Leith, William (3 page)

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 and, 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.

And Sadie she kept telling me I was too fat. Sometimes it was just little hints, funny looks at the dinner table, mean little rolls of the eyeball (oh, that can crush you) and sometimes it was The Frank Discussion. Sadie told me that I was becoming so fat that I was beginning to be unattractive to her. I was only mildly porky when I met her 208 lbs but then, somehow, in a horrible, inexorable way, I'd started to get fatter and fatter. I couldn't understand what had happened. `Your weight,' she said, 'is a problem.' And: 'Should you be eating that?'

And: 'Don't have any more of that.'

And: 'Do you really need that?'

And: 'Come on, why don't you just leave some?' And: 'I told you before, your weight's a problem.' And: 'No I'm not sulking.'

And: 'Why are you always thinking about food?' And: 'I'm just tired, that's all.'

And: 'I've got a headache.'

And: 'I know, I know. But I really do have a headache.' And: 'Can't you do something about it?'

And: 'Would you want to have sex with me if I was fat?' And: 'Have you ever considered therapy?'

Sadie absolutely hated fat, the very idea of it.

I remember one time we'd arranged to go and see Sadie's mother. We had to rush out of the house without having breakfast. We arrived at lunchtime and went out and sat in the garden. It was hot; I was hungover and cranky with low blood-sugar. After about twenty minutes, I realised that the reason lunch had not been mentioned was that lunch was not going to be mentioned. I looked at Sad
ie.
She looked away. And I asked if I could have something to eat. And I remember what I got part of a baguette, torn off, with a bit of cheddar. And I realized that the world is made up of two types of people. Those who measure out their lives in terms of food, and those who don't.

In any case, Sadie withheld sex as a motivation for me to lose weight. When we did have sex, she would take charge. I was fat, and she hated fat; in her eyes, I was diminished. So naturally, she felt a need to take charge. She had this one position she favoured. I would lie on my back which, being fat, I preferred anyway and she would lower herself on top of me, and then tell me to do a specific thing. I felt I had to get it exactly right. When she was finished, she'd give me an opportunity to finish, and then she'd get up quickly, slightly flushed, and put her underwear back on. Afterwards she wouldn't talk about it, as if it had never happened. Sometimes I would do the specific thing slightly wrong and she'd be furious she'd get up suddenly, angry, and put her underwear back on, and that would be that. Once I had to stop doing the specific thing because I got a cramp in my hand.

`What are you doing?'

`I'm sorry.'

`Well, I can't go on now,' she said. Then she got up, put her underwear back on, and walked out of the room.

My Montignac diet went well. I stopped eating carbs. I stopped being hungry. Every day, I had some fruit for breakfast, and for lunch I boiled up a lot of frozen broccoli and frozen Brussels sprouts, which I ate with salt and pepper and a little butter. The weight dropped off. I lost 10 lbs in the first three weeks. Still Sadie withheld sex. But she said she'd have sex with me on my birthday.

I didn't know how to feel about this. Girls had said this sort of thing to me before, but that was when I was a teenager. Even so, I had to admit I was excited. I had got thinner. Maybe Sadie felt better about me. Maybe our arguments would stop. Maybe the troublesome hell that was our relationship would get better. On the day itself, we went into the bedroom. I lay on the bed. Sadie closed the curtains. It was afternoon. I kept my shirt on, but unbuttoned it. Lying down, in the shady room, I looked ... chubby. Not too bad. Sadie took her clothes off, and arranged her slim body over mine, her knees outside my hips. She lowered herself, but not quite the full distance. I started doing the specific thing. From the start, I could tell I was doing it right. After a while, she was finished. But I hadn't started. Then she got up, put her underwear on, and stood in the middle of the room, getting dressed.

I said, 'Why did you do that?'

She said, 'Oh, come on. I've had enough of this. You said you wanted to go to the cinema. So let's go to the cinema.'

When we got to the cinema, there were no films she wanted to see. It didn't seem to matter that there were lots of films I wanted to see. I was too fat. She was in charge. My fat had reduced me to the ranks. Soon after that, I stopped Montignac altogether. I stuffed myself with bagels, croissants, thick slices of white toast and butter, and bars of chocolate. I started putting sugar in my coffee again. And my drinking took off. If you'd asked me about Montignac, I'd have said that, sure, I believed in the principles. It was just that, somehow, it hadn't worked. I was fat before Montignac, and fat afterwards. It was a diet. It had no palpable effect. So what was new?