Leith, William Read online

  I asked Singer about game. What if you were to kill your own food, as it were, in the wild?

  Singer frowned. 'I certainly think it's better,' he said.

  The Game Conversation that wasn't a conversation I had very much, back when I was a student. I shook hands with Singer, and went across the road on my own and ate a salad with adouki beans and hummus, but I had beef on the plane the next day, and I didn't look back. I reintroduced meat into my diet, and I stopped worrying about it.

  As long as it was low in fat.

  Ready to Believe

  But of course, avoiding fat did not stop me being fat. And, as Atkins points out, avoiding fat has not stopped us, as a society, getting fat. We eat 15 per cent less fat than we did in 1970, and we're 20 per cent fatter. So perhaps Audrey

  Eyton was wrong. Perhaps Hay was wrong. Perhaps Harvey and Marilyn Diamond were wrong. Perhaps Susie Orbach, who says that being fat is all in the head, is wrong.

  Perhaps Geoffrey Cannon is wrong.

  Perhaps Atkins is right.

  I'm ready to believe.

  Ping!

  The elevator doors open.

  `It's this way,' says Dr Robert C. Atkins.

  `I Knew I Had Something Wonderful'

  Like me, it turns out, Atkins hasn't had lunch, even though it's early afternoon. 'I sometimes just eat some macadamia nuts or something like that, when I'm working,' he tells me. `That's just something to tide me over until dinner.' Macadamias are highly calorific a handful can contain 250 calories, as much as a handful of chocolate drops. But that's fine according to Atkins, because they're very low in carbs. When you squeeze a macadamia nut between your molars, it pops, and you can feel the fat oozing between your teeth.

  We sit down on either side of his desk. For breakfast, he tells me, he ate 'Ham and eggs. And onions. Very dark fried onions.' Sometimes he has an omelette, sometimes bacon and eggs. He has followed the Atkins diet since November 1963, more than thirty-nine years.

  Atkins begins by telling me about his struggles over the decades. He sounds embattled, and a touch weary. Still, the tide, as he has been pointing out recently, seems to be turning

  his way. 'Now,' he says, 'the evidence confirms what I had noticed in studies that were done forty and fifty years ago. Which is that there's a metabolic advantage to a low-carbohydrate diet. That you actually lose more weight, calorie for calorie, than you do on balanced diets or low-fat diets.'

  Listening to this elderly man, looking at his pleasant face with the crinkly smile, I can feel something nagging at me, and I'm not sure what it is. Atkins talks on. 'And that's been proved by study after study,' he says, 'and all of a sudden, uh, we've reached an era where people are doing these studies, even people who felt that my diet was wrong, and finding out that it is better. And now people are writing about the fact that these studies have been done, and people's minds have to change. Because they always said there wasn't any evidence. But now there's an incredible amount of evidence, and it's 100 per cent consistent with what I had learned about.'

  When I tell Atkins that I've read articles criticizing him, he looks at me sharply and says, 'Whatever it is they're saying, there's nothing to back it up. Everything that we say has backup. There aren't any exceptions. And I'd like to know what have they said?'

  `Well, that your diet doesn't have enough fibre.' `In my new book, we talk so much about fibre.' I nod.

  Atkins says, `It's very important to know that here's a diet that is so effective that virtually everyone who goes on it can expect to achieve their ideal weight, and then spend the rest of their lives on a maintenance diet. For instance, in my case, back in 1963, I went on the induction level, and I just lost weight so rapidly. And it felt so much better.'

  He tells me the story of his own weight loss. It is the familiar diet guru narrative weight gain, followed by despair, the despair obliterated by a simple, miraculous insight.

  `In November 1963,' he says, 'two things happened. I gained an awful lot of weight from Thanksgiving, and John F. Kennedy was murdered. I was just sitting there watching television, watching all this sad stuff. And I made up my mind. I felt I had to do something. So I went on a diet.'

  Atkins says, 'I looked at a picture of myself and realized I had a triple chin. I was eating junk food. Nobody had ever told me junk food was bad for me. Four years of medical school, and four years of internship and residency, and I never thought anything was wrong with eating sweet rolls and doughnuts, and potatoes, and bread, and sweets.'

  He was six feet tall and weighed 225 lbs. As a man with a big appetite, Atkins knew he would not last on a traditional low-calorie or low-fat diet. But he'd just read an article in the journal of the American Medical Association about a low-carbohydrate diet. He says, 'It was so simple! I hadn't tried a diet before that. It was the only diet that looked like I'd enjoy being on it. I ate a lot of meat, and a lot of shrimp, and a lot of duck, and a lot of fish. And omelettes in the morning, and salad vegetables.'

  The diet worked a treat. The pounds fell off rapidly, and, significantly, Atkins did not feel hungry. His cravings for buns and rolls had gone. He felt perky and energetic. He began to realize that something was happening, something which contradicted general medical opinion. He was eating a lot of calories, and a lot of fat, but he was losing weight. Why

  was this? He decided to try his diet on patients, to see if it worked on them, too. In the mid-sixties, Atkins put sixty-five overweight patients on a low-carbohydrate diet. All sixty-five reached their target weight.

  Atkins looks across his desk at me and says, 'I knew I had something wonderful.'

  Jet Lag

  As I look at Atkins and nod along with what he is saying, I realize what it is that's been nagging at me. It's that I want to believe in him. I want him to be right. I want this because, if he is right, I will lose weight. And there's something else, too.

  If he's right I won't have to be hungry. True. But that's not it.

  If he's right, one day, quite soon, I'll be able to get a haircut and have a shave and wear a suit without looking like a fat nerd or a bodyguard. True. But that's not it.

  If he's right, when the weather gets warmer, I'll be able to walk around in a T-shirt. One day, it will be warm, and I'll put a T-shirt on, and just ... walk around. Again, true. But that's not it.

  Yes, I want to believe in this guy. And another thing occurs to me. To an atheist like myself, living in the twenty-first century, it's hard to believe in anything. I don't believe in Tony Blair or George Bush. I don't believe in Gordon Brown or Alan Greenspan. I don't believe in market forces. But then, I never believed in socialism either. And now I'm sitting in an office talking to a man who thinks that he can solve possibly

  the most serious crisis in the world. And I want to believe him. And he thinks he knows what the problem is. And it's carbohydrates. The problem is carbohydrates.

  I mean, I've talked to people with all kinds of ideas. In my work as a journalist, I've encountered a number of gurus. Gurus love journalists. Mostly, I'm pretty sceptical. Once I talked to a guy who said he had the answer to the world's health problems, and it was something to do with taking your blood, and boiling it, and then looking at the result under a microscope. The science, he told me, was incontrovertible. I didn't believe him. But I was perfectly polite. Then he ducked behind some kind of screen and came out with a syringe, and told me to sit down and roll my sleeve up.

  He said, 'I just need a little bit of blood.'

  `No thanks.'

  He walked towards me.

  He said, 'Just a little bit of blood.'

  `Uh, no thanks.'

  `Please. There's nothing to worry about.'

  He moved towards me, holding the syringe. I darted behind a chair. He was on one side of the chair, and I was on the other.

  `You sit down. I'll take some blood. Please. Please. It won't hurt.'

  I backed out of the door and walked briskly away. I never finished the interview.

 
Soon after this, I met a cult of would-be immortals from Arizona who believed they held the key to eternal life, the answer to everything. The answer was simply not to believe in death.

  `But how can you not believe in it? Everybody dies, don't they?'

  The man I was talking to, who smiled a lot, said, 'See, right now you're being deathist.'

  `Deathist?'

  `Yeah. You should hear yourself. You believe in death, don't you?'

  `I suppose so.'

  `Do you know anybody who doesn't believe in death?' `Apart from you, no.'

  `Well, haven't you ever put two and two together?' `How do you mean?'

  `OK. So imagine a world where everybody dies.' `Right.'

  `And where everybody believes in death.'

  `Right.'

  `That's our world. Right here. We live in a deathist culture.' ,uh ... OK.'

  `So if you think about it hard enough, you get to understand the real deal. Are you seeing it?'

  `Not quite.'

  `I'll go through it again. Everybody who dies believes in death.'

  `OK.'

  `And that's why they die. They die because they are deathist. We, on the other hand, deny death.'

  `Oh. Oh.'

  `To live for ever, you must deny.'

  `Mmm.'

  `Deny!'

  Another time I attended a seminar given by the self-help guru Anthony Robbins. This was while I was with Sadie. I was at a low ebb, drinking and overeating. The seminar, the idea of it, terrified me. I didn't want to be in a conference hall full of people yelling and hugging each other. I wanted to stay in my hotel room, and open a bottle of wine, and watch game shows on TV, and wait for yesterday's hangover to slip away. I dislike game shows. But as the time for the seminar approached, the early game shows were starting up, and they looked great.

  One thing I was worried about was the firewalk. Robbins' method was to whip everybody up into a state of rock-hard self-confidence, and then get them to walk barefoot over burning embers. I was certain, absolutely certain, that it wouldn't be dangerous, that he had worked out some way of making the embers safe to walk on. Still, I didn't want to walk on the embers. I wasn't even sure I wanted to possess rock-hard self-confidence. What I wanted was to lie on my bed in my hotel and watch people doing trivial, possibly humiliating things, people who were in worse shape than me. But that was the trouble with game shows. The people on them, the members of the public, had begun to look smarter, fitter. The producers, I thought, must be auditioning dancers and athletes and models. Game shows were definitely less reassuring than they had been. But that night, they still looked great.

  In the conference centre, Robbins strode on stage and told us stories about how to take control of your life. You had to separate what was good for you from what was bad for you. Stop smoking. Stop drinking too much. Stop taking drugs. He

  asked us if we thought trying to do a job well was good enough. Then he told us that no, doing a job well was nowhere near good enough. You had to aim for excellent! You had to aim for superb! Otherwise why do it at all?

  There were six hundred people in the hall. Robbins, a tall man with the air of Ted Danson from Cheers, told us to yell and to hug each other. He played loud bursts of pre-recorded rock guitar. The idea seemed to be to lose your inhibitions. Robbins told us he'd built a huge fire in the car park. This was the fire we were going to walk on. After two hours, we all filed into the car park to see it. just this huge fire. You could feel the heat coming right off it. When I got back inside, I sneaked past security and went up the stairs and hid on a balcony.

  It's not that I disagreed with Robbins. Everything he said made sense. To change my life for the better, I should be honest with myself, stop procrastinating, avoid the things that are bad for me. In his book Unlimited Power, Robbins had written that his firewalk was 'an experience in personal power and a metaphor for possibilities'. He said 'The lesson is that people can do virtually anything as long as they muster the resources to believe they can.' But I didn't want to muster resources. I didn't want unlimited power. I wanted to procrastinate, to escape into booze and drugs, hamburgers and fries. I wanted fuzziness, not clarity. I wanted to keep a distance from my own inner workings, to hang on to the friendly, familiar clutter of my inhibitions. I was the problem. But I didn't want to look inside, to see what the problem looked like. I wanted to be disengaged.

  I watched from the balcony as Robbins mesmerized the other 599 people in the seminar. Later, I sneaked into the car

  park and watched them line up to walk on the embers. The embers had been laid out on strips of what looked like Astroturf. When people walked on the embers, barefoot, they chanted the words 'cool moss!' over and over. Later, somebody told me it was all totally safe is it that the Astroturf is sodden with water, the pressure of the sole of the foot lowers the temperature of the embers just enough, so the foot doesn't get burnt? Aha, I thought. I was relieved. I wasn't sure which had worried me more. Not having unlimited power was pretty bad. But the alternative was terrifying.

  I've never really wanted to believe in anybody. As a student, I liked certain French philosophers Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard. But wasn't that just because these guys seemed not to believe in anything much themselves? Barthes wrote a brilliant essay about stripping in which he visualized the stripper's G-string as the rock upon which the meaning of eroticism could be built; all else was shifting sands. 'Woman,' he wrote, 'is desexualized the moment she is stripped naked.' Barthes, by the way, was gay. He was, I think, saying that as soon as you grasped the reality of something, it wasn't there any more, at least not in the same way. Or you might say that he had pinpointed, with deadly accuracy, the logic of the market in advanced capitalism what is valuable is what you do not have. As soon as you have something, it is no longer valuable. Derrida was similar; for him, meaning existed in the gaps between things, rather than the things themselves. Baudrillard, the most elusive and playful of them all, called this 'a philosophy of disappearance'.

  Thinkers were not like this in the past. Plato, with his

  theory that everything has an ideal version of itself, seemed fairly confident, as did Aquinas and Anselm, who collected together evidence, much of it spurious, to prove the existence of God. Bishop Berkeley had no problem that God existed, simply because he believed the trees in his quadrangle stayed there even when he wasn't looking at them.

  Descartes had faith in the self: 'I think, therefore I am.' But wasn't there a problem with this very thought? When he said the words 'I think', was he not positing an 'I' a self before he had justified it with the latter half of the thought, the `therefore I am' bit? Was he not, in that case, making a false assumption?

  After Descartes, it was more or less downhill. By the twentieth century, philosophers had lost the knack of looking for what is true, stymied by the question: 'What is truth?' The retreat was on; thinkers began to doubt their own tools. Philosophy began to be about the arbitrary nature of language, and then about the radical uncertainty of the self. Baudrillard said that we had become 'obscene' and 'obese', bloated with meaningless desires. Mankind, he said, had `become a virus', and might be on course to destroy the world. Well, yes, I thought. He might have a point.

  Baudrillard was my kind of guru. For a long time, I suspected that he did not actually exist. Also, I was not sure if I wanted him to exist. Who was he? In the intellectual imagination, he was a fashionable French thinker. He was just about as French as you can get. He had cruised effortlessly past the death of logic and the eclipse of the self. He wrote: 'God exists, but I don't believe in him.' He wrote: 'I feel like a witness to my own absence.' He saw the world as a

  place in which there was no way of knowing what is real and what is fake. We humans, mired in late capitalism, could not see outside the constructions of our own thought. In 1991, he accused the Gulf War of not happening.

  I arranged to meet him in the late winter of 1998. The meeting was fixed through a third party. I
wanted to find out whether Baudrillard was real or not, and, if he was, whether he was deadly serious, or a joker. Both outcomes would disappoint me. In photographs, he was a bespectacled man in an open-necked, expensive shirt with permanently half-raised eyebrows; he looked as if he was enjoying a joke that nobody else could understand. He once said, 'Since the media always make you out to say the opposite of what you say, you should have the courage always to say the opposite of what you think.'

  I flew to Paris with an address and a telephone number for Baudrillard on a piece of paper. In my hotel, I gave the piece of paper to the receptionist, so she could call a cab. She looked at it and frowned. Then she took out an index of the streets of Paris, looked through the index, and handed the piece of paper back to me.

  , Ce n'existe pas.'

  `What?'

  `L'adresse n'existe pas.'

  Quite, I thought. Baudrillard, who says the world is full of `simulacra', rather than real things, might be a simulacrum himself. He could, quite easily, be a brilliant invention. I was gripped by a sudden panic. Perhaps I was the butt of a joke, and someone would soon arrive and let me in on the secret that Baudrillard was not, in fact, real. Then, perhaps, I would

  be invited to join the conspiracy, and pretend to write an article about him.

  I called the number. A recorded voice, arch and French, answered and told me to leave a message.

  `Hello,' I said into the void. 'Is that Monsieur Baudrillard? Are you there? If you are, would you pick up the phone?'

  A taxi arrived. The driver was actually wearing a beret and a smock. He did not quite look real. I showed him the address on the piece of paper. He frowned. He said, 'N'existe pas.' He shrugged at me. He looked for the address in the A-Z. Unsuccessful, he put the book down.

  I asked the man wearing the beret and smock to call jean Baudrillard. The hotel receptionist dialled the number and handed over the phone. The man started talking. Someone, anyway, was on the other end. I stood there, slightly paranoid. 'Oui, oui,' said the taxi driver. Then he said, 'Come to the car. I will take you.'