Leith, William

by The Hungry Years

  Meanwhile, the Fat Crisis gets worse, and whenever politicians or nutritionists talk about it, they say the problem is we're eating too much fat. Sometimes it's too much fat and

  sugar. And sometimes it's too much fat and sugar and salt. It's like a mantra. Nobody official will mention carbs in public; it's as if they've all signed a pact or something.

  The morning slips by and my friend's wife starts preparing lunch, and we go for a walk, something that would have been unthinkable on an empty stomach just a few weeks ago. Sure, I'm beginning to get hungry, but my hunger has a steady, smooth progression, is almost pleasurable. We walk through the woods and breathe the fresh, cold air. I haven't seen my friend for a while and, last night, just as I was getting ready for bed, he caught sight of me in this T-shirt that I haven't worn for years because it was too tight, and now it hangs quite nicely, and he said, my God you've lost weight. And it's true I've lost about fifteen pounds. Some people, I'm told, get all testy when people compliment them on their weight loss; they feel insulted on behalf of their former, fat selves. It's as if somebody is treading on the grave of the fat person they used to be. But I didn't feel bad about the compliment. I felt fine a good sign.

  The weird thing happens when we get back from the walk. My friend's wife has made lunch and it's risotto. I tell my girlfriend there's no way I'm going to eat it, and she tells me I can't not eat it, and my friend's wife overhears the conversation, the hissing, and says, 'Oh, sorry. Of course! I forgot,' and I say it's fine, I'll eat the risotto. There's a whole big bowl of it. It tastes like a forbidden pleasure from the past; as soon as I touch the first mouthful I could eat the whole bowl in two minutes. Starchy grains of rice soaking up the flavour of the mushrooms and seafood, covered in gloopy starch paste and when you mill it with your back teeth the grains of rice have

  these uncooked kernels of pure killer carb. And of course, I have a second helping, it's like drinking wine, one glass leading to another, and I'm hungrier at the end of the meal than I was at the start, and I'm hungry in the car on the way to the station, and I get even hungrier on the train, hungry like I used to be, craving, wretched, unable to concentrate. My saliva is full of amylase, the starch-digesting enzyme, and I can't seem to swallow it all, and my blood is full of insulin, and the insulin has gobbled up all the glucose in my blood, and I'm crashing, crashing.

  And when we arrive at the station, I find myself staring at a display of pies, and I know I could eat three or four pies in as many minutes. My blood is raging. The pies look tiny, in the same way that a drink looks tiny to an alcoholic. How do they make them, these miniature pies? I know the pastry would be crunchy on the outside and gummy on the inside, starchy, starchy. But I walk away, and fill the hole with macadamia nuts and cheese, stuff I really shouldn't be bingeing on, and in the evening I have a big fat steak and green vegetables, and I don't drink any alcohol or snort any coke or take any painkillers, and when I wake up the next day I don't feel too bad, not too bad at all.

  It Was the Bread and Potatoes All Along

  My mother calls me and tells me that my father has lost

  weight, more weight than he's ever lost before, and she's pleased.

  But she's also a bit worried. He's losing weight, but he's

  still eating a lot. He bought the Atkins book and read it, cover to cover, and felt he understood the principles behind the book, even went to the library to find more reading material. For years he's had the same breakfast every morning, which he insisted on making himself a double-decker bacon and egg sandwich, with three thick slices of bread, the middle one fried in the bacon fat from the pan. Sometimes, like on Sundays, he'd add mushrooms to the sandwich.

  And now he has everything except for the bread, and possibly a sausage or two, or a slice of black pudding.

  And he's lost more than ten pounds in less than a month.

  My mother says, 'Do you think it's safe?'

  `Well ... probably,' I say.

  `He's eating so much fat. So much meat. So much black pudding.'

  `But he's not eating bread? Or potatoes?'

  `No, he's very strict about that.'

  I say, 'Remember you used to think he was overweight because he ate so much fat?'

  `Well, yes.'

  `And it was the bread and potatoes all along.'

  Complex Rather Than Simple

  I'm beginning to think like a conspiracy nut. I'm in a bar, ranting at a friend of mine who happens to be a diabetic.

  `So you see, it's the carbs. The carbs that make us hungry.'

  `And you're sure about this?'

  `Given the facts, any economist could have plotted the

  graph of today's obesity epidemic. Look, technological advances lowered the cost of refined flour; manufacturers increased the amount of refined flour in food products. Bakers, right .

  He looks at me, takes a sip of beer.

  `Bakers, yeah, began to put larger amounts of white flour in brown bread. So people got hungrier. And now, as a population, we've hit a tipping point, a sort of insulin watershed, and people's hunger for junk food is out of control.'

  I take a sip of San Pellegrino. I'm still off the booze, and I'm beginning to sample different types of water, I'm starting to like the weird shapes of the bottles, the labels.

  `And no government anywhere can think of a solution. Politicians are stymied. They don't mind telling people to eat less fat or sugar, because the people who produce fat and sugar are used to abuse in the media. They factor it in. But politicians won't say anything against carbs.'

  `Why?'

  `Well, can you imagine? Carbs are the biggest thing in food. Can you imagine the panic? The idea that carbs are bad is not a message anybody wants to hear. And yet carbs are the cause of obesity and, and .

  `And what?'

  `And, well. And diabetes.'

  I look at my water bottle, twirl it around in my fingers. My friend says, 'I'm confused here. My doctor tells me I should eat carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates.'

  I'm ready for this. 'Yes, well first of all, what he means is complex rather than simple. Simple carbohydrates, refined stuff like white bread, fries, pastries, certain types of rice, as

  far as your pancreas is concerned these things might as well be sugar. You should be eating stuff which hasn't been refined, stuff like brown rice. The carbohydrates which have the least effect on your blood sugar. In other words, the carbohydrates which behave least like carbohydrates.'

  `But . . .'

  `It's like a doctor might say, if you're going to drink, have wine rather than whisky. He's not saying, go ahead and drink as much wine as you like. He's not telling you that alcohol is good for your health per se.'

  `OK-aay.'

  `So you shouldn't go round saying, "My doctor told me to drink." What he told you to do was to go for the least harmful option. In this case, wine.'

  `So you're telling me that brown rice is sort of the wine of the carbohydrate world?'

  `Right. And white bread is the whisky.'

  `And doughnuts?'

  `Doughnuts are like high-proof vodka. Chocolate is chocolate is absinthe.'

  `So telling me to eat complex carbohydrates is like saying, if you must drink, stick to wine.'

  I'm nodding. I'm beginning to rant. I'm sipping at my water, automatic little sips from the bottle, and the water is fizzing at the back of my mouth, bubbling up into my nose, and I'm thinking about the analogy between wine and brown rice, and I'm thinking about wine, what it would be like to drink a glass of wine, just one glass.

  I say, 'Stick to wine.'

  It happens on a Saturday evening in March, and I've lost something like 20 lbs. I'm wearing a brown corduroy jacket, blue jeans, brown shoes, a blue shirt, and the jacket is hanging just so, or rather not quite just so, but almost just so. I'm walking differently, picking my feet up, I've lost my apologetic slouch, and my knees hurt less when I go downstairs, soon I'll be able to do normal things, such as run, and I'm standing in a door
way at a party, holding a bottle of San Pellegrino, I wish I could say San Pellegrino 1996 or whatever, but they don't put the year on the bottle, with water the year is immaterial, and someone I know spots me and nods, and that's when it happens.

  He says, 'HI, fatboy.'

  I'm getting somewhere.

  Happy

  Meanwhile, the world is getting fatter. In her book The Hungry Gene, obesity expert Ellen Ruppell Shell explains that people are getting fatter wherever 'Western-style commerce' thrives. Fifty per cent of people are obese in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay. In India, overweight and obesity are 'endemic' among the fast-Westernising middle classes. In China, a country that has Westernised faster than

  anywhere else on the globe, obesity increased 'sixfold' in the 1990s.

  According to National Geographic magazine, `supermar—

  kets stocked with processed food' accounted for 20 per cent of Latin American food retail in the 1980s. Now the figure is 80 per cent. Snack foods are up 25 per cent in Europe in the last five years. In some parts of Africa Africa for God's sake obesity rivals malnutrition as a health concern. In America, 41 per cent of people who believe they are 'underweight' or `about right' are actually overweight. Also, a growing percentage of people who are underweight believe themselves to be overweight. Many of them will develop eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia, or cut themselves, or binge on diet pills or cocaine or cigarettes.

  Around the world, obesity is concurrent with the increased incidence of these things: TV, mobile phones, cars, multistorey buildings, computers, pornography, credit-card use, cocaine use, binge drinking, celebrity gossip, images of extremely slender female models, images of male models with six-pack stomachs, media driven by advertising, depression, increased consumption of serotomn-enhancing drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat, increased incidence of self-harm, shopping malls, painkillers in bright, shiny packets, and supermarkets with upwards of 20,000 products under the same roof.

  But as March progresses, I'm happily losing weight. I'm beginning to refine my diet. The ideal breakfast, for me, is a handful of lowcarb macadamia nuts, a slice of turkey breast, and a couple of plums. The ideal lunch: a huge bowl of steamed vegetables. Mid-morning I walk to my local greengrocer and buy cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts. I then steam them, using two sections of the steamer, for four or five minutes. I eat them with butter, a bit of salt, and a lot of white

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  pepper. I binge on the pepper. In the evenings I have fillet steak with three or four tomatoes. I'm slightly obsessive, a little unhinged, but I'm losing weight and I'm not hungry and I keep telling people the same thing, over and over.

  `It's not about eating more meat. It's about eating fewer potatoes.'

  `But don't you get hungry?'

  `it was the potatoes that were making me hungry.' `Huh?'

  `Look,' I say, and then I rant on, trying to find an analogy that will fit. I find myself sitting at a table, at a dinner party, telling people that carbohydrate foods such as white bread and pasta are more dangerous than chocolate, because 'everybody knows chocolate's bad. Right? Everybody knows chocolate is about indulging yourself. You know that ad with the lizard? Where the woman is in the bath? And the phone rings, but she doesn't answer the phone, she just gets the bar of chocolate and, you know, slides it into her mouth, and as she's sucking on the chocolate, the phone's still ringing .

  `What do you mean, "the lizard"?'

  `There's a lizard. There's a lizard on the wall. It's to tell you she's somewhere hot and, you know, sensual.'

  `OK.'

  `Well, you know, she's not answering the phone, and You're supposed to think it's a man calling her, but she'd rather be sucking on the chocolate, because the chocolate ... it's her, you know, her indulgence.'

  `Now I remember the lizard.'

  `OK. The lizard. But see, my point is, right, we all know that chocolate is sinful. But then you see ads for really bad

  white bread, and it's all about, you know, families, health, kids running around in the garden. That's the real problem.'

  I keep saying the same things. 'My point is,' and 'What I'm trying to tell you is,' and 'See, that's just where you're wrong,' and 'I'm not saying Atkins is right about everything,' and 'But Atkins has really put his finger on something,' and 'It's not about fat,' and 'It's about carbs,' and 'Carbs are the problem.'

  And people say, 'But doesn't Atkins say you shouldn't eat fruit?'

  `No! Well, yes he does, sort of, but that's only for the first two weeks of the diet. People are always confusing the induction phase, that's the first two weeks, to get you going, you know, to break your addiction ... with the maintenance phase.'

  `How long is that?'

  `The rest of your life.'

  `So you can't eat fruit for the rest of your

  `Certain fruits. And you can eat fruit, anyway. The thing is, to be aware that fruits contain sugars, simple carbohydrates, and if you eat too much, you could get a sugar rush, and a crash that makes you feel hungry. So just ... be aware. Be aware.'

  `Is that what Atkins says?'

  `No. That's what I say.'

  The world is getting fatter. Unlike the world, I'm getting slimmer. Catherine Zeta-Jones is getting slimmer. Sophie Dahl is getting slimmer. Jennifer Aniston remains steady. Kirstie Alley, on the other hand, is still gaining. Kirstie Alley is keeping pace with the world.

  I eat one-third of a cabbage per day. For every cabbage I eat, a branch of McDonald's opens, somewhere in the world.

  166Now, 25 per cent of household pets are at risk of obesity.

  Experts, we are told, believe that the current overweight generation of children is the first who will not outlive their parents.

  Cocaine use in Britain is growing. Of 450 men who went to St Mary's hospital in West London complaining of chest pains, a third tested positive for cocaine. In London, cocaine deaths have 'soared' 600 per cent since 1997.

  One mobile phone user in three is 'said to be addicted'.

  Across the Western world, people, particularly young people, particularly young women, are increasingly engaged in 'binge drinking'.

  Something, something pretty fundamental, is not working. We want more, and then we want even more. We want more, and we want it faster. The plots of soap-operas are changing; murder and sexual assault in soaps are growing at the same rate as obesity in the outside world, although not as fast as cocaine-related death. An academic study of pop songs finds that they are no longer about yearning, but about sex; they are cutting to the chase.

  Meanwhile, an automatic iron is about to go into production. Sales of robot lawnmowers are increasing exponentially. People are getting more materialistic, more compulsive, lazier. People want quick solutions; the liposuction graph looks like the obesity graph, which looks like the graph describing mobile phone use, which looks like the graph describing the growth of labour-saving devices such as dishwashers.

  My mother tells me she can't imagine how she managed before she had a dishwasher.

  A new version of the Cabbage Soup diet is published.

  One day in late March, I'm walking through the park, and I hear a strange, buzzing sound behind me, and I momentarily freeze, and a fat guy buzzes past me on a kid's scooter. But this guy is not a kid. And the scooter is motorized.

  Another day in late March, US and British forces invade Iraq, a country rich in a resource which has enabled us to cut our journey times, to expend fewer calories, to watch more TV.

  And although all these things worry me, I'm happy, because I have, I believe, located my central problem. My problem is carbohydrates. I'm a recovering carbohydrate addict. I eat meat, vegetables, eggs, and nuts. I am planning to reintroduce fruit into my diet, and I'm still not drinking alcohol, and I'm happy, I think I'm happy, and I'm losing weight, and of course I'm not entirely happy, because I want...

  I'm not quite sure what I want.

  To lose more weight, I suppose.

  Keeping
the Faith

  Take a slice of Emmenthal or Leerdammer cheese. Place a slice of turkey breast on the cheese. Then cut a beefsteak tomato into fine slices. Place the tomato on the cheese and the turkey. A smear of mayonnaise on the tomato, or, if you like, a couple of drops of olive oil, a drop of vinegar, and a bit of basil. Then put another slice of the Emmenthal or the Leerdammer on top of that, and you have a low-carbohydrate sandwich.

  This is what I make myself for lunch on a day in early April, and I'm walking through my flat, and I pick the sandwich up as I'm walking, and the tomato slice begins to slip out of the sandwich, and I squeeze the edges of the sandwich to halt the slippage, which is my instinct, which is what I'd do with bread, but in this case, my instinct is wrong, and the tomato slice shoots out of the side of my sandwich, slides along the plate, falls to the floor. A big, fat tomato slice, lying on the dirty floor, soaking up dust and carpet fluff.

  And I think to myself: you can't really have sandwiches without bread. Just like: you can't really have pies without pastry. When you use cheese instead of bread, you can't control the sandwich in the same way; it's like trying to write with a pencil while wearing gloves.

  But maybe, as a lowcarb dieter, I shouldn't be sandwich-minded. I feel slightly guilty, like a Communist yearning for personal wealth, or a vegetarian who buys "cheatin'chicken5l or soya products tricked up to look like bacon. Anyway, I walk back into the kitchen, put another tomato slice in my sandwich, and I begin to eat the cheese, tomato and turkey combination with a knife and fork, and ... it's not bad, really not very bad at all.

  And when I sit down, I tell myself, that, yes, I have definitely lost weight, and, yes, this weight loss is definitely a good thing. I feel perkier, lighter, less bulky. I fit my clothes better. When I walk along the street, I know I do not compute in people's eyes as 'fat man', and this subtly alters my status, it affects me in a million tiny ways, all of which are positive.

  And yet ... can bread be bad? Can pasta be bad? And rice and potatoes and pastry and couscous? Can I go through life