Leith, William Read online

  This is the fat society. This is where people come, so they can have exactly what they want. And what they want is ... more.

  The Fat Society

  I think the fat society is a lot like the fat individual. The fat society is a lot like me. I'm fat, but I don't know what to think about it. I'm fat, but I don't know what to do about it. I know I have to change my way of life, but I'm looking for a change that is superficial, rather than fundamental. Like me, the fat society doesn't really want to know the truth about itself. Fat people would rather die than know the truth. Fat people would rather eat than know the truth. They would rather eat themselves to death. Like I said, fat people have a complicated relationship with the truth. Fat people are the world's best liars. Never trust fat people.

  Golden Arches

  It's eleven o'clock, coffee time, time to refuel with a bagel or a doughnut and a cup of something hot, although it feels later to me, more like lunchtime. When you're fat, you live on fat time. Your clock is fat. I walk past a place with a sign that says 'Bagel', and past a place that says 'Bagels', and past a

  Carbohydrate snacks make you hungry. They are culinary pornography, they are like Penthouse magazine. Looking at pictures of naked girls in Penthouse is not exactly having a meaningful relationship with women. Eating carbohydrate snacks is not exactly having a meaningful relationship with food. Fill yourself with snacks, and you'll feel empty a couple of hours later.

  In his book Britain on the Couch, the clinical psychologist Oliver James writes, 'Put crudely, advanced capitalism makes money out of misery and dissatisfaction, as if it were encouraging us to fill the psychic void with material goods.' He also writes, `If you are feeling lousy today or in urgent need of a drink or a fix or a fling or a fight, you probably have low serotonin levels caused by the way we live now.' Serotonin, of course, is the brain chemical that makes us feel happy. According to the Australian nutritionist Jennifer Alden, eating sugar and refined carbohydrates, such as white flour and crispy snacks, causes the level of serotonin in the brain to rise temporarily, and then slump, inducing cravings similar to the effects of cocaine.

  Like Anthony Sclafini's rats, we are hungry for the things that don't satisfy us. We crave the things that make us hungry. I'm thinking of carbohydrates, pornography, promiscuous sex, facelifts, cocaine, credit cards, computer games, and sugar.

  What about things that do satisfy us? We're not so hungry for them, are we? Organic cabbage. Broccoli. Brussels sprouts. Jogging. Working at relationships. Here, in the heart of New York City, I am in the global centre of relationship angst. This, as Candace Bushnell shows in Sex and the City, is

  place that says 'LUNCH'. Ahead of me I can see the golden arches of a McDonald's, flashing into my field of vision like a warning sign.

  Fries!

  Not good.

  I'd only eat them and feel empty afterwards. Fries are pornography. Fries are an advertisement for themselves.

  Look at this another way: fries can rely on that excellent ad agency inside your body, the pancreas, which, as a result of eating fries, produces too much insulin, which eats up the glucose in your blood, which gives you a blood-sugar crash, which makes you want to eat more fries.

  This is what Dr Atkins says, and I can feel my belief strengthening. What if he is right?

  But hang on what about the Cannon Conundrum? I can feel my belief in the Cannon Conundrum weakening. Diets make you fat, yes. But surely this is only the case when, by dieting, you reduce your total calorie intake. When you do this, of course, your body, not having evolved since hunter-gatherer times, thinks you can't find food, and switches to famine mode. When you reduce your calorie intake, your body tries as hard as it can to metabolize fat out of every bit of food it gets. And then, when you stop the diet, you put weight on. So Cannon was right. But only in a world in which diets were all about reducing calories.

  Calorie-reducing diets, in fact, were just as bad as pornography and cocaine and fries. They didn't work, thus creating demand for themselves.

  But Atkins is not a calorie-reducing diet, is it? It is simply a carbobydrate-reducing diet.

  So perhaps it doesn't make you fat.

  After the snacks I ate yesterday, my pancreas has been up all night, sitting at its desk, writing copy. The copy, which is on a crawler strip at the bottom of the screen of my mind, is crude but effective. It says, 'Eat snacks eat snacks eat snacks eat snacks eat snacks . . .'

  I glance up at the golden arches. There is a pang in the centre of my body that feels like hunger, but also like other things anguish, loneliness, basic misery. A sort of all-purpose craving. The crawler strip at the bottom of the screen of my mind says, `Eat fries eat fries eat fries eat fries eat fries . .

  I look away.

  The Andy Warhol Diet

  Perhaps Andy Warhol got it right. The Andy Warhol Diet: you go to an expensive restaurant, and order everything that disgusts you. And remember, this is an expensive restaurant, where some things can be seriously disgusting. When the food comes, it will make you feel sick, so you won't eat it. That's it. That's the Andy Warhol Diet. (Later, he would get the waiter to put the food in a doggy bag and then he'd leave it in the street for homeless people to eat, or feel disgusted by in their turn.)

  How Did She Get Like That?

  Remember what I said about the obese person's shuffle? Well, I'm walking behind an obese person now. A woman. I'm

  walking slowly, but she's at crawling pace. She must weigh 300 lbs. The pyramid of her trunk sits uneasily on her hips, which are joined to splayed, bulky legs. As she walks, she rotates slightly from a central axis, hammering pain and destruction downwards on her ankles, knees, hips, and lumbar region. Her arms stick out sideways from her body because of the large pannier-sized bulges on the outside of her ribs. Large veinless puffy hands with dimpled knuckles swing outwards, high and free, pushed upwards by the buttress of the woman's excess flesh, almost as if she's waving at the people she's walking past.

  But she's not waving.

  And people, in general, do not seem happy to see this woman. Fat or thin, we are not happy to see obese people in public. Just ask an obese person. As this woman walks along, people narrow their eyes or rotate their heads a few degrees away from her. 'Yuck!'That's what they're saying. And: 'Ugh!'

  And: 'Jesus.'

  And: 'God, don't let me get like that!'

  And: 'Poor soul.'

  Two slim, younger guys catch each other's eye, and their cheeks plump up, their eyes flash. This is: 'Whoo!' This is: `Catch that, Dude!' A couple of people walk past, staring straight ahead. This is: 'I really don't want to go there.'

  Looking at people, you can well imagine the stuff that's passing through their minds. Like, 'How did she get like that?'

  And: 'I wonder what it would be like to . .

  And: 'If I could talk to her, just for an hour, I could really help her.'

  And how do I feel, looking at this woman? Oh, I hate her. I hate myself for hating her, but like I said, I'm fattist. I hate her because she reminds me that I am fat, that I'm a bit like her. But I think I hate her also because she tells me something about the world. She tells me that we live in a fat world. She tells me that we, the human race, are out of control. She takes away a little bit of my hope.

  And look at her clothes. For a start, they are frumpy. Seeing this gives me a small frisson of horrified recognition. She's fat, so she is signalling, in a humble sort of way, her very humility. She's saying: I'm not the sort of fat person who is pretending to think I'm good-looking. She's wearing trainers, but not spiffy, bright, fashionable trainers. These are grey. They look like grandma's shoes; they look like they might smell of house-dust and cats and out-of-date cooking oil. She didn't have to choose these grey trainers. Mind you, her hand has been forced somewhat when it comes to her outer layers. Here, she has very definitely Gone Floaty, and wears a swaddling of greys and browns, a sort of protective cladding. She looks like a nomad's yurt that has been ripped from its moo
rings in a storm.

  I'll bet she has an expanding waistband on her trousers. Until recently, expanding waistbands have been associated mainly with children's clothes (because children grow), sporting clothes (they need to be flexible), bedwear (must be comfortable) and underwear (too flimsy to rely on fasteners, must not fall off). But now, expanding waistbands are entering the mainstream. Like children, adults are expected to grow.

  And expanding waistbands are a dangerous thing. As Greg

  Critser points out, research conducted by John Garrow, a British scientist, suggests that tight waistbands inhibit overeating. Garrow investigated a group of formerly obese patients who had lost weight on a calorie-controlled diet. This was a radical calorie-controlled diet: the patients had had their jaws wired. When the wires were removed, Garrow fitted half the patients with cords around their waists. The cords were tight enough to make a white line in the flesh when the patient was seated. The difference in weight gain between the waistband group and the non-waistband group, Garrow found, was 'striking'. Those without cords gained weight at a much faster rate. And this leads Critser to an interesting point. Elasticated waistbands are the thin end of the wedge. What about the larger-sized chairs being fitted into many restaurant chains?

  Will we grow into them?

  The Million-dollar Question

  I'm right behind the obese woman, close enough to observe the doughnut of fat she wears around her neck like a brace, like a shameful necklace, and I'm wondering what it's like to be as fat as this, and I'm thinking of Shelley Bovey's heartrending description, 'A Day in the Life of a Fat Woman'. Interestingly, even though Bovey writes in the first person, she switches to the third person when things get beyond a certain point of horror, when things get really personal.

  When she wakes, the fat woman feels tired. 'She always feels tired, no matter how much sleep she gets.' She also feels

  weak with hunger. She breakfasts on cereal carbs for a quick energy boost. In the car, 'she cannot do up her seatbelt without it digging in so that she can't breathe out'. She 'drives her car unbelted, breaking the law and feeling precarious and unsafe'.

  On the train, she is 'the focus of many eyes as the train lurches on its way and the cause of irritation to the passengers whose arms she accidentally jogs as she passes them'. When she squeezes into her seat, she is 'jammed for a few agonising moments as her stomach sticks on the hard rim of the table and she is wedged astride the central divider'. In the street, she is jeered at by workmen. At the office, she is desperate for a doughnut, but too ashamed to eat in front of her colleagues.

  Later, during a hospital appointment, the hospital gown does not fit in order to cover her breasts, she must wear it back to front, exposing her bottom. In a clothes store, she is intercepted by an assistant, who says, 'I'm afraid we've got nothing in your size.' On the way home, she visits a supermarket to buy some carbohydrate snacks for her children, because she feels 'the working mother's guilt'. At the checkout, she stuffs the snacks in the store's plastic bag as quickly as she can. Later still, weary and desperate, she goes home on the train. She is too tired to fight for a seat, so she stands. She wonders: is it just being fat that brings about this utter dreariness of body and spirit?

  Or is there something else, something that caused Bovey to be fat? That, of course, is the million-dollar question. It's a question she never answers. It's a question I'd like to put to her.

  Ten More Pounds and I'm Finished

  Looking at the obese woman in front of me, this lost soul, this woman who I guess must have some terrible problem, who, I would bet, overeats, who almost certainly has a relationship with food which is pretty disgusting, looking at this woman and thinking of her and thinking of myself makes me feel uncomfortable, and I would much rather be looking at someone else, thinking about someone else's dress sense. How much longer before I have to upsize? How much longer before I Go Floaty? Because, of course, part of me is still certain, absolutely certain, that Dr Atkins is wrong, that I am fat and getting fatter and will be fat for ever, that all I have to look forward to, as Clive James once put it, is 'a lifetime of thigh-chafing misery', that Geoffrey Cannon was right, that diets don't work, that I'll never solve my problems at all, that my girlfriend, who says she doesn't mind about my weight, actually, secretly, does, that my bulk will increase relentlessly, like Robbie Coltrane ...

  Why am I fat?

  I'm fat because I overeat.

  And why do I overeat?

  For a moment, I stop, watching the woman as she walks, haltingly, past the golden arches. Which makes a certain amount of sense. When I have talked to very fat people about fast-food restaurants, they mostly say they never go in them they're too self-conscious. They don't like the sneering. What they don't like, precisely, is for people to make the connection between their weight and their eating. They do not like people to see the cause and the effect, and make the right connection. Rather, they like to keep 'em guessing.

  Yeah, right.

  But those clothes they've made me think. When you're fat, clothes lose their meaning. The messages they were designed to send become warped and twisted. Take jeans. When you wear jeans, you're saying something about being rugged and outdoorsy and fit. When you see a fat person in jeans, your eye computes that image as something different. It doesn't fit. It doesn't work. It looks a bit ridiculous. This is true of other items of clothing, too. I know, for instance, that, above a certain weight (200 lbs) I can't wear a leather jacket. It really does not work. Somebody recently asked me why I always dress so negatively, why always in black, why always so scruffy. And, in a moment of honesty, a brief meltdown, I said that, well, this was all I had left. Brightly coloured, I look like a fool. Smart, I look like a dweeb. I look like a nerd. A fat nerd. When you get fat, your fat drives you away from the image you'd like to have of yourself. Sartorially, it blots out large areas of possible self-expression, until you're left with virtually nothing, and then, eventually, nothing at all. These scruffy black clothes I'm wearing they're all I have. I am, just, clinging on to an outfit that is the real me. But it's not much. It feels like a life-raft. I am bobbing on the waves, clutching my raft, scanning the horizon for a possible means of rescue.

  But this woman she's drowning. Those grim tweeds wrapped around her, around the bulk that she has become, those granny shoes they're not her. She has lost the her she might have had, the her I imagine she must yearn for. She's lost it. It's gone.

  How long before I lose me?

  I'm wearing: a tight black stretch T-shirt by Paul Smith, a tight black short-sleeved sport shirt by Gap, a black corduroy jacket, almost a coat, by Emile Lafaurie, black jeans which say Tommy Hilfiger but I don't believe they really are Tommy Hilfiger, and black suede shoes by Journey. My hair is a tousled mess. I am, of course, still unshaven.

  Ten more pounds. Ten more pounds and I'm finished.

  What It Means to Be a Fat Guy

  Years ago, when I met my friend Michael VerMeulen, future editor of British GQ, we talked about men and weight. Michael was a magazine editor. I was 28 years old, living with Anna, getting fatter. Michael was slim. At 5 foot 8, he was 170 lbs. 'Yes, but I'm a former fatboy,' he said. He told me that he'd been a compulsive eater, and that, at his worst, he'd weighed over 200 lbs.

  `Wow,' I said, 'I can't imagine that.'

  We talked about the possibility of my writing something about what it means to be a fat guy. I wanted to write the article. But I didn't want to write the article. I didn't want to write it until I wasn't a fat guy any more. Fat guys terrified me. I began to think about them. Orson Weller had had a strange, difficult childhood, and later tried to blot out his self-doubt with alcohol and food and periods of promiscuity. Marlon Brando had had a strange, difficult childhood, and later ... exactly the same thing. Ditto Fatty Arbuckle, John Belushi, John Candy. Robbie Coltrane I wondered about. And the same thing seemed to be happening to Chris Farley, a

  promising young comedian from Chicago, who was filling out at
an alarming rate, hitting the bottle, being spotted around town with escort girls and hookers, dabbling in cocaine. These guys had all fallen into the same hole, the fat guy's hell you lack some essential thing, some specific, elusive quality, and so you strive and strive, trying to replace the thing you lack with your achievements. You try to be funnier and smarter than the other guys. You succeed. But somehow, the very effort makes you unravel. And then: the food, the booze, the promiscuity, the drugs.

  And what about the fat guys who weren't famous? Did they suffer in the same way? Often, they did. They were the guys who laughed the most, sometimes with a kind of forced laughter. They were the guys who partied the hardest, who didn't want the party to end, because they had nowhere to go afterwards. (Fat guys who are not famous mostly have to pass on the promiscuity.) I knew fat guys who were incredibly smug and arrogant and brittle, always in on the joke, always quick to the punch, yet emanating a deep sense of unease, of distress. Fat guys who wore big fat rings and finely tailored suits, gangsterish shoes and hats. The fat-guy armour.

  Hey, Big Dave!

  Drinks are on me, baby!

  And I knew about the other type of fat guy, too the one who wanted to be left alone, the one who'd given up the ghost. This was the person who lived inside the fat-guy armour. Sometimes fat guys tried on the fat-guy armour, and couldn't deal with it, and took it off, and moved around their lives warily, furtively, like peeler crabs.

  A little over two years later, I started getting slimmer. How did I do this? I exercised. My diary at the time reads: '40 lengths. Football. Tennis.' That's all in the same day. I lived across the road from a tennis club. I hired a coach. Anna had told me that I was too heavy to get on top of her.

  Oh, and I met this other woman, and when I talked to her, or thought about her, I felt dizzy. She had pale-blonde hair and blue eyes; she looked neat and sane but with something in reserve, sort of like Sharon Stone. We became friends. She was about to get married. There was nothing I could do. Anyway, I started to lose weight. Just to look good at the wedding, I thought, would be something.