Authors: The Hungry Years
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
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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.
It is early evening. I sip my coffee, read my papers, wait for my painkillers and mobile phone to do their respective jobs. The papers, once again, are full of the obesity crisis. Government officials and obesity experts are bristling with enthusiasm for the battle ahead. They cite the villains: fat, sugar and salt. Carb is off the agenda. In my Guardian, Susan Jebb, we are told, 'called for the government to act and set real targets for bringing obesity levels down'. At the International Obesity Task Force conference, President Philip James says that the wellbeing of children is 'systematically undermined by the intense marketing and sales of foods high in fat, sugar
and salt'.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Physics has been studying the diet of Homer Simpson. 'We watched lots of Simpson
videos,' says the Institute's Michelle Cain. Analysis reveals that Homer consumes an average of 3,100 calories per day, including 129 grams of fat. His body weight, which is remarkably steady, is 239.8 lbs. Nearly 4 lbs heavier than me at my fattest, at least when I positioned the scale correctly. `Homer's current lifestyle is putting him at risk of coronary heart disease,' comments Deborah Allen of the British Heart Foundation. There is a picture of Homer eating a doughnut. The picture's caption is: 'Homer Simpson: eats too much fat.'
Barry, an overweight character in EastEnders, is trying to lose weight. He's exchanging cooked breakfasts of bacon, egg, and sausages for something apparently healthier cereal.
The paradigm is solid.
I flick through newspapers, magazines, waiting for my painkillers to kick in, waiting for my phone to ring. Sophie Dahl's weight is still decreasing. After several years as a token `oversize' model, Dahl's career briefly flourished as a normal-sized model, and now she is conspicuously thin. Her greatest moment was a much-maligned perfume ad in which a beautifully-proportioned Dahl was depicted on her back, legs spread, apparently being ravished by invisible forces. And this, I guess, is how she must have felt as an oversize model supine, ambiguous, trapped. Anyway, she is now famous for being thin, for having shed the bulk that defined her, which means that she is, of course, still defined by bulk, or rather its absence, which, in turn, drives her to shed yet more pounds.
I'm looking at a picture of Sophie Dahl, and I'm thinking of Cyril Connolly's phrase: 'Inside every fat person there is a thin one wildly signalling to get out.' And that's what this picture of Dahl looks like the thin person wildly signallingto get out. In the picture, Dahl is thin. But look into her eyes, and what do you see? The eyes of a fat person?
Jennifer Aniston steady. Cameron Diaz steady. Kirstie Alley still gaining. Alley is puffing up like Robbie Coltrane. I happen to know that her diet, the diet she recommends, involves fasting. Dolly Parton does this, too. I once interviewed Parton, and she told me that fasting made her feel cleaner and more clear-headed; being empty physically makes her feel less empty spiritually. In the case of Alley, though, I can imagine what might have happened. Fasting led to hunger, which led to bingeing. In pictures, she is beginning to take on the pyramid shape of the truly obese.
Was that ... ? No. Just somebody with the same ringtone. My hand is clutching at my phone, stroking it. Academics studying mobile phone users recently referred to phones as `electronic pets'. People leave buildings to take their phones for a walk, to check messages, rearrange settings. I saw an ad the other day in which people were trying, fruitlessly, to describe a sporting moment. The solution? Send a video-clip of the moment to all your friends. The messy business of talking is replaced with the very thing you want to describe. Every day, we are more connected. Every day, we are less connected.
This morning, my homepage had an article about celebrity eating. There was a picture of Cameron Diaz eating an unidentifiable piece of food, possibly a burger.
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`Cameron: how does she stay so thin when she obviously loves her food so much?'
The answer comes from Lucy Liu, Diaz' co-star in Charlie's Angels. Liu describes Diaz as 'a genetic freak because she can eat whatever she wants without piling on the pounds.'
Liz Hurley was eating fries. Renee Zellweger was eating either fish or scampi. Sarah Jessica Parker 'didn't do anything, honest' in order to lose weight after giving birth. 'I'm just one of those people who doesn't gain weight.'
Renee Zellweger, it is reported, did Atkins after gaining weight for her role as Bridget Jones, but did not slim down enough to prevent a glossy magazine from dropping her as the cover girl 'for being too fat'.
Elsewhere: it is reported that the woman who plays Kat in EastEnders has been told she is too fat to play romantic storylines, and so must slim down. Jennifer Aniston says, of her youthful plumpness, 'I wasn't really fat. I was just Greek.'
Maybe that was my problem all those years. Maybe I was just Greek.
My painkillers are beginning to take effect. Interestingly, even though aspirin was discovered in 1899, nobody knew how it worked until the 1970s. It works by fooling the brain, by messing with the signal that tells the brain something is wrong. When you take a painkiller, you are treating a symptom rather than a condition. You're still in pain, but you no longer know it.
Are painkillers a bad thing? We're certainly spending more money on them than ever before. In 1997, the British painkiller market was worth �309 million. In 2001, it was worth �398 million. Is this because we are in more pain? A pain specialist, Dr Raj Munglani, told me he believed that our society tolerates pain less well than before. So we're not in more pain. On the other hand, 'Pain is what the patient says it is.' So we might be in more pain.
These days, our expectations are higher. We want fast-acting pain relief in the same way that we want fast-acting diets, fast food, speed elevators, speed-dialling on our mobile
phones.
One thing about painkillers is that they are more widely available than they used to be; in 1996, the government relaxed restrictions on ibuprofen, allowing it to be available in supermarkets, newsagents and corner shops. This was part of a drive to save money by taking pressure off doctors and pharmacists; as citizens, we have been taught to be self-medicating when it comes to pain. Now, when we are in pain, we are no longer in the hands of the doctor we are in the hands of the marketing man.
My painkillers might, and might not, be working. For a moment, I take in what Howard Schultz, chairman and founder of Starbucks, calls 'the experience'. The experience is the same here as it is in the two other Starbucks outlets in my neighbourhood the same easy chairs, the same bright colour-schemes, the same soft-rock and jazz piped at the same soothing volume, the same high-tab cappuccinos and espressos. The Frappuccinos. The macchiatos. The mochas. The experience makes me feel relaxed and uneasy in shifting proportions.
Intriguingly, some doctors now believe that painkillers, when taken frequently, actually cause the problem they set Out to solve; Dr Timothy Steiner, of Charing Cross Hospital in London, believes that one in thirty people suffer chronic headaches as a result of painkiller overuse. 'If painkillers reduce the sensitivity of pain pathways, there is likely to be, Over time, a compensation for that,' Steiner told me, 'which results in those pathways becoming more sensitive, leading to the requirement for more analgesia.'
Painkillers give you pain.
Carbs make you hungry.
Mobile phones make you feel disconnected.
So what do people do? They take more painkillers to get rid of the pain, they eat more carbs to stave off the hunger pangs, they clutch their mobile phones to make themselves feel less edgy and paranoid.
Bad medicine.
The scariest thing about painkillers is that they now exist in a no-man's land between medicine and product. Which means that they don't need someone to prescribe them they need someone to market them. Don Williams is the man responsible for designing the Nurofen packet on my table. He works in Notting Hill, west London. His office is just what you'd expect minimal furnishings, blond-wood floors. In the upstairs lobby there is a shopping trolley full of products designed by his company, Packaging Innovations Global: Double Velvet toilet paper, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Pot Noodle and Nurofen. A former session guitarist from Middlesborough, Williams is tall and slim, with wonderfully tasteful clothes and a shaved head. 'That's our philosophy,' he said, looking at the trolley. 'That's what we believe in. Getting things in trolleys. At the end of the day, that's what we're paid for.'
One of Williams' innovations was to place the target in the centre of the pack, with a chevron radiating out to the sides. He also wanted more of the silver foil on the packs to be visible. Consumers, he told me, are visually literate they see the pack design before they read the words. When he took over the pack design of Benson & Hedges cigarette packs,
Williams made sure that every pack was gold, even the packs containing low-tar cigarettes, which had previously been silver. 'We believe that brand identities should be recognized at a distance,' he said, 'even through half-closed eyes, or suboptimal conditions, or in peripheral vision.' In supermarkets, said Williams, 'we want a blocking effect on the shelf. The