Leith, William Read online

  ��The Hungry Years by

  William Leith

  y

  `The Hungry Years is a confessional, satirical, wise, tragic, truly original book about addiction, food and what's really inside a fat man that's trying to get out. The Hungry Years defies categorisation it's part memoir, part diet book, part comedy, and part sugar rush. It's the first real book about body image for men, and it breaks taboos, breaks new ground, and breaks your heart. William Leith has finally fulfilled his huge potential. I loved it' Tim Lott

  `A wonderfully inventive, typically candid account of a life lived through consumption (of carbohydrates and sugar and sex and drink and drugs and painkillers). More than that, though, it is a sustained examination of the way we live now, a desperate and funny despatch from the front line of binge culture' Tim Adams, Observer

  `Wincingly honest ... a brilliant sort-of memoir' Time Out

  `This isn't a diet book. It's ultimately a "no-diet-works" book by a thoroughly engaging chap with the guts to bare his soul to the bone ... it's well worth it to hitch a ride with Leith on his incredible journey of self discovery' Toronto Sun

  `The insights in this mix of memoir and social commentary are as rich as the desserts he's forsworn' Newsweek

  `Leith writes about food addiction the way Hunter Thompson wrote about drugs and politics ... the social stigma of being fat is brilliantly evoked' San Francisco Chronicle

  `Shapely, rhythmic prose ... The feeling of being too big, of bingeing and bloating, cramming in toast and chips, of being out of control, has hardly been better described' Sunday Telegraph

  `This book is relevant to anyone who's ever counted a calorie or experienced a craving' Glamour

  `Take Naomi Klein's No Logo, Joanna Blythman's Shopped and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, simmer it with a dash of Super Size Me and serve it up with a hearty side order of Augusten Burrough's Dry, and you're close to sampling the taste of The Hungry Years a brave, moving, funny, honest and hugely enlightening memoir that forces us to look at consumption culture in yet another whole new light' Venue

  `The subject of this book is compulsion and it is compulsively readable. I gulped it down in a couple of greedy bites, rather in the way that William Leith tells us he used to eat his food. But his book is a good deal more substantial than the sugar rushes he once craved. It is a powerful memoir with areas of real depth ... it has the unusual qualities of heart and daring. In the end, these are what stay inside you' Daily Telegraph

  `This is admirably unflinching stuff' Daily Mail

  `Leith gets you to relish the butter on his fourth slice of bread eaten in ten minutes, to scoff and stuff, to live the agony and ecstasy of binge eating, to go into his mouth and stomach and to feel both bloated and wanting at the same time. The reader and writer become twin overeaters ... Read Leith and you will never again poke fun at the fat' Evening Standard

  `Leith's emotional and physical battle with food and society's contempt for fat is explored with searing honesty here ... Much more than a book about being fat, this is an exploration of food and diets, politics and addictions in the twenty-first century. Funny, compelling, moving and thought-provoking, you'll never look at a doughnut in the same way again' Easy Living

  `His entertaining, insightful findings are applicable to us all, from size eight up' You

  `It is hard to believe that there is a single person alive at least, not in the developed world for whom this book would not be of abiding interest ... It is Leith's addiction to bad food, and his analysis of the hurt this addiction has caused him and countless millions his funny, sad, clinical willingness to detail the everyday humiliations of bulk that really gives his book its strange resonance' Rachel Cooke, Observer

  `In little, compulsively readable, bite-sized chapters that always leave you wanting to read more, Leith writes about glossy health and beauty magazines which make their readers feel insecure enough to purchase the products manufactured by companies whose adverts pay for them ... So go on, buy yourself a copy. It really will make you feel much better about yourself, I promise' Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday

  To my wife, Dodie, and our son, Billy

  First published 2005

  This paperback edition published 2006

  Copyright � 2005 by William Leith

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 7475 7249 6

  9780747572497

  10987654321

  Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural,

  recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests.

  The manufacturing processes conform to the

  environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.bloomsbury.com www.hungryyears.com

  The Fattest Day of My Life

  I wake up on the fattest day of my life, 20 January 2003. I am just over 6 feet tall, and weigh ... how much? I step on the scale and off it very quickly, to limit the damage. 236 lbs. At best! My bathroom floor slopes slightly, and I have positioned the scale carefully to ensure the smallest possible reading.

  236 lbs. Waist size: 36. This is how I feel: light-headed, shaky, with a raw sensation, almost a pain, just below my ribs. I can feel the acid wash of heartburn in my gullet and the gurgle of juices in my guts.

  Hunger.

  I splash water on my face.

  Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I'm hungry most of the time. I also feel bloated most of the time. I am always too empty, and yet too full. I am always too full, and yet too empty. Last night I ate three platefuls of mash and gravy. I also had chicken and vegetables. I can barely remember the

  chicken or the vegetables. The mash was fluffy, starchy. I could not relax until it had all gone. Then I licked my plate clean. I picked the plate up and licked the starch residue and congealing gravy. It tasted delicious, vile, shameful. People sometimes ask me why I have crusty stains on the lapels of my jacket or the bib area of my shirt.

  My girlfriend said, 'I hate it when you do that.' `I thought you thought it was funny.'

  `No, I hate it.'

  `It's a tribute to your cooking.'

  `No, I hate it.'

  Now it's early, and I want toast. God, I hope there's some bread in the kitchen. God, I hope there's some sliced bread in the kitchen. I really don't want to do any slicing. In the morning, with low blood sugar, it's like slicing a stone with a long, bendy razor blade. I could easily have an accident. I swing myself out of bed, my belly tight and sore under my T-shirt. When I was slim, I slept naked, but now I dress for bed, or rather don't fully undress; I wake up damper, hotter, hungrier. My hunger frightens me. The fatter I get, the more I want to eat. The fatter I get, the more comfort I need. Right now, I want thick slices of warm white bread, crispy on the outside, with butter soaking into the middle.

  My girlfriend is sitting on the sofa, smoking her second cigarette of the day. This is seven-thirty in the morning. She has a serious addiction. She hates the fact that she smokes. She knows how hard it is to quit, but that's not the problem. She's quit before. But when she quits, she always goes back to smoking. In some deep psychological place, she needs to be a smoker. It's about her childhood, about protesting, about

  punishing herself. It's all mixed up with her identity. As a non-smoker, she feels like someone else, and that scares her.

  `First of the day?' I say, even though I can see there's already a butt in the ashtray.

  `Unfortunately not.'

 
; In the kitchen, there is most of a loaf of sliced bread, and yes! the butter has been left out all night, so it will be soft enough to spread. When I was a kid, when I had my worst hunger, I hated cold butter. Later, it didn't bother me so much I was patient enough to pare off thin slices, which I would arrange carefully on the toast. Then I would wait until the butter had melted, something I can't imagine now.

  Now I'm in a hurry. The bread is brown. Damn. Still, I put two slices in the toaster, and, while I'm waiting, I take another slice from the loaf, butter it, fold it over, and eat it in three bites. I pop the toast, to see if it's nearly done, but it's not nowhere near so I butter another slice, and try, and fail, to eat it slowly. Now, when I pop the toast, it is slightly crisp, and slightly warm, so I take a slice, butter it, eat the disappointing, mushy result, and put another slice in the toaster. And then I realise I should have put the second slice in the toaster before I ate the first. As usual, I am falling behind.

  I am in a toast frenzy. I have an urge, like in the Burger King ad, in which 'urge' is an integral part of the word 'Burger'. Although, of course, 'urge' isn't an integral part of the word `toast'. But I am aching for toast. It's like a Mac Attack. (I have actually suffered from Mac Attacks.) It's like a nicotine fit. It's like the feeling you get in a coke-snorting frenzy, when you say, 'Shall we, um, do another line?' and the reply is, `We've just done a line.' Please believe me when I say that I am

  not a coke fiend, have not been one for years. I know about willpower. Looking at the toaster, glaring at it, listening to the buzz of its little engine or whatever, 1 stop for a moment to make a cup of instant coffee, and ask my girlfriend if she wants any toast.

  `No thanks,' she says. She never eats breakfast.

  I open the fridge. Nothing for me in here. Tomatoes, bacon, eggs, salad vegetables. On the worktop next to the fridge, there is fruit in the fruit bowl. At the moment, I am not interested in any of these things. I am like a gay man looking at a girly magazine. I want bread, cereal, croissants, bagels. I could eat a baked potato, or some pasta, or some fried rice left over from a Chinese or Indian takeaway.

  This actually crosses my mind. Might there be fried rice in the house? Cold fried rice, the grains clumped together, sitting on a bed of congealed fat? In a silver takeaway carton? Once I saw a show, possibly an episode of Trisha, in which a man had got fat because he ate leftovers from Indian meals with his toast in the morning. I love Trisha.

  In any case, there is no fried rice in the house. In my heart, I already know this. (Some famous addict once said that a true coke addict knows when there is cocaine in the house, always, and cannot stop snorting until all the cocaine has gone. Well, I always know when there is fried rice in the house.)

  And now, my breakfast is ready. Two slices of buttered toast. No plate. I eat standing up. These days, I do a lot of eating standing up. People seem to disapprove. Perhaps that's why I do it. I take a sip of my instant coffee my girlfriend's brand, a brand which is supposed to give more money to the growers, although I'm not absolutely convinced. It is `ethically sourced'. It scalds my mouth. I eat the first slice of toast, munching through it like a praying mantis eating a leaf. Then I eat the second slice. And, for a moment, I'm in a bad place already bloated, but not yet sated. Too full. Too empty. Clouds of self-disgust are gathering on the horizon.

  At least I haven't got a hangover. All I have is a slight memory of the hungover state a phantom. My head still feels slightly fuzzy and sore when I wake up. This is the morning of my twentieth day without alcohol. I used to have a drink problem. Now I might and might not have a drink problem. We'll see. Apart from soft drugs, I am drug free. I am in a monogamous relationship, so I do not feel a constant urge to flirt with women. In any case, I'm too fat for this kind of behaviour. That's all in my past, I think. When you get fat, these sorts of opportunities are no longer open to you. When you get fat, people find you a lot less attractive.

  What happens to me is this: I get fat. Then I get fatter and fatter, over a period of years, until I'm fatter than I've ever been. Then I get slim again. But when I get slim, I'm never as slim as I was the time before. And when I get fat, I'm always fatter than I was the time before. Right now, at 236 lbs, I am close to obese. Another month, I'd say, and I'll be obese.

  Perhaps there will come a point, perhaps quite soon, when it is just too late. Perhaps when I cross the border from fat to obese I will be stuck, never again able to claw my way back to slim. I'll be a lifer. Might this happen? It happened to Orson Welles, to Sidney Greenstreet, to Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle. Big sad men, communicating their pain slowly, silently, pound by pound. It happened to John Belushi, to John Candy, to Chris Farley. It looks like it's happening to Marlon Brando, to John

  Goodman, John Prescott, Johnny Vegas. It's almost certainly happening to Robbie Coltrane. Coltrane, a decent actor, who, by being fat, has ruled himself out of contention as a top-dollar leading man, who could never be James Bond, but who was, instead, a fat, smirking James Bond villain, and who ended up as Hagrid, the fat wizard in Harry Potter, gained an average of 14 lbs a year for the best part of a decade. What was he trying to tell us? I once tried to interview Coltrane about his weight gain, and it was one of the most difficult interviews I've ever done. Did he talk about his weight? A little bit, maybe. Did he want to say how he felt? Much, much less. The feelings were locked up in an oubliette deep inside his brain. Fat people are not like coke fiends or alcoholics, who sometimes like nothing better than talking about their problems. With a fat person, there is an elephant in the middle of the room, and nobody's allowed to mention it.

  Fat Shower

  I am fat. Therefore everything I do is fat. This morning I take a fat shower, squirming around in the suds like an oversized cherub. Fatly, I towel myself dry. This is not like the towelling-dry of a slim person. Fat people absorb water like sponges. Fat people sweat more. Fat people don't want to walk, half-naked, out of the bathroom to a place that is less hot and steamy. Fat people don't like being exposed. Fat people take their clothes into the bathroom, so that they can emerge, magically, fully dressed, if a little damp and uncomfortable. Fat people wear fat clothes. Right now, I tend to wear tight jeans, and I tuck my shirt in, to advertise the extent of my fat belly. If I were balding, I'd be the kind of man who gets a haircut, rather than the kind who brushes hair over the bald patch. I know that the next stage, wearing loose, baggy clothes, will be the end. When you 'Go Floaty', you have admitted defeat. Somewhere, there is still some fight left in me.

  And when I pull my T-shirt over my hot, swollen torso, it feels like rolling on a condom. And when I stand on one leg to put on my sock, I feel a twinge. I am creaky.

  And when I walk out of the bathroom, my girlfriend says, `Don't tuck your shirt in. I've told you before.'

  I smile, a rictus grin.

  She says, 'It just bulks you out.'

  The Cannon Conundrum

  Today I am flying to New York, to interview a diet guru called Dr Atkins, possibly the most famous diet guru in the history of the world, and yet it does not occur to me that I am doing this, that I have set this up, because I need help. This is one of the funny things, the queer things, about being fat. You don't want to admit to yourself that you are trying not to be fat, because you might fail you will, in fact, almost inevitably fail and every time you fail, you know you are more likely to fail in the future. And the other thing, of course, is that almost all diets actually make you fat. This is the Cannon Conundrum.

  In 1983, diet guru Geoffrey Cannon wrote a book called Dieting Makes You Fat. 'Dieting,' wrote Cannon, 'creates the conditions it is meant to cure.' When you diet, your body just gets better at sucking calories out of the food that you do eat. What Cannon tells us is that dieting makes you hungry on the inside; it gives your body a secret hunger. This is because, when you diet, your mind wants to lose weight, but your body does not. When you diet, your body thinks you are unable to find food. You think: diet. Your body thinks: famine. And the more times you
diet, the fatter you get. As Cannon puts it, 'And what does the body need to keep it going between times of famine? Fat. The more often people diet, the more their bodies will protect the stores of fat.'

  Cannon began to study the effects of diets on the body because he had been an obsessive dieter himself. He had tried diet after diet, all with the same result: he lost weight, and then, when he stopped dieting, the weight came back. 'Between 1964 and 1976,' he wrote, 'I lost about 200 lbs. If all my diets had worked, on New Year's Day 1976 I would have weighed minus 20 lbs.'

  What he discovered was that, when a diet stops, the dieter experiences 'raging appetite'. You can't help it. It's not you it's your body. 'The healthy body,' wrote Cannon, 'can adjust to a period of emergency, which in effect is what a diet is, but once the emergency is over the body's imperative demand is for the nourishment that succours it.' Dieting, in other words, is like locking a sex maniac in a lap-dancing bar. He can look, but he can't touch. One day, inevitably, he escapes from the lap-dancing bar, and ventures into the real world.

  Like Cannon, I have been on diet after diet. Like Cannon, I have been on diet after diet that didn't work.

  Unlike Cannon, a little part of me, somewhere deep inside my brain, still has hope.

  What if He Is Right?

  Bullocking around my apartment, looking for things to throw into my travel bag, it occurs to me that, like all diet messiahs, Dr Atkins seems to promise a miracle. In his new book, Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution, which is more or less the same as his old book, Dr Atkins Diet Revolution, which he wrote thirty years ago, he says, 'If you believe that weight loss requires self-deprivation, I'm going to insist on teaching you otherwise.' The Atkins regime is not about will power. Atkins does not offer a twelve-step programme. He does not advocate avoiding fat, or cutting down on calories. He does not tell us to look deep into our souls. He tells us to stop eating carbohydrates.

  It's simple. Carbohydrates make you fat. If you radically cut your intake, you'll be slim. Meanwhile, you can eat all sorts of other stuff.