aisle of my local supermarket looking for some gluten-free toast options late on a Sunday night. 

The shelves hadn't been restocked after what had apparently been a busy weekend, so the selection was pretty limited. I turned to Google: "Gluten-free toast alternatives." After sifting through a few lists of brands my market didn't carry, I saw that someone recommended rice cakes. They're crunchy and naturally devoid of gluten. I grabbed a bag off the shelf, lightly grimacing at the "guilt-free!" label on the bag, and added it to my cart along with some good almond butter. 

The next morning, I was determined to put on my "food writer hat" and make something decent out of them. I coated one with a thick layer of almond butter and topped it with alternating rows of thinly sliced strawberries and blueberries because I had seen a teen on TikTok do something similar and thought it was cute. I drizzled the berries with a little agave, some orange zest and a sprinkle of smoked salt. It was the most unnecessarily dressed-up rice cake I had ever encountered — and it was delicious. 

Honestly, there was and is something incredibly rewarding about revisiting old diet foods and "reclaiming them," preparing them in new ways that speak to their potential as ingredients rather than a shortcut to deprivation. 

In recent months, I've fallen in love with chicken breasts again, this time through rich, supple Hainanese chicken rice topped with tangy chili sauce. Cottage cheese has gotten a glow-up, too. As Amiel Stanek wrote in his defense of the dairy product for Bon Appetit: 

What is cottage cheese but yogurt with more texture, or ricotta with more character? We giddily tear apart juicy wads of burrata and garnish them with all manner of peak-season produce. But how different, I ask you, is humble cottage cheese from the creamy, curdy stracciatella inside these fancy-sounding dairy balls?

And the thing is, he's right. Cottage cheese topped with market-fresh cherry tomatoes, basil and a drizzle of good olive oil is an excellent summer lunch. Even rice cakes have maintained a place in my regular rotation, most often these days as a vehicle for soy-smoked salmon, sliced avocado and yuzu furikake. 

That said, SlimFast can stay in the '90s.