Leith, William (16 page)

infections. Some of them were the kind that aren't easy to knock out. But I managed.'

`What sort of infections were these?'

`Oh, mycoplasma and chlamydia infections that can get involved and infect the heart.'

`And how did you come by these infections?'

`Well, as a doctor, I'm treating an awful lot of sick people, and I presume I've been exposed to these infections just because so many different people come into our office.'

`I see.'

`Now, I still don't know where the infections come from, but unfortunately I do have a kind of infection that you bring under control but you never really eradicate. So that I always have to be extremely careful to make sure that my resistance to these infections is always great.'

`Right.'

I have to take lots of vitamins E and C and A, vitamins which help knock out infections. I have to take about sixty vitamin pills a day.'

`Sixteen?'

`Sixty.'

`Sixty?'

`Sixty.'

We leave the office and walk down the stairs and out on to the sidewalk, and outside dusk has fallen, and Atkins tells me he's looking forward to his dinner, which he says will be `fish and about three or four vegetables, plus a salad'. Plus, presumably, ten or fifteen or possibly even twenty vitamin pills. Atkins walks east, towards his apartment, and the last I see of him he is on the sidewalk, walking past the spot

where, in forty-five days, he will so controversially lose his footing.

And I'm thinking: it's not me, it's the food. I walk to a restaurant and order a large steak with spinach and no fries, and I go to my hotel and pack my bags and call my parents, and I tell my mother that I think I've found the solution to my father's weight problems, which are worse than mine, and mention the name Atkins, and I mention the Atkins diet, which she's heard of but doesn't know much about. I take a cab to the airport, and I don't buy a bar of chocolate or a bagel or a toasted sandwich at the airpci t, and on the plane I don't eat a bag of pretzels or a second bag of pretzels, and when the stewardess serves me my dinner, beef and vegetables and potatoes, I eat the beef and vegetables, but not the potatoes, and I don't have the croissant for breakfast, or the toast, and after the plane lands I move along the travolator feeling lighter and more optimistic than I have in ages, and at the station I walk through the big, crowded concourse, swiftly past the snackpoints and mobile eateries, the bagel kiosks and baguette hatches, and I get home and later I buy some bacon and eggs and tomatoes and broccoli, and for dinner I eat another steak and a tomato salad, and my girlfriend is not sure about the Atkins diet, not sure at all, and I go to sleep feeling less bloated than usual, and when I wake up I feel hungry, but not so desperate as before, not quite so empty, and I go into the kitchen and I don't make myself any toast and my girlfriend is sitting on the sofa, smoking her second cigarette of the day, and I don't say anything about it. That's her affair.

It was the food. The food was the problem. I put some

butter in the frying pan, and wait for the butter to melt, and put two rashers of bacon in the pan. Then I put another rasher in the pan. As the bacon sizzles, I take an egg out of the carton, and break the egg on the side of the pan, and slide the egg into the sizzling mixture of butter and bacon fat, and watch the transparent albumen as it gets denser, cloudier, more opaque.

A Creeping Sense of Dread

Over the next few days, I find myself repeatedly standing over my kitchen sink, squirting detergent into my frying pan, running hot water over the cooking surface, watching the waxy deposits of fat melting and dribbling away.

Fat.

I hate fat.

No, I don't. I hate carbs.

I brush the pan clean, using circular motions, and put the pan straight back on the hob. The frying pan is no longer 'one of the pans'. It's 'the pan'. I no longer bother, between meals, to hang it up on its old hook alongside the saucepans and the wok.

The first week is fine. In the mornings I have bacon and eggs, or maybe an omelette, and for lunch I have an omelette, and for dinner I have steak and salad, or fish and salad, or maybe an omelette with salad. I get better and better at making omelettes. I put three eggs in a bowl, and add some grated cheese, and fry onions and tomatoes, and pour the eggs into the pan, and after a few minutes I put my plate over

the pan, and flip the omelette into the plate, and slide the omelette back into the pan, to cook the other side.

I keep discovering new omelettes. Omelette with wilted

I wilted leaves. Omelette with wilted salad vegetables. Omelette with cheese and wilted salad vegetables.

My hunger subsides. After a couple of days, I stop thinking about food all the time. After a week I only think about food a couple of hours a day, at mealtimes. And I must say, not being hungry all the time is a strange feeling, strange and slightly disconcerting. As I get less hungry, I find myself with more time on my hands. One day, after about a week, I'm sitting at home, trying to write something, and I get up to take a snack break. I walk into the kitchen, and it's as if something is amiss I'm not hungry. Temporarily, I am without a purpose. So I pour myself a glass of water from the tap, and drink half of it, and sit back down again at my desk, suffused with a creeping sense of dread.

Maybe I should have some macadamia nuts. No, I've run out of macadamia nuts.

Maybe I should have some bacon and eggs. But I don't want bacon and eggs. I'm not hungry.

And I realize there's something I miss, more than bread, more than potatoes, more than fluffy white rice or pasta. Don't get me wrong I do miss these things. I miss the rush of blood sugar I used to get after eating a few slices of toast or a flapjack or a bagel, and I miss the crunch of cornflakes and bran flakes, and I miss twirling a bunch of spaghetti in the tines of my fork, the elasticy feel of undercooked spaghetti, the farinaceous pasty sensation of chewed spaghetti. I miss the crispy outsides of fries and the starchy, comforting gravy—

sponge of mashed potatoes on my plate in the evening, a hot, bland pile I can lose myself in.

Most of all, though, I miss being hungry.

My Clothes are Slacker

Still, I'm losing weight. I lose about three pounds in the first week and three pounds in the second week, and I definitely feel less puffy, less tight around the face and neck. My clothes are slacker. After two weeks, I look in the mirror, and there it is my jacket no longer hangs like the skin of a snake. It's beginning to hang like a jacket.

And, as the weeks go by, I stop craving carbohydrates. In restaurants, it's easy I just have a salad instead of the fries, or the mash, or whatever. When I want a snack, I eat macadamia nuts. I keep buying these packs of macadamia nuts, 75 grams, which is slightly too much for a quick snack, but I tend to tear off the corner of the pack and pour them all into my mouth, and they're great, and I love them, and they hardly make me feel sick at all, but sometimes I look at the information on the pack, and it scares me. One hundred grams of macadamia nuts, it says, contain 748 calories. So a pack is 560. And that's just a quick snack!

But then I remember that it's not calories I should be counting, but carbs. And macadamia nuts are very low in carbs. And I'm losing weight. And my clothes are slacker.

My Fat Self

I'm talking to a friend over the phone, somebody I haven't seen for a while and who is overweight, has always been overweight. I mention Atkins, and the overweight friend says that he or she, I have agreed not to identify the person, even by gender, is also doing Atkins. So we have an Atkins conversation, and this person is definitely less enthusiastic than me. About a week later, this person calls again, and tells me that he or she has stopped doing Atkins, even though it had been working, even though being overweight had been the biggest problem in his or her life.

`Why have you stopped?'

`I don't know.'

`Did it stop working?'

`No, it's not that.'

`So why did you stop?'

`I don't know.'

Soon after this, I go to see this person, and we have dinner, and I explain my interest in diets, and this person agrees to talk to me about diets, about his or her history of diets.

We talk for hours, and I realize that, even though we've known each other for years, we've never talked about weight or diets, and, towards the end of the evening, we're talking about how magazines are full of thin people, the usual stuff. I remember a feature in a glossy magazine about how fat people dread the summer, particularly going to the beach. This is an article written by a woman, and it's full of pain and despair; in the article the author says the beach is a no-go area for overweight people. The piece is illustrated with a picture

of a woman on a balcony, wearing sunglasses, looking mournfully down at the beach. And the woman get this is slim. No, she's actually thin.

The person I'm talking to, the overweight person, lets out a little yelp, a yelp of actual pain. And we talk about what it's like to be fat, and what it's like to buy clothes when you're fat.

I say, 'It's enough to make you want to ... eat.' `Yes. Right.'

And somehow, aware of how hard this will be, I steer the conversation around to the subject of compulsive eating, and this person says that, yes, he or she is a compulsive eater.

`Can I talk to you about it?'

`OK. But I don't want to be identified.'

`That's fine.'

We talk for a while about compulsive eating. He or she says that he or she compulsively eats only when alone. In the evenings. Pizzas, pasta meals, avocados with mayonnaise, oven fries, tinned shellfish.

`Elton John had a thing for tinned shellfish.'

`Yes, well.'

`I can't do tinned shellfish myself.'

`Oh, when you start you can't stop. A jar of cockles . `Why did you stop doing Atkins?'

`I don't know.'

`Is it because you actually like being hungry?'

`What?'

`Is it because, you know, deep down you sort of actually want to be, you know . . .'

,What?'

`Well, you know.'

`No, I don't know. Want to be what?'

`Well, overweight.'

`No.'

`Susie Orbach says . .

`That's stupid.'

`Well, when I started doing Atkins, I .

`That's rubbish! And when you write this, I don't want to be identified at all. No identifying details. I don't even want you to say if I'm a man or a woman.'

`OK. Fine.'

We look across into the corners of the room. There is awkwardness, a depth of embarrassment and shame. I nod my head, trying to look serious.

We catch each other's eye. And for a moment it's like looking at myself. My fat self.

A Thursday Morning in February

It's a Thursday morning in February and I'm drinking a glass of water, something you're supposed to do on a lowcarb diet. Atkins, for instance, recommends drinking eight glasses of water a day. And every day, somebody a newspaper columnist or a nutritionist on the radio or somebody I meet in the street tells me that I should be drinking more water. One of our big problems is that we're dehydrated partly, I think, because we are obsessed with consumption, and drinking water doesn't quite feel like consumption. Somebody told me

something very interesting about water the other day. I wish I could remember what it was.

Is my memory going? A friend of mine, an Atkins sceptic, told me that cutting out carbohydrates adversely affects the memory. We were sitting in a bar.

I say: 'Have you read this?'

`I heard it somewhere.'

`So it might not be true.'

`Well, I wouldn't take the risk.'

`But you're drinking beer.'

`So?'

`Well, we know that beer destroys brain cells.'

`Yes, but . . .'

`But what?'

`But ... this is just beer.'

This morning I had a cup of peppermint tea and some blueberries, which are low in sugar, and a very tart cup of sugar-free cranberry juice. I made that up. Actually I got out of bed and had a talk with my girlfriend and when she went to work I walked down the road to a cafe and ordered a full English breakfast two sausages, bacon, a fried egg, and a fried tomato, which felt like quite a lot, almost too much, although I got through it. Soon I will be able to leave food I don't want on my plate.

As I'm sipping my water, which is from the tap, and has a metallic aftertaste, I'm thinking about the talk I had with my girlfriend. She wants to quit smoking, and she's waiting for `the right time'. I told her that if she wants to quit smoking, she should quit smoking.

I said: 'I stopped eating carbohydrates.'

`Smoking is different.'

`Not really.'

,Oh come on.'

`Carbohydrates are addictive.'

`They are so not!'

`They are! They give you a buzz! They make your blood sugar go up

`Not this again.'

`Well, it's true.

`It's not the same.'

My girlfriend took a cigarette from the packet, put it in her mouth, clicked her lighter, sucked on the cigarette, a sharp tug, and sucked on it again, removed it from her mouth, and looked at the end, put the cigarette back in her mouth, and tugged on it again, and removed it from her mouth again, sucked down a ball of smoke, held the smoke in her lungs, tilted her head upwards, and blew the smoke out in a narrow stream, a rhythmic procedure, complex, automatic.

`It is the same. I was addicted to carbohydrates.'

`Look. I've been smoking, apart from twice when I quit, which, added together, is about two weeks I've smoked every day of my adult life. I don't know what adult life is like without smoking.'

`Well, I ate carbs every day of my adult life. And my childhood too. I mean, I probably ate carbs every day of my life after the age of, I mean, even when I was a baby.'

My girlfriend sucked on the cigarette again and removed it and inhaled the smoke, and held it and tilted her head and blew it out, a long, steady stream. She said, 'Yes, but smoking is connected to my emotions. If I can't smoke I feel all these emotions welling up. And that's why it's so hard to quit.'