Leith, William

by The Hungry Years

  Neal Barnard's book, which promotes the virtues of a high-carbohydrate, vegetarian diet, is called Eat Right, Live Longer.

  Flares

  I wake up naked, I think alone, and there's a buzzing sound which, it turns out, is not my alarm clock but coming from inside my head, and I get out of bed, walk into the bathroom, and look at my body in the mirror. Not bad. It turns out that I am alone. My torso, which used to be square and bloated, is definitely taking on the beginnings of a V-shape; the shoulders are much broader than the waist. I weigh myself, looking closely at the poundage, pressing my feet into different areas of the scale. 203 lbs. Not bad. In the most advantageous position, I can get 201. But I'll stick with 203. Ten more pounds, I'd say, and I'll be fine.

  Walking over to the mantelpiece, a towel around my waist, hungover but not unpleasantly so, I study a picture I took of myself more than a decade ago. I stood in front of a full-length mirror and used a Polaroid camera. In the picture, I am wearing tennis shorts, white socks, white trainers, and nothing else. My belly is flat, and there is some definition; the middle part is separated from the edges. I can almost, but not quite, see the muscles. I cannot, however, see my face, which is obscured by flash.

  Fifteen more pounds and I will have the beginnings of muscle definition in my stomach. And has losing weight made a difference to my life? In many ways, yes. For a start, the clothes I wear look more or less like they do on the mannequins in the windows of the stores where I buy them. Seams are not pulled out of shape. The clothes will last longer, too. I once had a girlfriend who told me that certain people, mostly fat and bulky people, wear clothes out quickly; their bodiesare hard on the seams. Well, I used to be hard on seams, and now I'm not. And when I try clothes on, I no longer have to look at them purely in terms of minimizing bulk; I buy them if

  they look good.

  I pop three ibuprofen tablets, which I know I shouldn't be doing, but I drank too much vodka last night, but at least I had it with Diet Coke. Which makes me think of the Diet Coke ad in which a group of office girls rush to a window to get a good look at a builder with a perfectly toned body. Now that I'm not so fat, I think the ad is good, funny even, and I can admit something to myself that I would not have admitted before when I was fat, ads like that made me uneasy. Not because the man is being sexually objectified, but because the man is slim and toned, and I was fat, and the message, that women would not find me attractive unless I had a great body, made me feel uneasy.

  People are always saying that women don't really want men to have a great body, that what they want is a man who will make them laugh, or a man who will take care of them and make them feel special, but I don't think that's the point. When you don't have a great body, you behave differently around women you behave like an insecure person. If you're fat, women do not respond well to you, not because of the fat itself or not only because of the fat itself but because of the fat mindset that accompanies the .fat. I've noticed, for instance, that I walk differently now that I've lost weight, and this is not only because I'm carrying less baggage physically. When I was fat, I slouched and shuffled partly because I felt, in a deep, almost instinctive way, that I didn't deserve to carry myself with any elegance.

  And now, when I see myself in mirrors, in windows, on CCTV cameras, I see a normal person. When I take my shirt off at home, my eye does not slide instinctively to the window to see if anybody is looking. My posture, in general, is no longer defensive.

  Yesterday I tried on the jeans I've been saving for the last ten years, and they fitted. I can wear my old jeans! Unfortunately, I don't want to.

  When I went into the cupboard, and took them out, I thought that, by wearing these old jeans, the jeans I last wore in 1993, I would be able to erase a decade of bad living. I thought that, by wearing my old jeans, I might be able to reenter my life as it had been, to think the thoughts and feel the feelings of my former slim self. I unfolded the jeans. I put them on. They fitted perfectly. And yet they looked ... wrong. They looked strange. Ugly, even.

  What was going on? The old jeans are subtly, rather than dramatically, different from the jeans I wear now. They are slightly baggier around the knees, slightly tighter around the calves. And yet they look completely wrong. Did I walk around in jeans that looked like this? Yes, I did. At the time, I thought they looked good.

  Ten years ago, these jeans looked right.

  Something has happened to the way I look at things, and I have had no control over it.

  These days, I wear trousers that are almost ... flares. Flares, as an aesthetic choice, have crept up on me. I hardly noticed.

  Of course, I wore flares as a kid. I loved them. We all did. They just felt ... right. Like long, frizzy hair, and slightly

  chunkier models on magazine covers. The guys you admired in those days were different, too more solid, with broader shoulders and less muscle definition. The girls had rounder thighs and bottoms, bigger breasts. Back in the seventies, flares looked fine, and the bodies you saw, in magazines and on the television, in parks and on beaches, did not vary so much as bodies do these days there were not so many obese people, and not so many skinny people. When you thought of male film stars, you thought of them with clothes on. I don't think I would have been able to conjure up an image of what, say, Clint Eastwood's stomach looked like. All those spaghetti westerns, and he did not leave an identifiable memory of abs or Pecs. Now, when I think of Clint Eastwood's stomach, I think of the vaguely sagging flesh of the Clint character in The Bridges of Madison County, a movie made in the more body-conscious 1990s.

  I can't remember James Stewart's stomach, or John Wayne's, or Gary Cooper's, or Gregory Peck's, Henry Fonda's, or even Robert Mitchum's, although I must have seen them. The camera looks at men differently now. I can tell you about Brad Pitt's stomach rippled, tan, moist-looking like connective tissue. And Dennis Quaid he's cut into panels, but skinnier and whiter, like a hard guy from a poor background. And Jack Nicholson I think of as surprisingly flabby, but only because he didn't show his body much in his earlier films or rather, it wasn't presented to us for inspection. Like East-Wood, he's had the misfortune to be pored over in his later, fatter years. John Travolta was a perfect V-shape in Saturday Night Fe,,,, and then muscled up for the forgettable sequel, Staying Alive, and was slightly fat in Pulp Fiction. He loves

  burgers and fries, he says, and has a huge appetite and loses weight by exercising. Like a shark, he must keep moving the moment he stays still, he bloats.

  And Joey from Friends is chunky, with inflated pees, and Chandler, like me, has yo-yo weight, he can have quite a double chin, and, like me, he has had trouble with drink and painkillers.

  After I loved flares, I hated them, and now I don't hate them as much as I thought I did, in the same scary way that I probably like slightly skinnier women than I did before, with slightly higher, firmer breasts, smaller bottoms, and a pubic hairstyle of some kind, it's hard to remember how it used to be, but in the past, right through to the mid-eighties, women just let their pubic hair grow, and now a full thatch is the exception rather than the rule, most women I know are getting waxed and plucked, buying trimming tools, reading about different pubic hairstyles on the beauty pages, and this, of course, will happen to men.

  `Beckham shaves,' I was told the other day, with some authority.

  `Beckham shaves?'

  `You know. Down there.'

  As a teenager, I felt naked without the reassuring weight of my flares on my feet. Not feeling it, not experiencing, the billowing flutter every time you took a stride, would have seemed ... distasteful. Revealing the whole of your shoe it was something old men and tramps did; it was bad taste, like having food stains on your shirt. I remember an older boy making a joke at the expense of straight trousers. The punchline was about Communists. Straight trousers were something you

  wore in the fantasy totalitarian world of your bad dreams, a world that harked back to the fifties, to shaved backs of necks, narrow lapels, no spliffs or po
p music or casual sex.

  In those days, things moved so fast from bootcut to baggies in three years, 1972 to 1975; the cuffs moved outwards across the shoes in three deft movements from the middle of the shoelaces to the edge of the shoelaces; then out to the toe, and then, the final frontier, to beyond the edge of the shoe. The middle stage was awkward the front edge of the trouser-cuff didn't quite cover the shoe, and so had to be longer than the back edge, which meant that, for a year or so, everybody's trousers were too long at the back. The material picked up mud and other filth, and then it became frayed and split, so even when people took their shoes off, long tendrils of, at worst, dogshit-marinated denim left brown streaks all over the carpet. Indoors, with your shoes off, you manipulated your front trouser-cuff with your toes; outdoors, you leaned against walls and bus-shelters, looking downwards, casually flipping your cuffs over your shoes.

  And then I turned against flares. Why? I can't remember. But members of my generation had a particular grudge against flares, because they were all we had known, and somehow, in 1977 and 1978, we were persuaded to spurn them for straight trousers. We were made to hate flares. Straights were our first major conversion, our Damascus, and the new religion was tough at first skirmishes with the older boys, still clinging to the last shreds of hippie; walking into rooms hyper-aware of your feet.

  So I never thought I would even consider wearing flares again. I remember having conversations

  `Never! I just . . . can't see it.'

  `Right. It's like you made a mistake in the past, and you won't make the same mistake again.'

  `Exactly. I can categorically state that I will never, ever wear flares. Not even slightly flared trousers.'

  But here I was, looking at myself in the mirror, and these Jeans from 1994 looked awful, and so I took them off, and put my slightly flared or, rather, bootcut jeans back on again.

  And now I don't know what to do with my old jeans. Shall I throw them out? I pick them up, and run my fingers over them, feeling uneasy, feeling a creeping sense of dread, and I decide not to put the jeans on again, and I go and look at myself in the mirror again, my torso almost V-shaped but, I can see now, still too chunky, too fat. When I looked at it earlier, I must have had exceptionally good light. Weighing myself again, the scales say 205.1 shuffle my feet on the scales, looking for a better reading. There, 204. Not too bad.

  So today I put my bootcuts on, and a shirt, and look at myself in the mirror in the shirt, and relax a little I don't look too bad in the shirt. I look again at the picture of myself in the tennis shorts, and have a momentary worry is that muscle definition, or a flaw in the picture? and I decide it's OK, it's muscle definition. And then I notice something in the picture. My trainers. A box-fresh pair of Reeboks, preBelly's-gonna-get-you era, shoes I bought in 1989. And ther, I look at the trainers on my shoe-rack a pair of Diesels, a pair of Nikes, a pair of Reeboks the same pair! And they're slightly battered, frazzled, but still wearable.

  Jesus! No wonder I got fat. My tennis shoes have lasted till for nearly thirteen years.

  And I pack my bag, leave my flat, hail a taxi and head for the airport; I'm flying to New York, where there is a slight chance I will be able to meet Elizabeth Wurtzel, the former addict, and talk to her about addiction. I try not to drink at the airport, but fail, and I try not to drink on the plane, but fail, and on the plane I re-read Wurtzel's book Prozac Nation, and also an article headlined 'Prozac "found in tap water"', which tells me that so many people are taking Prozac these days six million Britons that tap water might contain toxic levels. I also read an article telling me that the Atkins diet causes depression, and the article is illustrated with a picture of two girls, one saying, 'Really? Well gimme thin and grumpy any day!'

  As Shelley Bovey says, the word 'thin' is beginning to replace the word 'slim'. Thin used to mean 'too thin'. Now it means 'just right'. And as Laura Fraser says, the difference between the average weight of models and the average weight of women gets bigger every year. No wonder there's Prozac in the tap water, I think as I try not to drink on the plane, and fail, and when the plane lands I get a taxi and get out and try not to drink on the way to my hotel, and fail, and after a while I stop trying not to drink, and end up drinking vodka with apple juice, which I really shouldn't, because it has carbohydrate in it, and, later, when I meet Elizabeth Wurtzel, she's not the naughty, drug-seeking girl of Prozac Nation, the Ritalin-snorting reprobate of More, Now, Again, but a thirty-something woman with a sweet face, who has, for now at least, renounced all artificial stimulants,

  although she has started

  smoking cigarettes instead.

  to

  Party, where she smokes, and I drink. She's been deeply

  while obese people bulked into view, telling the daytime presenters about their failed diets, their new resolve. I watched MTV. When you are exercising aerobically, your music tastes change. At home, I listened to the Beatles and Thelonious Monk. Jogging, I yearned for Bryan Adams or Oasis; I wanted power chords, lamenting voices, slashing, venegeful guitars. During my gym year, early January to late December 1998, I exercised aerobically for just over a hundred hours. I weighed myself throughout the year. My weight hardly fluctuated. At the end, I weighed 215 lbs.

  The gym had not made me slim. But it had slowed down my rate of expansion, my Coltrane trajectory.

  Still, in four months of lowcarb dieting, I've lost 30 lb. Lowcarb works better, for me, in terms of pure weight loss. On the other hand, going to the gym made me feel better; exercise, as everybody knows, produces endorphins in the brain, feel-good drugs. Merely being less heavy does not. It just means you look better in clothes, hold yourself with more elegance, are able to have more sexual contact with strangers. Getting slim pulls you into the world of surfaces and appearances and snap judgements. You are less ashamed of your body, but more self-conscious. When you lose weight, you begin to understand how frightened you were, as an overweight person, of the body-conscious world outside. How frightened, and how skilled at hiding your fear from yourself.

  I'm drinking a 'double-shot cappuccino', a frothy coffee with two shots of espresso, trying to savour the coffee, wondering if it tastes good or bad. Should I have had a latte, I macchiato? Or the Starbucks 'coffee of the day', which won't be the same tomorrow? My favourite is the espresso

  215

  marked by 9/11 and would rather talk about world politics than addiction, and we end up going back to her apartment, where she smokes, and I drink, and we take her new puppy for a walk in the small hours, and when we get back the puppy bites me with its needly teeth, but I don't mind, because I'm not sober, and I'm not sober when I walk out into the night, and I'm not sober when my plane takes off the next day, and I'm not sober when it lands.

  The Experience

  Back in London, as the world gains weight, the illusionist David Blaine hangs above the Thames in a perspex box, getting thinner. Every day, we look at him, and there is less to look at. People hate him. They throw eggs at the perspex box, and stand on nearby Tower Bridge, training laser flashlights at his head.

  I'm in Starbucks, drinking coffee, not relaxed, waiting for my mobile phone to ring. My weight has 'plateaued' at a touch over 200 lbs. I should do more exercise. I hardly do any exercise. Five years ago, when I weighed 214 lbs, when I was gaining weight at an alarming rate, I joined a gym. I went four times a week, then three times a week, then two, then, panicking, back up to four. I averaged three sessions per week, at roughly one hour per session, which means forty minutes' exercise. My favourite machine was a rotational jogger, which minimized impact injury to the knees.

  I didn't mind going to the gym. I plugged in my headphones and jogged while watching daytime TV, sometimes joggin

  Double Shot, a cold drink, or beverage as they say in Starbucks, a cold beverage made with espresso, milk and sugar. But I am anti-sugar, just as I am post-sandwich, post-pasta, post-rice. I do, however, drink coffee, even though it stimulates the adrenal glands, and this, in
turn, has a negative effect on insulin production. But you have to draw the line somewhere.

  Why is my phone not ringing? I'm glaring at it in the same way I glare at a half-boiled kettle, in the same way I used to glare at my toaster. But I no longer use my toaster; these days it is packed away in a cupboard. I no longer toast, no longer partake of the cheerful ritual, and I feel a gap in my life, possibly a spiritual gap.

  My phone is silent, still. Academic research tells us that mobile phones make us feel more connected, and yet less connected, with other people. They encourage a state of being that sociologist Kenneth J. Gergen calls 'absent presence'. You are here, and yet not here. Part of you is in cyberspace, waiting for messages, instructions. The average cell-phone user talks on his cell-phone for seven hours every month. But how many hours is he in its thrall? In an experiment at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a group of students was asked to switch off their cell-phones for forty-eight hours. Some of them saw the world as a different, more hostile, place. One woman said, 'I felt like I was going to get raped if I didn't have my cell-phone in my hand.'

  Certainly, I feel naked without my phone. Without my phone, I feel edgy and disconnected. With my phone, I feel edgy and disconnected. I am aware that one of the things making me feel like this is the phone itself; having a phone

  makes you feel the need for a phone, a need to connect that you were unaware of until you had a phone. In an important sense, mobile phones cause a lack of confidence, a vulnerability.

  But at least I've got my phone on me. (Why isn't it ringing?) just before I leave my flat every day, I check my pockets: keys, phone, wallet. Oh, and painkillers. I've just taken my last two painkillers, two sugar-coated ibuprofen tablets which taste like M&Ms, with my cappuccino. On the table in front of me, on either side of my coffee, are my phone and my now-empty painkiller packet bright, silver objects that look good on the table of a cafe, objects that have evolved hugely in the last few years, objects that, in fact, look very similar to each other. I am looking at the phone, waiting for it to light up. The painkiller packet already looks lit up. The brand name, Nurofen, stands above a fiery orange target. Nurofen, claim the manufacturers, 'targets' pain.