Leith, William

by The Hungry Years

  We moved through the thick, nervy Paris traffic. Baudrillard once wrote, 'I detest the bustling activity of my fellow citizens, detest initiative, social responsibility, ambition, competition.' On pavements, women were walking to work. 'It would be so nice to tear them from the blankness of the morning air and plunge them back into their beds,' Baudrillard wrote of these women. He had written that he found women walking to work in the morning 'erotic'.

  Baudrillard's apartment was in Montparnasse, on the south side of central Paris, in a street too narrow to exist on the Paris streetfinder. We moved towards him past famous iconic buildings ('They are not monuments, they are monsters.') One thing I liked about him was that he had a

  pronouncement for every place, every situation and emotion. Here he is on being fat: 'The overweight person ... says "I lack everything so I will eat anything at all." ' And on being slim: 'The obsession with becoming slimmer and slimmer is the obsession with becoming an image.'

  The taxi driver dropped me off at the end of Baudrillard's street. I pressed his doorbell, opened the door and found myself in a large hall with a high ceiling. There was a lift. But I took the steep stairs. Baudrillard was at the top of the building. He once wrote about a girlfriend who 'does not take the lift, but goes up the stairs instead and undresses floor by floor her sweater, her skirt, her shoes, her watch, finally, just outside the door, her knickers; then she rings the bell. When I open the door, she is standing there completely naked, like a dream.'

  I rang the bell. I felt obscene, obese, totally out of breath. The door opened. A smallish, compact man, definitely the eyebrow-raiser from the photographs, opened the door and backed away. He was wearing an expensive, open-necked shirt and a V-neck sweater of very fine wool. He looked at his watch. I was, of course, late. Time was short.

  The apartment was bathed in light. There was a sitting-room, a study, a bedroom. In the study were two bookshelves one for his books, and another one for books by other people.

  He said, 'What do you want to talk about?'

  `I thought ... the obscene. Your concept of obscenity. And other things.'

  We talked about other things for a while. He had recently taken up photography. 'When you are a photographer,' he

  said, 'you are a keen observer, an ethnographer, a hunter. There is a link with hunting. And also there is a link with travelling. So, for me, photography is a little bit like travelling. It's connected with journeys, moving around. But above all, it's connected with objects. There are no human beings.'

  He continued. He said that photography was 'the art of making the object appear, the subject disappear. In other words, me. I try, in fact, to disappear.'

  He got up from his sofa and went to the desk and picked up tobacco and a cigarette-rolling device. I asked him to tell me about his general world-view. He said, 'Where shall we start, then? Obscenity?'

  `Yes.'

  `I often talk about obscenity, but not necessarily in the sexual sense. General obscenity exists in a world where everything becomes transparent, everything is visible, there are no more secrets ... It's the same thing as pornography, if you like. That is to say that everything that existed before metaphor, utopia, dream, idealism, everything is immediately materialized. In pornography, materialized in a body, in a sexual act. But it's like that everywhere.'

  And for a moment, I could see it. Baudrillard was saying that the Western world had become bloated and pornographic obese, obscene. We had everything we wanted, in abundance. And it wasn't making us happy. It was making us hungry. He knew what the problem was. It was us. We were a virus. We were nothing but appetite. But was this something I wanted to believe?

  I said, 'Are you happy?'

  `Yes, I think I have succeeded in creating conditions of

  autonomy and freedom. So if that is happiness, no problem there. I have managed to avoid stress, impatience and all that. Anyway, I have invented for myself a sort of "jet lag" of a second state in which I can live. Not philosophically. just a question of existence. I keep a distance from a world which, for me, is not truly real, so the happiness which I can have in it is not necessarily real.'

  My Kind of Diagnosis

  `I knew I had something wonderful,' says Dr Atkins. I look back across the desk at him. The wonderful thing he had, of course, was the conviction that carbohydrates were the problem. Eating too much carbohydrate leads to overproduction of insulin. Overproduction of insulin leads to low blood sugar. Low blood sugar leads to food cravings. Food cravings lead to obesity. And diabetes. And misery on a catastrophic, global scale, legions of miserable people, wave after wave of fat bellies and chafing thighs and self-consciousness and anxiety and deep-seated feelings of not being attractive, not being worthy, not being loved. Women like Shelley Bovey, going through life terrified of public transport, men like Robbie Coltrane who really, really don't want to talk about it.

  Atkins and I talk about how insulin works in the body. For the record, I get him to take me through the cycle. I say: 'So, you eat carbohydrate . . .'

  Atkins: 'Your blood sugar goes up.'

  Me: 'Why does it come down so much?'

  Atkins: 'Because you then put out insulin. And insulin drives it down.'

  And we move on to the subject of hyperinsulinism. The pancreas produces insulin in response to carbohydrates, but if you repeatedly overeat carbohydrates, you reach a crucial tipping point, after which your pancreas produces far, far too much a veritable deluge of insulin, which causes a corresponding low tide of blood sugar, which triggers a cacophony of craving, which leads to an exponential population curve of obesity, an army of overeaters lining up under the golden arches.

  What a tempting analysis. The problem is carbohydrates! As Atkins says in his book, 'Many carbohydrate addicts could no more walk past a refrigerator without opening it than Venus or Serena Williams could let a short lob drift overhead without smashing it.'

  `You see,' Atkins goes on in his book, 'your food compulsion isn't a character disorder. It's a chemical disorder.'

  That's it! That's why I want to believe Atkins. If Atkins is right, the problem is not us, it's not the human condition. If Atkins were directing a disaster movie about the fat crisis, it would be one of those movies where the threat comes from outside, and can therefore be exorcized. It's just a bunch of spiders! It's just those pesky triffids! It's just the food we're eating! Atkins is saying that there isn't something essentially wrong with us, that there isn't something essentially wrong with me. I'm just eating wrong, that's all. And that's a diagnosis I like to hear. That's my kind of diagnosis.

  We talk on, as the sky darkens outside his office. Atkins roots around and produces charts, and shows me the results

  of surveys. He seems tired, but he doesn't want to stop. He makes no secret of the fact that he's not a top-level scientist. He's not a laboratory man. Equally, he doesn't seem like a huckster or a conman. He's a messenger. For three decades, he's been telling us this one thing, this one important fact. 'I didn't realize I'd be fighting the whole world,' he says. 'It didn't enter my mind.'

  Atkins grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His father was a restaurateur. A restaurateur, in the Midwest, in the 1950s! A vendor of fries! When his parents retired to Florida, Atkins put them on the Atkins diet.

  He lives in the shadow of his father. 'He was just an extremely likeable person that everybody sort of fell in love with. He was just a very wonderful role-model for teaching me to be a nice person.'

  `Yes?'

  `I will never be as nice as him. But he was special.' `What was his secret?'

  `He just truly liked people, and you could just tell.'

  My train of thought goes something like this. So there he was, the son of the neighbourhood restaurateur, the man who loved everybody, and fed everybody, a man who soothed the local populace with carbs, and was greatly loved in return. Hardly surprising, then, with food playing such a central role in the Atkins family set up, that Atkins began to overeat. And then he got chubby, and became
a chubby doctor, and one day, in 1963, he went back home to Dayton, and ate a huge Thanksgiving lunch with his family, travelled back to New York, looked at himself in the mirror, and felt waves of self-disgust. Here he was, 33 years old, unmarried and fat, living

  in a small apartment, and he'd just visited his folks, these great feeders of people he could never hope to emulate, and he'd eaten this meal, with potatoes and turkey and flour-based gravy and puddings a meal that, he tells me, went on all afternoon, until six o'clock. And he was filled with self-disgust. And so he became a diet doctor, the world's most famous diet doctor, and, later, when his parents had retired, he put them on his diet. He put his father on the Atkins diet! And what happened? His father followed the diet, and lived to be 84. His mother, who still lives in Florida at the age of 93, 'cheats too much. But she tries.'

  Atkins says, `Oh, I love working, what I'm doing now. Because the relationship I have with my patients is just like a love affair. They're so grateful. It's very gratifying to see them come back and then say, "Thank you, Dr Atkins." It's really incredible. Before I did this I don't think I knew what it was like to have a patient really thank me. But I mean, the emotion that goes into it. It's very gratifying.'

  Before I go, I have a question a delicate question. As a diet guru, Atkins is, in a sense, a living embodiment of his own work. And yet recently, one morning after breakfast bacon, sausages and eggs, as people have pointed out, sometimes snidely his heart stopped. He was rushed to hospital. He was diagnosed as having had a heart attack.

  `So do you feel a pressure to be healthy?'

  `Very much so,' says Atkins.

  `And does this make life ... difficult?'

  `Well, whenever I've come down with something, like I've had a few infections that have threatened my health, it's worried me a great deal, because I had to knock out the

  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.