Authors: The Hungry Years
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.
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