February 8, 2011
Hot or Not? A Model Turned Guru on What to Eat
By JEFF GORDINIER

YOGI CAMERON thought I was hot. Which, I figured, was a flattering thing to hear from a man whose cheekbones used to earn him thousands of dollars a day.

Alas, he did not mean it as a compliment. Yogi Cameron, whose given name is Cameron Alborzian, was talking about the three types of energy that tend to show up in the human body, according to the principles of ayurveda: an earthy energy known as kapha, an airy one called vata, and a fiery one, pitta. Mr. Alborzian had taken a look at my face, soon after we’d sat down for lunch at Szechuan Gourmet on West 39th Street, and had determined that I was overflowing with pitta. My vata was in the red zone, too.

“You have too much fire in your system,” he said. “You have too much air in your system — that’s why you move a lot.” He detected “a slight redness inside the eyes. And the redness isn’t, say, getting-up-in-the-morning redness. It’s really fiery redness.”

Mr. Alborzian has a book out, “The Guru in You” (HarperOne, $25.99), much of which is devoted to the ayurvedic approach to eating. He has high praise for ginger, turmeric, licorice and clarified butter. (“A life without ghee is no life at all!” he writes.) He’s down on cooking in oil, using a microwave and overdosing on icy beverages. At Szechuan Gourmet, he declined the customary glass of water.

“The body doesn’t really need more water,” he said. “What it needs is more lubrication, especially as it’s getting older. Ghee will take care of that.” Now and then Mr. Alborzian drinks a teacup full of ghee, or rubs a dab of it inside his nostrils. “Especially when I’m flying,” he said. “Because I’m sucking in six hours of dry air.” He had kicked off the morning with some hot water, followed by “two or three spoonfuls of full-fat plain yogurt.” A few hours later came “two pieces of dried mango, and then that was it” for breakfast.

When he’s not writing or studying in India, Mr. Alborzian makes house calls, sometimes even moving in with clients to observe their daily routines and guide them toward healthier habits. One of the first things he attends to is the way a person chows down. I figured he could do the same for me. I’d chosen Szechuan Gourmet, one of the city’s shrines to tongue-scorching, because I crave spicy food the way other people might crave, say, a bowl of ice cream.

This happens with pitta people, Mr. Alborzian told me.

“Innately you’re drawn to the spicy, which is the thing that is not great for you,” he said. “A little bit of spice is great because it kindles the digestive fire.” But gorging myself on plate after plate of stir-fried chicken with roasted chilies? That would amount, in his view, to a gastronomic version of burning down the house. “What you’re doing is throwing a ton of dry logs on there, if you keep eating spicy stuff,” he said. “And it just burns and burns.”

Mr. Alborzian, who turns 44 this month, has become something of a pitta-esque property, of late, thanks in part to a recent TV appearance on “The Dr. Oz Show” and his friendship with Ellen DeGeneres, who has embraced and endorsed his regimen of yoga, meditation and dietary mindfulness.

He often travels (on any given day he might be in New York or London or Trivandrum, India) but last year he moved into Ms. DeGeneres’s guest house in Los Angeles and acted as a kind of live-in wellness consultant for five months. This was during Ms. DeGeneres’s brief tenure as a judge on “American Idol.”

“ ‘Idol’ was really tough on her,” Mr. Alborzian said. “She’s an upbeat person and ‘Idol’ was all about judging people, and she really disliked it. So she walked away from it because it doesn’t go with what she believes in. It’s a sign of balance. You start giving up things that are imbalanced.”

Mr. Alborzian, who grew up in England and Iran, knows about giving up plum gigs. During the 1980s and 1990s he was a sought-after model who appeared in campaigns for Versace and Karl Lagerfeld and, most famously, as a sort of proletarian Adonis in Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video, grinding gears in a sad gray factory where it always seemed to rain.

One day in 1998 he decided to walk away. “I was in Nelson Mandela’s house in South Africa,” he recalled over lunch. (In spite of his counsel, I was inhaling a bowl of hot and sour soup. He took one slurp and declared it “way too spicy.”) “Naomi Campbell was there, Kate Moss, Amber Valletta, Christy Turlington: the whole crew. It wasn’t like a light bulb moment. It was more of, ‘Ah, this is really good, and it’s not going to get better than this.’ I thought, ‘Fashion will kick you out at some point, anyway. This is a good time to go off and find my path.’ ”

That path led him to India, where he studied yoga and ayurveda, an approach to health in which foods are seen as having different essential properties. A source of nourishment might be deemed “hot” or “cool,” regardless of its actual temperature. (Onions are “hot.” Rice is “cool.”) When he’s cooking or ordering a meal, Mr. Alborzian tries to reach the right balance between those properties.

And that’s only part of it. If he sits down in a restaurant, he is factoring in the room temperature of the place, how his body feels, which vegetables (he is a vegetarian) are local and in season. He doesn’t want anything that’s been canned or frozen. “It’s mummified food,” he said.

He’s not into eggplant, either, but that’s just because he doesn’t like it. “It makes my throat itch,” he said. When our main dishes arrived (fried rice and two relatively mild and eggplant-free platters of vegetables), Mr. Alborzian ventured in with patient, tentative nibbles.

“I’ll take a few bites, and then I’ll see how my body starts reacting to it,” he said, putting down his chopsticks. Meanwhile I charged through the fried rice with all the delicacy of a snowplow.

“You’ll enjoy it more if you eat slow,” he offered. “And then you’ll see: you won’t eat even half as much as you usually eat.” He is an advocate of fasting and said he once subsisted for 28 days on nothing but water and green tea.

It sounded like a lot of work. Doesn’t such an intensity of dietary awareness prevent him from just enjoying food?

“Food has now become a burden to us,” he said. “A lot of people don’t look forward to life anymore. They just look forward to food. People tell me, ‘But I love food.’ And I tell them, ‘You can’t love something that owns you.’ ”

More in Dining & Wine (6 of 34 articles)
$25 and Under: Mile End

Read More »
Close