Leith, William (32 page)

It's All About Your Parents

So is therapy the solution? I don't know. At the moment it's all about my parents. What a surprise. Sometimes I think therapists ought to have a sign on the door saying `It's All About Your Parents'. Still, I've only been doing it for seventy or eighty hours. And I'm not absolutely sure, but I think I know what I'll be talking about after another seventy or eighty hours. I think I'll be talking about my parents. And one

day, like James Frey, I might stop looking around for someone else to blame. As I say, I am learning.

Moreish

My girlfriend has come out to the bench, and given me a rucksack and two bottles of mineral water. We're going on a walk today, a long hike. Ten miles along the tops of the hills, the South Downs, and then five miles to the coast, and then ten miles along the coast; she reckons we can do the whole twenty-five miles in a day. That's our objective. I'm a lot better at walking, now that I walk all the time. I'm no longer a sloucher or a schlepper. I no longer totter along as if I'm walking on high heels. These days, I walk like a guy in Gore-Tex boots.

She's gone back inside to do the toast. I want the toast, possibly a couple of slices with lots of butter. But I'm not in a toast frenzy. I think I'll be needing the trifle, too, for the sake of energy. But I'm not in a trifle frenzy, either. I feel hungry, but I don't feel empty. And soon I'll feel full, but I won't feel too bloated. Food is beginning to look different. It looks bigger, for one thing. It looks like food, and not something to take my mind off how I'm feeling. At the moment, I'm not feeling too bad.

I take a swig of the mineral water. It tastes fine. It tastes of nothing. I've heard it said that, if the modern problem is overconsumption, then mineral water is part of the solution. This is my 'favourite' brand, Fiji water. It's supposed to taste soft and pure, and I sort of think it does. They say it's so pure because it comes from a spring a thousand miles away from the nearest city, which is Auckland, New Zealand. The

spring is on the island of Vitilevu, the most populated of the Fijian islands; it is where, as Susie Orbach says, there has been a sudden influx of Westernisation such as eating disorders and television. If you drive through the island, you can see it the logos, the aerials, the teenagers in their new Nike T-shirts.

They want our affluence. We want their purity. They want to be full. We want to be empty.

When I asked the owner of Fiji water, David Gilmour, what he thought it tasted like, he said, 'Soft and moreish.'

The First Line of Attack

I'd booked an interview with Neville Rigby, the Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the International Obesity Task Force. The address of the Task Force's office is North Gower Street, and I vaguely knew the area, north of the Marylebone Road in central London, where there has been a lot of activity lately a clutch of gleaming glass towers, a bit of modern sculpture, a square fitted with a restaurant, a Starbucks, a Pret A Manger.

I walked through the square, and then through some back streets, and then some council housing. I couldn't find the street, let alone the office. When I did, I thought I'd made a mistake. It was a dingy office building from the 1960s. The IOTF was on the second floor. There was a note tacked to the door: 'INTERCOM DOES NOT WORK. WAIT FOR SOMEBODY TO COME DOWN AND LET YOU IN.'

I pressed the buzzer. A woman arrived and led me up the stairs. There were two people in the offices of the International Obesity Task Force. One was Rigby. The other was the woman, a trainee.

Later, another woman popped in. We drank tea and chatted about the problem of obesity, and about what the Task Force was doing to stop its spread.

I thought: this is the international scientific community's answer to the problem of obesity. In contrast, McDonald's opens premises this size every few days.

Rigby had an air of cautious optimism. There are many reasons, he said, for the growth of obesity. Many, many reasons. Families don't sit down for meals so much any more. People, therefore, are snacking more. Snacks are fattening. In the Western world, he said, we are being driven into an ethic of overwork. People demand convenience, so they shop in supermarkets, where the food tends to be more fattening.

There was lots more. 'Pressures are coming at us from all directions,' said Rigby. 'The simplest example I can think of is that when I first started driving a car, I couldn't go into a petrol station and buy any food. It wasn't allowed by law. The petrol companies persuaded the government to change the regulations to allow food to be sold in petrol stations.'

Rigby continued listing the things which were making us fatter. Vending machines are now more sophisticated. Electronic devices tell the vending company when they need refilling. Calories are everywhere.

The big problem, said Rigby, was the food industry. 'Most of us,' he said, `get information about food from the people who are selling it to us. They would like to control the

message. They would like to shape the message to fit their marketing needs.'

Rigby said, 'They come up with this recital of "there is no such thing as a good food or a bad food". This is fundamental science, they say. Where is it fundamental science? Show me a textbook where it says so. And it isn't. There are no studies which definitively explain that there is no such thing as a good food or a bad food. It's an industry mantra. But if you have your largest proportion of your nutritionists and your dieticians and so on getting their income, in some way or another, from the food industry, then they tend to have views which reflect those who are paying them.'

In the Starr Report, said Rigby, there is a passage describing Bill Clinton, in flagrante with Monica Lewinsky, breaking off his activities to answer the phone. 'The caller was a sugar baron from Florida,' said Rigby. 'He actually stopped what he was doing to take the sugar baron's call. The call was about a particular tax on sugar. And the tax never materialized! The tax evaporated! The very people who were involved in that had donated huge amounts of money to his political campaigns!'

There was more, much more. The companies who make soft drinks are investing in `neuromarketing', advertising that makes use of medical research identifying areas of the brain involved in hunger, desire, and compulsion. More money is being pumped into the selling of doughnuts. Confectionery is up. Exercise is down.

But, said Rigby, there is some hope. The IOTF are lobbying the industry around the clock. A 'slow food' movement is thriving in Italy. And, at last, the government have begun tolisten, at least in the area of salt. A campaign to halt salt is imminent. Salt, said Rigby, is 'the first line of attack'. I walked down the stairs and into the dingy street, remembering to click the latch on my way out.

Passing Out

We walk up the hill, and along the top of the hill, and down into a valley, and up another hill. The endorphins begin to take effect about halfway up the second hill. After about five miles, we sit down under a tree and eat a bar of chocolate each. After ten miles we take a detour into a village and buy some kind of pie, which is all we can find, and which is disgusting. It doesn't matter, because I've had a bowl of trifle sponge cake with cream, custard, jelly, and glace cherries and a few slices of toast. I don't think there's any real answer to the obesity crisis. Getting fat it's in the system. In a way, it is the system. I heard an item on the radio the other day, in which an obesity expert was asked, 'If the government could do one thing to stop the obesity crisis, what would it be?'

The man paused, and said, 'That's the trouble. There is no one thing you can do. You have to do ... everything.'

As a society, we're getting fatter and lazier and more anxious and depressed. Why? Because the alternative is unthinkable. The alternative is to change everything. The alternative is to stop investing in extrinsic values. And that's not going to happen, is it?

When she put on weight to play the part of Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Renee Zellweger said she

felt 'really great. I got such positive responses from the fellows in my life while I looked like Bridget Jones. I had a lot of friends who said I should think about keeping some of the weight on. I have to say I agreed, because there were certain things about it I liked very much. But of course, I'm a girl, and I thought, "Ugh, no." Like anybody, I want to look my best.'

We reach the river and walk along the river to the sea, a few more miles, and it's getting painful, and we cross the river and walk along the coast, on the tops of cliffs, and press on, through the pain.

In general, I'm not optimistic. I went to see this fat friend of mine again, the one who does not want to be identified, even by gender. We went for dinner, and he or she said, 'You haven't asked me about my eating.'

`Well, maybe you don't want to talk about it.'

`Ask me a question.'

`How much do you weigh?'

`I don't want to talk about that.'

`Why?'

`I'm not talking about it.'

`I'm not asking you to tell me how much you weigh. I'm asking you why you don't want to tell me.'

`And I don't want to tell you that either.'

`Why? What would happen if I knew how much you weighed?'

`I just don't want to tell you.'

`I think that's interesting.'

`I don't want to go there.'

`But if you want to lose weight, you've got to make a start. You should talk to someone.'

`Has it worked for you?'

I think it's helping.'

`Well, it wouldn't work for me. I know what my problem

is.'

,You know what it is, but you don't want to talk about it?'

`No.'

`You know what this thing is, but it's too powerful?'

`Something like that.' `It's bigger than you.'

`Yes.'

`Or maybe you want it to be bigger than you. Maybe you're

afraid of what would happen if you took it on, and won.'

`Don't give me that cheap shit! I can't stand that cheap shit!

All those stupid, meaningless catchphrases! I can't be summed up like that!'

`OK, OK.'

`I'm not in denial! I'm not being defensive!'

`OK, OK.'

And I thought: the fat society is just like the fat individual. I know. I've been fat.

After twenty miles, I start to feel twinges. I am creaky. My ankles are sore. My calves are sore. My knees hurt when I walk down hills. After twenty-three miles, I feel better; after twenty-four, worse.

When we reach the town, we're hobbling. Nobody is around. Dusk is falling. We check into a hotel, and walk out again, looking for somewhere to eat, and we find a pizza restaurant, and I order spaghetti with a meat sauce, and some garlic bread, and a bottle of wine, and the exercise has galvanized us, and the sugar in the wine and the carbohydrate

in the bread and pasta give me a wonderful blood-sugar spike, and now I like food and we laugh, and we talk about how odd it was that I went to her wedding all those years ago, that I wanted to look good at her wedding, and now she's divorced. I stop eating when I'm full, and we walk back to the hotel, and sit on the bed, gripped by fatigue, and we pass out without taking our clothes off, not even our shoes, and when I wake up the next morning I think of the exact moment of passing out, possibly the happiest moment of my life.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

William Leith is a journalist who has written

about subjects as diverse as cosmetic surgery, African

royalty, Hollywood directors, and drugs. He writes

regularly for the Guardian, the Observer and the

Daily Telegraph.

Share your experiences on our discussion board and

find out more about The Hungry Years at

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A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after

the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan

Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype

and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to

be available in identical form for mechanical hot metal

composition and hand composition using foundry type.

Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font

engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by

Granjon. It was first used in 1966 and has proved

an enduring modern classic.