Leith, William Read online

  A miracle.

  Does the Atkins regime work? Does it work? On a journalistic level, it would be a better story if he were a charlatan. I could unmask him!

  I pick up Atkins' book. The cover is orange and blue, like emergency warning lights at the scene of an accident. I have the 'must-have' new edition. On the cover, Nigella Lawson

  calls the Atkins diet 'the perfect diet for those who love food'. I already have a problem with it: why is there no apostrophe after the word 'Atkins'? It should be Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution. Is it aimed at the sort of reader who is frightened off by the use of an apostrophe?

  What Atkins says, to put it simply, is that carbs are addictive. Well, any fat person can tell you that. When you're in the grip of fat person's hunger, you don't want an apple, or an egg, or a slice of ham. You want carbs. So I think Atkins has a point. This, as I say, slightly disturbs me. I'm wondering how it might fit in with my story. 'Here's a diet guru. He's right,' sounds pretty lame to me. Not quite the same as, `Here's a diet guru. He'll take your money and you'll still be fat afterwards.'

  So ... what if Atkins is right? What if carbs are the problem? Maybe it's that simple. But surely it can't be that simple. Etched in my mind, over a lifetime, is the notion, not that carbohydrates are bad, not that bread and potatoes are bad, but that fat is bad.

  That it's fat that makes you fat.

  That, gram for gram, fat has more calories than carb. That you get slim by cutting down on calories.

  That, therefore, you get slim by cutting down on fat. I am anti-fat.

  I hate fat.

  I am fattist.

  But what if Atkins is right? What then? What if carbs are the problem?

  Unspeakable

  A memory crosses my mind. I'm thirty years old. 205 lbs. Overweight but not quite fat. Waist size 34. I'm sitting on a train, and three of the fattest people I've ever seen get into my compartment. There's a mother, who must weigh 400 lbs, and her son and daughter, who are heavier in the son's case, a lot heavier. I'm startled, riveted. The sight of these people is almost entertaining. They each carry a plastic bag full of snacks bags of potato crisps, cylindrical tubs of potato crisps, chocolate bars, bags of sweets. As soon as they sit down, the show begins they grab the snacks, they tear at them, they wolf them. Their hands soft, oversized hands begin to cram the snacks into their mouths. Constant eating has developed in them superhuman abilities to chew, to release enzymes in the mouth, to form the food into a bolus and swallow. They do not talk to each other. The guy inhales two large bags of crisps in three or four minutes. The girl kills a Mars bar in a couple of gulps. Then she hits the Pringles. She eats the Pringles in 2-inch stacks. When she runs out of food, after about fifteen minutes of uninterrupted eating, she starts moaning. She tries to snatch her brother's food bag. There is panic, fighting. The girl is making sub-orgasmic noises. The guy is grunting. He's lashing out. The mother bops the girl on the head, and gives her a Mars bar to calm her down.

  It is after breakfast and before lunch. These morbidly obese people are moving towards a meal, having recently finished a meal. I think: they are addicted to starch, to sugar. They are like subsistence alcoholics, drinkers who have to drink all the time to stave off withdrawal. Perhaps, I think, the food is the

  problem. But then I think, no, it can't be that simple. There must be something else, something deep, ugly. Something unspeakable in these people's brains. When you see fat people, you want to blame them for their condition. Those fat bastards. You want to blame them.

  I Decide Not to Drink It

  Twelve years later, 25 lbs heavier, I look for things to pack. Fat clothes. Fat bathroom products. Fat beard-trimmer. I need the beard-trimmer because, if I have a proper wet shave, my face looks too fat I look moon-faced, with a smooth, shiny double chin that looks like a doughnut around my neck. So I make sure never to be clean-shaven. On the other hand, I don't want a full beard either. I can't go down the fat-andbearded route. I'm not ready for fat and bearded, in the same way that I am not ready to be fat and jolly. Like I said, I still have some fight left in me. So I set the trimmer to the lowest notch, which gives me a stubbly look enough to distract from the double chin, to mitigate the moon-face.

  My doorbell intercom buzzes. The taxi has arrived. My girlfriend has gone to work. As always, I am running late. The panic of being late clears my mind it enables me to pack. I bulk around the bedroom, bending over, crawling on all fours. My lower back is sore. My knees are sore. My ankle is sore. I pack tight, girdling T-shirts, short-sleeved shirts (long sleeves make me overheat), trousers, socks, books about being fat, and books not about being fat, so that I can sit on the plane, and eat, and read, and forget myself.

  In the taxi I eat nothing, and at the station I buy a coffee in a cardboard cup with a cardboard sheath, a 'Java jacket', to stop my hand getting hot, and I consider buying a sandwich, maybe push the boat out and have toasted ciabatta bread with melted cheese and something, I suppose ham or olives, but I don't, partly because I'm in a hurry, and partly because I don't really want a sandwich.

  Big Mac? No way. Not now, not ever.

  It turns out I don't want the coffee either. Still, walking through the big, crowded concourse, vast the snackpoints and mobile eateries, the bagel kiosks and baguette hatches, holding the lava jacket gives me a kind of focus. I am doing something. I have agency. My train leaves in two minutes. On the way to the platform I stop to buy a bar of chocolate, to go with my coffee, which is fine because now I won't buy a sandwich. I promise myself I won't eat the chocolate until I get on the train, and then I promise myself I won't eat much of the chocolate until I get on the train, and then I promise myself I won't eat all of the chocolate until I get on the train. I screw the wrapper up and slip it into my pocket, into the springy rustling wrapper-nest that is already there.

  On the train, I sip my coffee, which tastes bland and bloaty, and I decide not to drink it, but drink it anyway.

  The Real Problem

  I have a terrible problem.

  I'm fat, obviously, because I eat too much. But I don't think that's the real problem. Like many, even most, fat people, I

  am fat because I have other, deeper problems. One of them is a desire to procrastinate. Being fat is like living on one side of a valley and looking across at El Dorado the promised land of slimness, which can never disappoint you until you visit it. Deep down, every fat person is a little bit frightened of crossing the border into the slim world. What if it's not as good as it looks in the brochures? What then?

  I get off the train at the airport and begin the process of being borne along, via escalator and travolator, towards the bars and food halls of the departure area. Airports are very fat places. Everywhere you go, you see fat people. Everywhere you go, you see things to help you get less exercise and eat more food. And airports are the future; every day, the world outside the airport gets a little bit more like the world inside the airport. One day, you'll park your car in the vast car-park of some super-mall, and you'll step on a travolator that will bear you, salivating, towards a warm chunk of meat wrapped in a fluffy coating of starch, and you'll guzzle it, and lick your fingers, and step back on the travolator. Obese, snacking guys will sit and watch your progress on TV monitors.

  A fat woman cruises towards me. She is walking splayfooted, with effort, taking careful steps as if walking up a steep path. As John Self, the fat antihero of Martin Amis's novel Money says, when you're fat, everything feels steep. Being fat is an uphill struggle. I look at her, at the eaves of flesh hanging from her sides, and for a moment, a split second, I feel the fat person's twinge of fear and self-pity: will I get like that? Will I? The woman is in a much fatter place than me though if I lost, say, 15 or 20 lbs, my fatness

  would be mentionable. This woman would need to lose 100. She might not have spoken about her weight for years. Every day, I guess, she lives with this dreadful, lonely secret, that something has gone terribly wrong with her life, and nobody will talk to her
about it.

  All I need to do is lose 45 lbs. Even 40. Hell, if I lost 30, I'd almost be slim. If I lost 20, my friends would come up to me and say, 'Hi, Fatboy.' That in itself would feel like an achievement. Nobody calls me Fatboy any more. I'm too fat.

  I've been trying to keep a food diary. Yesterday I got up, walked to the newsagent, and bought a newspaper and a couple of magazines and a sandwich. I spent some time browsing through magazines, those travel brochures advertising the slim world; I took in thirty or forty images of girlish women's bodies low fat, lowcarb, high-maintenance. Catherine Zeta-Jones, losing weight; Sophie Dahl, losing weight. Kirstie Alley, the woman from Cheers the dark one Sam Malone always wanted to sleep with gaining weight. Jennifer Aniston, steady. The magazines were explaining to women that it is, indeed, possible to book a trip to the slim world, if you work hard enough, if you spend enough money, if you diet, if you exercise, if you check yourself into a clinic for a bout of liposuction. The sandwich I bought was a BLT, two slices of thick, soft white bread with crisp, pale lettuce, bland slices of water-bomb tomatoes, somebody's own-brand mayonnaise from a tub the size of a bucket, and hard, oily bacon with fat the colour of aspic. Perfect. I put my newspaper under my arm. Right there, in the doorway of the shop, I gripped the clear plastic sandwich box in my fingers. Three

  or four panicky tugs and the cellophane seal was off. The sandwich practically fell down my throat; it was like dropping a billiard ball down a well.

  `Hey, excuse me!'

  `Mmm ... horry.'

  Mid-morning I went back and got another sandwich. Egg mayonnaise on white. Close to confectionery. I sucked it up. The thing is, I should have bought it when I got the BLT, but then I would have had to put it in the fridge and leave it alone for two hours.

  By lunchtime, I was hungry. I cooked myself one of my favourite lunch recipes:

  You fill the kettle.

  While the kettle is boiling, you take a good fistful of three-minute spaghetti.

  Snap the spaghetti in half, and put it in the pan on the hob. The pan is still there from yesterday lunchtime, the last time you cooked this meal. It has some white-looking residue on the inside, but that doesn't matter.

  Pour the boiling water in the pan.

  Oh yes light the gas.

  You can put some salt in the water. But I never do. Put two handfuls of frozen peas in a sieve.

  Pour the rest of the boiling water over the peas. Wait ninety seconds. The pasta is now ready.

  Pour the pasta into the sieve containing the almost-thawed peas.

  Shake it about.

  Put it on a plate.

  Add butter, salt and pepper. I would put grated cheese on,

  but if there's cheese in the fridge I'll have already eaten it. In my kitchen, cheese is lucky to get to the fridge.

  Peanut Butter

  Later on, towards dusk, I had a thing with some peanut butter. Afterwards I lay on my bed. The sky darkened. The nausea passed.

  'I Didn't Enjoy It at All'

  I'm feeling guilty because I've eaten too much, and I have a problem, and I need help, but I don't want to talk about it, because I'm a guy, and guys don't have problems like this, and if they do they sort the problems out on their own. My problem is: I overeat. My problem is: I am hungry. I'm hungry for food, but I know it's not really food that I crave. It's something else.

  It's everything.

  I'm hungry for sex, for drugs, for alcohol.

  I want to go out and spend money!

  I can't keep still.

  If we have a core problem, here in the Western world, I am an embodiment of that problem.

  I'm hungry, and I'm out of control. My hunger is emotional, but this is something I find hard to admit. I have a very powerful, top-of-the-range psychological override mechanism, which I use to disengage my emotions. And this mechanism runs on heavy fuel. It needs a lot of food and drink and drugs and sex. To use the technical term, I'm a binger.

  And I'm not alone. More and more of us are bingeing. The term was coined in 1959 by Albert J. Stunkard, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. One day, a patient called Hyman Cohen turned up at Stunkard's practice. Cohen was 37 years old, 5 foot 9 inches tall, and weighed 272 lbs. He was obese. He was a compulsive eater. He told Stunkard he wanted to lose weight 'in order to qualify for the position as principal' at the school where he taught.

  Cohen told Stunkard he had 'no psychological problems'. What he needed help with, he said, was his willpower. 'Right now,' he said, 'my willpower just doesn't seem to be up to it. That's where you come in. It's like hiring a policeman to check on me.'

  Stunkard did check on Cohen, to the tune of weekly sessions of psychotherapy. Cohen began to lose weight. After five weeks, he was 10 lbs lighter than he had been at the beginning. On the sixth week, though, he was back up to his starting weight.

  Something had happened. Cohen described it. He'd gone to the bank to pay in his salary cheque, and found himself taking $100 out. 'And everything just seemed to go blank.' He walked into a grocery store and bought a cake, several slices of pie, and some cookies. Then he got in his car and drove, one hand on the wheel, the other stuffing food into his mouth. Next, he 'set off on a furtive round of restaurants', staying a few minutes in each restaurant, eating small amounts of food and moving on. He felt in constant terror that he might be discovered. He knew that what he was doing was bad. Later,he went into a deli, bought $20 worth of food this is the 1950s, remember and ate 'until my gut ached'.

  Cohen said, `I didn't enjoy it at all. It just happened. It's like a part of me just blacked out. And when that happened there was nothing there except the food and me, all alone.'

  Stunkard described the Hyman Cohen case in a 1959 report in Psychiatry Quarterly titled 'Eating Patterns and Obesity'. One thing he had noticed, of Cohen, was that, `Almost any kind of frustration, or achievement, could trigger his eating.'

  Since then, of course, bingeing has grown exponentially. I read books about bingeing all the time. I binge on them. Elizabeth Wurtzel writes about bingeing on drugs, Caroline Knapp about bingeing on alcohol, the former Arsenal and England soccer captain Tony Adams about bingeing on alcohol, William Donaldson about freebasing cocaine, Ann Marlow about heroin, Geneen Roth and Betsey Lerner about bingeing on food. James Frey has written a memoir about his binges on crack and alcohol and cigarettes and self-harm and food. Gus Van Sant has bought the film rights. In his book, A Million Little Pieces, Frey says, `It's always been the same, I want more and more and more and more.'

  And all of these bingers have something in common. There's something hollow, right in the middle of their psyche. Something missing. Something they've spent their lives not wanting to talk about.

  Sometimes every few days, in fact the Trisha show is about people who have been bingeing on food. You should see some of them. They're mostly women. Susie Orbach, the writer and psychotherapist, thinks that a lot of women binge

  because they can't cope with their sexuality. They can't cope with the sexual demands of the modern world. The sexual revolution didn't solve women's problems it made them worse. It made them fat. They binge to make themselves fat, to stop guys hitting on them.

  Susie Orbach thinks that women get fat because, on some level, they want to be fat. I think this is happening to men, too.

  On Trisha, bingers ease on to the stage, hunched, bowed, shamed, brave, the Lycra in their oversize clothes stretched to the limit. Sometimes they slowly glide across the stage as if limbless, like galleons moving through the water. Sometimes they are like big trucks trying to manoeuvre through city traffic. When they come to rest, they park at odd angles, engines hot, brakes tested to the limit. People in the audience whoop and cheer, as if witnessing a miracle.

  On the Plane

  On the plane I eat a welcome-pack of pretzels and another pack of pretzels and a chicken meal with gravy and wet mash and softish vegetables and a salad with Italian dressing and a bread roll and a soggy cake an
d, later, an egg-mayonnaise sandwich and a chicken sandwich. I have a feeling about Dr Atkins and his lowcarb mantra I think it might just be the future. About four years ago, when I was having a really bad time in a really bad relationship with a woman called Sadie, I picked up a book by a Frenchman called Michel Montignac. The book was called Dine Out and Lose Weight. Well, I was

  dining out a lot, as you do in bad relationships. Being in a restaurant gives you less to squabble about. You eliminate the need to argue about the shopping and the cooking, for instance. And we never argued about the bill, because I always paid it. So there I was, dining out. But I wasn't losing weight. Boy, was I not losing weight.

  Still, I wasn't as fat as I am now. I must have been 215 lbs! It would take me a month of hard gym-work to get back to where I was then. This thought flashes through my mind, and I try to push it away, and it won't go, and I grab my pretzel packet and ream my finger around the inside, picking up some pretzel-dust, and I rub the pretzel-dust on my tongue, a bit like a coke addict rubbing the last little bit of white powder into his gums, and the thought still won't go away, and I think of this fat guy I used to see in the gym, he was a bit fatter than me, looking at him made me perversely happy because I was not as fat as him, and now I am, and I think: I must do something, I must do something, and I open my bag and take out a magazine and stare at the cover, and I wonder if it would help if I flipped through the magazine and found something distracting, like pictures of women in their underwear, and I flip a few pages, and I can't settle on any image.

  Anyway, I did the Montignac diet, which is based on the Glycaemic Index, or GI. The GI measures the effect different carbohydrates have on your blood-glucose level. Pure glucose has a GI of 100. Hardly surprising. More surprising is that mashed potato has a GI of 70. A bagel is 72. White bread is 70. Carbohydrates, in other words, quickly turn to sugar when you eat them.

  That's the science behind the Montignac diet, which works

  on the same principle as the Atkins diet. The upshot is that carbohydrate, particularly refined carbohydrate, makes you hungry. When you eat it, glucose is released into the blood, which causes your pancreas to pump out insulin; when you eat too much of it, your pancreas pumps out too much insulin, which eats up too much blood glucose, which gives you a blood-sugar crash, which makes you feel hungry. A vicious circle develops you eat carbs, you crave carbs. You get fat. You become miserable. You need comfort. You eat more carbs. You crave more carbs. You get even fatter.