Leith, William (7 page)

Fat people and their excuses. It really makes me angry. They're always whining, the whiny fat pigs. Why don't they just stop whining and do something about it? Why don't I just stop whining and do something about it?

The answer to that question is that I already am doing something about it. I'm on a diet. I've been on the diet for five minutes already, and I'm holding up fine. I'm doing better than that woman, anyway. Look I'm walking past the bagel cart! No eye contact with the bagel man. I am full of Day One thinking. Such as: if everything goes according to plan, the lowcarb way of life might make me slim, and, slim, I might become a better person. I might become my old self, the person I was before I became bloated and weak and self-deceiving. Sure, I got fat because I have problems. But maybe, if I get slim, I'll be able to tackle those problems in a more effective way. I can just see it myself, in however many months' time, sitting at my desk, slim, paying bills. Myself, in

however many months' time, slim, standing in the kitchen, holding a wet cloth. My girlfriend saying, 'Oh, you shouldn't have it was my turn!' Myself, slim, taking my clothes off, slowly, slim-style, before getting into bed. My girlfriend looking at me. Me not minding. Torso like Marlon Brando's in A Streetcar Named Desire. (When Brando was rehearsing the original play, Truman Capote went to interview him; later, Capote said that 'it was as if a stranger's head was attached to the brawny body'. The body was taut and muscular; the head was 'so very untough'. Ten years later, when Brando was beginning to be haunted by his personal demons, the powerful feelings of self-loathing that live inside the fat person or, in this case, the future fat person he told Capote, 'Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalised and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalised, develop scabs.' Then he said, 'Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you feel too much.'

Well, that's how he lived his life. Trying not to feel anything. Eating and feeling hungry and eating and feeling guilty and eating and getting fat and feeling bad about being fat, in order to avoid feeling his real emotions. Which is exactly what I do, and I know it. But I don't want to know it. So I don't think about it. I'm fat, and I hate being fat, but there is something else, something I believe is worse than being fat, something I can't bear to think about. What is it?

At my age, Brando was slimmer than me.)

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Wearing High Heels

I'd like to walk briskly, but my stomach muscles have gone, pushed outwards by the blob of churning dough which is my belly, so that the bottom half of my body feels as if it is not quite connected to the top half. I'm not a great walker. I'm a sloucher, a schlepper. I walk at the pace of a woman wearing high heels. Fat, I feel the raw power of the earth's gravitational pull. I move forward discordantly, propelled by the prow of my gut, my feet splayed outwards for maximum balance. Whenever I say I'm walking, don't imagine someone actually walking. Imagine effort, discomfort, pain, shame. A long-standing injury in my left ankle has been aggravated by my excess weight. My ankle is weak, but I'm fat, so I don't exercise it, so it gets weaker, and sometimes the ankle turns, just gives way, and I spill over, I fall down with an almighty crash. Falling down is much, much less dignified a thing to do when you're fat than when you're slim. I've fallen down slim, and I've fallen down fat, and there's a big difference. For instance, when a slim person falls down, people turn their heads and look in sympathy. A fat person falling down, on the other hand, is a tragicomic sight. And when I heave myself up, I stand on my bad ankle gingerly, to test it out. And when I walk, I naturally favour my right foot, which further weakens my left ankle, and puts a strain on my right calf. Recently, I had an ill-advised run the panic exercise of the not-quite obese male as he enters middle age. That morning, I looked at the scales. 230 lbs. I put on a pair of old trainers I had not worn for years. They felt brittle, deep-fried. I donned a tracksuit. I jogged through the park, hobbling slightly,

will consume. And, as Critser points out, the number of new snack products launched in America every year is growing exponentially from 250 per year in the late 1970s to 2,000 per year by the late 80s. And now what? Now what?

Perhaps more worrying still, Professor Schwartz believes that this degree of choice is driving us nuts. This overabundance, he says, 'may actually contribute to the recent epidemic of clinical depression affecting much of the Western world'. What happens to the consumer's head, Schwartz thinks, is that this level of choice drives up the consumer's expectations, which leads to disappointment, and eventually depression. People are spending more and more time searching the aisles for what they want, and then, when they get it, they find out that it's not what they want. It's just a cellophane bag full of reconstituted starch, flavoured with stuff like monosodium glutamate and methyl-2-peridylketone. It's not what they want at all, which makes them feel hollow and empty.

And when you feel hollow and empty, what do you want to do?

You want to eat. Just like the rats in an experiment conducted by Anthony Sclafini of Brooklyn College. Sclafini gave his rats access to foods high in carbohydrates and fat. They ignored more nutritious food, and became obese. The bad food had left them feeling empty, which made them want more of it. Presumably, the fat tasted good, and the carbs made them hungry.

I want to eat, of course, but, more importantly, I don't want to eat, I really don't want to eat. I want to be slim. If I eat any more, I'll be obese, putting myself at greater risk of, among other things, arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease,

carpal tunnel syndrome, deep vein thrombosis, diabetes, gallbladder disease, gout, heart disease, hypertension, impaired immune response, impaired respiratory function, infertility, liver disease, lumbar pain, pancreatitis, sleep apnea, stroke, and urinary stress incontinence.

So I drift back out of the deli, smiling, hands in pockets, avoiding the evil eye of the man behind the counter who is trying to kill me.

More

According to Dr Atkins, carbohydrate snacks, quite simply, do not satisfy you. That's why, as a product, the snack is doing so well. Americans spend $32 billion on snacks per year. You eat one, and you want another one. Eat. Want. It's a vicious circle or, if you're a manufacturer of snacks, a virtuous circle.

Snacks are an advertisement for themselves.

In a time of material abundance and consumer choice, the successful manufacturer must create more than just a product he must also create a need. Successful products are the ones that make you hungry. In other words, the products that do well are the ones that do not satisfy. Or, to put it another way, in the Darwinistic struggle of the modern marketplace, the ideal product is addictive.

The ideal product is the one that does not work. Like, say, pornography. Pornography doesn't really do the trick. Pornography is an advertisement for itself. The more pornography people have, the more they want.

a place where people actively repel each other. It is, in the words of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, 'the anti-Ark'. In some ways, it's the loneliest place in the world.

This is the fat society. This is where people come, so they can have exactly what they want. And what they want is ... more.

The Fat Society

I think the fat society is a lot like the fat individual. The fat society is a lot like me. I'm fat, but I don't know what to think about it. I'm fat, but I don't know what to do about it. I know I have to change my way of life, but I'm looking for a change that is superficial, rather than fundamental. Like me, the fat society doesn't really want to know the truth about itself. Fat people would rather die than know the truth. Fat people would rather eat than know the truth. They would rather eat themselves to death. Like I said, fat people have a complicated relationship with the truth. Fat people are the world's best liars. Never trust fat people.

Golden Arches

It's eleven o'clock, coffee time, time to refuel with a bagel or a doughnut and a cup of something hot, although it feels later to me, more like lunchtime. When you're fat, you live on fat time. Your clock is fat. I walk past a place with a sign that says 'Bagel', and past a place that says 'Bagels', and past a

Carbohydrate snacks make you hungry. They are culinary pornography, they are like Penthouse magazine. Looking at pictures of naked girls in Penthouse is not exactly having a meaningful relationship with women. Eating carbohydrate snacks is not exactly having a meaningful relationship with food. Fill yourself with snacks, and you'll feel empty a couple of hours later.

In his book Britain on the Couch, the clinical psychologist Oliver James writes, 'Put crudely, advanced capitalism makes money out of misery and dissatisfaction, as if it were encouraging us to fill the psychic void with material goods.' He also writes, `If you are feeling lousy today or in urgent need of a drink or a fix or a fling or a fight, you probably have low serotonin levels caused by the way we live now.' Serotonin, of course, is the brain chemical that makes us feel happy. According to the Australian nutritionist Jennifer Alden, eating sugar and refined carbohydrates, such as white flour and crispy snacks, causes the level of serotonin in the brain to rise temporarily, and then slump, inducing cravings similar to the effects of cocaine.

Like Anthony Sclafini's rats, we are hungry for the things that don't satisfy us. We crave the things that make us hungry. I'm thinking of carbohydrates, pornography, promiscuous sex, facelifts, cocaine, credit cards, computer games, and sugar.

What about things that do satisfy us? We're not so hungry for them, are we? Organic cabbage. Broccoli. Brussels sprouts. Jogging. Working at relationships. Here, in the heart of New York City, I am in the global centre of relationship angst. This, as Candace Bushnell shows in Sex and the City, is

place that says 'LUNCH'. Ahead of me I can see the golden arches of a McDonald's, flashing into my field of vision like a warning sign.

Fries!

Not good.

I'd only eat them and feel empty afterwards. Fries are pornography. Fries are an advertisement for themselves.

Look at this another way: fries can rely on that excellent ad agency inside your body, the pancreas, which, as a result of eating fries, produces too much insulin, which eats up the glucose in your blood, which gives you a blood-sugar crash, which makes you want to eat more fries.

This is what Dr Atkins says, and I can feel my belief strengthening. What if he is right?

But hang on what about the Cannon Conundrum? I can feel my belief in the Cannon Conundrum weakening. Diets make you fat, yes. But surely this is only the case when, by dieting, you reduce your total calorie intake. When you do this, of course, your body, not having evolved since hunter-gatherer times, thinks you can't find food, and switches to famine mode. When you reduce your calorie intake, your body tries as hard as it can to metabolize fat out of every bit of food it gets. And then, when you stop the diet, you put weight on. So Cannon was right. But only in a world in which diets were all about reducing calories.

Calorie-reducing diets, in fact, were just as bad as pornography and cocaine and fries. They didn't work, thus creating demand for themselves.

But Atkins is not a calorie-reducing diet, is it? It is simply a carbobydrate-reducing diet.

So perhaps it doesn't make you fat.

After the snacks I ate yesterday, my pancreas has been up all night, sitting at its desk, writing copy. The copy, which is on a crawler strip at the bottom of the screen of my mind, is crude but effective. It says, 'Eat snacks eat snacks eat snacks eat snacks eat snacks . . .'

I glance up at the golden arches. There is a pang in the centre of my body that feels like hunger, but also like other things anguish, loneliness, basic misery. A sort of all-purpose craving. The crawler strip at the bottom of the screen of my mind says, `Eat fries eat fries eat fries eat fries eat fries . .

I look away.

The Andy Warhol Diet

Perhaps Andy Warhol got it right. The Andy Warhol Diet: you go to an expensive restaurant, and order everything that disgusts you. And remember, this is an expensive restaurant, where some things can be seriously disgusting. When the food comes, it will make you feel sick, so you won't eat it. That's it. That's the Andy Warhol Diet. (Later, he would get the waiter to put the food in a doggy bag and then he'd leave it in the street for homeless people to eat, or feel disgusted by in their turn.)

How Did She Get Like That?

Remember what I said about the obese person's shuffle? Well, I'm walking behind an obese person now. A woman. I'm

walking slowly, but she's at crawling pace. She must weigh 300 lbs. The pyramid of her trunk sits uneasily on her hips, which are joined to splayed, bulky legs. As she walks, she rotates slightly from a central axis, hammering pain and destruction downwards on her ankles, knees, hips, and lumbar region. Her arms stick out sideways from her body because of the large pannier-sized bulges on the outside of her ribs. Large veinless puffy hands with dimpled knuckles swing outwards, high and free, pushed upwards by the buttress of the woman's excess flesh, almost as if she's waving at the people she's walking past.

But she's not waving.

And people, in general, do not seem happy to see this woman. Fat or thin, we are not happy to see obese people in public. Just ask an obese person. As this woman walks along, people narrow their eyes or rotate their heads a few degrees away from her. 'Yuck!'That's what they're saying. And: 'Ugh!'

And: 'Jesus.'

And: 'God, don't let me get like that!'

And: 'Poor soul.'

Two slim, younger guys catch each other's eye, and their cheeks plump up, their eyes flash. This is: 'Whoo!' This is: `Catch that, Dude!' A couple of people walk past, staring straight ahead. This is: 'I really don't want to go there.'

Looking at people, you can well imagine the stuff that's passing through their minds. Like, 'How did she get like that?'