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:
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
I’m happy to see you contributing as a writer to the Autopian as I think your particular brand of automotive insanity meshes perfectly. You are absolutely one of us! I look forward to more material on Italian cars and whatever else you care to write about.
If you enjoyed this one, I recommend a stroll through the archive, as I have occasionally written here before!
I love apples. I add diced apples to my quesedillas. They go with anything in a quesadilla. I add them to a variety of things. Plate of cheese, crackers, and sliced meats, add a slice of apple there.
My daughter and I call that last Snack Platter and it is a staple of our diet. Sharp cheddar – the good shit, with texture and flavor – apples, usually Triscuits, figs, sometimes jalapenos, and very occasionally some kind of meat. Generally any two things are good together and some things go in threes.
Hmmm, diced apples in a quesadilla is intriguing…
We once made a mac and cheese with apples and sausage in it, that was pretty excellent.
We have an orchard nearby with something like 120 varieties of apples. I probably only like ten of them, as I’m a sour supertaster, but damn, apples are great.
I visited England (suburb of Manchester) for work for the first time not too long ago and was led to believe the food would be pretty grim, but I really enjoyed the meals I ate in the handful of pubs I hit for dinner. Got another trip coming up and dropping a few (read: way more than a few) pounds would certainly make the flight more comfortable…
No more apples in the vending machine please.
I’d forgotten how good Mareas looked. I haven’t seen on in the UK for years. I did go in one once, in 2004, which belonged to a French estate agent, and I remember staying in a youth hotel in Turin in July 1996 and there being some Fiat publication in the common room with a double page spread of these wonderful new cars. Strange what a nice article like this makes you remember.
Mine was formerly the last black ’99 Marea Weekend in the UK. They are exceedingly rare because they sold poorly in the first place, then nobody bothered to save them.
I must say, I really enjoyed this story about
Mr Abarth Readily Eating Apples
My favorite part of this whole article “I am le sad..”
You could probably pin down my age, plus or minus 2 years with that phrase
Uncle Adrian’s Ferrari! 🙂
At one point I had the Marea, the Ferrari and the Mini parked outside my house. It was starting to look like Adrian’s hot car lot.
How is Abarth pronounced, with a long a or short a at the beginning?
Meat tenderizer works wonders on cheaper cuts of steak. I wouldn’t mess with such an extreme diet, it would play hell with my Type 1 diabetes.
Brava for importing such an ordinary car. I drove a 93 Tipo and enjoyed it, but no more than the A1 Jetta I was driving at the time
It’s… weird. If you use the Italian pronunciation, it’s more like AAH-barT, I’m not entirely sure how to write it out. However, most of the English speaking world seems to use UH-barth. Basically you’re taking an Austrian guy, filtering it through the Italians, then saying it with an English-oriented tongue. Most Americans seem to have learned pronunciation from Jeremy Clarkson back in the day.
I’ve heard it several ways, the first from my older PhD know-it-all brother who pronounced it AY-barth. And recently I heard a YouTuber who had lived in Germany a while say uh-BART. So maybe Abarth himself needs to settle it.
I’m wondering if there’s a patented Autopian Ouiji Board for this sort of thing?
I instinctively said Ay-barth, but was never sure, fortunately I can curse at our base model Fiat 500 in Spanish since US market cars were hecho en Mexico
Essentially that diet is a variation of a low-carb “healthy keto” diet.
What that means is when you cut your carbs, your body stops converting carbs to sugar to burn. That causes the body to go into ketosis… which means your body will start burning fat.
And that’s why you start losing weight.
I essentially do a “healthy Keto” diet. But what I do is 75% “above ground vegetables” and 25% meat/protein.
And all carbs are treated like a treat or desert.
Eating only 800 calories of anything a day will shed weight.
The laws of thermodynamics remain undefeated. 800 kcal a day is basically a starvation diet, you can do 1800 a day of twinkies, steak, and cookies for a month and still lose 15 lbs while improving your cholesterol.
I do not understand why CICO continues to trigger the hell out of people- it is the base criterion for all diets/nutrition, and if you screw it up nothing else matters.
Well yeah… that too.
TBH cutting out alcohol results in more immediate weight loss for me than anything.
No way, jose.
I know, news flash. Right?
So funny enough, I don’t usually drink much, but I knew what I was getting myself into with this trip, so when I wasn’t doing this diet, I actually drank a bit MORE than usual in an attempt to boost my tolerance. Yeah, I still got my ass kicked by those tiki drinks.
Not throwing shade anybody’s way. I struggle with sobriety and know sober me loses 2″ on my waist and 15 pounds over baseline pretty quickly. The hard part is staying there with business travel, etc…
I appreciate the commitment to the bit, but I also feel obliged to point out that starvation diets (which this definitely was) are a lousy way to lose weight in the long run. You can’t starve yourself forever, but once you’ve taught your body that starvation is a possibility it tends to want to pack away as many calories as possible once you do start eating normally. Calorie counts that would have been fine before suddenly result in weight gain, and my understanding is this effect can last for years.
I doubt one week is enough to do any harm, but I want to caution anyone against trying this sort of thing for “real”, if you will.
Definitely not something to be doing for more than a few days and as soon as I went back to eating normally, two pounds came back before being walked off again. I did this as a fun historical experiment first and foremost, not with any plans of long-term weight loss.
Your understanding is common, but misplaced. “Starvation mode” is a thing that exists, but only in extreme circumstances and with a moderate effect that disperses pretty much immediately upon returning to normal calorie intakes.
What most people mistake for “starvation mode” is the simple fact that when you lose weight, your body needs fewer calories to sustain itself (ie- there’s simply less body mass to spend energy on circulating blood and oxygen, keeping warm, etc). As a result, a diet that would have kept them at a steady weight prior to losing weight will now probably cause them to gain weight. So yes, you do need to stay at a lower caloric intake, but that’s perfectly normal. Alternatively, you can just exercise more.
I’m not sure how credible I find that article. For example, they flat out admit that one of the studies they cited found lower metabolic rates in some people even after they gained back the weight they had lost:
In that particular case there weren’t long-term results to look at, but it does suggest that metabolic rates can in fact be altered by extreme dieting, and metabolic changes are not exclusively tied to current weight or diet.
That said, I think pretty much everyone agrees that any unsustainable diet (which I’m pretty sure includes this one 😉 ) is bad. If you can’t keep following the diet than any beneficial effects will be temporary, and even worse, people tend to binge eat after quitting a diet.
This is good information. I happen to be an experienced bass player and long-time devotee of classic Fender instruments. Before I work up to trying a Rickenbacker 4001, I will likely have to spend some time on Lemmy’s diet of of nothing but red meat and Jack Daniel’s.
Probably significantly more fun than apples.
Lemmy got seriously health-conscious in his later years – I recall him adding some Diet Coke to his Jack during one particular interview.
Okay, Andrea, I gotta know: how was the British interpretation of Mexican food? Was it Tex-Mex? California Mexican? Atlanta Mexican? Real Mexican? Or was it like the Iowa Mexican I had years ago at a place appropriately named Gringo’s that had zero spice, and the beef fajitas tasted suspiciously like roast beef?
There used to be a place in Edinburgh called Illegal Jacks—Scottish-Tex-mex. The haggis burrito was awesome.
Was that the one near The Virgin Hotel/Royal Mile? I did. Not. Like.
Nah, other side of the castle, fountainbridge. I do remember something about them moving and maybe beginning to suck… this was many years ago.
Haha great question, I am not Andrea obviously, but I lived in the UK for a couple years. I never attempted it in London, but the only Mexican restaurant I actually saw was literally called the “Chicago Bulls”… Yeah. That was weird. And 0 spice for sure. I think that was in Leicester, but I am sure the restaurant is long since closed.
I just watched an old episode of the Great British Baking Show and they did Mexican week. No one had any idea what the recipes were and they called tortillas “TACK-os.”
I was wildly curious going into the restaurant and honestly, having had Mexican food in Colorado, California, New Mexico and several regions of Mexico-Mexico and it was not like any Mexican food I’ve had anywhere. I can’t really explain it, tbh. It wasn’t bad or anything like that, it was kinda like if someone read about Mexican food then tried to do it based on how it was described. But the Corona definitely tasted like a Corona, so there’s that!
When I was in the UK in the 80s there was an item in the paper about the winner of the Foreign Food Restaurant of the Year—a Mexican place. Being a Southern Californian at the time, I had to do a little brain adjustment. Oh, right, That would be foreign here, like Indian food would be foreign in the US.
Welcome Andrea as I have not seen you here before. Your column was entertaining but if I may suggest changing for the future. Create a story line of it. That crazy diet around Halloween lends to some crazy. Do a weekly weight loss consider adding fights with husband and coworkers. While flying let’s here you talk to your seatmate about the cars the diets and other diet infused imaginary journeys like an Indian on his first peoty induced mirage. Then the pickup test drive, eating real food without silverware etc. I think this could have entertained us all for months with unhelpful advice from the readers.
Nice looking wagon. I’m jealous as none of my many 20+ yo wagons have looked that good—even the repainted one.
Enjoyed the internal dialogue as well: we humans do fun stuff in our heads
I’ve had a long distance crush on this car for a few years now, she is just so achingly pretty to me
So Goth friends ate out a LOT?
It was my chef’s week off.
You made good coffee without your chef’s assistance, so I’d say you managed just fine.
Not having kitchen access and thus not cooking anything for a week felt very strange, especially as cooking for people is usually how I express my affection for them. The best I could do was bring little gift bags of cookies I baked the day before I flew out.
So if I’m getting this right, that would be respectively: Italian/American, French, American, Mexican, and Chinese cuisines?
Not much British on that list.
Noticed that as well: no bangers & mash, spotted dick, not even fish & chips!
Blood pudding, Scotch egg, stewed tomatoes, a rasher (or two) of bacon?
I’m an Anglophile and I use “British food” the same way I refer to “Chinese junk.”
British restaurants can cook some of the best food in the world, and Chinese factories can build the world’s finest products. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority don’t 🙂
We can cook some of the best food in the world. It’s just other peoples.
I know this is a food and I have a very vague memory of what it looks like, but I’m afraid to plug that into Google to confirm. 🙂
Understandably!
It’s a pudding. I just tried, and, at least on Safari, searching British food spotted dick returns non-scary tasty-looking results
Ha, yeah, a few years ago I was reading a collection of Xmas stories including “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.” by Charles Dickens & when I came across that term I had the presence of mind to check Wikipedia first before going to the search engines. A friend later told me about such searches going seriously awry during some academic research and causing some serious problems with malware (this was during the dial-up era when it was a lot more common for computers to become infected with viruses) so she always checked Wikipedia first when looking up potentially problematic terms before going elsewhere on the internet. So I was always glad for her having given what has indeed been pretty good advice.
Just use your personal computer (vs. your work one) and you’ll be fine. 😉
That’s what “Incognito mode” is for.
Our food is like our language and museums; at its best when the vast majority of it is stolen from elsewhere.
Unfortunately, some of the steak both looks and tastes just like the Elgin Marbles. 🙂
I’m still pretty impressed with the UK’s domestic fast food biz in general. Everything from freshly-made sandwiches almost everywhere, to Tesco Metro combo meals, to Pret and Gregg’s, in 25+ years I’ve never found myself looking for a BK or McD’s.
The Burger “King” and Dairy “Queen” are inside the Royal Castle…right?
The closest I got to British fast food was a visit to Nando’s. I’m a massive wimp with spicy food, so I went for the lemon-pepper sauce, and it was perfectly acceptable.
The best food we had when staying in London was Indian.
I did have a few English hotel breakfasts, but it wasn’t nearly as entertaining to express my newfound love of breakfast mushrooms.
I feel like it’s a travesty to go to England and not enjoy the best of English cuisines. Indian.
Ha, now if the Marea could speak, if it breaks down on the side of the road, it might say “how do you like them apples?”
If. Ha, you’re funny
She’s a pretty sturdy thing, so far so good!
Yeah, that’s why I said “if” and not “if and when” or even “when” as I didn’t want to jinx anything (now that I’ve said that, does that cancel out the jinx or does that just bring it on?) Yeah, so far so good, knock on wood!
That line is going in the trailer for Marea’s European Adventure, starring Tyler Perry as Andrea.
OK, this needs to be a book, call it The Monza Diet, pay a ghostwriter to stretch “eat 800 calories per day of apples and beef” into 200 pages, make the rounds of inane morning talk shows = $$$$
Has too last longer than a week
If there’s money in it, I’ll do it, I’ve already dropped 30lbs on an intermittent fasting thing, could always gain it back and lose it again if required for business
Gotta have some kind of angle, though — we can’t let people know that calorie restriction works.
Maybe Mediterranean Diet With a Twist: Eat Like our Ancestors for Maximum Health!
(and the asterisk under “ancestors” is “My uncle Vito from Sicily”)
Excellent read. I look forward to seeing this car around!
This is prime Autopian; history lesson, unusual car, insane food stuff. Results were much better than Torch and DT trying to eat while driving, not to mention shower spaghetti.
I dunno, the eating while driving video made me hungry so it did something.
I am absolutely 100% not volunteering the Marea for any food experiments, especially as there is a lone aftermarket cupholder screwed into the dash and it doesn’t exactly fit American size fast food cups. Basically, you can eat a banana in the car, and that’s about it.
Ok, but I’m guessing you’re going to skip apples and steak in the car, then?
Steak, absolutely not. Apple slices could be survivable if given a wet wipe for sticky finger abatement, but still probably not great.
This story is bananas, excuse me, apples!!!
This is the level of weirdness that makes the Autopian so great!
Nice to see the Mondial!
I won’t lie, the Mondial is my favorite Ferrari, so getting to be chauffeured around in Adrian’s was absolutely a delight. Zipping down narrow, hedge-lined country roads in the evening, interior dimly lit by lovely vintage gauges, with a soundtrack of good goth tunes layered over that beautiful V8 that sounds like a doubled version of my own Lancia is something I will never forget.