I Tortured Myself With Carlo Abarth’s Apple-Based Diet To See If It Actually Works

Once in a while, I feel the need to do something a little strange and adventurous. For most sane people, that would be something like “go backpacking” or “take up goat yoga.” Unfortunately, I’m not particularly sane and I really don’t enjoy anything outdoorsy. No, my choice of crazy for the year was to agree to buy my friend’s 25-year-old Fiat Marea Weekend approximately 4,700 miles outside of my normal Marketplace search radius. One of the great things about the history of unusual Italian cars is it’s littered with bizarre ideas and adventures, so this would just be my own little spin on that history.

I had a fair amount of time to ponder and plan as I waited about nine months for the car to reach its magical 25th birthday when the gates to the ports of the US are thrown open to all manner of imported vehicles. This is a lot of time to scheme, as well as worry, which I’m quite good at. My plan was to fly to England to sign the papers, get into shenanigans with friends, attend the fabulously massive NEC Classic Motor Show, and generally galavant about the island of Great Britain for a week.

The less awesome part is I am not a particularly skinny human and I can’t sleep on planes. Eight-ish hours in an economy seat from Salt Lake to London Heathrow was going to be miserable. In about mid-September, as I considered my calorie intake, I was suddenly struck with an outrageous idea to add in a little more Italian car history while also hopefully making myself more comfortable for the journey.

I would go on Carlo Abarth’s crazy apples-and-steak diet.

Abarth Was A Wizard Of Small Italian Cars Who Needed To Get Smaller Himself

If you are familiar with small Italian cars, you probably know the name Abarth. In the modern context, it’s a spicy Fiat from an in-house tuner, essentially the Fiat version of an AMG Mercedes or GR Toyota. Some of a certain age may also know Abarth as a company producing excellent-sounding exhausts, a dearly held tradition that remains in the company DNA, albeit in a slightly questionable new EV way.

Go back a few decades though, and you will find a man; Karl (or sometimes Carlo) Abarth, an Austrian-turned-Italian small car wizard. While mostly known for Fiats, he also got his hands on Simcas, Autobianchis, Lancias, Alfa Romeos, and even the occasional Porsche. Abarth-built and -tuned cars were known for being tiny but mighty and held dozens of speed records across numerous classes and tracks, but the home turf for the company was undeniably at Monza.

With such a tiny engine in a featherweight car, the power-to-weight ratio can be greatly affected by the size of the driver. So Carlo decided to slim down, and under the guidance of a doctor, he is said to have gone on an “apple-based” diet. Like many historical Italian car tales, it can sometimes get a bit apocryphal. The strictest official version from the Stellantis Heritage Hub says just apples, but they also say “apple-based,” so there’s already some question marks to start with.

Somewhere along the line, “and steak” was added and it seems this part may come from one Al Cosentino, a legendary, somewhat insane, American Abarth tuner and racer, but someone who can be regarded as a solid source of Abarth knowledge from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

You can always tell a long-time weird Italian car person as they’ll likely have an Al Cosentino story, usually prefaced with “he went a little crazy in the end.” However strict the diet may have been, Karl lost 66 pounds, fit in the seat, and set two records in the car before swapping in a 2000cc engine and setting two more the following day, just for fun.

Thus I, a woman of size 12 pants, decided to follow in the footsteps of this legend to fit better into my Delta economy seat. Every day for a week, I would eat an apple for breakfast, an apple and two slices of “pressed beef lunch meat” for lunch, and an apple and small steak for dinner, with a snack apple available for hunger emergencies. I slightly bent the rules and allowed myself a daily black coffee (it seems almost culturally offensive to think an Italian would forgo his morning coffee for a diet) and a gummy vitamin lest I lose my sanity or run out of some necessary mineral, and I dutifully logged every bite in my calorie counting weight app.

Depending on the steak, it was an average of roughly 800 calories per day. Considering I enjoy cooking, this was also a significant blow to a daily creative outlet.

The first two days were miserable, I was constantly starving and the steaks were tough. Lunch only seemed to make me more hungry. By day two, I was assaulting the meat with a rolling pin in an attempt to tenderize it. My jaw was tired from the amount of chewing I was doing to consume so many apples and I was eyeing the dinners I made for the rest of my family with jealousy. I was beginning to question my life choices, something I’ve done many times in pursuit of Fiat-based adventures, so at least I knew how to handle the psychological side of things.

By midweek, my body felt like I was getting used to this, although food sensations felt oddly heightened. My breakfast apple felt strangely cold in my stomach. As it was a week before Halloween, my boss brought in candy but also kindly brought a bag of apples for me. I dared not cheat, lest I get caught on the security cameras sneaking an Almond Joy and never hear the end of it. That was when I realized the genius of this diet; even when I was starving, I didn’t want to eat another freaking apple. Similarly, as the week wore on I began to pawn parts of my dinner steak off onto my very willing husband.

I’d switched to a better cut of meat, but I was deeply disinterested in it. I’ve never been much of a steak eater to start with, so it felt a bit wasted. I also began skipping my dinner apple, it was honestly better just to not even bother.

Here are what my slightly unhinged notes look like from the time:

As I forced myself through this ridiculous diet, I quickly saw just how well it worked. I was losing nearly a pound every day! My watch felt loose on my wrist and by the time Saturday’s autocross event rolled around, I found myself tightening my harness a bit more than usual. By this time my body had adapted to the deficit somewhat and I didn’t even find myself getting particularly hungry as I did something more physical than my usual mix of sitting and typing interspersed with a bit of walking.

By the end of the week, I’d lost 5.3 pounds and had not gone completely insane! As I returned to my normal diet, the intensity of flavors felt heightened, with orange juice tasting more acidic than I’d remembered and broccoli tasting more broccoli-y. It was also apparent my stomach had shrunk a bit, as my previous portion sizes were now uncomfortably large.

Onward To England!

It was in this moderately smaller state that I boarded the flight to meet my new car, a 1999 Fiat Marea Weekend SX 100. The diet had certainly failed to make the flight any more comfortable, but it had created a good bit of fun anticipation on top of all the anticipation I’d felt in the first place. My 2,888 pound, five-seater wagon powered by a 1,581cc engine bore absolutely no resemblance to Karl’s mosquito-size single seater, but hey, at least I looked a little better on vacation!

As I first met my car, tucked away on a quiet driveway in Cambridge, I enjoyed the thought of my little historical experiment as part of my journey to get to this point. After all, importing the first (and probably only) Marea into the US felt a little historical in its own miniscule way. I will definitely say that the radly 90’s upholstered driver seat of my Marea was far more comfortable than an economy seat on a Airbus A330.

All hint of my diet gone, I promptly dove headlong into the unfairly maligned world of British food. I wasted no time before trying a variety of swanky pizzas in Cambridge, quiche outside Derby, a couple days worth of burgers at the NEC Classic Motor Show in Birmingham, a Mexican sampler platter in Coventry, and wildly good Chinese in London. I also made a significant dent in the English national cider and tiki drink reserves.

It is at this point I should probably apologize for the extreme surrealism to anyone who saw two goths in a basement tiki bar having a drunken Italian car brand hierarchy debate. I expected to have regained all 5 of my lost pounds due to this hedonism, but apparently walking around a massive exhibition hall for two days followed by two more days of walking around London evened the score.

Now that the Marea has arrived in my own driveway, I smile a little bit every time I look at it and think of all the ridiculous things that went into getting that car here. If you’re going to buy a rare Italian car, you might as well just keep layering on the weirdness because it’s never really going to make a ton of sense in the first place. So eating apples and steak for a week in tribute to another weird Italian car starts to make a strange amount of sense. And now that the holiday season is over, I’m starting to look at those apples again. I may have had just a bit too much cake and the racing season is just around the corner.

Image credits: Stellantis Heritage Hub; Author
Top graphic inset: Stellantis North America