Notso Fatso

NOTSO

FATSO WALTER WHICHELOW

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Published by Accent Press Ltd - 2004 ISBN 0954489969 Copyright © Accent Press Ltd 2004 The right of Walter Whichelow to be identified as the author of these works has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers; Accent Press Ltd, PO Box 50, Pembroke Dock, Pembrokeshire SA72 6WY. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Cover Design by Accent Press Ltd www.accentpress.co.uk

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CONTENTS

You Are Fat

1

Food Through History

9

Why Bother Slimming Anyway?

25

Meet The Victims

29

Know Your Enemy

33

Bad Attitudes

43

Types Of Diet

63

Going A Bit Too Far

99

Fooling Yourself

113

Getting Started

137

Exercise

161

Keeping It Going

199

Fooling Yourself – Part II

225

For Ever and Ever - Amen

243

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Chapter 1 YOU ARE FAT

Ahoy there, Fatso! Before I start, I would just like to say: “Oh dear, oh dear. Has it really come to this?” I mean you of all people. And where did all that … that padding come from? Open the family album and have a look. Look, there is that photo of you passing your driving test when you were eighteen. Is it really you? Your little sister, maybe or, perhaps, your younger brother? - either way it certainly doesn’t look much like you, does it? Look at that pair of trousers. You actually once got into them, did you? What the hell are those strange bumps on your face? Cheekbones? Look, here is another of you in your cozzie on the beach at Hunstanton in 1983. You could have opened letters with those hip-bones. Has it really come to this? Well, regrettably it has, or you wouldn’t be standing here, in the aisle of WH Smith, John Menzies or some other high quality literary purveyor, thumbing through this book in the vague hope of a miracle solution for your condition. The sorry news, I’m afraid, is that it isn’t going to happen. You didn’t get 1

fat overnight - you put many long hours into it - so, short of an intravenous injection of the Ebola virus, you are not going to lose the mountain of flab overnight either. What you need is a diet - and judging by the looks of you, right now and a pretty darned good one to boot. But it won’t be the first time though, will it? I bet that you’ve tried the lot. High fibre (Hi-Fiber if you are American and find correct spellings confusing)? Phew-ee! Protein overloads? Raw vegetables? Groan. Who the hell lasted longer than three days on that one? Pasta by the bucketful? Of course you have. You’ve probably been to tub-clubs, fiddled with little cardboard saturated-fat ready-reckoners, counted ‘sins’, had ‘red’ days and ‘green’ days and any number of other scientifically proven methods of ‘Getting it Off – Keeping it Off’. Atkins? Of course - who hasn’t? How about Kensington? You’ve probably had a dig at some of the cheat ones too. The eat-as-much-as-you-like-as-long-as-it’spurple types. Carbo-Holics diet? Bones? Mustard (yes, even mustard can be marked up and sold by the pail full in the name of dieting)? I bet they lasted a long time. On some of them you probably ended up thinking you would have been better off eating the book. Yet here you stand, blocking the aisle as effectively as a mountain of a thousand unsold Harry Potters, trying to flick through yet another diet book with those chubby fingers of yours. You never learn, do you? Half a lifetime of fighting the flab and you still haven’t twigged that, in most cases, about twenty 2

minutes after you give up a diet you are fatter than before you started. But do not despair! You got lucky. You picked up ‘Notso Fatso’. The only diet book that: • Has Absolutely No Basis in Science. • Tells You the God’s-Honest-But-Ever-So-Ugly Truth. • Calls You ‘Fatso’ to Your Face and Still Expects You to Part With Money. Whilst I think about it, if you are still bunging up an aisle, browsing, would you please now proceed to the checkout where the shop assistant will charge you “six paaaaahnd ninety-nine, love”, or “fifteen paaaaahnd ninety-nine, love” if you are considering the sumptuously bound hardback edition. Much as I would love to sit here all day amongst the high quality pages of this lavish volume, offering you free advice on your excess flesh, Mrs Whichelow and the little darlings are banging on about a visit to Legoland and these things all cost money. Not to mention the fact that your bloated carcass is probably preventing a middle-aged shipping clerk with a penchant for hiking boots and gnarly, fivefoot-high walking sticks from reaching the Ordnance Survey maps of Rhum, Muck and Eigg. So how, you ask, can I make these proud boasts? Let us take them one at a time.

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No basis in science This doesn’t actually sound like much of a boast, until you think about it logically. Ask yourself, what has Science ever done for you? Buckets of stuff, of course. What a stupid question. We have drugs and motor cars and contact lenses and sun-block that doesn’t hurt rabbits’ eyes and forty thousand different types of unmistakeably plasticky plastic and rubberised playground floors and supercomputers that can predict the weather up to an hour in advance with 65% certainty. Do I not sit in front of a word processor as I write instead of hacking away at a slab of sandstone with a lump of flint? Are my buttocks not cushioned by the foam and plush of my hydraulically damped executive office recliner? All Science, all wonders. So why then is Science so crap at other stuff? Seventy five years on and my television is no smaller than John Logie Baird’s and it still tips the scales at about the same weight as his cast iron prototype. A hundred years down the road my tyre will still go as flat as Dunlop’s original when I run over a nail although I will probably flip out into a ditch when it happens, rather than jolting to a gentle halt in the Edwardian style. And a million years on we are fatter than ever despite the apparent efforts of Science on our behalf. Confused? Of course not. The two simple facts are:

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1. There is more money in getting us fat than getting us slim. That is why Science makes more of an effort that way. 2. Getting fat is easier than getting slim, so who are we to fight the inevitable? What conclusion does this lead me to? It is this. Science is not the answer. God’s honest-but-ever-so ugly truth Surely other diet books don’t lie to you? No, of course not. But ‘telling the truth’ and ‘not lying’ are marginally different concepts. Why do you think that witnesses in court are not simply asked not to tell lies? Exactly. The sad fact is that the reason people get fat and stay fat and get fat again after they have slimmed down a bit, is because no one is prepared to tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. When did you last hear this conversation? “Hello Wendy. How’s the diet going?” “Oh, wonderful. I’ve got down to my target weight.” “Oh really? No offence, love, but you’re the size of a barrage balloon. I mean why would your target weight be 3st heavier than it ought to be?” It just doesn’t happen does it? What is far more likely is: “Hello Wendy, how’s the diet going?” “Oh wonderful. I’ve got down to my target weight.” “Well you look fantastic.” 5

This sort of nonsense is exactly what the whole diet industry has been trading on for years. It is a social paranoia that is practically impossible to avoid. Well that is what I’m here for. I will tell you the truth about yourself, about diets and about keeping the weight off. I don’t care one iota. Why should I? I know we have been having this cosy tête à tête, but we hardly know each other and if I passed you in the street I would probably need to veer into the gutter to avoid a collision, so let’s not pretend I’m going to flatter you. I most certainly am not. OK, I admit there may be the odd white lie thrown in here and there, but I’m sure you will forgive me these. For a start, as I have outlined in Proud Boast No. 1, there is no scientific basis to this book. Therefore, in order to ensure that I don’t break this promise to you, I have decided that your brain does not need to be filled with pointlessly accurate statistics. Hence, wherever you see a statistic in this book you need to be aware that it has come from one of three sources: 1) I read it somewhere recently. 2) I read it somewhere a long time ago and can’t now remember the exact figures involved, but I’m doing my best and it sounds reasonable. 3) It would take a lot of finding out so I made up something that would pass a relatively flimsy inspection. I would say that the statistics in this book fall roughly into; 1- 25%, 2- 30% and 3- 45%. This particular statistic falls into Category 3. 6

So you see how it works. Needless to say, there will be little impact on the overall effectiveness of this book since most statistics are useful only for repeating to other people in order to tart up dull conversation. Calls you Fatso to your face. As for proud boast No. 3, I think I have already proven this point. Now, will you please get on and purchase this book, Fatso!

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Chapter 2 FOOD THROUGH HISTORY

Troughing Down - The Early Years In this day and age, like in any other, humankind enjoys an obsession with food. However, whilst it was for many millennia a healthy obsession - i.e. Neanderthal Man; job description - hunter gatherer; vocabulary - ‘kill’, ‘eat’, ‘beast-with-two-backs’ nowadays it is an unhealthy one. Food has become a subliminal driving force in our daily lives. It is hard to estimate how often we mention food or foodrelated ideas in non-food contexts but suffice it to say that it would be enough to give us a very sore head were a man to stand behind us and crown us with a tin of Del Monte Pear Halves every time it happened. How many times have you used the following expressions? • A plum job • Warm as toast • Not a sausage • Honey, I’m home. (US only) • The dog’s bollocks (Korea) • Currying favour • Spicing up your love life. 9

• Pot Noodles (counts as non-food reference) • Over-egging the pudding Do you not say ‘cheese’ when the camera is pointed at you (or, in Walter Jr’s case, ‘Get stuffed!’)? Do you not work food into other exercises if at all possible? Working lunches, dinner dances, breakfast meetings? Just tack a meal on to something else and it gains a credibility it wouldn’t otherwise enjoy. On an average day, I am inclined to work until lunchtime, then grab a sandwich - sometimes two if I have actually done any work, rather than playing minesweeper and surfing Friends Reunited to see if any of my old schoolmates have died in bizarre circumstances - a cup of tea and a sliver of Mrs Whichelow’s delicious hand-purchased Bakewell tart. If I were to sit down to a three course blow-out of Terrine de Lapin, Lamb Cutlets, pink, with seasonal roast vegetables and chocolate mousse drizzled with raspberry coulis, all washed down with a bottle or two of Fleurie, then I might feel as if I had over-indulged somewhat. However, if I go up to town to see my publisher and he isn’t in his usual stinking mood with me for whatever reason, then we might enjoy this self same repast and go away with the comforting feeling of a job well done, even if all we discussed was how far from total collapse his prostate gland is and who is giving his wife something with which to prop up her tent at the moment.

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You see, the problem is one of custom. A blow-out is a blow-out is a blow-out. Putting on a DJ and dickie bow, not to mention a cummerbund to haul your gut in, doesn’t change that. I cannot, though, believe ‘twas ever thus. Today we’re so obsessed with food that even the scientific guff off the sides of Corn Flakes boxes trips off our tongues without us even knowing. But what about the dawn of civilisation, when man first roamed the Earth in the Pleiocene, Niacene and Riboflavin eras? No, of course it wasn’t always like this. Early man may have allowed himself the odd cavort after a particularly juicy kill but then you would too if, in order to stay alive another week, you had to sneak up behind some ferocious horned beast and slap it to death with a whittled elder twig. One thing is for sure. Australopithecus did not use boiled yak fat as a social lubricant (although he may have used it in some other lubrication role). Despite this, he was already one step down the road to ruin. He had discovered fire. Probably more by luck than as the result of a business lunch, but he had discovered it nonetheless. Next thing you know, some clumsy Cro-Magnon jogs his elbow and his mammoth cutlet is straight in the flames. By the time he has dug it out, he has invented cooking. With cooking followed the notion that food could be made to taste better. With the notion that food could be made to taste better (stick with this - we’re getting there) followed the idea of eating for pleasure.

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Not that eating for pleasure is intrinsically bad, no sir, but we really ought to know our limitations. Because eating for pleasure may be a fabulous way to spend an evening, but it also gives rise to the practice of forcing as much down your oesophagus as will go, four or five times a day. That sort of behaviour will kill you as sure as falling out of a plane. Now I would pay a large sum of money to be able to fly just by extending my arms and soaring off into the wide blue yonder, but I also know that leaping from a plane is probably the maxout of this desire, no matter how thrilling were the ninety seconds of furious arm-flapping between my taking to the air and creating a Walter-shaped dent in the countryside. As for the maxing-out of our eating desires, we may get more than ninety seconds before it kills us, but we still have to remember to pull that ripcord in time! Anyway, back to fire. One thing it did for our old chum Australopithecus was that it elevated him above the chimpanzees. Previously ‘Oz’ and the Chimps had been mingling on a regular basis attending the same schools, borrowing each other’s tortoise-pounding rocks, picking scurf out of one another’s back-fur and the like - but now Australopithecus ditched his erstwhile chum and became upwardly mobile. Pretty soon he was cooking everything. Raw yam became ‘jacket’ yam, sour fruit and gulls eggs became lemon meringue pie, rancid ghee became fondue. Only select foods continued to be eaten raw, 12

such as oysters, but these were very much the domain of Australopithecus’ close relative Homo Erectus, who was destined to out-populate his cousin eventually by dint of a phenomenal reproductive rate combined with the propensity of Australopithecus to drop dead at an early age with fondue-related heart problems. Back up in the trees, meantime, the omnivorous and less talented chimpanzees were left forcing down the same old grim and unappetizing fare. Nuts and berries are all very well, but for protein, iron and the like you can’t beat raw meat. So, as the delightful Sir David Attenborough pointed out on one of the more unsavoury offerings I have sat through on a Sunday tea-time, they started to club together and go after the odd monkey as well. Now I’m no expert, not being a customer of the bushmeat trade, nor a Chinese businessman - I haven’t sampled the delights of monkey meat either cooked or raw - but I would bet a pound to a penny that cooked monkey tastes a damned sight better than uncooked. And back we are to the crux of the matter, which is that there is a world of difference between eating for survival and for pleasure. Cooked monkey was such a tasty dish that Australopithecus put his best men on to it, inventing nets, traps, spikes and lures to gather as many monkeys as could be clubbed, skinned and braised over a roaring fire in one night. The chimpanzees conversely were sharing one monkey a fortnight between a family of seventeen. 13

So you can see there is a broad chasm between subsistence and gluttony and it is as wide today as it has ever been. As Sir David explained to us, he was forced to crouch in a thorny bush for eight hours every day for a month, suffering in silence, for fear of startling the shy primates, as cramp wracked his ancient body and four-inch thorns penetrated his scrotum, just to see the spectacle of chimpanzees hunting for a single monkey on one solitary occasion. Then, every night he would trudge back to camp and be met by the sight of forty gargantuan villagers each tucking into crispy baked baboon on a stick with jacket yam followed by lemon meringue pie. The rest, as they say, is (pre)history. Australopithecus gorged his way to oblivion and Homo Erectus rutted up a storm until world domination was his. Then, as we can see today, he found Australopithecus’ recipe book and set off down the slippery slope. Troughing Down – Getting the Hang The main problem with dieting post-Australopithecus, then, is that food is so damned delicious and abundant and exercise is so damned dull and an awful lot like hard work, now that we don’t have to wring our dinner’s neck. The modern relationship with food, however, has changed immeasurably over a relatively short space of time. Lack of a decent refrigerator and a paucity of good old E-numbers meant that, even up until World War 14

II, food was either as salty as a cow-lick or went rancid the moment you dug the waxed paper off it with your finger nails. Then, just as Science was getting to grips with the knotty problem of keeping food and pin-mould apart for more than ten minutes, along came Adolf Hitler and set the cause of obesity back decades. Never has a country been so healthy as Britain 1939 – 45. Not only that; the health kick ran on for much longer. Apparently bananas were off the menu for an entire generation - not that that is a great example since the banana is a fine health-giving fruit (yes, I know a banana is ‘officially’ a herb or spice!) and its absence from general consumption explains why old footage of Wimbledon shows middle aged combover victims mincing about at 4 mph in long flannels, rather than the turbo-charged, sinuous apes to which we have become accustomed in latter years. Anyway, the fact is that rationing lasted in one form or another into the sixties and included for at least part of its duration meat, clothing, butter, cheese, sweets and all sorts of stuff that, were they denied to the general populace today, would give rise to mass hysteria and swooning. In my opinion some sort of phased reintroduction of rationing wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. How about sweets and clothing sized XXL (18 for the ladies) and up? I’m told that the end of sweet rationing brought about a descent on the nation’s confectioners of a kind which made the run on the German banking system in the 1920s look like a visit to the cashpoint. The obvious 15

consequence was that, six months later, there was a similar run on outsized clothing. Yes, the lifting of wartime austerity in Britain was far from a good thing for the nation’s vital statistics. However, worse was to come. Firstly, you can imagine that after six years living off turnips, onions and rabbit tods, anything is going to taste good. But this was the tip of the iceberg. Because along came the Yanks. They brought with them Coca Cola (an instant, sugary success), hamburgers and fried chicken (symphonies in delicious grease), maple syrup (diabetes-in-a-jar) and Hershey Bars (OK, there are some things Europeans do better). The even bigger problem was that they also brought food preservation technology. This allowed for food to be prepared in bulk form and kept for what must have seemed like centuries (but was probably about a fortnight). Hence no more struggling in the kitchen with hashed beef and diced onion. No more rotting dough under the wedding ring. With preservation came convenience. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that selling people, say, frozen chicken lumps and slabs of frozen pastry is going to be significantly less profitable than selling them frozen chicken pies. So next thing you know, all ‘chef’ has to do is to reach into the freezer, whip out a cardboard box containing a pizza, a steak and kidney pie, a chicken Kiev or the like, and slap it in at gas mark 6 for thirty five minutes.

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Ease of use leads, of course, to grand scale overconsumption. Would I indulge so freely in little luxuries like, say, elevenses if, instead of sticking a spoonful of instant coffee in some hot water and opening a packet of Lemon Puffs, I had to roast and grind coffee beans by hand and to bake my own shortbread? Undoubtedly not. But the technology is there and we, the Human Race, abuse it. This is not to say that we’re not obsessed with the healthy side of things, just as long as it does not interfere with the amount we eat. For instance, we’re more conscious than ever - to a fault one could argue - of, say, hygiene. Look at how we eat now in comparison with a century ago. The other day, as I was trying to educate my brood by taking them all on a walletwitheringly expensive trip to Portsmouth Historical Dockyard, my eye was caught by an interesting fact. It was this. Apparently in 1865, the ship’s cook of England’s then finest battleship, HMS Warrior, was still cracking open casks of meat to feed the crew which had been nailed up before the Battle of Trafalgar. Meat! In wooden barrels! For sixty years! Today you can turn on the telly and see adverts for blue washing up liquid that claims to winkle every last bacterium out of the surface of your vile chopping board, lest it enter the duodenum of one of the little darlings and smite them down in the prime of life. Needless to say, it is priced along the lines of 17

‘life-saver’ rather than ‘bubbly-stuff’. Now quite apart from the obvious fact that even the ultimate slaying medium, Domestos, kills a mere 99% of the one hundred million germs lurking in every cranny, thus leaving the odd million lying in ambush, what good is this actually doing us? I hardly think that a chopping board that hasn’t been wiped down for twenty minutes constitutes a greater health-hazard than sixty year-old meat. Alright, the stench of salted, rancid and rock hard meat isn’t the most pleasant thought to entertain, especially if you are reading this just prior to a meal, but it was good enough for Britain’s fighting elite in 1865 so I think Mrs Whichelow’s hysterical insistence on wiping the butcher’s block from one day to the next is thrown into sharp relief. It isn’t as if the stir-fry I’m preparing for them was originally crated up by the crew of the Tirpitz, now is it? Chances are that, in the event that the little darlings were all starving, they would be quite happy to tuck in. But just enough to get by on. Not in the same quantities that they force fried chicken into their faces, until they are unable to speak or move. Anyway, I think the point is made. Modern hygiene, preservatives and nutritional values are all good things, but eating diseased and putrid flesh has its upside as well.

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The Third Millennium And so to today. After a couple of million years of struggle, the human race has finally got the upper hand over food. No more chasing it, choking it, gutting it, plucking it or being poisoned by it for us lucky inhabitants of the developed world. It is an odds-on certainty that, sometime in the 21st Century, it will become possible to do away with any form of cooker and simply to open tins and pour out selfcooked meals of a quality that we could never have hoped to achieve with our own hands. By then, of course, obesity will no longer exist. Not because we will have discovered a way of halting weight gain, but because we will all be so huge that the powers that be will undoubtedly re-draw the line in the sand as to where obesity starts. A six-foot man weighing 14st would go from borderline ‘obese’ to borderline ‘dangerously emaciated’ in one stroke of a pen. Do not scoff! It will happen. I don’t believe it will just be a straight fiddling of the figures - ‘you were fat, Mr Jones, but government guidelines have re-classified you as ‘svelte’ - unless the shameless Mr Blair is still cracking the whip at the time. But the moment you hear reports of how much heavier our bones are, or how superior our nutrition is, or how much better for you, than previously thought, cholesterol is, then you will know that we are but a short step away from re-calibration. In the meantime, however, we’re still fat when we’re fat and our relationship with food is such that we

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must try to hide the fact behind a smokescreen of excuses. Obviously some excuses are pretty feeble: “It’s my glands.” Is there a person alive who doesn’t immediately think: “What, you’ve got a gland that tells you to stuff your face?” Some even say it - and good for them. Some excuses are worse than that (‘I’ve got big bones’ - Under all that, how can you tell?) and some are just bizarre. How about the ‘fat gene’? Science is pretty quiet on that particular theory, despite the fact that many morbidly fat people bandy it around with some conviction. I believe that this gene was actually discovered by The Roly Polies. Why they haven’t received The Nobel Prize for Genetics is a mystery. The big test of our relationship with food will come the day that Science - if it can be bothered to put in the hours - discovers a way of making food that is just as delicious as we have come to expect …but won’t make us fat. Cooking oils and fats that just pass through the body; proper cream with no cholesterol; bread and potatoes without calories. Oh happy day. I wonder sometimes what proportion of people would smoke if cigarettes could be made to present no health hazard at all. It probably depends on things like whether people like the smell and taste, how much the healthy cigarettes cost, how much tax the

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Government is looking to wring out of us for the pleasure and so on. If, on the other hand, food could be made to be 100% healthy … the mind boggles. I for one have no doubt that every single person with access to the technology, the ability to beg, borrow or steal cash and a hole in their head, would spend 16 hours of every day shovelling it in with both hands. Of course, food is most certainly not 100% healthy, but that is of little concern to the powers that be. In a society crying out for a helping hand on the road to moderation, what has our beloved Government done? Answer: it has just signed away our sturdy and reliable Pounds and Ounces to the odious miscreants of the European Union. Now, instead of buying food by the pound we have to buy it by the ‘half a kilo’. Of course, this means that yesterday’s 454g of fatty meat is tomorrow’s 500g. Even more simply, we all have to eat an extra 10% because the European Union says so. Sly, eh? That, however, is to identify a rather convenient scapegoat for a situation that is actually of our own making. It is true, to an extent, that the quantities we’re encouraged to eat are increasing by stealth. A Big Mac, for instance, is still a Big Mac. From the day that the prototype of the genre slithered down its little aluminium ski-slope and into the first doubledepth polystyrene clam-shell, little has changed in the world of the Big Mac. OK, a bit of tinkering with the special sauce here and an extra five seconds of

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bun-toasting there, but it is basically the same beast as ever it was. What has changed, though, has been the appetite of you and me - the consumer. ‘Big Mac and Large Fries’ used to be the hungry-horse equivalent of ‘Hamburger and Fries’. You would deliver the line with a swagger and an air of meaning business. Here indeed stood a giant of a hunger. Today, ‘Hamburger and Fries’ is what you find in a kid’s Happy Meal. It is scarcely sufficient for an eight year-old as my own children will gladly testify. Today Mr Hungry-Horse is bearing down on ‘Megamac and Supersize Fries’, probably washed down with a waste paper bin full of Coca-Cola. By some strange logic, therefore, the Big Mac has now become the smaller of the two Macs. So, to continue the extrapolation, at McDonalds, ‘Big’ is the new small. In truth, it is becoming endemic. Have a look at a flier for your local pizza delivery service - if you don’t have one to hand, go and stand by your letterbox for about three minutes. How many people does it suggest that their smallest pizza serves? ‘One to two’, I’ll be bound. What on earth can that mean? Is there any other industry that allows itself such a broad margin of error? When a thirty year-old applies to Dateline, they certainly don’t expect to wind up, carnation in lapel, at the Aberdeen Steak House cutting up a piece of sirloin for some sixty year-old (nor ordering a lemonade for a fifteen year22

old for that matter). When you ask an estate agent for details of flats priced at a hundred thousand pounds you know full well he is going to attempt to pry one twenty-five out of you … but two hundred? Getting back to the subject, if you are the sort of person for whom half of this pizza is a refined sufficiency, would you offer the delivery boy £3 instead of the advertised £6? No. The fact is that ‘feeds 1 – 2’ means ‘should feed 2, but you’re never going to share that miserable little thing, are you?’, in the same way that a family, as in ‘family size’, used to mean Mum, Dad and three teenagers, but now means a bloke and his girlfriend as long as she isn’t too hungry. And don’t think it ends there! The other day I found myself in the queue at Starbucks pondering my options (for those as yet uninitiated in the delights of this particular establishment, Starbucks is a mighty American chain of coffee shops much favoured by Mayday anarchists for acts of wanton destruction). Normally, when faced with three different sizes of a product such as a cup of coffee, I would assume that ‘small’, ‘medium’ or ‘large’ might do the trick, but no. Starbucks take the McDonalds route. For ‘small’, read ‘tall’ - I don’t know how that works, but they seem to like it. For ‘medium’, read ‘grande’, which, as we all know, is Italian for ‘large’. Finally, and presumably as a result of running out of suitably catchy adjectives meaning ‘bigger than huge’, but without overtones of sweaty grotesqueness, for ‘large’, read ‘venti’, which is, I’m led to believe, Italian for twenty. I think this comes 23

from the weight of the container in pounds, but I may be mistaken. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the catering industry is able to extrapolate this trend of ‘portion inflation’ for some considerable time before it reaches a natural peak. That is the nature of our relationship with food. Go on, prove me wrong. Back in Starbucks, though, the lady in front of me ordered a ‘venti mocha whip’. To save having to buy a dictionary of Seattle coffee-house slang, this means a milk pail containing a thimble full of industrial grade coffee, five or six squirts of heavy duty chocolate sludge out of a public convenience soap dispenser and about a pint of boiled full fat milk. The whole thing is then topped off with an inch thick carpet of whipped cream. Straining under the weight, the lady concerned staggered to the ‘toppings counter’ where she shovelled on a dense layer of powdered chocolate, vanilla and cinnamon. Finally she stirred in three sachets of ‘Sweet’n’Low’. Needless to say this woman was not just grande - she must have weighed in at over venti stone.

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Chapter 3 WHY BOTHER BEING SLIM ANYWAY?

Are you sitting comfortably? If so, put the book down, get up and run up and down the stairs four or five times (and don’t put the open book face down! You will break the spine.). Done? Good. Bloody awful wasn’t it? Now do me one more favour. Write your present weight in the box below. Please do it in biro or some other permanent ink and please be honest. There is a very good reason for this, but we will have to wait until the end to find out what it is. (Please, no cheating!) My weight: …… Stone…… lbs or ………kg Have you got over that tiny exertion yet? No? Whilst we’re waiting for your heart-rate to drop back out of the danger-zone, let me tell you something. I had a dog once that liked to run around the garden at full tilt. That was her deepest love, apart from attempting to reproduce with a giant stuffed panda. The point is that she was still doing 25

this at the age of sixteen, which is something like a hundred-and-odd in doggy years. What the hell am I talking about? I am talking about how out of shape you have become, even at your age - and, to be fair, it’s not just you. At the time of writing, I read that something like 60% of Americans are 30% overweight. Or perhaps 30% of Americans are 60% overweight. Maybe both - it makes very little difference. The fact is that one hundred and fifty million Americans weigh about the same as two hundred million Americans ought to and this means an excess of fifty million Americans all told. This is not only astonishing but also quite disgusting when you consider that 90% of this extra weight is stored in the form of mottled flesh at the backs of their knees. Big is Beautiful Let us dispense with now the old ‘Big is Beautiful’ chestnut. It isn’t. Alright? Without wishing to overstate the bleedin’ obvious, beautiful is beautiful and big is big. Sometimes bigger is more beautiful, like a television screen or a pay rise, but most of the time big and beautiful things are that way by pure coincidence. If you scaled up the Grand Canyon by 1000%, or an E-Type Jaguar, or Renoir’s Les Parapluies, or the cute one out of The Bangles, or any other object of beauty for that matter, would it become more 26

beautiful? No. On the other hand, aesthetes might argue that space-consuming eyesores such as Arndale Centres, Basingstoke, the Royal Festival Hall and Pat orff ‘f East Enders, would be far more pleasing to the senses if shrunk down to Hornby 00 Gauge (and then smashed flat with a club hammer). So why should it apply to humans? Answer: it doesn’t. When did you last hear: ‘Over 7 ft. tall is beautiful?’ ‘Gigantic facial features are beautiful?’ ‘Enormous forests of body hair are beautiful?’ ‘A whopping great Adam’s Apple is beautiful?’ Never. As for ‘enormously overweight is beautiful’? We are urged to believe that ‘big’ people are more cuddly and therefore better in bed - that is about the nub of the argument in favour of this motion. A chap likes to have something to get hold of, don’tcha know? In pointing out the flaw in this approach, I’m sort of reluctant to go down the route of ‘great big puddens just lying there, clammy with sweat and blowing like beached pilot whales whilst you rummage through the folds for their private parts’, so I won’t. Nor do I really want to examine the large gap between the imagined joy of snuggling into hillocks of velvety cushions and the reality of catching an eyeful of flubbering cottage cheese after your paramour has hopped up for a dump in the middle of sexual congress. 27

I will, instead, limit myself to laying down the following great truths: • ‘Big is Beautiful’ is a notion espoused only by fat people. • Most fat people want to slim. No slim people want to get fat. • Male sexual fantasies involving fat women tend to go down the route of how dirty they probably are. (They would have to be, being so fat.) Female sexual fantasies involving fat blokes are too rare to be properly studied. I sometimes wonder if the whole campaign has been funded by the E.C. Lard-Arse Advisory Council or some guilt-ridden, underground militant group. I mean, why else would you bother unless it were merely some shamed apology by fat people for being the way they are? Yes, of course we’re all aware of the problems at the other end of the scale - anorexic supermodels, bulimic princesses and so forth - and I welcome any attempt to draw the youth of today away from the skeletal look that seems to be the rage at the moment. On the other hand, ‘Big is Beautiful’ isn’t about scrawny teens becoming normal sized. It is about people with life threatening obesity being encouraged to think that it is a good-looking lifestyle choice. Well I’m afraid it isn’t. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and, in this case the beholder is saying ‘Ugh’. 28

Chapter 4 MEET THE VICTIMS

To illuminate our path to weight-loss it will help us to examine the pitfalls of starvation, exercise, pain, suffering and so forth through the eyes of a couple of perpetual dieters. Let us familiarise ourselves with my two guinea pigs, Barry and Carrie. Before we get too comfy with these two mountains of humanity let me at first dispose of the legal side of things: If I know you, these are not you. Especially if you are that obnoxious great oaf who lives four doors down and who lets his dog shit on my doorstep every other day. Any similarity between you and these characters is purely coincidental. If you see yourself as Barry or Carrie then you are merely projecting your sad life on to this book and please don’t feel the urge to sue the publisher if you turn a page and your assumed character takes a turn for the worse. Barry and Carrie are a pair of generic, typical tubbies. They need not be of any specific age nor do they have to be absolutely enormous, just as long as you can identify with them enough to be able to follow their plight.

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Barry is a busy chap working behind a desk in a busy office. He has little time for exercise and less inclination. His leisure time is taken up with: • Snooker. • Drinking lager. • Shouting mild obscenities at the West Ham manager at the weekend. • Pulling his knickers out of his posterior cleft. • Gasping for air. • Eating. • Passing stools the size of baguettes. • Mopping his brow. In short, Barry lives the sedentary lifestyle familiar to so many of us these days. When he looks at himself in the mirror he sees, like many people, just how wide he is but can’t see how deep he has become. He still gets into a 38 inch trouser and kids himself that he is this shape all the way up. The fact is that if he pulled his trousers up another six inches, he would have to let the waistband out an extra foot. Barry stores his fat not just on his gut. He also has double chins, a fat back and wobbly bosoms, which he conceals underneath XXL lumberjack shirts with mind-blowingly savage patterns. Barry is a worrier. He worries that women might him unattractive. He worries that he may die of the clogging-up of some or other vital piece of tubing. He worries that people could call him ‘Tubby’ behind his back. He worries that any efforts by him to indulge in any physical activity will be greeted with two parts sympathy to three parts snorting 30

derision. But Barry worries in vain, because they do, he will, they do and they are - there is no maybe about it. Carrie on the other hand isn’t a bad looking girl. The general smokescreen thrown up around Carrie, by mothers of her mates, is that she has ‘a pretty face’. Men, when trying to pair her off with others say, she ‘has a nice personality’. In either case it isn’t something you want to hear about yourself. Carrie has a fine pair of calves and elegant wrists. She is indeed pretty, but her chin looks like a hammock with a matelot asleep inside it. Her upper arms are pallid white from being permanently covered, in an attempt to hide the great rolls of underarm flesh her mates have cruelly started referring to as ‘bingo-wings’. Her pulled back hairdo is carefully chosen to stretch out the jowls. Although her waist isn’t out of control, her chest and backside have become her fat storage silos and her ‘hourglass’ looks like it could go for a week before needing a turn. Carrie has removed the full length mirror from her bedroom and replaced it with a dressing table mirror that only shows her from the collarbones up. She still spends the same time in front of it, though, applying make-up in the forlorn hope that the casual observer will think that she has cheekbones. Both our guinea pigs have what they call ‘low selfesteem’ and comfort themselves with food. This suits them for the moment, because ‘comfort eater’ 31

gives some sort of psychoanalytical credibility to their habits and sounds a whole lot better than ‘greedy pig’. Anyway, now we understand each other, it is time to embark on our voyage of discovery. I will be with you every step of the way and remember, if it seems like I’m pushing you too hard, it is because you are lazy; if you find my comments offensive, it is purely so you take note of them; if it isn’t working, it is because you are cheating.

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Chapter 5 KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Your enemy for the purposes of this book is ‘Fat’. I accept that your real enemy may be some tattooed oaf from four doors down with an incontinent Doberman Pinscher, but we ought to keep our objectives simple, otherwise we might find ourselves heading off at a tangent. So, what is fat? Well, we all know the gumph about it being the body’s way of storing excess intake for breaking down into carbohydrate in the event that … blah, blah, blah. But physically what is it? Pull up your shirt and examine your stomach. Suck it in if need be. Now we both know that if you were a lean and athletic type in this position (imagine Sir Steven Redgrave, hunched over his oar, with his knees up around his chin) your gut would be very much in the ‘new moon’ phase - crinkled skin sitting on a concave bank of rippling muscles, you know the look. The moon you are looking down at now, I will wager, is much more the kind that sets timber wolves baying. So what is it that is keeping your skin and your ‘Steve Redgrave Area’ two or three feet apart?

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Is it, for instance, an elegant kapok-stuffed pillow, full of cuddly goodness? Is it just extra-large organs? Is it merely enormous but over-relaxed muscles? No. If you think any of the above, you are obviously an idiot. I don’t know why I said them. Closer to the truth is that under your shirt lurk hundreds of big juicy rinds off pork chops - the bit you know you aren’t supposed to eat, but do anyway, plus someone else’s if they leave it. Yes that yellowy-white, slimy, translucent gunge that you don’t really want to touch until it is nice and crispy. Then, of course, you can’t keep your mitts off it. If you’ve ever been privy to watching a liposuction operation (and those of you who surf satellite channels will be familiar with this nauseating spectacle) you will know what I mean when I say this. When the lumpy, yellowish fat and the pinkish tissue and the general ooze and drool are removed from the skin, it looks like nothing on earth so much as someone scraping the remains of a trifle into the dustbin. And lest you forget, this crap covers every single square inch of you with the possible exception of the flaps of your ears and the surface of your tongue. If you want to find out how deep it goes, simply grab a fold of flesh and pinch. Try somewhere relatively fat-free to start with - say, the webbing between your thumb and forefinger. Give it a squeeze. Hold it up 34

to the light and have a look through it. Notice how thin the pinch of skin is. That is two layers of the same skin that you are covered in from head to foot. Now let’s go to the other end. Pick up a fold of ‘skin’ from your stomach. Got it? Right, now deduct the eighth of an inch for the two layers of skin. That is two layers of week old sherry trifle. Now try your thighs; and your arse; and your upper arms. In fact you can do it anywhere and be disgusted. How much fat is there on your forehead for instance? How about your shins? Or your neck. Or, just as bad, your back? Back, in Chapter four, I mentioned that our guinea-pig, Barry has ‘a fat back’. How many of you, I wonder, thought: ‘What the hell is he on about’? Give it a pinch and find out. It is, I’m sure you will agree a long way from the gossamer-thin layer of fibrous but gloriously white material that you see stretched over cuts of meat in the butcher’s window - a very long way. Know Your Enemy Part Two - The Enemy Within. Now we have identified the ‘enemy’ as fat, should we perhaps begin our offensive? Not quite yet, I fear. That is because there is one other enemy to consider and this one, I’m sorry to report is a far more slippery customer. It is the enemy within, that is to say, your body.

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You see your body loves fat. It loves it far more than you do. It simply cannot get enough of the stuff. Ok, I agree that Barry, with his fat back and extravagant cravings, might be seen as the embodiment of lard-lust, but he is a mere amateur in this field. The real villain in the Barry vs Fat title bout lurks deep within, way beyond anything that Barry can control. It is evolution. A billion years ago, a lump of space-mud collided with a clod of Earth-goo at the exact same moment as a bolt of lightning struck the very same spot. The result - an amino acid. A mere thousand million years later, the amino acid is up and about and operating heavy machinery with fifty million generations of aplomb. But how did this happen? Obviously students of Darwin may skip this next couple of paragraphs, although it will be a sight more concise than the great man’s original attempt at explaining the whole deal. The long and short of it is that over time, the descendants of any organism mutate for various, quite natural reasons. Sometimes, the mutations will be detrimental - there aren’t many five-legged animals around, but that’s not to say that Nature hasn’t given that particular option a go from time to time - and sometimes beneficial. The process of ‘natural selection’ weeds out the five-legged horse (by means of tangling its legs up every time it is put under pressure by a marauding smilodon), whilst allowing the good mutations to thrive.

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As you will be aware, five-legged horses aside, the changes from one generation to the next will be almost imperceptible, but over hundreds and hundreds, the shift will be made. This is why firstly, no animals appear to be evolving at the moment no matter how hard you stare at them and second, why it will take another million years before the England & Wales Cricket Board can turn out a side capable of beating Australia. Usually in the case of Darwinian theory, you and I leave it at that. Fair do’s, we say, teensy-weensy changes are the way forward for all species. If every teensy-weensy change represents an improvement on the previous generation, then the ‘mutated’ creature will have an advantage over the ‘unmutated’ and the mutation will become the norm. This, unfortunately, is to over-simplify the whole thing. A lot of questions will never be answered: • Surely the first mammal was actually a slightly hairy reptile? • If dinosaurs were so damned special, why are they not re-evolving? • Surely a part-evolved eyeball is of no bloody use to man nor beast? So how did the eyeball evolve? • And feathers for that matter? Not to mention lungs. • Why would testicles evolve in the one place where any damn fool could land a hefty kick on them? In fact, without wishing to sound too creationist, there must be more to it than Mr Darwin let on. I can well imagine that the first reptile to grow a feather 37

stood on the ground flapping its spindly forelegs, desperately hoping to take off, until some passing carnivore made it a pre-prandial snack. No time for reproduction there, so hardly a good advert for Darwin. Moving back to Barry for one second, we can at least be certain that large chunks of him are explicable by Darwin. • He walks upright. • He can use basic tools. • He can comprehend complicated ideas. • He can taste the difference between sweet and bitter. All these things are of necessity. However, like the plumage of Amazonian birds, or the mane of the lion, or the antlers of stags, or the song of the skylark, a lot of Barry is evolved out of taste. The finest feathers, the thickest mane, the tallest antlers and the sweetest song let the amorous female know which of the herd is the strongest, fittest and generally most eligible mate, without the need for the species to fight itself to the death to prove it. In the same way, Barry, a human being, is naturally selected by potential mates. To this type of selection he owes all the things that make him attractive to potential mates; his smooth skin, his insatiable appetite for sexual congress, his pronounced musculature and his ready wit and charm. You may be starting to smell a rat here. This is because Barry is a hairy great oaf who can’t be bothered with sex as it knackers him out, hasn’t been 38

aware of a muscle since he fell out of a tree on to some corrugated iron and contracted lockjaw, and would be boorish in the extreme if one could hear him through the mouthful of pastry he is invariably masticating. So why have Barry and all the other Barrys out there not been naturally selected from the system leaving only three billion Steven Redgraves talking like Leslie Phillips and inseminating everything that smells of Tweed by Yardley? I think the answer is that man has actually stopped evolving in several departments. In some areas all goes smoothly. If Barry were shipped back seven hundred years, he would be so fantastically intelligent and erudite they would be forced to burn him. He would also be a giant. And twenty or thirty generations is but a split second in evolutionary terms. On the other hand, despite having left the ‘grunting troglodyte’ stage behind hundreds of generations ago, he still has the potential to be charmless, or ugly, or both. The great evolutionary wheel does not seem to have turned a single degree in these departments despite the obvious conclusion that the Barrys of the world must have a significantly harder time getting their ends away than most. What about his eating habits? Well, don’t you know it, if good old evolution hasn’t taken care of that one as well. Like hibernators, Barry’s body can convert all those excess nibbles to a convenient food store for the times when nutrition isn’t so easy to come by. The grizzly bear nods off in December weighing 39

in at about the same as a Transit van and wakes, in March, in the Vespa region. So it is with Barry. Except Barry doesn’t go to sleep for three months. He hasn’t done this for ten thousand generations and his body simply hasn’t twigged yet. Thousands upon thousands of extra building blocks ingested in the form of protein and carbohydrate and what does the body do? Nothing. You would think that there would be the chance of a spot of evolution going on here. With all that raw material pouring in, what price: • A third set of teeth? • Hair that doesn’t go grey or fall out? • An extra eye in the back of your head? • A spare heart? But no. The body takes it and turns it into fat … and more fat and more fat. It doesn’t know when to quit. Once it gets started it never stops. Even more odd is the fact that it kills you eventually. Your body actually kills itself! If you don’t think that is a bit strange, just try to stab yourself with a kitchen knife (don’t really! I can live without seeing your relatives in court, thank you). It isn’t so easy, is it, even just trying to get through the first millimetre of skin? You could plunge it into a side of ham alright, but into yourself? The body simply will not harm itself. But show it a cream doughnut and wallop! Straight up the artery wall.

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It matters not one bit that what you are eating isn’t fat - because it sure as hell will be next time you see it. Don’t think, either, that the body will offer you any help. It won’t ring a tiny bell when it considers it has enough to see you clear through a Scandinavian winter without you consuming another morsel. It won’t make your nose wrinkle when it sees one Danish pastry over the limit. Just the reverse in fact. The fatter you are the more food your body demands and the more fat it lays down for an ever longer bleaker winter. Yes, the enemy within is the ultimate foe.

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Chapter 6 BAD ATTITUDES

Let me try a few little tests out on you. They are designed to help you discover the truth about your attitude towards food. More to the point, this chapter is designed to remind you of the strange ways in which you and I and most people on the planet start behaving the moment there is food, or the suggestion of food, in the offing. In order to make it look kind of scientific, I have made a total of eighty statements set out in seven sections below, to do with the way a person might approach food. See how many of them ring true by doing the following: Number up a piece of paper from 1 to 80 and mark down a score for each question as follows: 1 point - No. It means nothing to me. 2 points - Ok. I won’t deny that has happened once or twice. 3 points - Oh dear. That sounds like me alright. 4 points - Cripes. You seem to have cut to the very heart of my being.

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There are a few rules I would like you to observe: • First time round, please take the test alone • Take the test all in one go. Don’t take a break. • Try to be pretty frank. I don’t care whether you are a tub or not, but I have worked damned hard on this so don’t nause it up by lying, OK? There, that ought to do it apart from my obvious caveat that I am, as I think I have already stated, not a scientist. I have also been known to invent statistics in situations that are just crying out for them. Hence, you might like to consult your GP before answering these questions in case he feels that doing so might endanger your life. Before you get settled, why not cop hold of your calculator, as we will be requiring it later and I don’t want you to wear yourself out getting up and down the whole time in your condition. You might also like to make sure that it is one of the ‘desktop’ variety with the big buttons, since the sums are going to get a mite fiddly for those pudgy great fingers of yours. You will see that I am not inclined to use the sort of points system favoured for tabloid newspapers’ sexual self-help questionnaires and Gossipy Cretin Monthly’s How-Well-Do-You-Know-Your-Soaps survey. Yes, we will do a bit of data manipulation at the end, but if you just cannot wait for ten minutes, why not apply the following ratings guide to the end of each section?

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Your Score: Under 10 points: Liar! 10 is the absolute minimum you can score! 10 – 20 points: Ooooh! La-di-da, your Royal Highness. All table manners and self-control. Pull the other one! 21 – 30 points: Ok, that is more like it. You don’t lick the spoon after feeding the cat, but that is probably not beyond your wit in a crisis. 31 points and above: Yuk! There are no depths to which you wouldn’t stoop (assuming you can actually bend at the waist). You are a slave to your lower intestine. Now that is out of the way, here is the real bogus science: Part 1 - Shame The shame, the shame, oh God the shame! We are all ashamed, are we not? We lie and cheat and generally try to paint as rosy a picture as possible of ourselves to others. For instance, we all love roast potatoes - that is a given - and when we offer to scrape Granny’s plate after Sunday lunch we know full well that the little crispy one she left in the pool of gravy won’t be going anywhere near the rubbish sack, since we have other plans for it the moment we reach the other side of the kitchen door. Not just us, either; everyone else knows it too. So why do we not just spear it and eat it in front of the old dear? Let’s see how we score for Shame: 45

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

There is food in the house other than in the place I normally keep food I bought big plates with high edges to make my large portions look smaller I finish other people’s leftovers in private I have retrieved stuff from the bin and eaten it I have eaten stuff in another room to avoid sharing I have counted chips on the quiet Sometimes I fry myself two eggs and claim I got a double yolk I hide ‘bad’ food under ‘good’ food to make people think I’m eating more healthily I have ‘fluffed up’ food in a packet to make it look like I haven’t raided it I have threatened a small child in order to encourage it to share sweets with me I have helped myself to food that I have found unattended I have helped myself to food that I have found unattended in a hospital I have deliberately eaten a secret meal just before another, to make it look like I’m eating less I eat on the toilet I have offered to wash up just so I can keep on eating in private

Tot up the fifteen answers you have to date. I would expect your average supermodel to score exactly 15 here. The ‘average’ person might clock in at around 30-ish. However I don’t believe the full 60 to be beyond the realms of possibility. No one wants people to believe that they are a pig. I have no idea 46

why - the fact that one weighs 23st might make people believe that one is a pig long before they witness your shameful efforts to disguise the fact, by picking at food like Willie Carson at a pre-Derby breakfast. Part 2 - Shamelessness Of course, the reason we have shame is because our genuine, guard-down behaviour is so vile in the first place. Fight it as hard as you like, but none of us can fully conquer that moment when the sight of a heap of tasty morsels triggers off a feeding frenzy of nosebleed-in-the-piranha-tank proportions. Add up your score for the next 15 statements to see just how shameless you are prepared to become when grub beckons and the social defences are down: 16. have asked people ‘are you going to finish that?’ the moment they have shown the slightest sign of flagging 17. I have bartered food at the dinner table 18. I have been in a fight about food when sober 19. I have conspicuously overeaten at a wake 20. Whilst passing wedding cake down a table I have intercepted one with more icing than the others 21. I have asked for a doggy-bag at a dinner party 22. I lick my plate in company 23. I lick other people’s plates … and knives, now I think of it 24. I have counted chips … and made a fuss 25. I finish other people’s leftovers in front of them

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26. I help myself to other people’s meals before they have finished 27. When there is spare food, people say “Oh, soand-so will eat it” - and I do 28. Supermarket checkouts always have to scan at least one empty wrapper for me 29. I have dropped in on a mate for coffee just because I’m out of biscuits 30. I have asked to ‘lick the spoon’ beyond the age of twelve Now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty. There is no real calorific reason why your score should be high or low here. Some absolute skin-and-bone sticks will moan about chips - even in a restaurant - whilst a dyed-in-the-wool glutton may suffer in silence. What is interesting to us here is the difference between your scores in parts 1 and 2, of which more later. Part 3 - Table Manners We were all, I’m quite sure, brought up to eat our peas off the top of the fork, chew with our lips firmly pressed together, sip our drink only when our mouth is empty of food and put our knife and fork together when we finish. Unfortunately, every so often, when faced by the irresistible, our eyes roll up to the roof of our skull, our dignity leaves via the cat flap and the most rudimentary of table etiquette deserts us, possibly never to return: 31. There is nothing that can’t be better eaten with a spoon – a big spoon 48

32. I sweat whilst eating 33. I cannot imagine circumstances that would lead me to refuse food 34. I have eaten a meal I’ve been offered rather than admit to just having eaten 35. I eat meals on the street/in trains/on buses instead of waiting five minutes till I get home 36. After a good meal I kick off my shoes and undo my trouser button 37. I have eaten with a ladle/cake knife/fish slice/pair of barbecue tongs 38. I have been invited to banquets in front of the Queen/Lord Mayor/Prime Minister etc and my first thought has been ‘I wonder how many courses we get’ 39. I have found myself with a mouthful before grace/toasts/the Queen has sat down/anyone else has been served 40. I have burped a sentence before realising I’m in company Tot up your score for those 10 statements. Still being honest, I trust - you might as well; there is no one around except you and me. Bizarrely, having been brought up in a household where there were ‘no prizes for finishing first’, where ‘all joints on the table will be carved’ and where we were never ‘at home to Mr.Toot-Bottom’, I personally score particularly highly on this section. Most odd. The whole ‘etiquette’ malarkey, lest we forget, is no more than a tool for social exclusion. In truth, can a person really have ‘bad table manners’, or, for that matter, ‘bad diction’, ‘poor social skills’ or ‘bad 49

posture’? Surely, if it feels right then it is right and this is as true with table manners as with anything. Question: Why must asparagus be eaten with the fingers? Answer: To let you know which people are ‘our sort of people’ and which are the plebs. For all that, though, rules are rules and we all find ourselves in breach from time to time. Part 4 - Out and About One of the most important aspects of our lives at the trough is the way we behave when we depart from our own dining tables. Psychologically, we tend to discount ‘meals out’ as anomalies and therefore feel free to consume whatever we please with utter dietary impunity. It is a one-off, so it doesn’t count. Obviously this mind-game has a limited application - if you eat out seven nights a week you are unlikely to consider that you are becoming dangerously malnourished - but score up the next ten statements and see what sounds familiar: 41. The MegaMac is the best thing to happen to the restaurant trade in a generation 42. I finish every scrap of airline meals 43. I reckon I get top value out of all-you-can-eat restaurants 44. I go on holidays to the US for the cuisine 45. If I’m going somewhere and I pass a burger bar I instinctively look at my watch 46. I’m usually out of the front door before I realise I have heard the ice-cream van 47. I have said to a waiter ‘I’ll have what he’s having’, based on size alone 50

48. I have complained in a restaurant half way through a meal in the hope of getting another whole one 49. I have started a meal in a restaurant in the full knowledge that it has been delivered to the wrong table 50. I have asked for seconds in a restaurant You won’t be surprised to learn that, regardless of our attitude to eating at home, we almost all behave like a plague of locusts descending on an Ethiopian maize crop the moment we’re released into bars, cafés and restaurants. A few scores between 35 and 40 here, if I’m any judge. Part 5 - A Sense of Perspective Do portions somehow seem … less … these days? As policemen get younger so food gets smaller. We see the advice on the boxes of things such as Tesco’s Chicken and Ham Pie, or Sainsbury’s Sausage and Onion Plait that they contain ‘four servings’, but dismiss this as some sort of feeble joke. Be truthful! When was the last time you got the same number of servings out of a ready-made meal as the box suggested? And as for the ‘Serving Suggestion’ … It never shows the entire, undivided product flanked by two massive baked potatoes, afloat in a sea of gravy and butter and parked on the knee of some hairy geezer in his pants sat in front of Eastenders, does it? That would be ‘Serving Reality’, I suppose. Have a look at the next ten: 51. Meals for one? Meals for one third more like 51

52. I copy Delia/Jamie/Nigella’s recipes but they always forget the chips and two slices of bread and butter 53. I choose meals by size 54. I have finished off jars of jam/pickle/ mayo/ honey/barbecue relish with a spoon, because ‘that last two inches is no use to man or beast’ 55. I have eaten a whole tub of glace cherries whilst under the illusion I’m only having a couple 56. When I dip tortilla chips, I need to cup my hand under them to get them to my mouth 57. I have made an attempt to eat a meal so vast that the restaurant offers a prize for finishing it 58. I have bought chocolate bars by the fistful 59. I own a four slot toaster even though I live alone 60. Snack size? What the hell size is the normal size then? In actual fact, food is getting bigger all the time, but even the clamour of the food companies to pour ever increasing piles of comestibles down our distended gullets can’t keep pace with the relentless march of our own unalloyed greed. Did you know, for instance, that a bag of Kettle Chips is not supposed to be an ‘individual’ serving? No? Part 6 - Forgive Me Father For I Have Eaten… While we’re doing this, we might as well ask for some absolution along the way. Let us be clear at this point, this section is not a suggestions box. If any of these statements give you an idea for opening an as yet unexplored avenue of consumption, score 52

five points and move on quickly. Forgive me, Father, for I have eaten …: 61. medical supplies out of hunger (esp. Setlers Tums) 62. a huge knob of butter - with just about everything 63. dog biscuits/Good Boy Choc Drops, liked them… and gorged out on them 64. rare meat, just so I can get it quicker 65. rice paper, dry custard, milk or cocoa powder and/or hundreds and thousands, swigged straight from their little tub 66. stuff, off which I have picked mould 67. around half of what I brought to feed the ducks with 68. something I have found on the ground 69. two incompatible foodstuffs I have inadvertently mixed 70. food off a sexual partner and forgotten all about the sex part of the deal Disgusting as it may seem, this section often provides the highest score of the lot. As for repentance … Well, how do you feel right now? Like forswearing the evils of grazing on anything remotely digestible that comes within reach? Most likely, you are thinking of looking out that old tub of hundreds and thousands, grabbing that mouldy French stick out of the dustbin and strolling off to feed the ducks.

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Part 7 - Is It Just Me, Or… Finally, give yourself a score for the sorts of things you might accidentally blurt out in company and which are greeted not with general agreement, but with an impenetrable silence followed by a hasty and embarrassed change of subject. 71. My spouse/mum/kids have to hide their chocolate, because if I find it I’ll eat it 72. Sometimes I get totally legless and throw up. That’s a kind of diet. 73. ‘Tea’ doesn’t count as a meal … does it? 74. To function properly the human body needs some sort of pastry every day 75. Throw away food that’s passed its sell-by date? Why? 76. I can’t think of any food I don’t like 77. I’m never less than an hour from eating or from having eaten 78. People who say they ‘forgot to eat’ are bloody liars 79. Grilled? How do you have to hold the frying pan to ‘grill’ something? 80. Diet Coke with a meal means I’ve been ‘good’ Needless to say, if you score highly here, then yes, it is just you! Data Manipulation Now you have a sheet of paper with 80 numbers written down, the first thing I want you to do is to take the test again. First time round, you did it on 54

your own, but now I want you to ask a wife, husband, partner, or close relative to read the statements out to you and to note down your score. For reasons, which will become apparent later, it isn’t a good idea to ask anyone more distant than this to assist. All done? Let’s go! 1 – SLOBBISHNESS Slobbishness is a form of compulsive behaviour. The best way to illustrate how this applies to you is to draw a little chart that I call The Slob Gradient. Firstly, count up the numbers of 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s you scored (note: if you managed any 5s in section 6, these count as 4s as well). Then make a chart out of it by drawing an ‘L’ shape and marking 1,2,3 and 4 along the bottom and, say, 50 up the side. Now simply draw an ‘x’ for each of the four scores at the appropriate height on the vertical axis. Finally draw a line through the four crosses You will be left with one of six shapes. This is what they tell us: Downhill Slope: Skinny person reading the book for purposes of Schadenfreude. You should be ashamed of yourself. Humpback bridge: It depends to an extent at what point the hump appears, but you are certainly

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tending towards the slobbish. However, help is at hand, so do not despair! Horizontal line: You are one of those people who answers ‘B’ on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire because ‘it hasn’t been ‘B’ for ages’. This is what we call, in multiple-choice circles, the ‘Goldfish Score’. Do it again! ‘U’ shape: Binge-eating bulimic. Seek professional help (or learn to cook properly). Uphill slope: - The classic Slob Gradient. You are heading for the piano-case burial. An undiluted slob. I suspect that the fact that you’ve scored any 1s and 2s is probably to do with lack of opportunity rather than any restraint on your part. Zigzag line: Are you sure you read the questions properly? 2 – HONESTY We need two numbers here. Firstly calculate your Shame Quotient. This is done by taking your total from Part 1 (Shame) and subtracting your total from Part 2 (Shamelessness) SQ = S1 – S2 Then calculate your Window Dressing Factor. Tot up the total score for all 80 questions when you answered them alone (Solo score - Ss). Then tot up

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the 80 answers from your second ‘assisted’ attempt (Assisted score - Sa). Subtract ‘assisted’ from ‘solo’. WDF = Ss – Sa Your Shame Quotient is the measure of the difference between how you act in public and how you act in private. A high Shame Quotient indicates a high level of secrecy about your unholy habits. A low Shame Quotient, in contrast, may indicate either that you are at least honest about your own greed or, more likely, that you are past caring what anyone thinks. Your Window Dressing Factor, reflects your honesty or otherwise about your eating habits when forced to talk about them with someone else, with whom you might discuss other personal matters in a relatively candid manner. That is why it is best to do your second test with a partner or close friend rather than with the checkout girl at Safeway or an Indian waiter. The higher the score, the greater your desire to ‘window-dress’ your habits. Shame Quotient of: Over 20 - Ugh! You eat like a debutante in company, but once on your own it is Stig of the Dump. No one can understand why you are so tubby, I’m quite sure. Your clandestine gluttony defines a deep dishonesty about your appetites

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12 to 19 - Definitely ashamed of your eating habits and prepared to top up that ‘diet’ whilst no one is around. 5 to 11 - At least you are pretty up front about what you get up to. An average score would be about 10. Well, none of us wants to be caught eating out of the bin, do we? 0 to 4 - Maybe a bit honest for your own good. People probably consider you a bit of a pig, especially in comparison with those who have the tact to score highly on this test. -1 and less - You are a total case. You are overeating for the specific purpose of making a show of it. Odds are that you are not overweight, merely peculiar. Window Dressing Factor of: Over 80 - You are not ready to lose weight. You can’t even admit to your nearest and dearest that you have nasty habits, so what chance do I have? 50 - 79 - Come on. It is time to ‘fess up and get real. You will own up to some gruesome behaviour, but there are still as many porky pies coming out of your mouth as going in. 20 - 49 - This is about average for a normal person. OK, we like to drink gravy from the boat, but we also wish to maintain some of our mystique for the boudoir. You are quite ready to shed a few pounds. 58

0 - 19 - A commendable honesty. Was your partner looking at you with a curled lip at the end of the test? I would have been. Negative - Unless you subsequently remembered some more of your disgusting habits, there is no excuse for this kind of score. You are probably some sort of tiresome clown who is going to die alone. 3 – WEAKNESS The figure we need here is the Gluttony Rating. To get this we are interested in the total number of 4s you scored in the test (note: as above, count 5s as 4s). Add up the number of 4s scored (S4) and make a percentage of it by dividing it by 80 and multiplying the answer by 100. GR = S4 X 100/80 The Gluttony Rating can go from a hundred down to zero. It demonstrates how weak you are in the face of a potential feeding frenzy by discovering how many items on the list have caused you to register 4 points (i.e. the item ‘defines’ you). The higher the ratio of 4s to non-4s the weaker you are. Gluttony Rating of: Over 50% - If you’ve answered 4 to more than half the questions you are in serious trouble. You have no self-control whatsoever when faced with an opportunity to consume outside the bounds of polite

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society. If your score is over 70%, you may be close to death. 30 – 50% - 24 to 40 4s is still a heck of a lot. Your weakness for food really runs your life, or what you have that passes for one. 15 – 30%– Yes you are weak, but you’ve checked some of the baser urges. We can definitely do good work here. 10% ish give or take - This is about normal. Everyone likes to go for the max in 8 to 12 categories, even Kate Moss. Zero - Do the test again. What have I told you about lying? 4 – READINESS Did you do the test all in one go, without stopping for a snack? How many items did you consume whilst doing the test? If the answers are ‘no’ and/or ‘more than zero’, perhaps you might like to have a little think as to whether or not we’re going to do this. If you can’t do what you are told then I might have to send you to your room without any dinner, capeesh? 5 – ‘LIGHT’ RELIEF The Whichelow Scales

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Simply add up all your answers (from your ‘solo’ run-through of the test Ss) and you will have a number between 80 and 320 (330 if you were particularly naughty in part 6!). Men should now add another 20% to take into account big bones, bulging biceps and the like, but for the women this total is your final figure. And Hey Presto! Your weight in pounds. If you don’t believe me, go and weigh yourself right now. Go on then! See? W = Σ Ss (x 1.2 for the men) There is little point in this except in as much as it is a bloody good trick when it works. Unfortunately it does not actually work that often, but it is good for a laugh none the less. So What? Right, that is the bald pseudo-science out of the way. Where did that get us? In terms of losing weight, not very far. Unless you failed the Readiness section, you probably went twenty minutes without eating, but that is no major advance in itself. However, if you stack the results of the tests up against your own opinions of yourself in the categories of ‘slobbishness’, ‘honesty’, ‘weakness’ and ‘readiness’, you might well have learnt a little something about yourself. 61

Did you think you were more or less of a SLOB, than the test showed? Did you consider yourself more or less HONEST? Did you believe WEAKNESSES?

you

had

more

or

fewer

Are you as READY TO DIET as you thought? The fact of the matter is that different people will take bald statistical analyses of their own shortcomings in different ways. Some may use it to justify their existence, whilst others may spend the next four nights crying themselves to sleep. Yet others might say ‘what the hell’ and go and scarf down a trolley-load of Mini-Rolls. I don’t know how you are going to react to the information revealed here. More to the point, I don’t want to start up with all that Body Mass Index spiel. This test isn’t designed to produce a load of numbers that you can start waving around. It is also not designed to give you targets. If you scored sixty 4s on the test you might give yourself a target to get that down to fifty within a year, but that is up to you. You may be quite pleased with a result that others would find disgusting or quite horrified with one that others would consider reasonably restrained, but that isn’t the point. The point is to remind you of your attitude to and relationship with food, because by doing so, you will be more able to adjust your habits to suit.

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Chapter 7 TYPES OF DIET

Planned diets can be arranged into broad groups depending on their individual approach to weightloss. The first thing to note is that there is really only one way to lose weight, of which more later, but a million ways to sell a book. So they all find a gimmick and sell that to the exclusion of the real business. This is, naturally enough, where they fall down eventually and inevitably, of which, also, more later. For the meantime here are our categories of diet to pop on the chart: Mental Arithmetic Diet The good old fashioned, bog-standard, cheap as chips, calorie counting diet. Fashionable for a while in the Seventies, but shunned these days for shinier models. The Ford Capri of diets. Nowadays it is really not the thing since it is gimmick-free and merely depends on the willingness of the individual: a) to look up the calorific value of every single morsel ingested in an encyclopaedia the size of

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the Shanghai phone-book and not half so easy to use. b) to be ruthlessly honest about intake, especially when the meal is of uncertain lineage and is consumed in Fleet Services whilst the Calorie Diary is on the kitchen table at home in Spalding. Dieters using Rule of Thumb are prone to quite amazing flexibility. You would be surprised at how large a lump of chicken can be deemed to be 100g or how big a spoon can be called a teaspoon when doling sugar into a cup of tea, or how many chocolate digestives constitute ‘two water biscuits’, so ruthless honesty tends to be an early casualty. Another way in which the system fails is when the dieter starts making up his or her own figures. The book might say that an average 11st man requires maybe 25,000 calories per week to maintain his weight. Our 22st dieter might then decide that, using his powers of extrapolation, he requires 50,000 calories. He will then struggle to cram 45,000 calories per week down his pelican-esque gullet and wonder why his abdomen is still the size of a kettledrum. Undoubtedly the main gripe with the ‘Mental Arithmetic’ diets is that they’re desperately dull. Mealtimes become joyless mathematical exercises. Every mouthful is masticated to the sound of the flicking through of pages, as the victim tries to negotiate a suitable calorific settlement for the meal.

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Eventually the dieter can bear it no longer. “I know how many there are in this,” boasts Barry - our guinea pig dieter - brandishing an entire wagonwheel of Brie and quoting the value for a smear of it on a salty cracker. “And we call these water biscuits zero,” he continues, pressing great lumps of it onto inch-thick flapjack squares. In the end, actually operating the diet is too energy sapping and it merely ends up as a vague background noise to the symphony of his continued and conspicuous overconsumption. In this mould you will also find diets that eschew the literal calorie-count in favour of a points system. This is generally because giving something 2 points and the thing that goes with it 3 points is an easier bit of totting up than giving Item A 450 calories and Item B 680, especially when the hapless Barry is so grumpy with hunger pangs that the very thought of doing sums in his head is likely to make him fly into a rage. Another reason for the ‘points’ system is that it offers the dietician the chance to explain that it isn’t just about ‘calories’. For instance ‘fat’ is not just ‘fat’, no sir. One has to distinguish between saturated and unsaturated … and between unsaturated and polyunsaturated. Of course the dietician won’t waste an awful lot of time explaining how such complicated notions can be broken down into the ‘Item A = 2 points and Item B = 3 points’ variety of village idiocy. That would take the shine off the gimmick, I think.

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The way that the ‘points’ system fails is that it seems to give rise to a kind of credit/debit arrangement that the more labour intensive ‘calorie-counters’ do not. Whilst our out-of-date Barry, as ‘calorie counter’, is trying to do sums on the back of an envelope and failing, our bang-up-to-the-moment ‘points-scoring’ Barry is doing it all instantly in his head. 20 points per day, 1 for this, 2 for that and 9 for lunch equals 8 to go for later. What could be simpler? The trouble is that it is so simple that Barry is now able to carry his points over or back depending on whether or not he over or under-consumed. All goes well until one day Barry finds himself behind the required rate and will fail to make up the 20 points, short of going to bed with a lump of cheese, a scrape of margarine and three small boiled potatoes. He weighs up the pros and cons and in little under an hour, he decides simply to carry the credit over to the next day. He sleeps well and remembers, on waking, that he has been so conscientious about his diet that he is now ahead of expectations. Barry celebrates by expending the outstanding points, within 15 minutes of waking, on a grilled rasher and a poached egg (i.e. a gigantic fry-up of sausages, bacon, egg, black pudding, beans, kidneys etc.). He returns to the plan for lunch and expends 7 points honestly but unfulfilling. By mid-afternoon, his disgruntlement with the world in general is reaching dangerous levels, Barry borrows some points from his forthcoming dinner and envelops a

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Danish Pastry like an anaconda disposing of a deceased tapir. Come bedtime, he can’t remember whether he is in credit or debit, but remembers how easy it was to build up a credit yesterday and decides to retire early with a lump of cheese, a scrape of margarine and three small boiled potatoes. In the morning he wakes ravenous, inhales the contents of the fridge, calls it 1½ points ‘because he was so good yesterday … or was it the day before’ and vows to return to the diet at lunchtime. And so it continues with the dieter always ‘up’ against the system, like a fruit-machine junkie who has reputedly ‘never lost a penny’ but still lives in an outside khazi in Toxteth, despite his job as managing director of a billion pound company. The truth is that in both cases the debits are wiped away immediately whilst the memory of the occasional credits endures innumerable knocks. The final ignominy comes when Barry notices somewhere deep in the bowels of his ready-reckoner the item which makes his brown adipose fat cells oscillate for very joy and which leads us neatly to the next type of diet. This is the ‘zero-rated’ foodstuff. The Glutton’s Friend This dietary set owes its title to one particularly dangerous characteristic. Whilst the ‘Glutton’s 67

Friend’ might take the main basis for its existence from one or more other less ‘liberal’ regimes, it does so with an added, crucial and, to my mind fatal, difference. This comes in the form of an ‘all-youcan-eat-for-free’ opt out clause that completely sinks the whole thing. See if any of these ring a bell: • Fresh fruit and veg is one food group on which we do not place any restriction. Feel free to eat as much as you like as often as you like. • As long as no protein is consumed on a given day you may eat as much pasta as you please • The basis of this diet is that you will consume a large quantity of protein. As long as you do not eat any fibre, starch, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins, or minerals you may eat as much lean grilled meat as you like. These diets are fantastic. Well, they are fantastic to an extent. Carrie - our second serial offender - has tried several diets in the ‘Glutton’s Friend’ mould and they never seem to get her anywhere. This may be because of the one crucial difference between Carrie and the average person in the street and that is that Carrie is a pig. Just like opinion polls are great at finding an opinion without ever mentioning that the opinion garnered is limited to the tiny and unstable demographic known as ‘The Sort Of People Who Want To Answer Opinion Polls’, so ‘Glutton’s Friend’ diets are fantastic as long as they’re not left in the hands of gluttons.

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Unfortunately, Carrie is a glutton and, if you are on one of these diets, the odds are that you are too. Frankly there ought to be some sort of watchdog looking into this sort of thing. It is a disgrace. The logic that makes the ‘Glutton’s Friend’ useless can be glimpsed in the logic that publishers use to sell diet books. It goes like this: Step 1. There are three types of people who buy diet books: fat, fatter and fattest. Step 2. The fatter they are the less keen they will be to sacrifice even the tiniest morsel of food. Step 3. The less inclined they are to reduce intake the more drawn they will be to a diet with an ‘All You Can Eat’ clause - a ‘Glutton’s Friend’. Step 4. Hence, the market for the ‘Glutton’s Friend’ lies with the sort of person who is most likely to be able to eat their weight in Demerara sugar without pausing to lick their lips. Step 5. Thus, the end result is massive overindulgence in the name of dieting. Let’s get real here. An average human being would eventually desist in the continued consumption of a single foodstuff, no matter how delicious. However, there is often one weak spot, a blind side, a chink in the armour of even the best of us. Something so attractive and delicious to a certain individual that it

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could be forced into the most crammed of oesophagi and the body would still scream out for more. I - yes even I - must admit somewhat shame-facedly that I do indeed have a weakness. It is, to be blunt, an appetite for Midget Gems that requires me never to be allowed to gaze on the confectionery section of my local Spar, lest I succumb to temptation. One minute I’m wondering whether to purchase HobNobs or Bourbons. The next I’m awakened as if from a trance, spread-eagled on the grocer’s floor, mouth frothing, surrounded by little hard circles of rich tea biscuit from which I have nipped the tiny icing sugar swirls with my teeth. Moving on rapidly, before I find myself halfway to the corner shop with a tenner clutched in my damp palm, where is this leading us? Where we’re going with it, is that a Glutton’s Friend Diet, as far as we’re led to believe, is a relatively benign regimen. All the spinach you could eat? Yes, about half a plateful. All the pasta? A couple of bowls a day maybe, but no more. All the fibre? How awful does that bran cereal taste after a couple of weeks? The suggestion is that there is always a ‘back-stop’ something that means we never have to go hungry again. But that isn’t what Carrie is interested in. Oh no. Carrie, you see, can eat pasta faster than they can combine harvest the wheat. This diet is brilliant. Screw ‘back-stop’! She has read, in black and white so it must be true, what amounts to a licence to shove as much food into her mouth as will 70

physically go in and this is precisely what she intends doing. Carrie is the exact sort of person to whom this diet appeals - a glutton. She is losing weight, fast, she reckons at the rate she is getting through it - and hasn’t been hungry for months. She can even eat out. Every day. Twice! And the exercise she gets lifting the enormous forkfuls up to her cavernous, slavering mouth. That must burn a calorie or two, surely? Now I’m no expert, but my amateur brain would be prepared to bet good money that I could eat nothing but pasta and not get thin. I would go further. I would bet that I could eat nothing but pasta and actually get fat (not to mention ill). But Carrie has yet another problem with which to contend and that is that she is only human. She knows what the diet says, but … well, you can’t just eat pasta on its own, now, can you? She is being so good that, hey, a knob of butter isn’t going to hurt, is it? And if it makes the pasta slip down that wee bit quicker then obviously she will be able to be even more abstemious by having another bowl … with another knob of butter … and another. Before she knows it she is supplementing a fairly ordinary diet with unlimited poundage of what amounts to nothing more than flour, eggs, salt and butter, not to mention olive oil “because that’s how the ‘I-ties’ do it”. Whilst Carrie thinks she is pursuing a monkish existence it is really little better than continuing as normal all day, then rounding off 71

with a white loaf’s worth of fried egg sandwiches, then a quick jump on to the scales to see how much weight she has lost. I am reminded of one victim of the ‘Glutton’s Friend’ diet, I used to know. She had cut out, from some ghastly ‘wimmin’s’ mag, an article, which explained that tomatoes were especially good for you. Now this isn’t strictly speaking a true ‘Glutton’s Friend’ diet in as much as it was held up as a ‘Route To Health’ rather than as some sort of weight loss regime, but the principle is the same, as are the dangers. Anyway, Annabel, as we shall call her (since that was her name), developed a lifestyle around the intake of tomatoes. More to the point, as Annabel was not over keen on the tomato au naturel, she developed a lifestyle built around the intake of tomato ketchup, which, she convinced herself, was even better because it contained health-giving, tractscouring vinegar as well and if you’ve seen how clean vinegar brings up old pennies, just imagine what it is doing for your insides! So, armed with the knowledge that she was doing herself nothing but good, she turned every meal into a symphony of tomato - fried eggs and ketchup, fish and chips and ketchup, pizza and ketchup, cheese on toast and ketchup, baked potato and butter and ketchup and, if she were feeling extra-good, salad and ketchup. The list gets worse, but you get the picture.

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Needless to say she was not only the size of a family hatchback, but she also had a heart murmur that sounded like someone shifting chairs across lino. Again the point is well made. The ‘Glutton’s Friend’ attracts the gluttons. Slightly less dangerous amongst the genre are those diets, which allow unlimited fruit and veg. Strictly speaking (although it is my book and I make the rules around here, so I don’t know why I’m bothering to justify myself on this point) these diets aren’t true ‘Glutton’s Friends’ unless they kick the door right open. By this I mean there are few diets that will stop you from eating, for instance, all the celery you can cope with. Celery is, after all, only water and green earwax. The diets I’m pointing the finger at are those which say: “You may consume unlimited quantities of fruit and vegetables*”. They usually let the dieter down with a bump. Whilst they’re busy celebrating, they find the reciprocal asterisk at the bottom of the page: “* Excluding potatoes”. So, having failed miserably with unlimited pasta, Carrie sets out on a different tack. The pasta intake is clamped firmly down to six strands of spaghetti or one sheet of lasagne per week, but fruit and veg take up the slack. At first all is well. First thing Monday, Carrie trundles down to Sainsbury’s and buys up vast quantities of mange touts, artichokes, star-fruit, 73

asparagus and wild cherries. By Wednesday she realises that she can’t stand the way asparagus makes her urine smell, that you don’t need to get the tiny peas out of the little mange tout pods, that you are not supposed to eat the toxic hairy clump in the middle of the artichoke, that passing a cherry stone is about as much fun as childbirth and that the whole exercise has cost her so much that she can’t afford to eat anything but this embryonic compost heap until the end of the month. Not only this but she is now practically chained to the toilet bowl for one or other, or often both, reasons. On the first day of the next month, Carrie is straight down to Sainsbury’s again. Pausing only to use the customer facilities, she makes a beeline for the other end of the fresh produce department, where they sell stuff by the sack rather than the pinch. She fills up with cabbage, carrots, onions, foreign apples and swedes. The bill comes in at a satisfying thirty quid or so less than previously. By the third of the month, she is deep in the slough of despond and feels that even the delightful Ainsley Harriot would struggle to make a dish out of that lot that she wouldn’t want to shove straight back in his stupid great face. Within a week, she is living off honeydew melons, avocados, plums, seedless grapes and that type of potato that isn’t actually called ‘potato’. She has also discovered that by applying a rather more flexible approach to the definition of ‘fruit and vegetables’ than the book, she can also include derivatives 74

such as honey (“flowers are vegetables too aren’t they?”), sugar (“they wouldn’t stop me eating a whole sugar beet, would they?”) and, by further leaps of ‘logic’, toffee apples, jam, wine gums etc. And so the whole thing falls apart. My brother-in-law, Giles Orr-Watt, did in fact set out on just such a diet and stuck to it for what was, for him, a pretty decent time (a month or two, I think). In the end, of course, it all fell apart in the predictable way, but he still remembers it fondly if only for the sheer volume and quality of his flatulence, which could clear a room in twenty seconds flat - less if his dinner guests heard it coming. The Gloop Diet The Gloop Diet is undoubtedly the most obnoxious and humiliating dieting experience you will ever achieve. It is so plain awful that it is almost a taboo in polite society. Conversations are rarely struck up about it. Books are not written about it. The media does not debate its efficacy. If you notice someone losing weight fast, they are more likely to tell you they have contracted AIDS or are suffering from necrotising fasciitis than tell you they’re on a Gloop Diet. However, when you next see them and they’re ballooning to new and unexplored weights and they tell you they were cured … you will know the truth.

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What is this awful creation? What heights of inhumanity has man scaled against his fellow man? Does this sound familiar: • Have a light breakfast. • Have a proper dinner. • Got it yet? Of course you have. • Drink this ‘delicious’ shake instead of lunch. Yes, it is the meal-replacement-with-a-big-old-glassof-gloop diet, or the ‘Gloop Diet’ for short, and I’m prepared to make a reasonable wager that you’ve already given this one a go. And another fiver says that you’ve still got three-quarter-full pots of the wretched stuff at the back of your kitchen cupboards. Where do you begin on this sort of thing? Firstly, you will never buy a diet book that suggests this sort of approach to dieting. Why? Probably because you can’t buy the crucial ingredient - the Gloop powder - in the book shop. More likely it is because it is such a horrible way to spend your life and there is little market for pain-inducing books outside the racks of memoirs of 19 year-old pop ladettes. The way you find out about this diet is either: a) Word of Mouth: Someone who, unbeknownst to you, has always despised you and wants to see your fat arse suffer in the worst possible way, recommends it to you with a 76

light “Oh I lost pounds on Skinni-Quik. It really is the most wonderful diet and you never feel hungry.” And so forth. This is a pack of lies. They are simply looking to lash out after a particularly grim experience and you just happen to be to hand. Naturally, since most people cannot bring themselves to speak about the horrors of the Gloop Diet, this means of referral is quite rare. b) Television Advert: It isn’t immediately obvious that you’ve actually seen an ad for Skinni-Quik. This is because the advert and the reality are so far divorced that you are merely left with the subliminal imprint of the product. Let me refresh your memory: “I couldn’t believe it when I saw the video of me that Christmas.” (Cue video of immense woman acting all bashful in a way that only drama students can.) “Did I really dress like that?” (Photo of startled hippo with her head sticking through the roof of a family tent, wearing tiny paper hat and partially obscured by skeleton of 36 pound turkey.) The camera pans back and a totally different woman - possibly a super-model - is holding the hippo snap with her elegant fingers. “That was six months ago,” she leers. “Now I don’t mind having the camera on me.” (Cue video of super-model rising from swimming pool and giving it large for the camera. The skin on her stomach is as 77

taut as cling film and her thighs look like a pair of breadsticks. The disappearance of half an acre of spare skin isn’t explained.) “And all I had to do was to have a light breakfast, a proper dinner and a sachet of Skinni-Quik for lunch.” (Camera cuts to super-model in unrealistically hygienic kitchen.) “Butterscotch is my favourite. Mmmmmm.” (Tremulously she lifts a three-quart vase full of something that looks like transport caff mustard to her pursed lips. As the glass comes into contact with her mouth the producer cuts away - probably overcome with nausea - and replaces her ten-thousand-dollar-a-day figure with a stark close up of a brutally plain box.) “Skinni-Quik!” Syrups a reassuring voice-over (male, to let you know that our supermodel is now in good enough shape to attract a mate). “Bring out the new you!” c) Medical Reference: You don’t often hear doctors say: “Holy Shit you’re fat!” However they are entitled to prescribe Gloop Diets and that amounts to the same thing, more or less. Pharmacists, likewise will often wave their particular brand of Gloop at you if asked sometimes if not asked (you may have gone in for a 64 pack of Rennies and a tube of Germoloids) - and act as if there is some sort of science in detecting obesity.

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Theoretically, medical reference is an absolute must, as the packet tends to leave hanging in the air an unspoken list of disasters that await the unwary dieter. Whichever way you find out about it, there is a certain sinister quality about the whole thing. Whilst the benefits are there for all to see (as long as they have the rose-tinted specs on), there are a number of things about the Gloop Diet that sort of take the gloss off it: • Available on prescription? Oh dear! • The blurb on the box contains lots of words like ‘obese’, ‘clinical’, ‘sudden weight loss’, ‘heart condition’ and the killer, ‘flavoursome’. • When you go into Boots to buy it, they quiz you about whether or not your GP is in agreement, as if to suggest you are about to indulge in lifethreatening activities. • The list of ingredients reads like a catalogue of the stars in the constellation of Orion. • They are often given brand names that end in the word ‘Fast’ as if to imply either unrealistically rapid results, or, if one takes the other definition of the word, a hunger strike. Naturally enough, Carrie, during her struggle with her weight, has tried a Gloop Diet. She told her mother it was because she saw a photo of herself looking a tad overweight on her Spanish holiday. In actual fact what had finally done it, was the time she visited her boyfriend’s parents house, sat in a dining chair, crushing it into matchwood and her

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boyfriend’s father had barked out “That was Queen Anne, you mastodon!”. After the floods of tears had subsided - the poor man had been inconsolable - she had made straight for the ‘Dietary Supplement’ shelf of her local chemist’s shop and purchased a box of Slenda-Blend® SemiLiquid Dietary Supplement For The Clinically Obese. We pick her up when she gets home and reads the back of the box and the accompanying pamphlet. Bad idea. Phrases such as ‘depletion of heart muscle’, ‘extreme allergic reaction’, ‘lactose intolerance’, ‘complication of other medical conditions’ and ‘fainting fits’ are delivered into her subconscious like a series of rabbit-punches. Carrie (brave soul) decides to take her life in her hands and plough on regardless. She girds her loins with a hearty breakfast and lasts until about 12.15 pm before mixing the powder with the milk. She stares at the resulting pink mud. It looks a bit rough, a bit grainy. Clumps of dry powder stubbornly resist her efforts to destroy them with the back of the teaspoon. The smell is reminiscent of Haze Rose Petal air-freshener in that it starts off pleasant enough but burrows into the back of your throat until you just want to shove a stilton up your nose to get rid of it. She raises the quivering gloop to her lips and drinks.

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Some of it goes down. Some of it starts coming back up. She remembers that there is no other food to be had until the evening, so she forces down the first batch and continues. Two-thirds of the way through, she remembers that milk makes her bowels react in a most unpleasant manner and gags. However she is nearly done now. She polishes it off and heaves some big breaths as if she has been underwater for a minute and a half. It is done, and it felt good. Tasted … well, horrible, but felt good. She re-reads the packet and is comforted by the fact that this shake will ‘fill her up until dinner time’. By two thirty, she is as ravenous as the grizzly bear in Chapter five, waking from hibernation. By three she has waved goodbye to her lunch as her colon, unable to cope with the unexpected influx of a bucket of milk, rejects the whole deal by firing it out of her like an anti-hooligan water cannon of the type favoured by German riot police. The next day, the thought of the noxious gloop helps her to resist the urge to lunch until 1 pm and her bowel hangs on to it until four. By the end of the week she is lunching at 3.30 pm and dining at 6pm. Within a month she is eating breakfast at eleven and dinner at five washed down with a glass of SlendaBlend®. And so it continues. The weight falls off her. Soon her skin is loose and she catches sight of her own feet for the first time in ten years. The pain and 81

humiliation is worth enduring for the results. Every day as she struggles to force down the gloop she reminds herself of just how skinny she is becoming. Within mere months she has lost stones. It is a miracle! She looks up that ex-boyfriend, whips out the old bikini, becomes an object of great desire and after a short but exhausting career as an It Girl settles down to have children and appear in OK magazine wearing borrowed jewellery. At last a dieting story with a happy ending. Except, of course, it isn’t. The last bit never happened. Why? Because the Gloop Diet is the dietary equivalent of a prison sentence. When you are released from eighteen months in clink, do you go and lock yourself in the cupboard under the stairs and relieve yourself in a bucket for the rest of your days, to ensure you don’t stray from the straight and narrow? Of course not. So when you come off the Gloop Diet, do you continue to consume vile grainy milk shakes instead of eating real food? No. If that were all you had to look forward to, you would be quite justified in continuing the diet until your atrophied heart muscle finally gave up the ghost and put you out of your misery. We find Carrie, six months down the line standing in front of the mirror, modelling her new outfit. But Carrie has no eyes for the outfit, beautiful as it is and glorious as she looks in it. Because Carrie has 82

reached target weight and that means that she is ‘off the diet’. Off the diet! Unutterable joy! She is free and vital and the world of possibilities lies at her feet. The first possibility Carrie is going to try, from the broad panoply, is lunch. A mighty great, grease-dripping, stinking, fried lunch. Obviously she won’t make a habit of it, but just this once. Forwards another six months and oh dear … ! The mind was willing but the flesh was weak. Only now the flesh is in the significant majority. Unfortunately Carrie fell victim to the great lowblow of the Gloop Diet - weight regain. This is a generic problem amongst diets and dieters but the Gloop Diet is far and away the worst culprit. For every action, said Newton, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or was it Einstein? Whoever it was they had obviously come off the Skinni-Quik Rapid Weight Loss For The Morbidly Enormous, or similar, regime in the last six months. On the one hand, the Gloop Diet promotes severe weight loss by means of punishment and nausea in equal quantities. On the other, the reintroduction of normal eating leads to the discovery of the joy of eating anew and increased obesity is a few short months away.

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The Catalyst Diet This is the only diet that really works. The ever so simple premise is that the right food groups eaten in the right proportions will have a more beneficial effect on your body than the wrong ones eaten in the wrong proportions. The reason overweight people have become like this is that their bodies store long-chain hydrocarbon lipids, unless these are activated by a catalytic reaction prior to passage through the liver. In order to promote the catalysis, it is necessary to ingest exactly balanced proportions of fibrous aminovitamins and short-string Nebulomorphins. In this manner the lipids are catalysed into broken-chain hydrocarbons and cannot then be processed into adipose fat for deposit by the body. Hence by understanding a simple yet precise dietary algorithm you need never gain another ounce of fat. There. That got you going. Of course this is a pile of pants that I just made up. In fact fibrous amino-vitamins can only be made by dropping a plate of Parma ham and melon on a shag pile carpet and Nebulomorphins are, I believe, a natural enemy of the Pokémon. It sounded pretty reasonable though. However, the model is good. Base a diet on the idea not that you are eating too much but are just not eating enough ‘magic ingredient’ and it sounds a bit weak. Tart it up with some chemistry-master guff 84

and Bob’s your uncle. I don’t understand it, so I can’t challenge it, ergo it must work. This diet rears its ugly head in several ways: Overdose - For example, the F-Plan diet. (Shovel it in. Shit it out.) You just crank up something in your general intake and crank down some other stuff. Usually there is no magic to it. A diet book that says that spinach contains more Epsilon Hypo-Active Plasmons than any other food and that doughnuts contain fewer, is more likely to sell than one that merely tells you to eat spinach in place of doughnuts. Potassium & Water These ones are all the rage at the moment. You can eat X as long as there is no Y. Next day, eat all the Y you like as long as you don’t touch any X. X and Y are the dietary equivalent of mixing potassium and water. Perfectly charming in their own rights, but mix them together and, WHAMMO! Love handles everywhere. (Note: if you are not familiar with O Level chemistry, I will be glad to arrange a demonstration of what happens when you drop a lump of potassium into water. It’s huge fun.) Jekyll & Hyde Just a couple of drops of this magic potion in your drink and every fat molecule in your meal will be locked away and pass through your body in the 85

normal course of events. Obviously there is nothing natural about passing balls of undigested fat and the magic potion probably costs around £500 a bottle but who cares? Come to think of it this isn’t really a diet at all. It is just an excuse for incredible excess. Let us join Barry on his never-ending quest for the perfect figure. As we meet him he has done with his F-Plan approach – the ‘Overdose’. Frankly his arse is as sore as if he were passing pineapples, rough end first and he could do with a month or two off. He was also surprised by how tasty a bowl of All Bran is once in a while but how incredibly awful it is every single day without fail, especially given that his taste buds sustained considerable damage due to the fact that he was living his life in a cloud of unchecked gas seepage. He has also done with the ‘Potassium and Water’ business. He was losing weight, but it was generally because he found going whole days without protein so exhausting he could barely bring himself to chew another grain of rice and as for days without carbohydrate..! He has been saved, though. His efforts have lost him a stone and he is rewarding himself with a week in the USA. It would have been two weeks, but he did not want to regain more than the original stone whilst out there. In the States he turns on Channel 754 (Housebound Shopping Network) and is astonished to find an 86

info-mercial shouting the praises of a fabulous new product called Lipo-Lube X3. Lipo-Lube X3 is, according to a scrawny middle aged woman with skin like a century-old ostrich skin suitcase, a ‘revolutionary breakthrough in the Science of Dietonomy’. Barry pops open another family bag of ‘potato chips’ and stares agog. The info-mercial ploughs on. “But look at you!” croons a man who looks like a cross between Gyles Brandreth and a grand piano with its lid open. “Look at you!” Barry shields his eyes as the studio lights glint off his perfect ivories. “I know,” gushes the suitcase and lifts up her arms to reveal crinkly folds of brown paper where her fat used to hang. An invisible audience whoops and cheers in a way that suggests that cocaine is being shovelled into the air-conditioning system. “Eighteen months ago I weighed … three…hunnerd…” sound of coked up room sucking teeth, “… fifty … six …pounds.” The man operating the audience cue cards is obviously overcome with the sheer terror of the vision this conjures up, since some members of the hen coop clap, some whoop, some faint, some go ‘awwwww’. Barry has no idea if 356lbs is a lot or a little. “Isn’t that just..?” Words fail the grand piano, but the cue card man is back marshalling the troops and a wave of applause covers his silence. The director 87

cuts to a well-worn bit of footage of a selection of marginally overweight people applying a clear liquid to glasses of orange juice prior to demolishing heaps of cream puffs, pancakes and chips. The voice-over explains: “Lipo-Lube X3 is the miracle you’ve been looking for. Just three drops in your drink with every meal will see the pounds just melt away. Eat doughnuts … pancakes … french fries … in fact eat anything you like, and never worry about putting on weight again.” A few testimonials follow along the lines of “I was fat and ugly and now I’m just ugly”. Then an actor in a white coat and a pair of protective specs appears, shaking gently a tiny phial of clear liquid. “Lipo-Lube X3,” he says, “Is better known to you and me as Serum of Limpet. For generations, man has known the power of Serum of Limpet to attach itself to saturated fat and to make it indigestible to humans”, he continues, failing to quote authority for his outrageous claims. “But LipoLab Inc has concentrated the power of Serum of Limpet by means of extracting it from the pancreas of the limpet under zero gravity conditions in our laboratory a thousand miles above the Earth’s equator and has brought to you Lipo-Lube X3, a naturally occurring chemical agent so powerful that three drops can render the entire fat content of this,” he gesticulates at what looks like part mediaeval

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banquet, part Just William-esque “Indigestible to the human tract.”

tea

party,

The director cuts back to the studio, but Barry is already stabbing away at the telephone keypad with trembling fingers. Forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents later plus six ninety-five for a Jiffy bag and a stamp, Barry is a mere twenty-eight days away from the miracle that is Lipo-Lube X3. He envisages the day when he can gorge himself on fried chicken and chips, sausage sandwiches and brown sauce, bread and dripping, safe in the knowledge that three drops of Lipo-Lube X3 will mop up his excesses and commit them to the deep faster than he can say ‘I’d give that ten minutes if I were you’. We will scroll forwards six months. We’re not that interested in Barry’s time on the diet. Suffice it to say that, for a highly toxic compound, Lipo-Lube X3 does indeed possess some fantastic properties. On the downside it only mops up fat in Barry’s diet, so results have been tainted somewhat by the several hundredweight of excess carbohydrate, starch, protein and fibre he has guzzled down. All things being equal, though, Barry considers it a success - he has lost a good chunk of weight and he feels great. On day one hundred and fifty he wrings the last three drops into a glass of Coke and savages a plate of pork chops with two baked potatoes that contain more butter than anything else, including potato.

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He sleeps. Visions of sugar plums dance across his somnolent transom and straight into his mouth. Little does he know of the torture that awaits. Because Barry’s stomach is now the size of a bolster-case. Months of being allowed all he can eat has created a hole inside him that ordinary consumption cannot fulfill. Even after the most gargantuan of meals, Barry’s gut will start to howl like a lonesome coyote within half an hour. The pain is unbearable. Within weeks he is at his heaviest ever and heading for new records. Of course, the diet threw him a curve ball. It offered him unlimited greed at no cost. The Catalyst Diet is the Pandora’s Box of weight loss. Atkins Now we have examined the pitfalls of the Gluttons’ Friend and Catalyst Diets, I think it is a good time to have a little chat about Dr. Atkins and his marvellous magical mystery cure. After all, there is nothing like an Atkins Diet for effortless toning, now is there? Just like there used to be nothing like Slimcea bread, for instance, or Mr Motivator, or those fat-wobbler machines where you strap a wrestler’s support belt around your arse and fire it up like an emergency generator. That is not to say that Atkins doesn’t work. Of course it does. All diets work, unless they’re put together by someone who has totally missed the point of the whole thing. But it also falls down in 90

exactly the same way as we see with other diets. I won’t bore you with another lecture on cause and effect. These have already been explored elsewhere. It might be nice to know, though, why Atkins is such a phenomenon. Here then is my two penn’orth. Consider the following facts: • Atkins is lots of fun … whilst it lasts. Then abject misery. • Weight loss is too fast to be credible. Weight regain afterwards is all too believably rapid. • People on an Atkins diet find it hard to shut up about it. • Dr. Atkins’ books are outsold only by Harry Potter books. • Dr. Atkins is still knocking out learned tome after learned tome despite being dead. All this leads me to one inevitable conclusion, which is this:- Dr. Atkins is a Voodoo priest. Radical I know, but someone had to say it. How else can you explain some of the peculiar stuff that goes on around Atkins diets? Middle-class thirtysomethings who previously would have rolled up their top lip at the very mention of fried food, citing cholesterol, carcinogens and saturated fats, glaze over like moonies and start heaving everything they can get their lard-burnt fingers on into their brand new, hundred-pound, 21 inch, titanium skillet. A gazillion people bought The Atkins Diet. These self same people then went out and bought Atkins 2 91

or Son Of Atkins, or whatever it was called. Why? Did Dr Atkins forget to put 50% of his diet into the first volume? The last time I was in Waterstone’s trying to persuade Walter jr. to spend his birthday money on something that required more than a slack-jawed coma to enjoy, I noticed that there were stands and stands of the bloody things: Atkins, More Atkins, A Thousand Atkins Recipes, Another Thousand Atkins Recipes, Early Atkins - A Million Breakfast Fry-Up Permutations, and so forth. I will be interested to see whether it is Atkins or Harry Potter who will first run out of steam. As young Potter reaches his mid teens and discovers that not all ‘magic wands’ come from Ollivander’s, there must be endless scope to write exciting new stuff about a heavily repressed boarding school pupil locked in his dorm at night with only raging hormones, magical powers and an effeminate, ginger classmate for company. However, as Atkins has shown us, the appetite of the general public isn’t necessarily for the new. Watch this space! In the meantime and on a more serious note, we await with trepidation the medical notes of the first batch of serial Atkins-junkies. Now I’m not one to sit here and say that the idea of a ‘balanced diet’ is anything other than an old wives’ tale, nor that failure to keep up any sort of intake of anything other than protein will ultimately cause you no end of problems. Just don’t come moaning to me when people start dropping dead of massive organ failures, that’s all!

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It just may be that you need carbohydrates to live, OK? The Recipe Book At this juncture it is briefly worth noting the role played in the pure misery of dieting by ‘The Recipe Book’, in whatever guise it comes. It may be called ‘Lo-Cal Lip Smackers’, or ‘Fibre-Funfest’ or ‘A Million and One Gourmet Gut-Shifters’, but it is basically the same beast, however it presents itself, and, of course, being a money-spinner, every diet that lends itself to scribbling down a few recipes and bunging a glossy cover on front and back will do just that. The biggest - but by no means the only - culprit in this department is the Mental Arithmetic diet. You are already fighting with pages of microscopic writing and scrawling down sums on the backs of envelopes, so what could be easier than a handy recipe book that will take the strain on your behalf? Flip it open at any page and there is a menu suggestion, with a ‘points’ or calorific value and an astonishingly mouth-watering macro photograph of succulent, plump, gently steaming delicacies. Mmmmmmm … nothing could be finer and only ten pounds and ninety-nine pence, please. Relax, you are now fully in the hands of the ‘experts’. What the experts are saying is: “Dieting doesn’t have to be dull. Look what you could be eating yet still losing weight.” And so you enter Phase One.

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Phase One, or the ‘Obedience Phase’, is the period (studies show that it almost invariably lasts from nine to eleven days) during which you actually follow the recipes. The book says ‘2 teaspoons of olive oil’, so your Boeuf Provençale gets exactly two, precisely measured, teaspoons of olive oil. The book says ‘1 small slice of wholemeal bread, made into breadcrumbs’, so your Superlean Chilli-Burgers contain not a crumb more and not a crumb less. Whatever the book says, goes. In this manner you continue for nine to eleven days. And then you awaken to one or other, or, more likely both, of the following two thoughts: 1) Why am I living off Vietnamese Poached Wild Mint Salmon in Vine Leaf Wraps followed by Mediterranean Carrot Cake with Satsuma Pith Icing, when I used to get by with a large Doner Kebab and a bar of Fruit & Nut? 2) I know how to make this stuff, without looking in a book. This awakening might come about as a result of pure exhaustion (“If I have to lift one more wokful of noodles this week, I think I’ll faint”), or from accidentally stumbling across one of the several recipes, the photogenic nature of which belies the sheer ghastliness of your own best effort at it. For instance, a firm poached egg perched on an English muffin, when caught at the exact right moment, with the yolk split and oozing glorious golden, steaming lava on to the crisp shell of the browned crumbs beneath, is as photogenically 94

enticing as the Cadbury’s Flake girl allowing her rose-petalled bath to overflow onto the cold slate floor beneath, her lips parted to welcome in the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate. However, the reality of the dripping, shapeless dishrag of an egg that you fish from the saucepan and slop onto a slice of burnt, scraped, unbuttered Hovis is something totally other. Ok, they look similar, but the magic is somehow missing. The lips are still puckered, but they no longer suggest the imminent entry of a Cadbury’s Flake, but rather of James Herriot’s soaped arm. Once these thoughts arise you enter Phase Two. Phase Two, or the ‘Edit Phase’, is characterised by the dieter mentally editing the Recipe Book. This is a psychological process by which the contents are sub-divided into two categories: 1) Stuff I can make myself without your help, thank you very much. 2) Stuff I’ve never heard of. In the ‘Edit Phase’, the dieter, already overloaded with dietary information, casts the book aside except for flicking through the recipe headings for ideas and then proceeds with the preparation of Boeuf Provençale, or Superlean Chilli-Burgers without further reference to what are now totally superfluous recipes. ‘Two teaspoons of olive oil’ becomes ‘the inversion of the olive oil bottle over the pan for as long as it takes to say “two … tea … spooooons … 95

fuuuuullllllll”’. ‘One crumbed slice’ becomes ‘everything in the bread-bin, crumbed’ and so forth. The very fact that a recipe is mentioned in the book provides carte blanche for the dieter to make it using whatever ingredients they see fit. Soon the working knowledge of the book is so good that the dieter knows exactly what is in it, without any need of reference. And so to Phase Three, or the ‘Freewheel Phase’. This is usually arrived at within around a month of the purchase of the book and is recognisable by the fact that the dieter has ceased even opening the book and merely flags up their diet to anyone who will listen, by announcing at regular intervals: “Oh, I’ve got the new Lo-Cal Lip-Smackers, you know. Marvellous, absolutely marvellous.” A typical symptom of the ‘Freewheel Phase’ is that the dieter has so lost touch with what they were supposed to be doing, that having announced this fabulous tome, they’re often totally unable to locate it if asked. And once you’ve lost it … well, you’ll need another one, won’t you? … And The Rest Of course these categories are not exhaustive. There are other ways of dieting. But they do cover about 98% of all dietary regimes and so will be familiar to most. I could go further into the minutiae of the dietary art but this would involve an amount of research and, frankly, none of them works so what is the point? You might have had cause to try diets that 96

make the following idiotic suggestions as to how you might lose a few pounds: • Eat nine microscopic meals a day • Eat standing up • Eat nothing and drink only distilled water for three weeks • Eat everything raw • Lock your fridge and keep the key in the toilet bowl • Attempt to dream that you are really thin Whether or not any of these will produce results is neither here nor there. They all sound ghastly and useless and so they probably are. Let us leave it at that for the time being.

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Chapter 8 GOING A BIT TOO FAR

Whilst most diets - or perhaps all diets - involve one or more of pain, hunger, savage mood swings, depression, embarrassment and nausea, it is possible to overdo it yet further. Collective Humiliation This is a sub-set, usually of the Calorie Counting variety of diets, but it does not have to be exclusive to this type. Obviously I’m talking here about the various slimming ‘clubs’ that people attend. I won’t dwell too long on the dietary side of Collective Humiliation Clubs, because it is dealt with elsewhere, but it is important to know that just because you put yourself through such a regime, you aren’t guaranteed any more success than sitting in a darkened room on your own. Carrie has visited a slimmers’ club in her home town, called Weightloss Express. She was originally lured by the recommendation of her hairdresser, Mandy.

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“Weightloss Express,” Mandy had rasped in that voice peculiar to hairdressers, “Done wonders for me. Firty pahnd I lost in free mumfs. Firty! ‘At’s more ‘n two stone, ‘at is.” That was more than enough for Carrie. She signed up. More to the point she paid up. Ten quid they wrung out of her, plus three quid every week she showed up. Ten pounds! How much did you pay for this book? Probably 99p out of the remainders bin. Anyway, Carrie calculates that Mandy’s threemonth regime cost her a short fifty pounds or, to put it another way, one pound fifty per pound of weight lost. Must be good. Week one. Carrie shows up and is welcomed to the club by a woman who is the living embodiment of ‘heroin chic’. She probably weighs in at about 6st and she is just finishing off a two-pound bar of Bournville chocolate. Carrie is introduced to the other subscribers to Weightloss Express with a familiarity that suggests that some of them have been coming to the club for many years. Not everyone looks overweight to Carrie, although some are complete blimps. The club meets in an extremely draughty school gym, but despite this, half of the attendees are standing around in gossamer-thin summer gear, sporting goose pimples you could sand teak with. There are no men in the club. The gossamer-wearers demand to be weighed immediately. A couple of them get a ripple of applause for having shed a 100

pound or two. A few have put on weight and the news is greeted with a shuffling of feet. Most have made no move either way. One lady removes her blouse and proclaims that she has lost two ounces. The unsuitably-attired crowd leaves. Ten minutes later, Carrie glances out of the window and sees them, now sporting three sweaters apiece, jostling through the doorway of the Spar over the road. The rest stay for ‘heroin chic’ to explain the principles of their dietary regime - points, sins, ‘black’ days, ‘white’ days - to them for what is probably, for some of them at least, the millionth time. Carrie is given a book called ‘Black Day – White Day’ and a suggested weekly menu, is weighed and packed off home. Most of the rest of the club fall into the pub next door, but Carrie, full of youthful enthusiasm, hurries off home to get started. She cooks herself dinner off the menu card and then realises that she had dinner before she went out. She shrugs her shoulders and eats it anyway. Week six. Another round of applause for Carrie. She has now shed a whole stone including 3lbs in the last week. ‘Heroin chic’ is starting to make noises about their Slimmer of the Year Award. Last year’s winner went from 16 to 12st - well, they’re only a local organisation; 22st down to eight is very rare - and Carrie could be in with a shout at this rate. Just keep paying the three pounds and, who knows? A photo in the local press isn’t out of the question. She is so pleased she barely notices that her hairdresser, Mandy, has put on a pound for the third

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week in a row and is now crying in a corner, whilst everyone else is trying to pretend she isn’t there. Week ten. Why can Carrie not lose that next pound? Two weeks on the trot with no change in her weight. No one has mentioned that Carrie is now down to her bra and pants before stepping on the machine. It has to be wrong. Has to! She nips out after weighing and desperately tries to defecate. She tries so hard she strains her sphincter and is found, freezing and groaning in the toilets at the end of the session. She shuffles into the pub afterwards as has become her wont of a Thursday evening and has two pints of Guinness and six bags of crisps. Week sixteen. Carrie has given up giving a toss. She goes for the first time in three weeks and is told that she has put 3lbs back on. She does not care as she had a few glasses of wine before she came out. There is a sucking of teeth and one of the more vocal members is heard to make a remark to her neighbour about ‘how disappointing it is when they don’t stick to the book’. Carrie swings round and invites her to take a look in the mirror, with some colourful Anglo-Saxon thrown in for good measure. The woman uncrosses her arms and puts her hands on her hips in indignation, forgetting that she had only made three ounces of progress, herself, by dint of removing everything except an uncomfortably skimpy pair of knickers. Her enormous breasts fall together with a loud slap. There is a general ‘rhubarb’ from the assembled group. Carrie stalks

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away, stopping only at the Spar for a pork pie, never to return. A further month on. Weightloss Express was, figures Carrie, a partial success. For a start, she did lose a stone in six weeks and she did get her hands on ‘Black Day – White Day’, which she knows must be somewhere in the kitchen if she could be bothered to get up and look for it. On the other hand, she is now the same weight as when she began and she still eats the same quantities as she was eating before she started. So would Carrie join up with SlimClub 2000, or Weight Reducers, or any other weight-loss club, if recommended to do so by one of her friends? Probably not, she figures. Stripping in a freezing gym for that extra ounce, praying that she would have a big shit at about 6.30 on a Thursday evening, swapping smug mutterings with a neighbour when a fellow-slimmer had failed to come up to scratch, starving herself on a Thursday and stuffing herself on a Friday and generally sprouting a new and unwanted social circle of fat dullards she would normally cross the street to avoid. In short, her life had become something of which to be ashamed. Well, she eventually thought, screw that!

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Are You Sure? Now, I know what you are thinking, especially if you are an old-stager of the Collective Humiliation genre. “What a load of old codswallop!” None of this has ever happened to you, has it? You may have removed your overcoat before being weighed … and your shoes, of course, but that’s only fair. Not to mention your sweater … your watch … your ear-rings … But no one ever tutted at you for putting on a pound or two did they … well, except maybe that horrible Sandra … and all of her little gang, for that matter. They all enjoyed a bit of a snigger at someone else’s expense, didn’t they? And so what if you had a bit of a poo before clubnight? It wasn’t forced. You were regular as clockwork, weren’t you? Every morning at 7.15 and Thursday evenings at 6.45. Nothing wrong with that, eh? I accept that what I’m painting here is more of a caricature than the Gods-honest-but-ever-so-uglytruth I promised you at the outset. However we live in a world of extremes these days and who is to say that in a couple of years’ time, the nightmare of Collective Humiliation won’t be exactly as I have laid down. Peer-pressure is a funny thing. How else would you explain:

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Kill or Cure Be honest. Do you really want to go on a diet, at all? No. Not you nor me nor anyone for that matter. So what are you going to do? You could simply stay fat. Probably not, though. That isn’t what you are here for is it? You could diet, even though you don’t want to. Gosh, that sounds like hard work. Or, you could have some mountebank surgeon put you half under with laughing gas and perform slapdash surgery on you with his Kitchen Devil. Hmmm … Why don’t we have another look at that diet, eh? Yet believe it or not, there are people who would gladly choose the surgery option, in the hope that they will emerge, svelte, bronzed and gorgeous, without the bother of learning to eat less in the meantime. These people generally fall into one of two groups: 1) Gargantuan, immobile freaks 2) Vain middle aged women The trouble with surgery is that it is a bit like being offered a year’s salary to go five rounds with Mike Tyson. You will end up covered in bruises, you may never be right again, there is an outside chance that you will die half way through and, if you do survive the ordeal, you will probably piss the money away, 105

so it will all have been a big waste of time. Likewise surgery is dangerous, potentially disfiguring and results are far too easily attained. The three big hitters in this department are: 1) Liposuction 2) Stomach Stapling 3) Jaw Wiring You may already have figured out that I’m not about to recommend you undertake any of these procedures. Here is why. Liposuction Also known as Lipo-Sculpture, to make it sound a notch less grisly, this is the process by which a surgeon grubs around under your skin and slurps off the fat layer with a big suction pump. Disgusting. I don’t think any of us need to go into the technicalities of the nasty business, but it isn’t something you would want to watch, far less wake up in the middle of. The problems with Liposuction are two-fold. Firstly, the very real threat of ending up marginally less beautiful than you thought. We have all heard the stories about botched cosmetic surgery jobs and we can number the possible outcomes from most desirable to least:

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• • • • • • • • •

Perfection. Oh well. It’s better than it was. Are you sure this is the shape we agreed on? I thought you said ‘No visible scar tissue’ Why do my scars keep weeping? Will these open sores and contusions ever heal? My wounds are full of cysts I’m scarred for life What do you mean, ‘I’ve been in a coma for 5 years’? • I’m sorry, sir. We did all we could to save your wife, but … Pretty bleak at the end there, I’m afraid. Sorry about that, but it does happen and unless you are confident of hitting number one every time, do you really think this is the ideal risk/return scenario for you? The other eventuality as far as Liposuction is concerned - and forgive me for donning my technical hat here - is that it is not just the fat that is removed, but the fat cells themselves. Woohoo! I hear you cry. No more fat cells. No more fat cells means no more fat. Well, no more fat where the fat cells have been removed, at least. So what, if you start putting it on again, even to a relatively small extent? “I’m not going to start putting it on again,” you cry. “After three grand and four months mopping up my weeping sores. Not a chance."

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Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but what it was that a) led you to have the Liposuction and, b) got you into this mess in the first place, was the fact that you were not prepared to diet. I think I’m justified in suggesting that you are going to start putting it back on from Day 1. But where? The place you had ‘sucked out’ - thighs, bum, gut, wherever - was almost certainly your number one fat storage zone. Of every pound of fat you put on, perhaps 8 oz went on your problem area and an ounce each on eight other parts. Now the body has to find room for an extra 8 oz of fat. That means that your lipo-sucked area will remain svelte and sculpted, whilst the rest of you increases in size at twice the original speed. Uh oh! If you continue along this path, you will end up looking like one of those balloon sausage-dogs that has been unknotted - all puffed up at one point and shrivelled at another. If you want to see how attractive that will be, you only need to look at the ankle of someone with fat legs who is in the habit of wearing tight socks. The fat will merely bulge out either side of any man made constriction. Stomach Stapling Oh my goodness gracious me! Whoever thought of this must have been a genius. Dr Mengele, perhaps! Stomach stapling - before we begin - does not involve some dopey office bod shoving your intestines into a giant Rexel Staplo-Saurus and thwanging in a big line of metal with the heel of his 108

hand. It should, but it doesn’t. It is a technique by which a corner of your distended stomach is partitioned off by means of being sewn up. The organ is then slipped back in, let loose on a plate of sausage, egg and chips and hey presto! The needle shows full about half way through. The ‘staplee’ is delighted and trots off to enjoy the sensation of filling up without having to spend a week’s Social Security to do it. Whilst Liposuction was the domain of the lazy cow, this one is very much for the forty-plus-stone freaks. “I can’t diet,” they whine. “I always feel hungry.” Ahhhhhh, diddums. In order not to pre-empt the contents of The Walter Whichelow Psychological Self-Help Book - Notso Nutso: coming soon to the shelves of every good bookshop and most terrible ones as well, I hope - I won’t dwell on the mental side of this problem. We’re all aware that ‘fat’ is just fat, whilst ‘grossly obese’ tends to mask a deep, dark psychological malaise that must be dealt with tenderly and with great feeling. But for now, the best I can say is: “Pull yourself together, you wretch! You disgust me.” Yes, you get hungry. We all do. It is the body’s way of reminding you to eat. The reason you are so frightened of hunger is that you’ve never lived with it for longer than about ninety seconds, before. Sorry, I digress - went off the rails a bit there. Suffice it to say that if you are so fat you’ve gone 109

nuts, or, indeed, so nuts you’ve become fat, don’t forget, it’s Notso Nutso - the ideal stocking filler for next Christmas at just £6.99. Anyway, the problem with stapling up your stomach is one that is common to most diets and that is that it is all too easy. After the row of blanket stitch is put in, you go straight out (or more likely someone else goes out on your instruction) and order two pies and double chips. Halfway through, you are full. “Blimey,” you think. “I’m stuffed, but I’ve left half of it.” One of only two things will now happen: 1) You will finish the rest off in about an hour when you have room. Then live your life on twelve halfmeals a day instead of six full ones. 2) You will be so impressed by the fact that you can pig out with impunity, you will eventually stretch the remaining part of your stomach out until it is the same size as the whole thing was before. Yes, I’m afraid so. Your intake will immediately or eventually reach the same levels as before, because you will not go on a diet. We know this for a fact. No one but a nutcase would opt for surgery if they were prepared to diet. And are you a nutcase? (Oh, sorry. We decided you were.) I’m aware that you could always go and have a further stapling treatment on your re-distended stomach, but after a while your insides would be full of spare stomach wall all sewn up with crisscrossing needlework like a big quilt.

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Jaw Wiring I have put this one in because it is funny. Not so funny to those to whom it happens, you say. Quite right, but as it isn’t me, what do I care? Anyway, there is a reason for this apparent cruelty of spirit, as you will see in a moment. I don’t know when jaw-wiring was invented, but it always seemed to me to have something of the Seventies about it. Everything about that decade was designed to be as unappealing and I suppose, cruel as possible. Photographs of myself as a lad tell a despairing tale of trousers like pairs of wigwams, gruesome haircuts and hideous hand-knitted sweaters in filthy colours. Television schedules consisting of Crossroads, Crown Court and Indoor League must have kept the phone lines at the Samaritans white hot, twenty four hours a day. There were blackouts, rampant inflation, everyone, but everyone, was on strike unless they were unemployed in which case they only bothered looking for work so as they could come out on strike like everyone else. What a stinking decade that was. And on top of it all, someone came up with the idea of taking a roll of fuse wire and knitting fat people’s jaws together. Brilliant! The poor sod has got deep-seated psychological problems, so what we’re going to do is to tie his mouth up and send him out to be laughed at. And how we laughed. “Look at that fat great slob,” my father would say when the inevitable articles 111

appeared in the press. “What a disgrace!” We would pass it round the dinner table and laugh our socks off whilst growling ‘Sausages’ in the manner of the dog off That’s Life. I can scarcely credit the mental damage such humiliation would have done to a victim of such unusual torture. Imagine every time you are given food having to snarl, “Can you shtick it in the glender, kleese?’ through clenched teeth. Who could keep a straight face after that? Unfortunately, the psychological price may simply be too high to pay. Not to mention the hunger. Oh lawks, the hunger! In one swift bootlacing of the teeth you go from pies and chips and burgers and pies and cakes and more pies to … pureed vegetable, milkshakes and custard. No wonder they want to keep your jaws wired up. You might otherwise fall foul of the Dangerous Dogs Act. I’m afraid the only conclusion I can draw from the whole sorry surgical deal is that it isn’t an option. If it is easy, then it won’t work. It is as simple as that. Perhaps now you are ready to knuckle down.

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Chapter 9 FOOLING YOURSELF

Far and away the most interesting aspect of our relationship with food is the way in which we fool ourselves, or, more specifically, the many, many ways in which we fool ourselves. As we saw in a previous chapter, it is only in recent years that we, in the developed world, have suffered the double problem of having i) way more food than we could possibly ever eat and ii) gnawing guilt about being overweight. Back in the good old days, being fat was a sign of prosperity and to die of surfeit, apoplectic fit or liver poisoning was to have lived the full life. Nowadays, anyone, prosperous or otherwise, can be as fat as they please, as a visit to any chip shop will quickly testify. Hence we fool ourselves. We get fat. Then we fool ourselves that we aren’t fat. We fool ourselves into thinking we’re slimming. We fool ourselves that we have slimmed. We lie to ourselves. Friends lie to us. Society lies to us. Everyone lies to us. The whole thing is a tissue of lies. It has to be. Were it not, we would be living in a constant state of panic, guilt and clammy-palmed stress. They say 113

that a field mouse has a heartbeat of around 250 beats per minute. That is probably the way we would all live our lives, were they not cushioned by our propensity for padding out the sharp edges of reality with a little white lie here and a little white lie there. Perhaps we should take a moment out to study the sleight of brain we use to get through life, if only to understand that it isn’t going to help you lose weight. I regret (no I don’t) that dieting is about accepting the truth. The more you sugar-coat the pill, the less effect it will have. The Games We Play There is neither time nor space in this slim volume to discuss the entire universe of games that humankind plays with itself in order to get by. Suffice it to say that there is quite some distance between the ‘Reality of Life’ (you are born, learn to look after yourself, the weak are weeded out, you procreate, raise offspring and die) and the ‘Condition of Humanity’ (self-awareness, culture, love, avarice, war, suicide, envy, religion etc ad nauseam). In short, this could be described as ‘What Separates Us From The Animals’. If you would like to pursue this study further, I can strongly recommend my alma mater, Open University, which, in its Philosophy module, not only screens some bang-up guff on the Fichtian Concept of Ego, but also bungs it on at 2.30am when any old garbage seems utterly absorbing.

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In short (if Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s theories of Transcendental Idealism aren’t your cup of tea), the difference between ‘Reality of Life’ and ‘Condition of Humanity’ is often to do with fooling oneself. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that this is intrinsically good, bad or otherwise, even if your notions of ‘greater purpose’ and the like are no more than so many sugar-plum fairies dancing around in your empty head. Merely, that we need to know that it goes on. Consider this: One of man’s greatest inventions, if not ‘The Greatest’, is money. When you look at it, the wheel could really have just been a fortunate discovery early troglodyte steps on log; essays comedy pratfall; wheel discovered - and fire most certainly was. I suspect that for the first million years of having fire in harness it was being created not by rubbing a dry stick on another dry stick, but by rubbing it on an already burning stick. However money had to be invented and now it owns our civilised little lives to the point of no return. It doesn’t matter who you are, how worthy you are, how noble your cause; take away money and it is all over (well it is for 99.99% of you - there is always the odd nut who spoils these sorts of arguments). Try disagreeing with that, I dare you. By the way, you can keep your mouth shut if you: • Have ever asked for a pay rise, or moved jobs for the money • Do the Pools or Lottery • Bet on the nags • Have outstanding loans or credit card bills 115

• • • • • •

Have ever been into The Gadget Shop Save Talk about property prices Envy rich people Covet a Ferrari Are an emergency plumber

For you - and I think that covers most of you - cash is king. Even drug-addled junkies, so far out of it they can’t remember to eat, wash, sleep or remove their trousers before defecating can still remember how to mug or burgle someone to get funds to stoke their habit and that it is easier to rob the cash than to rob the drugs. Fittingly, the only people to whom money means pretty much nothing are children and the little darlings, as we all know, soak up the stuff like Always Ultra Panty Pads soak up blue water. And what of the City types you read about every so often in the Daily Mirror, who have given it all up to be welders on Lundy or stoat-breeders in Clackmannanshire? Are they the exceptions proving the rule? No, I’m afraid they are merely people who have figured that metalwork in the Bristol Channel, or animal husbandry in the Lowlands will give them a more favourable ‘Groats-to-Aggro’ ratio than continuing to be mediocre Merchant Bankers facing the imminent heave-ho. And yet, given this inescapable truth, do we not all try to pretend that it is most certainly not all about money, lest people think that we’re cold, heartless, 116

one-dimensional robots? Of course we do and other people make the same pretence to us and, blow me if we don’t buy that as well! Try this conversational gambit with one of your mates and see how the truth hurts: Mate: Christ, Walter, have you seen property prices? My house must have gone up another twenty grand in the last six months alone. WW: You’ve just been handed twenty grand you didn’t earn, yet people starve to death in Africa for the want of fifty pee. How does that make you feel? I don’t recommend it though. ‘Yeah, but mine is thirty-five grand to the good,’ is actually a better answer. If we’re all going to live the lie, then make it a good one. Porky Pies I drifted away from the subject somewhat there. Please stop me next time, or we will never get through this. The fact is that not every lie in the repertoire is to do with money. Drama, fiction, art, games, sport, etc are all ‘leisure’ activities. Yes we need money to indulge, but they are more in the way of ‘personal’ distractions and it is the ‘personal’ distractions that we’re looking at here, particularly where it has to do with your own body.

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Let us start with two easy questions: 1) How old are you? 2) How old do you feel? The chances are that if you are aged 36 or over, the answer to question 2 is approximately half of the answer to question 1. Why? I mean why would we need to feel eighteen when we are thirty six? If we all ‘feel’ eighteen, why can we not just ‘feel’ thirty six? How would we know what thirty six felt like, if we still ‘felt’ eighteen? What is the point? It isn’t going to make us live any longer. Is it not all about denying the truth, Clinton-like, until the lie simply becomes the truth? How about some others?: How many people in the world do you reckon think you are a complete arsehole? None? A couple, maximum? The actual answer is almost certainly a sight more than you imagine. Lads, do your mates show a constructive interest in discussions about your football team? Of course they do - that’s what friends are for. However, if they’re not supporters of the same team, I can personally guarantee that they wish your team nothing but humiliation and damnation. I don’t care how interested they seem. It is the truth.

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Are you good at your job? Of course. How about everyone else in the world? Bloody useless, mostly. What are the odds, eh? Or is it just another falsehood we use to protect ourselves from grim reality? That is life, I’m afraid. But before we start running a warm bath and opening a vein, let us look at ways some big, some small - in which we apply a Clintonesque twist to values in respect of our bodies. Bend It Like Bill Categorisation. I hope this does not come as a shock to you, but no one in the whole world outside of your mother and possibly your spouse (and this is a big ‘possibly’ why, just because they’re married to you, should they find your three extra stones easier to ignore than the rest of mankind?) gives a flying flap about a pound here or a pound there. When it comes to size, there are three main categories of people in the world as far as anyone is concerned: • Fat people • Everyone else • Me And that is pretty much it. 99.999% of all thought in the developed world concerning the state of the human physique can be placed under one of these three headings, with ‘Starving to Death’ filling up the other 0.001% 119

Remember that, as far as you and everyone else are concerned, YOU fall into two different categories. That means whilst you are giving it ‘me, me, me’, the entire world is thinking ‘fat person, fat person, fat person’. Of course, they aren’t saying it. They’re saying: “Ooh you look fantastic’, and ‘Wow, I’ve never seen you look so good’. But you are still a ‘fat person’ until about three years after you’ve successfully slimmed down to super-waif proportions, when you become ‘everyone else’. That is until you gain an ounce - then you become ‘fat person’ again. You are guilty of it too, aren’t you? Telling fat people they look good? Well, don’t forget, it is all just a game. Pride In One’s Appearance Carrie’s mum says to her friends that Carrie is such a pretty girl. She has a pretty face (ouch!) and ‘always takes such a pride in her appearance’. That is an odd one. Pride in one’s appearance? Surely if we were really proud of our appearance, we would all be wandering around stark naked, or as stark naked as common decency would allow. Is it not actually the case that it is the people who are least proud of their appearance about whom we make this comment? People who take the most pride in their appearance are likely to be the ones who are disguising more features, about which they most

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certainly are not in the slightest bit proud, than anyone else. For the ladies, long jackets with big shoulders hide fat stomachs and hips; dark colours shrink you down; vertical stripes stretch you out; big hair reduces a big face; a bob gathers in the jowls. For the men, an untucked shirt hides the beer-belly overhang; giant plaid breaks up a big outline; double-breasted suits truss down the wobbly bits. There is a difference between ‘taking pride’ and ‘having pride’. That is why I am most certainly not going to suggest that you nip off to Harvey Nicks and smarten up a bit. We’re trying to address the problem, not seeing if we can bury it under a Betty Jackson trouser-suit. As a brief addendum to this category, here is a short example of how the fashion industry panders to our ‘pride’ in our appearance. Nip down to your local leisurewear outlet and try on some jeans. Then come home and put a tape-measure around your waist. Then wonder why jeans with a 38 inch waist are practically falling off you, when you are quite obviously in excess of 40 inches round. Is there some sort of clandestine ‘sizing cartel’ in operation? Or is it just a sop to our vanity?

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Eating Disorders No, not anorexia and no, not compulsive gluttony. What I’m really talking about here is the way in which we convince ourselves that what we are eating is something other than what we are eating. A common mistake amongst dieters is to think the best of stuff they knock up for themselves. Giles (the brother-in-law) swears by the breadmaking machine he bought my long-suffering sister for Christmas. “Marvellous!” He mutters, almost inaudibly as he showers you with moist crumbs. “And so much better for you than that shop-bought rubbish!” I agree that there may be a tad less emulsifier in the Orr-Watt version of the white loaf, but his equation does not seem to address the inequity in weights between the fat-slathered doorstep he is busy putting himself outside of and the paper-thin flap of Kingsblest Extra-Salty he eschews. ‘Make-Your-Own’ foods used to be about cost (and giving the kids something to do when it was chucking it down). Nowadays, though, DIY food is all about ‘health’. This is often a mistaken impression, not just from a nutritional point of view. My sister informs me that Giles once acquired an ice cream maker and decided to make a couple of improvements to it. Having read that a key ingredient in the reduction in temperature was 122

saltpetre, he dismantled the machine and filled the coolant chamber with a horn full of black powder left over from his last outing as a Roundhead corpse for the local Sealed Knot. Then he gave it a good shake, screwed it back together and turned it on. They found the lid three villages away. To this day Giles is unable to hear the Mr Whippy chimes without diving under the nearest piece of heavy furniture. Of course this is probably a less obvious health risk in home-made food. The real risk is in pure and simple over-consumption. See if any of these ring a bell: Home-made Yoghurt Raison d’Etre “None of the crap they put in that shop-bought muck.” Old Recipe 150ml eaten with a spoon New Recipe 400ml natural yoghurt, honey, nuts, banana and brown sugar eaten with a ladle. Home-made Bread Raison d’Etre “Loaves I make are far superior to stuff scientists have toiled over for generations” Old Recipe One slice toast and marmalade New Recipe Might as well eat the whole loaf. It’ll be like a breeze-block tomorrow. Home-made Jam Raison d’Etre “With just 12 hours work I saved 6p a jar” Old Recipe Spread thinly on toast. 123

New Recipe Shovel on an inch thick and make mental note to cut the fruit up a bit finer next time. Home-made Pizza Raison d’Etre “Three quid for a bit of dough and some cheese? Nonsense!” Old Recipe Thin ‘n’ Crispy New Recipe Thick ‘n’ Slabby Home-made Burgers Raison d’Etre “Those miserable little things have twice the fat of mine” Old Recipe Tiny burger - twice the fat New Recipe Half the fat - burger the size of a curling stone. Home Brew Raison d’Etre “We all know what you can make with grapes and grain, but has anyone tried distilling those flowers growing out of the overflow pipe?” Old Recipe Get lashed up and vomit. New Recipe Get lashed up and lose the use of one or more major organs indefinitely. I sense a general consensus here and it is that, in the name of ‘Health’, we’re hogging out. If that isn’t fooling yourself, I don’t know what is. ‘Ghost Menus’ are relatively common when discussing diets. Later on, I will be asking you to write down what you actually eat. But before we get to that, I need to make sure you are going to give me the lot, rather than what you’ve convinced yourself you are eating. 124

Barry leads us into the subject: WW: “Tell me, Barry - and please be scrupulously honest - what would you eat on a typical day?” Barry: “Well, I might get up and have a bowl of Cornflakes a cup of tea and a couple of pieces of toast. About eleven, I might have a coffee and a biscuit and then lunch will be a ham roll with maybe a sausage roll or a bag of crisps, with a Kit Kat or something and a Diet Coke. When I get in, in the evening, I like maybe some bread and butter or a bag of crisps and then dinner will be a hamburger and chips or some pie or a chop, followed by a slice of cake. I might also have a beer or two and maybe the odd bit of chocolate to settle me down before bed.” WW: “Tell me Barry, because I’m at a loss to explain it, why is it that you’re so fat?” Barry:” …mumble mumble” WW: “Are you eating?” Let us now examine this conversation, but with the truth inserted in square parentheses so as you can judge Barry (by your own standards? Careful!): WW: “Tell me, Barry - and please be scrupulously honest - what would you eat on a typical day?” Barry: “Well, I might get up and have a bowl of Cornflakes [full cream milk and sugar] a cup of tea [milk and sugar] and a couple of pieces of toast [butter and jam]. About eleven, I might have a coffee [cream and three sugars] and a [chocolate] biscuit [or four – or a doughnut] and then lunch will be a [thickly buttered] ham roll [bap] with maybe [inevitably] a sausage roll or [and] a bag of crisps, with a Kit Kat [Super Size Twix] or something and a 125

Diet [yeah, right!] Coke. When I get in, in the evening, I like maybe [indubitably] some bread and butter [a peanut butter sandwich] or [and] a bag of crisps and then dinner will be a ham[cheese]burger and chips or some [a whole] pie or a [couple or three] chop[s], followed by [seconds and then] a [two] slice[s] of cake. I might [no ‘might’ about it] also have a beer or two [four] and maybe [only on days when the Earth revolves around the sun] the odd bit [bar] of chocolate to settle me down before bed.” WW: “Tell me Barry, because I’m at a loss to explain it [too polite to mention it], why is it that you’re so fat?” Barry: “…mumble mumble” [are you looking at my Danish pastry?] WW: “Are you eating” [duh!]? What Barry has done here is pick out the salient points of his diet. The staging posts are Corn Flakes, Coffee, Ham, Pie, Beer, Bed. There is really little need to examine the countryside in between. However the fact is that there is more to Barry’s daily intake inside the brackets than there is outside and a family of four could probably survive on what Barry does not bother to mention. Why Barry is fat, though, could well be a mystery to him. He has no concept of the fact that his ‘ghost diet’ is composed of anything more than mere incidentals to the mainstays of Cornflakes, Ham and Pie. I won’t waste a lot of time on restaurants. There is a good reason why food in restaurants is so much

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better than food you make for yourself. It is that it is full of • Fat • Sugar • Cream • Butter It is not because trained chefs grill a bit of chicken better than you do. It is because they fry it in buckets of oil and butter and probably sling cream and sugar all over it too. Chicken is chicken is chicken. The good stuff is something else. When you are on a diet that says ‘eat plain pasta’, trotting off to the local Trattoria for a bowl of even their plainest farfalle is a bad idea (as Carrie found out on her Glutton’s Friend diet). Weights and Measures As I have mentioned before, a huge amount of our relationship with ourselves and with others is based on anything other than the truth. By this I don’t just mean the usual ‘Oh, Windmilla, you do look absolutely divine tonight,’ delivered to a ruddy, porcine creature in a shapeless polyester body-bag. That sort of thing is voluntary (not that you would ever have the control over your involuntary reflexes to let Windmilla know that she looked like a pig in a windsock). No, I’m talking about the subconscious and a fine feeder of the subconscious comes under the heading of ‘Weights and Measures’, by which I mean that there is nothing like a spot of scientific

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proof to back up your own (mistaken) theory that you are lean, handsome and athletic. As a matter of interest, why do you suck your gut in and puff your chest out in front of the mirror? No one else is going to see you looking like that. Is it just that if you can see yourself at best advantage for five seconds in a day, that is how everyone else will see you for the rest of it? I am considering setting up a company called Slim Jim’s Mirrors, to manufacture and sell ever so slightly convex mirrors that make people look thinner. People actually say that they look ‘better’ in some mirrors than in others. No, love, whatever mirror you happen to look in, you still look the same. But the idea would sell like hot cakes. Why? Because we cannot live without the lie. Are you ever surprised and disappointed when you see yourself on video or in a three-way mirror? That is how everyone else sees you - not from face on as you see yourself. The only time people see you straight face on is in a passport photograph. Nuff said? Have you ever seen film of yourself playing sport? More easily distinguishable from Beckham, Botham, Faldo, or Wilkinson than you thought, yes? So, having tipped our hat at this concept, how does it manifest itself in our day to day lives? The other day the ubiquitous Giles visited Chez Whichelow along with my sister and several others, for a dinner party. We had scarcely hoicked the lid 128

off the olive jar and lobbed the sugar cubes into the Champagne cocktail glasses when there was a scream from the upstairs bathroom. Dashing up to investigate, we were met with the sight of a prostrate Fenella Murgatroyd - a parish council mainstay and governor of Walter jr’s school - being hovered over by a naked Giles Orr-Watt - a bloated mountain of liver sausage - cupping his hands over his genitals in what passes for modesty in the Orr-Watt household. “What, for the love of God, are you doing?” I asked “Weighing myself on your scales,” he replied without a hint of shame. “They weigh about a pound lighter than mine. Shall I go and fetch a glass of water?” Now I know that Giles is quite an extremist when it comes to letting Science take the rap, but it remains a fact that many dieters know exactly where the scales are that weigh them the lightest. Giles won’t weigh himself at his parents’ house in Norfolk because, he tells me, it is a good hundred feet closer to the centre of the Earth than his own house. You may think this is lamentable, but ask yourself this: “Have I ever shifted around on my scales when I have believed the reading to be a bit off, because ‘it’s the way you stand on them’?” I thought so. It isn’t just scales and mirrors, either. What about all the other ‘science’ out there? • Bodily Fat Percentages • Height-to-weight charts • Body Mass Indices • Body Age to Chronological Age calculations 129

• Cholesterol Counts • Tidal Lung Capacity And this isn’t to mention the less tangible ones such as the time it takes (in your own estimation, of course) for your pulse to return to normal after exercise, how long you can hold your breath, whether you once ran the London marathon and so on. How many times have you heard some great wheezing tub say something along the lines of: “I have the Cholesterol of someone half my age” (Yes, and twice your weight), or “My bone-age is ten years younger than my chronological age”, or “It is my high tidal lung-flow that allows me to compete in the London marathon” (once … twenty years back)? We are allowing science to implant in our mind enough in the way of statistical analysis, that there is - there must be - at least one stat we can churn out that shows us in a better light than we deserve. What does not help, too, is when you read in the papers, as I have done recently, that some nutritionists are advising fat people not to cut back on their food, since ‘they need to become healthy before they can diet successfully’. What utter poppycock! Whilst I’m sure that these alleged ‘nutritionists’ are entirely above board, rather than being from the Ronald McDonald Institute of Healthy McEating and have been thoroughly taken out of context by newspapers suffering a slow day on the newsdesk, they have to realise that they have opened a real can of worms. As any boss will tell 130

you, the kind of behaviour you tolerate is exactly the kind of behaviour you get. What these guys have done is merely throw open the larder door and say to the tubs: “In you go, folks. Come out when you are ready.” Sweating It Off Another way we deceive ourselves is in relation to the amount of exercise we do. In brief, in case you are the sort of person who overplays the ‘active lifestyle’ card, when the experts talk about exercising, they’re not starting from the base point of lying motionless, barely breathing, blinking as infrequently as possible and not stirring even for toilet breaks. They’re starting from the base point of living a normal if inactive life. This means that you don’t get to claim every tiny movement as being in some way ‘health-inducing’. It does not mean that when you sweat because you are fat, lazy and unfit, it counts as a ‘rigorous workout’. People claim the most pathetic things against their exercise quota: • I had to run for the bus • I walk to my car every day • I’ve been up and down those stairs all evening • I sweated buckets in that sauna • I’ve lost the remote control 131

Sorry, fatso. That sort of stuff - and plenty more - is a given. For you, old bean, it is going to have to hurt. Are We Still Kidding Ourselves? Back to Basics You are fat and you eat too much. I don’t wish to go into any great debate about this. I would guarantee that even now there are people, of which you may well be one, reading this book thinking: “Yes, that’s right. A lot of people out there are fat and do eat too much. Aren’t I a clever cove? Etc.” It is you I’m talking about fatso. Yes you! And, as a diet book, this volume should immediately start back-pedalling on this message to make sure you don’t hear it again, in the raw like that. So what I should do is to run it through a translator a couple of times then send it round the table as a Chinese whisper until it becomes unrecognisable. A few trips through the dietary thesaurus can change these two simple concepts beyond what we would deem to be acceptable paraphrasing. I have set out the Whichelow Percolator below, to show you what can happen to these basic ideas when boiled to within an inch of their lives. I call the statements (‘You are fat’ and ‘You eat too much’), Walter’s Ground Zero. In order to put yourself back on to the right track, you need to bring yourself back to 132

Walter’s Ground Zero. Without this you are labouring under a serious misapprehension that is holding you back from being anything other than a fatso. Obviously the further away from Ground Zero you are, the more work you will have to do to get there. Sorry - those are the rules. In the meantime, count off down the two lists overleaf and see where you are starting to achieve some sort of resonance: Walter’s Ground Zero: You are fat • Your body-mass index is high • You can pinch more than an inch • You are 9 inches too short for your weight • You are embarrassed about your body in front of strangers • You are one bikini-size from perfection with 3 weeks to go before your holiday • You are not fat at all Walter’s Ground Zero: You eat too much • You eat too much of the wrong stuff • You eat at the wrong times • You take in too few vitamins and too little water • You don’t eat enough of our expensive product • If you could cut out one specific thing you could eat as much as you liked • You don’t eat enough As you can see, a book that is convincing you that you are not at all fat and that you don’t eat enough is placing you a very long way from Ground Zero, 133

which is where you actually need to be (either that or it isn’t a diet book, of course). And believe me, there are real diets out there that will stick you anywhere down these lists with the possible exception of the very top. Yes, I have witnessed a dietary regime, of the handson variety, that shall remain nameless (but it knows who it is and shame on it!) that is regularly in the habit of telling folk that they aren’t eating enough. “I’ve got a bit stuck,” the dieter will say. “I’ve lost 12lbs but I’m not getting any further even though I’m eating less than the diet you gave me.” “Aha,” the hands-on dietician will say. “You must stick to the diet, even if it means eating more. Now leave your weekly cheque with the receptionist as you leave.” Well, who knew? We were fat because we ate too little. Remarkable. It is an example of how a situation can become so ridiculous that it simply disappears off people’s radars and is accepted at face value. When you call off work, sick, with a genuine and quite gruesome cold, everyone is all ‘tut tut’ and ‘get well soon’ until you put the phone down. Then it is: “Yeah, right. Skiving bastard”. Phone in sick and claim, however, to have contracted blood poisoning from a curare-tipped blow dart fired at you by an Amazonian pygmy who is squatting in your garden shed … Needless to say it won’t occur, even to the most cynical of bosses, that this story might be made 134

up and, hence, you will be free to spend the day at Lakeside Thurrock doing your Christmas shopping. I’m therefore happy to allow you to wrestle, on your own, with the concept that you could squeeze in another meal between brunch and lunch and start losing weight immediately. In the meantime, though, we need to keep in mind that ‘YOU ARE FAT AND YOU EAT TOO MUCH’. Does this mean that dieticians and diet books have been lying to you all this time? Think about it. Whom would you trust? • Politicians? • Estate Agents? • Double Glazing Salesmen? • Stockbrokers? • Car Dealers? • Unsolicited Drive-Tarmacking Contractors? • Dieticians? No reason, I feel, to single out the last name on the list for special treatment. As far as books go, the same applies. Some people actually get diets out of tabloid newspapers. They even sit there, moan about what a pack of lies the whole tabloid business is and then grab their scissors, cut out the diet and stick it up on their fridge. Delightful. So we’re all doing it, are we not? The fact of the matter is that those people we say ‘look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles’ are only using one layer of rose-tint more than the dozens we are all choosing to colour reality with. 135

I don’t think that the world is ready for too much of the truth right now - the shock might kill it. However, we’re now aware of the silly games we play, so that at least we can recognise them when they rear their ugly heads, even if we simply nod in an inscrutable manner and allow them to pass. Now let’s face up and get cracking.

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Chapter 10 GETTING STARTED

Now we come to the bit you’ve been dreading. Or is it the bit that you’ve been looking forward to with a gleam of anticipation in your moist eye? All right, you’ve been dreading it, but that may not be a bad thing. For a start, if you aren’t dreading it, it probably means you have every intention of cheating in one of the multifarious ways outlined elsewhere in the book. If you are dreading it, then you probably mean it and that can only be a good thing. Remember that Chairman Mao said: “The longest journey starts with but a single step.” Or was it Karl Marx? Whoever it was it sounds like they didn’t have a car (‘The shortest journey starts with but a single step to the sideboard for my keys’ doesn’t have the same ring to it, somehow). The point is that the fear comes from the distance of the journey you have to take rather than the single step. There is little to be afraid of in a single step and it is my job to help you focus on each step and let the journey take care of itself. Buying it so far? Good. It is a bang-up concept.

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Let me then begin by laying down a few ground rules or, should I say, axioms. I don’t want you lashing into this thing willy-nilly and, to be fair, you look like you could do with the discipline. 1) It won’t be easy. It will change your life, undoubtedly, but easy? No. As you cannot have failed to notice in your years on this planet, nothing worthwhile is ever easy. If you want to lose weight effortlessly you will have to shove your arm in a threshing machine or recline on a bacon slicer for about half an hour. That ought to do it. Otherwise - hard work. 2) It is your fault that you are fat. If you are currently suing a global fast-food outlet in the hope of proving that it is they, not you, that have been shoving beefburgers into your slavering maw, then: a) this book isn’t for you and, b) don’t forget to sue your secondary school for allowing you to enter the real world so stupid. Premise #1 and premise #2 are of paramount importance. If you can’t accept these two simple concepts then I recommend you put this book down until you can. Better still, throw it away and buy another one later. It is a cathartic process and my extra royalty is but a side benefit of little consequence. Once you have come to accept nos. 1 and 2, try: 3) You are going to experience hunger. At times it is going to be a good feeling, but, generally … Need 138

I say more? We all know what hunger feels like. If you are on a diet and you are not experiencing hunger it isn’t doing you any good at all because you aren’t learning anything from it. It is like going to prison and not experiencing confinement. 4) There is to be no correspondence along the lines of: ‘This diet doesn’t work’. It does – if it doesn’t don’t blame the diet; it is your own fault. If, however, you get the urge to write and tell me that I’m a miracle worker then please don’t forget to capitalise your gratitude - a tenner pinned to the letter should do it. 5) Most diets treat you like an idiot. Not this one this one treats you like a grown up, if obese, human being. 6) Please consult a qualified physician before commencing any weight-loss programme. Before we move along to the meat and drink of it (oops, sorry), I would just like to clarify point no.6. I would guess that you skimmed over that one without even a second glance. The fact of the matter is that they make us put stuff like that in. The ‘authorities,’ whoever they are, demand that authors of diets include the warning contained in no.6. Why, God alone knows. As if it were not bad enough being a giant tub of dripping, you are now obliged to humiliate yourself by prostrating yourself in front of a GP, short on both time and laughs, and begging to be allowed to lose weight. What, in the 139

name of all that is holy, do you think he is going to say? No? He has probably seen you twice in the last ten years and is horrified at the way you’ve let yourself go. We shall send Carrie to her local surgery and eavesdrop on the likely conversation: Doctor: Good morning, Miss Plumpley. How can I help you in the ninety seconds I can let you have? Carrie: I’d like your permission to lose weight. Doctor: Um, let me give that some thought … Hmmm, no! NEXT! That has probably never happened in the history of the NHS. Harley Street maybe, but not the NHS. Try this as a more likely scenario: Carrie: I’m considering beginning a weight-loss programme, Doctor Struckof. Doctor: I’m glad you came to see me. Weight loss can give rise to all sorts of problems: fluctuations in blood pressure, chemical imbalance, atrophy of heart tissue … (ninety minutes and a battery of tests later, from the finger up the tradesman’s entrance to some plutonium-powered scan considered too pricey even for NASA) … I’m going to prescribe you an expensive placebo and would like you to come back and see me on a monthly basis for the rest of your life. Carrie: Thank you doctor. (Removes tubing from orifices, dresses and leaves) 140

Doctor: (Into intercom) Nurse, fish out those Mercedes Benz brochures again, will you. However this approach to medical care seems exclusive to situations where you actually ask the right question. The last time Carrie went to see Dr Struckof the conversation went something like this: Carrie: Doctor, I have a rash on my back and it is spreading fast. Doctor: Ok, Miss Plumpley, please remove your blouse. Holy shit, Plumpley, what have you done to yourself? You’re the size of a prize-winning Friesian. You should seriously consider losing weight … and fast. Carrie: What about my rash? Doctor: That? Oh yes, don’t worry too much about that. Give this bit of paper to a pharmacist and describe your symptoms. He’ll give you some sort of cream or something and tell you how to rub it on or what to eat it with, or whatever. Jesus, woman, lose some weight, though! Seriously, love. You’re going to die. No battery of tests there I notice. Of course not. They aren’t needed. Dangerously fat, yes. Dangerously thin, also a possibility. Dangerously thin and fat at the same time? Never. And fags are just the same. The good Doctor Struckof would be all over Carrie, if she smoked.

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Carrie: Doctor a lorry ran over my leg and mangled it. Doctor: Good, good. Tell me Miss Plumpley, are you still smoking? Anyway, I’m drifting from the point, which is that losing weight is generally, for overweight people, a bloody good idea. Until you make it official, at which point the seed of the nagging doubt is sown. The nagging doubt that you may be the one person in a gazillion that should remain at 23st for the sake of your continued well-being. And I concede that it is just possible that when you begin losing weight, instead of it coming off your hips or gut or bingo-wings or jowls it might actually come off your heart muscle and you will end up with an organ the size of a blackberry (and with the pumping power of my dear Grandmamma, high on dry Amontillado, trying to inflate a sausage shaped balloon at Christmas) serving a venal system with outposts farther flung than the Roman Empire. Just. But probably not. Be Prepared You will need the following items in order to make this diet work for you: • A set of scales. Good ones too. If, when you stand on your scales, the little wheel rotates all the way to the left and jams, then they’re not a whole amount of use. 142

• A full length mirror. Oh yes, we’re going to be having a good look at ourselves. • A tape measure. Like the scales, if the two metal end bits don’t quite meet, get one that fits! • A pencil and the back of an envelope. Nothing there that you did not already have, I’m sure. Then, OVER THE NEXT 24 HOURS WEIGH YOURSELF ON YOUR SCALES AT 7AM, 6PM AND 10PM - AND WRITE IT DOWN. (Sorry to shout. You would be surprised at the number of people who aren’t really reading by the time they reach this point.) Next, write down what you eat in a day or week or month or year - however long you want really, but it depends on the size of envelope you’ve selected being pretty honest. As I have said all along and will continue to do, if you cannot be honest then just stay fat. I don’t want you dragging my success rate down. As an example, I have obtained a copy of Barry’s daily fare and it reads something like this: Breakfast: Cornflakes, milk, sugar. 2 x toast, butter, jam. Tea, milk, sugar. Elevenses: Coffee, milk, sugar. 4 x Rich Tea (possibly jam doughnut). Lunch: White bap, ham, salad, butter. Crisps (smoky bacon). Sausage roll. Twix (super-size). Diet [ha ha!] Coke. 143

Snack: Peanut butter sandwich (white + butter). Bag of crisps (roast chicken) Dinner: Burger in bun + cheese, onions, ketchup/Steak and kidney pie/Pork chops and apple sauce. Chips, veg. Sponge cake (2 slices). Beer (3 or 4 cans) Extras: Miscellaneous chocolate. This in itself is possibly familiar to you and possibly not. It is definitely the sort of intake that will get you fat, but it is by no means as bad as say: Breakfast: 2 eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, fried bread, black pudding. 2 croissants, butter and marmalade. Coffee, cream, sugar. Elevenses: 2 cream doughnuts. 2 x coffee, cream, sugar. Lunch: Jumbo sausage, in baguette & mayonnaise. Samosa. Chelsea bun, butter. Mars Bar. Coke. Tea: Danish Pastry. Coffee, cream, sugar. Dinner: KFC bargain bucket. Tin of beans. Bottle of red wine. 2 Mr Kipling cakes. Extras: 5 more coffees, numerous biscuits, etc etc ad nauseam. This may strike more of a chord with you than Barry’s menu and it will certainly get you fatter, quicker, but that isn’t the point. 144

The point is I want to see every last thing you eat in that sort of detail and don’t try to leave stuff out, because I will catch you and then there will be trouble. If there is a large variance from one day to another then write down two typical days, or three, or seven. Whatever suits best and whatever gives us the truth. At this juncture it is important to realise that it does not matter one jot whether your current intake looks like Barry’s or like ‘Superfatso’ in the second example or completely different from the pair of them. What is important - and I will print this in bold and hang the cost - is this: This is too much food for you. Yes, indeed, it is this diet that is making you the fatso that you are and you cannot continue to keep on eating this amount. I suspect - and you might like to go back and check this out yourself - that your dietary routine has not so much varied over the years as acquired extra foliage, like an untended hedge. Barry has for some time, eaten a ham salad bap for lunch with a Twix and a Coke. He remembers the time the local sandwich bar changed their suppliers. That must have been a good five years ago now and, boy, did they make delicious sausage rolls. As for the crisps? Well he just developed a taste for smoky bacon one day and, well, they just became part of the order, didn’t they? And they only sell those super-size Twixes nowadays, so he can hardly take the blame for that.

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And the rest of his intake has progressed along similar lines. Adding two more Rich Teas here, or an extra bit of cake there, until each and every meal gradually becomes a gourmand’s paradise, but without him ever realising that he is eating a heck of a lot. Done? Good. Now take your pencil and strike through, for arguments sake, everything that is made of potatoes. This will give Barry a daily sheet that looks like this: Breakfast: Cornflakes, milk, sugar. Toast, butter, jam, Tea, milk, sugar. Elevenses:Coffee, milk, sugar. 4 x Rich Tea. Lunch: Ham salad bap. Sausage roll, giant Twix, Diet Coke. Snack: Peanut butter sandwich Dinner: Cheeseburger, onions, ketchup /S&K pie/ Pork chop with veg’. 2 slices sponge cake. 3 or 4 beers Extras: Misc chocolate. And Superfatso ends up with: Breakfast: 2 eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, fried bread, black pud. 2 x croissants, butter, marmalade. Coffee, cream, sugar. Elevenses: 2 each, cream doughnuts and coffee, cream, sugar. 146

Lunch: Jumbo sausage, in baguette, mayo, samosa, Chelsea bun, butter, Mars bar, Coke. Snack: Danish pastry, coffee, cream, sugar. Dinner: 6 fried chicken wings, tin of beans. Bottle of red wine. 2 x Mr Kipling cakes Extras: coffee, biscuits x lots. My first observation here is that Barry seems to have crossed out proportionally more than Superfatso. This is undoubtedly true. Let us try the same exercise for Barry, putting the spuds back and removing all the bread (plus its attendant coverings we don’t wish to be eating unaccompanied butter, do we?): Barry: Breakfast: Cornflakes, tea, milk, sugar. Elevenses: Coffee, milk, sugar, 4 x Rich tea. Lunch: Ham & salad. Crisps. Sausage roll, giant Twix, Diet Coke. Snack: Crisps. Dinner: Burger/Pie/Chop, chips & veg. 2 x sponge cake, 3 or 4 x beer. Extras: Misc chocolate

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Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe that either result for Barry (no potatoes or no bread) looks like too bad a menu for someone of Barry’s size and proclivities. Both have the following advantages: • He gets to eat as frequently as he did before. • He isn’t going to become so absolutely ravenous that he starts eating the furniture • It is still crammed with those goodies, which sustain the fabric of Barry’s being. • It does not require him to blow an intellectual fuse to work it out. • It is less than he was eating before. Barry, let it be said, just happens to be fat. He is not a freak of dietary weakness. Hence, in order to eat less without turning his life into never-ending drudgery, cutting out the bread, or cutting out the potatoes, or even both if he is feeling brave, starts the process in a satisfactory manner. Superfatso, on the other hand, is more of a special case. Losing the potatoes didn’t trim a lot from the list, nor would losing the bread, were we to calculate a bread-free menu for him. If Superfatso has a weakness, then it is for pastries. So Superfatso crosses out pastries and ends up with: Breakfast: 2 eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, fried bread, black pud. Coffee, cream, sugar. Elevenses: Coffee, cream, sugar. Lunch:

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Jumbo sausage, baguette & butter. Crisps, Mars bar, Coke. Snack: Coffee, cream, sugar. Dinner: KFC bucket, tin of beans. Bottle of red wine. Extras: Bucket of coffee. Now that is a whole lot better. Packed with calories, but pared down enormously. The only problem is that this is about the point where Superfatso slings the book in the bin and heads off to his local patisserie muttering: ‘waste o’ money, that bloody diet’. Whilst the menu above has many advantages it also has the following disadvantages: • Cold turkey withdrawal symptoms will give rise to irresistible cravings. • Looks like a punishment. • Whole meals disappear. Superfatso will never stick to this. Well, not at first anyway. However he might well be able to get within decent range of it in time and that is in itself a triumph. The trick is to get him to that point in a way that suits him and not in a way that suits me. If Superfatso’s ideal weight is 12st and he weighs 20st, getting him to 15st in two years will stand him in much better stead than getting him to 12st in six months, not least because after the two years is up he will probably pass 15st again, this time on the way to 30st. And here is the nub of getting started. 149

The human body is not a Formula One car. It doesn’t thrive on sharp accelerations and decelerations, nor does it enjoy being hurled into hairpins and being required to dart off at a tangent, throttle wide open and valves popping. The human body is a supertanker. One of those ones that they used to tell you about in Look And Learn magazine, that is the size of twenty four football pitches and has to be tied up front and back in different towns. Like the supertanker takes many miles to build up speed, so the human body takes many years to build up dietary momentum and, once in full flight, both take an enormous amount of time and sea room to turn around. Any attempt at sudden movements will ultimately be as unsuccessful as a Milford Haven pilot holding back from throwing the wheel over until he sees the scrambled egg on the harbourmaster’s hat. The body will wind up parked next to the Sue Ryder shop in Pembroke High Street, glugging out enough crude to put an inch-thick coat on every cormorant in the Northern Hemisphere. Just think about it for a second or two. How long have you been overeating? How much overweight are you? If you are thirty years old, were in pretty good shape at twenty and are now 5st overweight that only works out to a weight gain of 2oz a week. 2oz a week! And 5st overweight in ten years is pretty hefty going. So if so much food has so little effect, it means we’re going to have to make some pretty decent cuts to reverse the effect. However, 150

this should show you that nothing in this equation happens overnight. Giles has just come back from a week in the Algarve and when I asked him if he had had a good time he replied: ‘Oh dear, I let the diet slip a bit. Put on half a stone. I’m going to have to lay off the chips and booze for a week or two to get it off’. Now my brother-in-law is obviously - and actually an idiot. For a start, he did not ‘put on half a stone’. If that were the case and he carried on living in the same high style he would pass 100st some time before his forty-fifth birthday (and he is forty-two now!). The fact of the matter is that he simply consumed 7lbs more food than he passed. On the other side of the equation, if he gave up consuming anything other than distilled water for a week, he would certainly lose over 7lbs but that would come purely from excreting more than the gross input. In real terms he would be lucky to lose 1 pound, let alone 7. Giles, it is true, falls into much the same trap as many dieters. He treats his body like the Formula 1 car it isn’t - and Giles has a mirror in his bathroom, so there is no excuse for the confusion - and is subsequently surprised when his attempts at sudden manoeuvres end in the status quo being unchanged. Because of this, when Giles undertakes weight-loss programs there is an awful lot of howling tyres and burning rubber smells, but the end result is never worthy of the effort involved. 151

So how do we treat Barry and Superfatso? Well Barry practically takes care of himself. He has no great vices and so can start by simply removing something from the equation and carrying on as normal. I think we can trust Barry to decide where he is comfortable starting. He knows that lettuce, peas and corn flakes aren’t his problem, so a first step that involves, say, removing all peas from the list isn’t going to move him very far down the road. If he decides to cut all bread for the time being, or all potatoes, or all chocolate, or even all added sugar, then it is a start. Where he should go from there, we will explore in the next chapter. Superfatso is more of a problem and he will have to decide what he can afford to cut without it seeming like a great burden. If he is prepared to let the pastry go, brilliant, but I wouldn’t suggest it as a good idea, because Superfatso without pastry might exhibit the same destructive instincts as a Grizzly Bear catching you making off with its cub. If Superfatso cuts out potatoes, or bread, then, as we have seen, it isn’t the world’s greatest sacrifice. However it is a start that needs to be applauded and Superfatso should be allowed to congratulate himself for making the move. He might also like to consider giving up cream in his coffee, or any pastry before 3.30pm or more than one of anything in any one sitting. All of these have merit and since he is so much further off course for Milford Haven, he needs to make a greater number of smaller manoeuvres rather than fewer but larger. 152

Hopefully the message is coming through loud and clear now. If not: • There is no rocket science to this, just common sense. • You eat too much, so you need to eat less. • You don’t need to uproot your whole life. • Quick fixes are worse than useless. • You can move at a speed with which you are comfortable. • It really is this simple. To put it into working practice we will take our other guinea-pig, Carrie, through the procedures to get her started. First, we buy her a decent set of scales, a nice long tape measure and a full length mirror. The envelope we find in the bin and the pencil, behind her right ear. Then off she troops and uses them - the tape measure, envelope and mirror can be used just the once at this juncture, but I recommend that she weighs herself several times over a couple of days. She will then come up with a ‘range’, which, as we shall see later, is significant. The results are: - 14st 3lbs to 15st dead - 40/37/42 - Ugh! And: Breakfast: Bowl of natural yoghurt with honey, walnuts and sliced banana. 3 Toast & butter. Orange juice. 153

Elevenses: 4-finger Kit Kat, coffee & milk. Lunch: Large pasta salad with a buttered bap. Crisps. 6 Chocolate digestives. Hot soup. Banana Snacks: Peanut butter and jam sandwich. Tea, milk. Dinner: Pie or pastie with chips, peas, gravy, bread & butter. 2 individual chocolate mousses. Banana. Coke. Extras: Chocolate bars (one or two). Bread and butter. Glass of wine or two. Bananas. This isn’t necessarily Carrie’s daily intake but it is representative in the style of ‘A Life In The Day Of…’ and so can be used quite comfortably. The ‘honesty’ factor that we use here is to establish what it is that you are eating. Once you’ve decided on the rule or rules you intend to apply, you don’t have to keep writing down your menus. You simply have to apply the rules to your ordinary daily routine. So, with her pencil cocked over the back of her envelope, she considers where the cuts are going to come. The options, as far as she is concerned are: 1) No bread. 2) No potatoes 3) No bread or potatoes 4) No chocolate 5) No bananas 6) All ‘large’ to become ‘small’. All high numbers to become low numbers. 7) Lose all snacks 154

Some of these don’t lend themselves to her way of thinking. For a start she would keel over without half a dozen bananas a day, so 5) is out. 2) is hardly a sacrifice at all and she does want to lose some weight. She isn’t ready for 4) yet - maybe when she is in a nice cosy relationship, but not now. 7) is probably not feasible because her body expects to be fed every couple of hours. If she gives up bread she wants at least to have the odd potato, so 3) is out. That leaves it as a toss up between 1) and 6). She calls ‘heads keeps breads’, it comes down tails. She is disappointed, so tosses again three times until she gets a head and sets the wheels in motion on option 6). For various reasons, option 6) isn’t ideal, the main one being that there is a clear dividing line between ‘bread’ and ‘no bread’, but ‘large’ and ‘small’ are separated by a rather too flexible subjective judgment. However, this is the first step with which Carrie is comfortable and she can congratulate herself on starting to spin the helm of her supertanker. Her new intake is: Breakfast: Scoop of natural yoghurt with hint of honey, walnuts, sliced banana. 1 buttered toast. Orange juice. Elevenses: 2 finger Kit Kat. Coffee and milk. Lunch:

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Small pasta salad with a buttered roll. Crisps. 2 chocolate digestives. Soup. Banana. Snack: Jam or peanut butter on one slice of bread. Tea with milk. Dinner: Pie or pastie with chips, peas, gravy, bread and butter. Individual chocolate mousse. Coke. Extras: Etc: Half a chocolate bar. Bread and butter. Glass of wine. Banana Now that still looks like a lot of food. Not to Carrie though. Let’s see what she is giving up: - Half a bowl of yoghurt plus a spoon of honey - 2 slices buttered toast, half a bap and a peanut buttered/jammed slice of bread - 2 fingers of Kit Kat, a chocolate mousse and a chocolate bar. - Some pasta salad. - A glass of wine That is a full daily ration for some people. Hence, Carrie has opted for the easiest route (i.e. she has tried to cheat the system) but has still negotiated her way into giving up a considerable amount of food. She will still eat as often as she did before. Still the same food. Still the treats with which she rewards herself. All she has done is reduced some of the excess. She could have chosen a different way of making a start, but whatever way she began she would eventually have had to address most of the issues on the list. The choice she has made is the order in which she does it. 156

The Beginning of the End – or the End of the Beginning And there it is. The very first step on the path to the new Carrie and, but a small leap of faith away, a new you. You might like to get this underway before reading the next chapter and you might like just to crack on with it. As far as I’m concerned, you can do what you like. This book isn’t like one of those selfhelp videos that invites you to digest, validate and claim ownership of your new-found state of selfbeing. As long as you don’t simply put the book down and decide to eat yourself sick, then we’re in harmony at least to some extent. I know what you are thinking though (and if not, you soon will be). ‘This doesn’t work’. It is quite obvious that darling Carrie, well-intentioned as she is, is still tucking away pounds of grub she could well do without. Well, yes and no. Back on the bridge of the supertanker, the skipper has just blown down the speaking tube, given the order for revs to be cut to ‘ahead slow’ and chucked the helm over three points to larboard. The vessel, which was knocking on at 22 knots in an East Nor’ Easterly direction has now … Well nothing has happened. The ship is still making 22 knots ENE. That is where Carrie is today and probably for the next few weeks. The helm will eventually come over and the ship will eventually slow, but all that is happening for the time being as far as Carrie is 157

concerned, is that she is allowing the momentum to change slightly. And as with the tanker, the momentum, once it has changed, will be hard to change back. We’re a long way from the Milford Haven dockside at this juncture, but we have also made a start in steering ourselves off the rocks. The Kitchen Sink One thing we do like to do in the business world is to put all the bad news into one very tall but very narrow pile. This is a practice known as ‘Throwing in The Kitchen Sink’. In effect, if a company is starting to show its arse through the seat of its pants and you are asked to come in and turn it round, you don’t merely buy it a new pair of trousers and say ‘that’ll hold it for another year or two’. There lies the path to ruin. Basically the board, shareholders, staff and dependents of the company are braced for bad news. So let them have it. Everything you can find. If there might be the odd bad debt, make provision for it. If the workforce is pricey, sack a load of them. If some of the income or profit can be treated one of two ways in the annual report, treat it in the least favourable way. In short, find as much bad news as you can and chuck in the kitchen sink with it too. Why? It makes you look better. You can write back bad debts that never materialise, as profit. You can re-hire staff and ‘expand’. You can boost profitability in the report that follows your first year in 158

charge rather than boosting your predecessor’s outgoing figures. You start from a lower base and with lower expectations, so beating forecasts is easy. Where the hell is this going, I hear you ask. Actually it is quite relevant to the dieter, because a diet is ‘bad news’ just like a fall in profitability. Perhaps, if you are reviewing your personal life you may also come to the conclusion that you need to: • Give up smoking (Look out for’ Notso Deadso’ in the shops soon!) • Give up booze • Get out more • Give up other antisocial habits • Come out of the closet • Move house • Take up sport • Resign your job The list of people’s self-improvement theories goes on and on and I’m not in the mood to start telling you how to live the rest of your life. However, I do know that most self-improvement schemes remain unrealised for indefinite periods because they are simply too much like hard work to be bothered with. But, having undertaken the route to selfimprovement laid down in these pages, you will be aware that you’ve now decided to take steps towards a new you. As you will find out shortly, you aren’t just going to lose weight, you are going to change permanently. This will involve (and not against your will, I promise you) a new look, new clothes, exercise, etc. In short, a new you. 159

Now, I’m sure that you can’t be bothered with going through this process more than once, so I strongly recommend that you dig out the list of selfimprovements you’ve always been meaning to tackle and chuck them all in together. Throw in the kitchen sink, if you like. If you want to pack in your job, give up the weed and go and find yourself some sexy chap or chap-ess for a bit of the other, then roll up your sleeves and get cracking now. You will be thoroughly narked if you find ‘New You’ and he or she still has a pile of those smelly old habits that were putting people off Old You. The only caveat I would put up against that, is don’t take up large quantities of exercise just yet. There is a good reason for this and we will come to it in the fullness of time. Also, you will be taking exercise on this diet, but you are going to have to wait for me to tell you when. In the meantime, I would like you to get this preliminary stage under your belt (as if there is any room under there!). Once you’ve got yourself started, stick to your plan rigidly for ten days. We don’t wish to make it too long, nor do we want to let you off the hook too easily.

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Chapter 11 EXERCISE

Mens Sana In Corpore Sano: A healthy mind in a healthy body. This was the catchphrase of a chap I used to work with some years back. He had reached the age of fifty without so much as taking the top off a pickle jar without mechanical assistance, but then, as mid-life crisis hit him, he decided to get fit. He joined the local gym, bought a pair of shorts and adopted said Latin soundbite. Some weeks later, I asked him how it was going. “Fine,” he replied. “That’s the best thirty pounds a month I’ve ever spent. The gym’s only a mile from my house, so I can drive there, do a couple of miles on the walking machine and be home again inside an hour.” “Why don’t you just walk there and back and save thirty pounds a month?” I asked in all innocence. He looked at me with pity. “It’s not just the walking,” he sneered. “It’s the company.” “Who do you go with then?” I asked. “My next door neighbour,” he replied. Mens sana? Turn it up!

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Diet and Exercise ‘Diet and Exercise’. That is what they say is the answer to the ills of your indulgent lifestyle, is it not? ‘Diet and Exercise’. That is the current thinking, anyway, and who are we to argue? It is a given. In the same way that we consider loss of liberty to be the correct form of punishment for criminal activity, or that we see democracy as the correct procedure for the just and efficient management of our country, so we see Diet and Exercise as the solution for the overweight. One thing that is common to these three things, in case you hadn’t noticed, is that the acceptance of the truth of these principles is based on custom rather than on reason. Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that such tenets of civilised society are intrinsically flawed, merely that, were you to question their validity in polite company, you would hear a selection of snorts, whinnies and harrumphs rather than the opinion of anyone who has bothered to consider the alternatives. This is especially true of jumped up little accountants who think that having a partnership and a holiday cottage in Cornwall gives them the right to belittle you at dinner parties. I certainly am not looking to open up the ‘What’s wrong with a damn good thrashing?’ debate within these pages (neither for criminals nor accountants) and we are all familiar enough with the endlessly depressing succession of nincompoops to whom the democratic process delivers power, to reconsider 162

that particular cornerstone of civilisation for ourselves. But Diet and Exercise? Surely that can’t be a non-starter can it? Well, ‘yes and no’ is the answer to that one: Yes: We consume more calories than our bodies use up. Hence we need to consume fewer calories and to burn more. Hence diet and exercise. No: We could achieve our aim either by consuming fewer calories or by burning more. Sounds pretty weak, so far, but there is an amount of logic behind this. Consider the following people: • Ex-footie wizard and non-English-speaking wifebatterer, Paul Gascoigne. • Archbishop’s ‘gofer’ and onetime involuntary taxexile, Terry Waite. • An average, gravity-distorting Sumo wrestler • Knobbly Olympic sprint-diva, Marion Jones • You on the last ‘Diet and Exercise’ program you went on. This could be the dream ticket for next season’s Channel 4 reality TV show, I’m A Celebrity Locked In The Back Of A Transit Van In A Heatwave – Get Me Out Of Here! … but isn’t. In fact these are all names that prove a point, namely that diet and exercise are not necessarily joined at the hip. 1) Paul Gascoigne. I use him as an example, but any footballer who has done themselves serious damage will fit the bill here. When you see the 163

poor lamb hopping around on crutches, his cast all covered in the biroed ‘X’s of his team-mates, he invariably looks like he is running to fat at an alarming pace. When the plaster comes off and he starts lumbering around the practice ground, his manager will explain that it will take a week or two (or thirty in Paul’s case) to get him up to ‘match fitness’. Now, whatever you think of them, these guys aren’t sitting down to great heaps of KFC and spotted dick, the moment they rick an ankle. It is simply that the reduction in a hugely onerous physical schedule means that what they’re eating does not have to be pumped into the muscles and so the body starts reverting to type. Hence, no requirement for diet, just more exercise. 2) Terry Waite. Nothing like a few years chained to the plumbing and living off bread and cloudy water, to slim you down. Poor Terry was pretty well covered when he headed off for Beirut and I’m pretty sure he was not offered the option to jog round the park every day whilst he was there. OK, OK, this is all a bit tasteless and I’m sure that Terry could have been in slightly better health when he was delivered back to the fold. The point, however, is that his emaciation was a product solely of diet and not of exercise. 3) Sumo. For those of you who failed to catch the Sumo season on Channel 4 when it was in vogue (for about twenty minutes in 1991, I believe), one of the larger stars of the dhoyo was a thirtysomething stone Hawaiian brawler of the nappy164

slappy variety, called Konishiki - a trained and super-fit athlete, no doubt, but with the nickname ‘The Dump Truck’. The lesson here? You can spend your entire life eating boiled rice and indulging in physical training and still end up the size of a sanitation utility vehicle. So watch it! 4) Marion Jones. Next time you see a magazine feature about how damned good the Yanks are at sprinting, find the picture of Marion ‘breasting’ the tape (the inverted commas are for a good reason) in a 100m final and then dig out Leroy Burrell achieving the same feat in the men’s event. Trim off anyone else in shot (they are usually some distance back, so this shouldn’t be a problem) and stick your thumbs over the faces of each. Then invite a friend to try to identify which is which. Not easy, I guarantee, unless Ms. Jones is in her ‘Beetle-bonnet’ hot-pants. Now that isn’t to say that Marion is not a fine looking gal - not to my tastes, but I don’t suppose she will lose any sleep over that - but she does look a bit, shall we say, blokish. This is the downside of diet and exercise for the ladies, I fear. Do you really want to develop a torso like a cobbled street and calves like rugby balls? You might also like to have breasts as well. 5) You. I trust you’ve been on a ‘Diet and Exercise’ plan before. Even if you haven’t, this may well ring true. Exercise is a pain in the neck. It is worse than dieting for two reasons, to whit you have to get up to do it and it involves changes of clothing. In fact about 85% of Diet and Exercise 165

programmes fail at the ‘exercise’ stage before they fail at the ‘diet’ stage. Psychologically there is a very good explanation for this. The brain tells us that dieting is painful and that exercise makes it worse - but it picks out the two elements in that order. You didn’t go on an ‘Exercise and Diet’ program, you went on a diet that added exercise to the misery. There are potentially two reasons for packing in one part of this regime: ‘I just can’t do thirty minutes on the rowing machine when I’m hungry’, or, ‘I just can’t reduce my food intake when I’m taking so much exercise’. However, you never hear the latter, only the former. The point this illustrates is that Diet and Exercise regimes are, potentially good for you, but are often actually more than the body can take and are therefore no damn good at all. So a rousing cheer all round. Walter isn’t going to ask you to do exercise. Or is he? Well, yes I am. Sorry about the last bit. I can see how it might have got your hopes up a bit - ‘I know I’m lounging in front of the telly all day but it’s part of my diet’ and all. That would have been sweet. But the good news is: Not Just Yet. From what I have laid out above, we can draw two main points and from these we must figure out the way forward. They are: 1) You can diet successfully with or without exercise

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2) No one wants to diet, let alone exercise whilst they’re doing it So we now need to mould our weight-loss strategy out of this rather unpromising raw material. No problem. Before we do, though, let’s examine what exercise is all about. Exercise: What Is It All About, Then? Let’s get one thing clear from the start: A mile-and-a-half trudge through a couple of muddy fields, once round the duckpond and struggling over two stiles does not burn the same number of calories as are contained in half a pound of roast turkey, stuffing, eight roast potatoes, four veg’, gravy, Christmas pud, white sauce, a tablespoon of brandy butter, three mince pies, and a handful of After Eight mints. Let alone a couple of gin and tonics, a glass or two of fizz, a bottle and a half of fruity red, two big brandies and the great slurp of Tia Maria you poured into your coffee. If you think that equation is lop-sided, don’t forget that the very next thing you do after you’ve kicked off the wellies and released the accumulated gas from either end, is to sit down, make a pointedly self-satisfied grunt and start all over again with great slabs of buttered malt loaf and Christmas cake. Now I appreciate that this is an extreme example. Deep down we all know that the Christmas Day 167

stroll burns off about 8 of the 20,000 calories consumed, but there is still, present in the backs of most minds, the element of ‘walking it off’ or of ‘working it off’ or even of ‘exercising it off’. Unfortunately the backs of most minds tend to under-estimate quite seriously the amount of exercise required to even things out. Walking is a good example. Strolling along, even for mile upon mile, uses about 3 more calories per hour than lying in a coma with clear plastic tubing draped out of every opening. You would use more energy by stripping down to your skuns and standing outside your back door in the cold, since at least your body would have to burn calories to stop you from freezing to death. The Christmas Day walk, then, is nothing more than a courtesy tool used to draw a line under one meal before getting your snout into the next. How about swimming? That is proper exercise and probably not a bad choice. It has the following advantages over things like running, cycling, playing football and the like: • No wrenching of joints, no ripping of tendons, no rupturing of vertebrae. • All parts of the body get worked together. • Your copious sweat just washes away. • No need to stop exercising for toilet breaks • Fat people float better than thin ones Swimming also has the following advantage over things like Pilates, Ashtanga yoga and so forth: - It is 168

exercise, not just sitting around making constipated noises and giving it a fancy name So all in all it is the perfect exercise (unless you are a non-swimmer in which case it is useless or possibly even fatal), although I should point out that when you are swimming, you do need actually to swim. Some of the chubbier folk merely bob around the pool, propelled only by the suck of the filtration system, as if it is the immersion that is doing them some good. Of course it isn’t and these people would be best advised to get out and let all the water get back in. When done right, however, swimming can burn up to a maximum of 500 calories per hour. 500 calories! In an hour! Of butterfly stroke! Can you do the butterfly stroke? Of course not. If you tried, how long do you think you could keep it up for before your heart burst? Two, three seconds? Less? In fact, do you know anyone who can do the butterfly stroke? Have you ever even seen anyone do the butterfly stroke? Outside the Olympic Games, of course not. No one ever does it for fun because it is such a waste of energy. It is the Greco-Roman wrestling of swimming. Anyway, back to the pool with a flick of the reality towel and with the keen but unathletic Barry as our stand-in.

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Now Barry started with visions of himself Johnny Weismuller-ing through the water at tremendous velocity, but, as he cowers in the snake-pit of the men’s changing rooms listening to the chill draught thrumming across the stiff nipples of shaven-chested Adonises, the visions disperse and are replaced with a hallucination of him having to be fished off the bottom by chortling lifeguards brandishing a pole with a hoop on the end. I think we can safely assume that he isn’t going to be giving it a hundred lengths of ‘fly’ in an hour, so just what options does he have? Given that trying to get the key out of the locker is causing him to break out in a muck sweat, I think we can assume that Barry isn’t going to do an awful lot of front crawl either, although it is always worth chucking in a length or two every so often for the sake of appearances. As for backstroke, well his version is that rather stupid upside-down froggie-type thing, which he isn’t keen to put on such public display. So breast stroke it is. Or, more likely, that much easier, hybrid side-stroke affair that Barry thought looked very elegant in those Busby Berkeley movies but which will ultimately give him the lopsided athletic build of a giant Martina Navratilova. When done properly, the breast stroke will burn off around 60 calories every ten minutes. When done Barry’s way it will burn about 30 or so as he is only using one side of his body. When you factor in the enormous, baggy swimming shorts he has chosen specifically because they cover his unshapely body, from solar-plexus to kneecap, we’re down to 20 per 170

ten minutes, as he will spend a lot of time stationary due to the resultant drogue effect. Barry showers, or rather shoves the front of his forelock into the jet for about a third of a second and then steps into the pool area. Lane-swimming. Three lanes, separated by floating lane-dividers, are in operation - slow, medium and fast. Barry considers his options. The old dears in the slow lane are merely floating as if indulging in a game of human Pooh-sticks. He wouldn’t want to capsize them with his bow wave. In the medium lane, it is more his speed but the two swimmers are both girls. He looks at the fast lane. Three men in Speedos and goggles are frontcrawling up the right hand side of the lane and back down the left in a little convoy. Barry counts under his breath. He reaches fifty before the convoy returns. “Nearly a minute for two lengths?” he snorts to himself, confidence restored. “Hardly a ‘fast’ lane!” He decides to get in with the men and teach them a thing or two. After all did he not used to be the school under-12s champion for the 75 yards front crawl? (No, but years of telling himself he could have been have rewritten his memory irredeemably). It may have been a decade or two and 12st ago, but you never lose the speed through the water, now, do you? Six or eight lengths, he considers, ought to do it. Let them see that, for all their snakeskin trunks and UV protective goggles, they’re no better than 171

him, in his high fashion Nauticas. Then, once everyone is suitably impressed, he will then be able to finish off his session by ducking under the rope and mixing with the ladies in the medium lane, just by way of warming down. He strolls up to the edge of the fast lane and does a couple of quick physical jerks, which result in his neck clicking so loudly it echoes around the pool and causes the lifeguard to look under his high chair to see if his Zippo lighter has just fallen out of his pocket. Barry bends down to put a hand on the poolside and hops in. “Jesus H.Christ!” he yelps involuntarily at the unexpected iciness of the water. His penis retracts fully and he finds himself standing on his toenails with his arms raised stiffly to either side like a penguin. As he gradually settles into the water, the 30 litre pocket of air trapped in his shorts bursts loose and bubbles noisily to the surface. Simultaneously, the convoy cruises up to the wall, flip-turns with a display of three muscular, Lycraclad posteriors and thunders off up the right hand side of the lane through the curtain of Barry’s bubbles. Barry dips himself fully into the water and stretches a muscle or two. In an alarmingly short space of time, the convoy bounces off the wall next to him again. Giving them a ten-yard start, Barry shoves off and sets off in pursuit. He glides before bringing an elegant curved arm over. A churning of water tells him that the convoy has just passed him again, going 172

the other way. He accelerates. A second stroke. Breathe out. A third. Head up and breathe. The convoy races past him to his left before pulling in and continuing on its way. Barry now starts windmilling in a furious panic. Thrash, thrash, blow, thrash, head up, breathe … thrash, thrash, blow, thrash, head up, breathe … Barry becomes aware that he has just inhaled a lungful of water and is too tired to struggle on any further. He begins to sink. The convoy churns past, directly overhead this time. He looks at the bottom of the pool as it comes up to meet him and sees a bright light and his long dead Grandmother beckoning him towards her. When he awakens it is with a heave of liquid from his aching lungs. He is aware that the first breath of his second life is being stifled by a humungous French kiss from a stiff-nippled Adonis and he coughs and pukes his way back into the mortal world. The gathered crowd laughs, cheers and points and Barry hoists himself on to one elbow and comes face to face with his saviour’s reproductive equipment, which has been awakened by its owner’s life-saving endeavours. Barry closes his eyes and prays for his Granny to come and get him. Barry, you will be pleased to know, survives this near-death experience (at least until near the end of this book when he will be struck down with a succession of massive coronaries … just kidding!) and goes on to better things. However, his brush 173

with his maker does help illustrate a point and that is that you must not believe everything you read about exercise. Barry set off with a notion of 180 calories burnt off in half an hour - sounds reasonable - and discovered within about 30 seconds exactly how unrealistic this was. Mathematicians amongst you will calculate that Barry’s first pool visit burnt off one calorie, or, to give it flesh, half a crisp or a can of Tab. Yes, the figures they bandy around with glib assurance aren’t for Barry and they’re not for you either. They are for fit people. Or, to put it another way, they’re for people for whom it doesn’t matter. Cut these figures in half and, maybe half again - that will give you a more accurate guide. Refreshed, by the discovery of a second pool near his home, where his exploits have not become a photo-montage on the reception notice board, Barrie straps on his Nauticas again and strikes out again with slightly lower expectations. After a few visits he finds he can last about 30 minutes all in, with about 10 minutes in the medium lane if he is feeling particularly geed up. Within a mere 12 months half an hour in the medium lane without pause may well be within his reach as long as he keeps going 3 times a week, but this is where we will leave his exercise regime. This is because whether or not Barry eventually sprouts gills and webbing is none of our concern. What we’re interested in is how much weight he is 174

going to lose by virtue of this endeavour and the answer, I fear, isn’t half as much as you would think. Given that the first thing Barry - and anyone else for that matter - does after exercise is to reward himself, we need to consider the ramifications. One of the greatest shocks a dieter/exerciser will experience is the day he reads the back of a sweet wrapper, where our bureaucratic cousins in Brussels insist all manner of spurious information is recorded. Armed with the sure knowledge that he has flushed his system of 200 calories, Barry will be taking his mind off his heaving chest and thundering pulse by stuffing a whole four-finger Kit Kat into his mouth in a single shot and studying the ‘nutritional information’ on the wrapper. Needless to say he will be lucky, in this highly-strung condition, to survive the shock of discovering that his 200 calories were accounted for with his first swallow of chocolaty drool. In fact, calorifically speaking, unless he immediately spits out the rest of his mouthful, he will find himself worse off than before he started. Beware the Earn-Out On the next page is a chart of commonly undertaken exercise and the ‘rewards’ generally consumed afterwards. As a third column I have given the time you would need to spend on the said exercise merely to work off the reward, or the ‘Earn Out’ as we call it in the business world.

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EXERCISE Walking in muddy field Swimming Swimming – fat person Step class Pilates Running for the train 5-a-side football game Cycling to work Round of golf Bowls Digging in the garden Day out with the kids London Marathon in Giraffe outfit

REWARD EARN OUT nd 2 Xmas dinner 10 mile yomp Mars Bar King Size Mars Bar Cream doughnut

1 hour The Channel

1 sachet of Lucozade Sport

You’re going to die

Up Empire State Building Grain Bar Sit still and grunt forever Large Chase for 6 Mochaccino stops 4 pints and a 3 seasons for plate of chips Aston Villa Baked potato Tour de and butter France Ham, egg and Arnold chips Palmer’s entire career Pint of Mild and You won’t a pasty live long enough Sunday roast To Earth’s and treacle tart mantle 1 bottle whisky Spot on

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Yes, the grim truth is that ‘earning’ your gluttony isn’t as easy as it may appear at first sight. Adding a Twix and a bag of crisps to your daily intake would require you to put in something like eighteen hours of breast stroke a week. As for banging on about the 400 yards you walk to and from the station every day and the ten sit-ups you once did before herniating yourself … yes, yes, good effort and all, but it does not entitle you to describe yourself as ‘active’. The ‘Active Lifestyle’ I hate the word ‘lifestyle’. It is one of those vapid nothingnesses that you can slap on anything and make it sound desirable to the half-witted. Lifestyle Choices: an expression suggesting that the way someone trudges through their workaday existence is the culmination of a great grand plan. This is about as risible as the Chancellor of the Exchequer passing off a raft of petty tax raising scams as being part of a Vision for Britain. Lifestyle Magazines: these are responsible for: • Freezing cold houses with no carpets • Decline of the word ‘watch’ in favour of ‘chronograph’. • Belief that all nano-celebs live in the lobby of an Edwardian hotel and wear black velvet and borrowed jewellery.

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• Kitchen cupboards needing new doors every season (off with the limed oak, on with the Shaker-style). • Deceased vegetables being able to enjoy a second life as ‘sun-dried’. Alternative Lifestyles: yes, well …. Better than being called a dropout, weirdo, freak or fruitcake, isn’t it? Lifestyle Guru: a type of psychological leech for people with vanity and money in lieu of sense. Until it was pointed out to you that you were wealthy enough to do so, did you really want to change your whole wardrobe for something ‘fashionable’ (i.e. both overpriced and unflattering)? Or take up a new religion with about three adherents and a stupid name? Or sit around clenching your private parts and chanting some meaningless noises when you could have been watching Bargain Hunt? No? But then again, that money was just going to lie in your account doing nothing anyway … wasn’t it? Active Lifestyle: now I’m painted into something of a corner, am I not? For the purposes of simplicity, perhaps we will drop the contentious ‘lifestyle’ tag and simply call it: Not Being Such A Slob What is a slob? Barry is, for one, even though he is now, as we have seen, on his exercise regime. He is visiting the gym twice a week to swim and has 178

started doing sessions on the exercise bike for his third weekly session, but for all that, he is still a slob. His life is full of tell tale signals, all of which Barry himself is quite proud of: • He can now swim 40 lengths comfortably within his half an hour in the pool. • He can now do an easy 7km in 20 minutes on the exercycle. • Workmates he bumps into in the lift have started commenting on his regime. • Getting in and out of his car has become less of a strain. • He is watching more health programmes and fewer cookery programmes. • He always used to have to find a seat in the pub on a Friday night, but now he is quite happy to stand. • He finds it easier to manoeuvre his way around the crowded bus to and from the station every day. • He knows that his post-gym Mars Bar is in a good cause. Barry is thrilled with all of these. He is exercising. Exercising. Him - Barry. And it is a doddle - 40 lengths, doddle; 7km cycle, doddle. People are noticing too: “Been down the gym again, Baz?” they say. “Regular Arnold Schwarzenegger, you are”. He is more supple as well, more … (dare he say it?) lithe. Lighter on the old tootsies, so to speak. Barry the Cat? Maybe that would be to overstate the case a wee bit but he is certainly a new Barry.

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Except he isn’t a new Barry. He is old Barry with a few hours of gym time under his belt. Look at Barry’s pride and joy but without the rosy specs on. • He used to push himself at the pool, but now he just cruises. • He used to sweat, but now he is freewheeling. • What is wrong with the stairs, fatso? • Walk, tubsy! • Watching health programmes is just as lazy as watching anything else. • Friday night down the pub. Every week, regular as clockwork. • Bus? It is only a mile, if that. • Yes, the good cause is ‘Undoing the Good Work’. I know what you are thinking. ‘That’s a bit harsh, especially on poor old Barry, who is doing his best and might possibly have some sort of glandular problem’. Weep not for Barry, though. It was harsh, but it was designed to show you how the bits that dieters are proud of in their regimes are often the bits they should be looking to change. That and the fact that Barry is, as we’re all aware, fictional. But the fight against slobbishness is a 3-round bout. So far Barry has won round 1, but is taking a fearful beating in round 2. He may never make it to round 3 at this rate and if he does he will lose. However he can turn the contest round. Round 1. Getting Off Your Arse. Points victory for Barry. He goes to the gym and swims or cycles. A bit of huffing and puffing - good start.

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Round 2. Staying Off Your Arse. Big comeback for slobbishness here. The exercise Barry is doing burns a few calories here and there. The big rewards come not in Getting Off, but in Staying Off Your Arse. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as you shift around enough to at least know that you are not about to take root. Walk, don’t drive; put up those shelves instead of watching the box; go down Walthamstow Dogs and shout at the greyhounds instead of hanging around in the pub; take the stairs not the lift; walk up the escalator; do anything instead of watching anything. This is where the fight against fat is won and lost. Once off it, Stay Off It. Round 3. Paydirt. Like Audley Harrison finishing off a cringing Lithuanian in an Olympic quarterfinal, you already have plenty of points on the board. Maybe not enough to be able simply to sit back and enjoy the moment - compose some asinine ‘poetry’ or consider reworking your hairdo to look even more like a lattice pork pie and so forth - but enough to allow the momentum to take over. The paydirt of Round 3 is the increased metabolism. You have not just Got Off Your Arse, but Stayed Off Your Arse and now those punches just land themselves. This means that you are burning more calories all the time, rather than for half an hour every other day. Your body needs to divert resources to muscles rather than to fat, you generate more heat, you need more ‘repair work’. If Barry can win Round 2, then his whole body becomes a much higher maintenance machine. Then, assuming he does not drop his guard, the fight is won.

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Into The Lycra Right, let’s get you started. You will have noticed, when we talked about diets, I did not pad out this book with eighty pages of recipes. For a start, that sort of thing makes the book considerably heavier for your wasted limbs to drag around and for another thing, I have no idea what you actually eat now, so I can hardly tell you how to eat less of it by merely quoting recipes, now can I? In similar vein, I can’t lay down an exercise regime. I might say to you: ‘Every day you must cycle ten miles.’ You might say: ‘I haven’t got a bike.’ And that would be it for your interest in this chapter. Some people are very particular and all exercises have their downsides. The smell of aerobics students in sweaty leotards, for instance, or the ejaculation of chlorinated water unexpectedly from one’s sinuses on to one’s dinner, or the repeated sandpapering of one’s nipples by a polyester running vest aren’t to everyone’s taste. What I’m leaning towards here is that we’re all adults and can make our own decisions as to the type of exercise we do. What I will do for you, however is to point out (as I have done all the way to date) the bleedin’ obvious, just in case your brain has become addled by lack of food. Also, it bears repeating if only because the number of people who think 182

they’re going to get fit by doing ten thousand bicep curls beggars belief. Yes, I know that any exercise is good exercise, but for now, I think we should avoid heading down the route of ‘body-building’ and stick more to the path of ‘general fitness’. WW Approved. (Good all-over work out with sweat and heavy-breathing.) • Aerobics (and all that sort of stuff) • Running • Swimming • Rowing • All-round movement sports - Soccer, Rugby, Squash, Tennis, Hockey etc. • Cycling WW Partial Credit. (Specialised attention. Not enough huffing and puffing.) • Multi-Gym exercise contraptions • ‘Specialist’ sports - Athletics field events, ten-pin bowling, cricket etc • Weight training • Rock climbing WW Non-Approved. (Too specific. Attention to muscles only rather than fitness.) • Weight-lifting, Bench-pressing • Ab-crunching (i.e. sit-ups with or without bananashaped Zimmer frame) • Curls • Press-ups, squat thrusts, dips, or anything else you’ve only ever seen on Superstars. • Anything with the word ‘power’ in it. 183

WW Give-Me-Strength (Just a complete waste of lots of time and not enough energy) • Pilates, Yoga and other stretch’n’grunt stuff • Tai Chi • Anything with the word ‘walking’ in it • Anything that involves taping electrodes to your skin • Golf You will appreciate that the lists above are by no means exhaustive, but I believe that they give you a good feel for whether or not the exercise you are doing is worth the effort as part of your diet. If you need further guidance, ask yourself the following questions about the exercise you are doing: Afterwards, am I all tired - or just tired in one particular place? Does my exercise make my muscles tired - or sore? Do I feel as if it is my heart that is ready to explode or my muscles? Is it my stamina that is increasing - or my strength? As long as you feel that it is the first parts of these questions that apply, then I don’t care whether you are swimming, ice-skating, line-dancing or kangaroo boxing. The important thing is that you do it. Back to Barry and a short rewind to the beginning of his regime is required so that we can guide him through it at a pace that will neither kill him, nor will leave him with an over-inflated sense of his own achievement. 184

What Barry needs are targets. Not to start with, but to continue to make progress. Without targets he can’t tell whether he is moving ahead or not, but by setting himself unreasonably lofty targets he can convince himself that he is never going to make any progress so he might as well give it up as a bad job. Inability to recognise a sensible target accounts for 90% of all discontinuations of gymnasium membership (with most of the balance being made up of people throwing their backs out slipping on sweat and people who joined up to train for the London Marathon only to have their application rejected in the ballot). As long as you can follow Barry in working towards sensible targets, then you will not only succeed, but you may well start enjoying it. You should break up your exercise regime into five distinct sections as defined by the acronym ‘PANIC’ as follows: Planning Appraisal Natural Increment Comfort Zone Getting Into a PANIC Planning When, where and how are you going to do this exercise? At what time of day? On what days of the week? Are you a member of a gym? Do you have a park nearby you can run in? Do you own a pair of 185

trainers? Are you going to run or swim or cycle or what? You may think I’m being a mite obvious here, but how many people have taken up jogging, from scratch, in January, with bad knees, thirty year-old Dunlop Green Flashes and a penchant for coughing up phlegm like a snooker crowd during the respotting of the black? How many have joined a gym near their home and found that they can’t be bothered to go to it after they have struggled in from work? How many have gone swimming without goggles and spent the next week with an Optrex eyebath clamped to their faces? It is so obvious we forget to do it. Barry has given it some thought and has joined a gym close to home. He wants to swim and cycle and they have a pool and all machines, so that is satisfactory. He reckons that his forty pounds a month will be a decent enough investment as he will be attending on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays - it comes out at about £3 per visit. He has a cozzie, shorts, shirt, trainers, goggles, a padlock for the lockers, some sports shower gel and a towel and is now ready to progress to stage 2. Appraisal. Appraisal is the process by which you discover your actual abilities as they stand today. This does not mean what you can achieve first time out. That will be, to be unkind about it, very little indeed. Your body needs to get used to the unfamiliar movements that you are going to be requiring it to make. If you 186

are not a jogger, then, yes, the action of running will be relatively alien to your body and the same goes for playing tennis or doing the long jump or rollerblading. Even though the body may well display a natural aptitude for one or other form of activity, what we’re looking for is its natural starting point, which, paradoxically, isn’t going to be found first time out. What a lot of fitness coaches will say is that you need to undertake around three weeks of regular exercise (and I mean every other day at the minimum, not once a week!) before you start to notice your body feeling the benefit. I would extend this, and say that, for someone coming off the couch after a long period of inactivity, it will take something over four weeks to start the process. In Barry’s case it took him about a month before he could be absolutely certain he was not going to throw up after his cycling and if it takes four weeks to notice any benefit, then it is somewhere in the region of this point in time that we must evaluate. Hence, the appraisal period should last a month and at that point, you should set yourself a base achievement level. This should be the level, below which you wouldn’t be happy with what you achieved. Barry’s might be twenty-four lengths of breast stroke or 6km on the exercycle, in twenty minutes. Carrie, might have approached it differently. She may be looking at one ten-game set of tennis or half an hour’s Bev Callard Fitness Workout before she is blowing like an orca, but the principle is the same. The idea isn’t to push yourself 187

at this juncture, but simply to find out what it is you can do. Targets are, as I’m sure you can figure out for yourselves, what you cannot do. There is a difference. Once appraisal is finished, take a note (mentally if you like, but I would prefer you to write it down so as there can be no arguments about it later) of these base evaluations. After a month, you have now reached the base or ‘natural’ level of your physical ability. Natural. This is really your first ‘target’. Except it isn’t a target at all. As we saw during the appraisal, your ‘Natural’ is actually what you can already do and shouldn’t present too much of a challenge to you. The point of the ‘Natural’ is to give you the feeling of reaching a target before you have to go through the pain barrier of improving your performance. This is a technique used throughout sport. To illustrate, I once watched a golf instruction video in which the pro advised that the first thing you should do on a practice green is hole four or five eighteeninch putts. The idea behind this was that it engendered good psychology, hearing a succession of putts hitting the back of the cup so that you would start the round in a positive frame of mind. He neglected to mention the effect of missing five eighteen-inch putts in a row just before a round, but fortunately I was able to research this independently.

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Once you are aware of the natural level of achievement, you will then be able to get a feeling for what a ‘good’ day feels like (and, of course, what a ‘bad’ day feels like), since you will be able to measure your actual performance against your ‘natural’. Anyway, the idea of the ‘Natural’ is that you set it as your target and one of three things will happen. You will achieve it, fail to achieve it, or whip it into a cocked hat. You will then need to react accordingly. • Achieved. Meets expectation. Good. Same time, day after tomorrow, then? • Failed. Had a bad day? At least you know what went wrong. Because you are not actually striving to set a personal best, it will be easy for you to assess why you fell below your standard. You may be hungrier than usual, or had a sleepless night, or more tired than usual as it is your third consecutive day at the gym, or anything. However you will know the reason. Solution - try again next time. • Whipped into Cocked Hat. Excellent. You are starting to make progress. Let’s see if you can whip it into three cocked hats in a row. Then move on to the next part. Increment. This is where we begin to get serious. You may have knocked a minute off your best time, or carried on for an extra ten minutes without ill effect, or put in an extra half-mile without rupturing your aorta, or 189

whatever. But that is just the first step up the mountain. You now need to start applying incremental increases to your targets in order to continue towards the summit (obviously you are not actually going to the summit - that is where you find the Steve Redgraves, Linford Christies, Ian ‘Thorpedo’ Thorpes and Rory Underwoods of the world - but you sure as hell aren’t going to hang around here if I can help it). The reasons for this are two-fold: 1. In real terms, the amount of exercise you are doing to this point is pitifully small. 2. Without targets it becomes both easy and, worse, boring. Now, your progression from Natural to Increment may have taken from three weeks to a couple of months. Once it is over, we’re done with easily achievable targets. What we need is something to work towards. Barry, on his exercise bicycle has started getting through 6 km in twenty minutes quite comfortably and has therefore passed into Increment phase. He notices that the geezer next to him tends to go at it like a man possessed for about 45 minutes and crams in something like 30km in the time. Barry would love to be able to do that, so he sets himself a target of 30km in 45 minutes. He is woken in hospital by me slapping him hard and returns to the gym, chastened.

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Reassessing his 6km in twenty minutes, he now figures he has two choices. Either: • Same distance, less time, or • Same time, more distance In fact it doesn’t matter, since he will have plenty more incremental increases to make. What he must remember is to choose a target that is unachievable for him now, but that he could see himself achieving soon. Say, 7km in twenty minutes. And off he goes. Next time he might go for 7km in eighteen minutes, but that depends on his rate of improvement. And exactly the same goes for you as for Barry. You must be the judge of ‘unachievable’ and of ‘soon’. I would recommend that you look for improvements of up to 20% early on in your regime (no more than that unless you enjoy the struggle more than mere mortals) and that ‘soon’ is a figure based on your own patience. As your ability increases you will find that your incremental increases may fall to 5% or even 3% - remember, real athletes train to thousandths of a second, so don’t be too greedy! Equally, some people can do a hundred lengths of a pool in half an hour, so increasing from twenty-four to thirty (i.e. +25%) should easily be within reach. How do you know when this phase is over? The bottom line is that your body will tell you. When you’ve set a target of knocking a minute off the thirty you’ve been taking to run three miles and you 191

are creeping towards the target one second at a time, then you will know that you are reaching saturation point, or the limits of your ability. Then it is time to step into the Comfort Zone. Comfort Zone Sounds like fun? Well, like a lot of stuff in this book, yes and no. You can certainly cast from your mind notions of drifting back off to your bean bag and catching up on Corrie or Eastenders. We’re still in this thing, but you may, by now, notice that the stakes have changed to some extent. • When you enter the Comfort Zone, you are actually not fat and unathletic. You are slim(mer than you were) and fit(ter than before). • Exercise isn’t the god-awful chore it used to be. • The whole Notso Fatso regime is part of your life and you are damned well not going to give it up. The ‘C’ of PANIC is attained at the stage where the time and application available to you will not allow you to make another increment to your target. That is to say, you’ve reached the limit in respect of the effort you are prepared to put in. At this point, you are going to have to make the decision as to whether you want to keep going with what you have achieved or not. I’m certainly not going to try and make you do anything you don’t want to and, as you sit reading this book, it is probably hard to imagine wanting to do anything other than burn your trainers and eat some sausage rolls, but you will find that the weird thing about being in the Comfort Zone is that you don’t want to give it all up. 192

• You enjoy being fit. • People say: “That So and So - jogs to work every other day he does. Amazing.” • You don’t know what you did with all that free time before. • You are actually good enough at something to compete at it. After entering the Comfort Zone, Barry has learnt to dive and turn, has swum 100 lengths for charity and is entering a works swimming competition against the younger bucks. He gave up on the bus and train and now cycles to work (10 miles each way). He saves a fortune. Meanwhile, Carrie has been asked to take an evening aerobics class twice a week. She is considering her options, though as she is doing particularly well in this year’s tennis league at her club and she wants to remain focussed. And the same will happen to you. Trust me. That is the nature of exercise. It releases a hormone into the blood stream that gives you the same sort of addictive high as nicotine or chocolate. Health Warning Time to run screaming for the hills? ‘Dear Reader, please be warned that suddenly heaving yourself out of your armchair and flexing some long dormant muscles can leave you in traction, unable to function as a man, suffering severe mental trauma or, if you get lucky, dead.’ Not quite. 193

I would like to point out here, that I strongly recommend that you seek medical opinion before … well, lots of stuff: taking intravenous heroin out of a needle that has gone half way round the hostel; jabbing yourself in the eye with a clothes prop; drinking French tapwater. As for ‘…before undertaking any form of strenuous exercise’? To be honest, if a few minutes on an exercise bike are going to kill you, do you not think, in all seriousness, that you would actually be better off dead? I do. Why not just give it a go and see what happens, eh? No, what I’m actually talking about here is the mucky stuff that only seems to happen to you. • Day 2 after you exercise - not the next day, for some reason that can’t be explained, well not by me at any rate - you will wake up so stiff you will know what the twenty-five minutes between the bite of the Black Mamba and death feels like. • You will stink, especially in the private part department. • Bits will chafe off you and never seem to grow back. • You will become so exhausted, you may lose control both of ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ muscles simultaneously, if you know what I mean. • Your legs will occasionally seize up and you will do an impromptu impression of someone walking across broken glass in his socks, for your mates, yelling ‘oh! … ah! … ooh! … ow!’ as you proceed. 194

• Filthy, sticky sweat will start to pour out of each of the six million pores on your body from three seconds after you start exerting yourself until an hour-and-a-half after your shower. • Someone will always make you look like a prat (it doesn’t matter, what you do or where, or how good you are at it, someone will always pitch up and do it better - look at Tim Henman). • I don’t know what ladies’ showers are like (probably not like Giles’ video collection. Of that, at least, I’m sure), but men’s showers only contain the physically repulsive and pooves lathering their cods. • Gym equipment is invariably damp with strangers’ sweat. Does this only happen to you? No, don’t be silly! Yet, when you pick up that Holmes Place brochure, or visit LA Fitness on the web, none of this crap is happening to any of them. See that gorgeous, tanned blonde on the treadmill, her towel draped elegantly over the handrail, her even more highly bronzed beau offering her advice from the next machine. They are both smiling and laughing, heads up, shoulders back, their hair crispy-dry and bouffant, their stomachs like plates of chipolatas under their cool cotton singlets. Where are you in this photo, then? Where is the girl with the ‘Vision On’ logo soaked into the back of her leotard? Where is the jelly-legged ball of flab, draped up against the wall praying for death? Where is the fat and dangerously purple bloke squinting 195

ferociously to keep the rivers of salty perspiration from waterlogging his eyeballs? Come to think of it when did you actually see anyone laughing at a gym other than at a serious injury on the next machine? As far as Fitness First, Esporta and the like are concerned, the mucky bits are a fiction and if they happen to you then it is only because you are not doing it right. Their world is filled with: • Empty swimming pools • Available exercise machines of the highest spec • Supermodel athletes • Hysterical joy in the face of exhaustion • Saunas in which no one sweats • Strangers chatting amiably in changing rooms • All-white kit And to read most ‘diet and exercise’ works, you wouldn’t be given any reason to doubt that this were indeed the case. So to break the mould, I’m here to say ‘Prepare for muck!’ Even if we fast forward all the way to ‘The Comfort Zone’, it is still the same story. What it really boils down to is that exercise is tiring. If you are looking like Holmes-Place-Man or Woman when you do it then you most certainly are not doing it right. Like so much stuff in this book, you know damn well if you are doing enough, too little or too much. You certainly could do without nonsense generalizations muddying your water. Just because 196

you aren’t walking at exactly 1.75 metres per second does not mean that it isn’t doing you any good, just the same as the fact that just because you are walking at 1.75 metres per second, it does not necessarily mean that it is doing you any good. If dear porky old Giles put in 5 miles at 1.75 metres per second, it would certainly do him more good than if, say, Paula Radcliffe were to do , say, three times the distance at three times the speed. And as for getting yourself a heart monitor. Forget it! I once worked with a chap who developed a spasm of the neck doing no more than light exercise. He had the doctors totally baffled for weeks. All he was doing was a spot of work on the treadmill and a little bit of light cycling. Eventually, his doctor asked to watch him on the equipment. It turned out that he was so desperate to get his exercise regime right, he was doing all his workouts with his neck angrily contorted so he could keep an eye on the heart monitor strapped to his left tit. Probably half of his increased heart rate was to do with the panic of trying to maintain a regular 155 bpm. Unfortunately, the constant nagging of ‘mens’ health’ magazines had eroded his own self-belief to a point where he had no will of his own in respect of exercise and only 155 bpm would do. Strangely, the day that his boss told him he had screwed up and the NHS Trust where we were working was going to have to cash in two dialysis machines and 600 miles of sterile bandage to pay for his blunder, his heart rate must have peaked out at around 300. Apparently he ran up and down the corridors baring his gums 197

and shrieking at the startled patients like an oversexed baboon. I believe he is still there to this day, although kidney patients now have to go sixteen miles down the road and you don’t really want to show up there with a wound of any great size. The fact is, you know when it is doing you some good and, despite what some of these dopey articles say, you know when it isn’t. So be realistic.

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Chapter 12 KEEPING IT GOING

“It’s a miracle! I’m thin, so thin … and beautiful!” Dance around room in ecstasy until puffed out (approx 10 seconds) then wait for shuddering flesh mound to come to rest (approx 30 seconds). Of course you are no such thing. But why? I mean you must have been off the sausage rolls for, oooh, ten days now and the way your stomach has been growling, it must have been biting great chunks off you from the inside. But no - this hasn’t occurred. Two fewer sausage rolls a day for ten days does not amount to a weightloss regime. Let us see why (and don’t forget that this applies to any start to a diet, not just to the tearful departure of delicious pastry savouries). Twenty sausage rolls weigh, I would say, about 3lbs. Therefore, Newton says that the maximum weightloss you could have experienced by refraining from eating them would be 3lbs. Undoubtedly Newton was no dietician as this argument isn’t entirely accurate. For a start there is the old water-retention business. Then there is the question of whether or not you’ve had a good dump in the last few days. Or 199

had a bit of a sweaty night and so on. So thanks, Isaac, but no thanks and let us examine the facts. • 80% of all food consumed is used to generate body heat. • Some of the rest of it passes straight through you. • Even you, you lazy lump, need to build, repair and maintain muscles. • Water - leave the sausage roll too long in the oven warming and see how small dry and crispy it becomes. So starting with a 3lb mass of food, we can take away 24 oz of water, 8 oz of roughage and then multiply by 0.2 to find out what we have left for building muscle and fat deposits. The answer is approximately 3oz. So even if you build and maintain no muscle at all, you would expect this level of dieting to decrease your weight by one pound every seven weeks or so. To dishearten you further, don’t forget that you may actually have been gaining weight at a rate faster than one pound every seven weeks (if you are putting it on at half a stone a year then that is exactly what is happening). Therefore, this preliminary step will merely serve to put a brake on your weight gain. Now let us be sensible. The Sensible Approach So far you’ve made a good start as outlined and, I’m sure, acted on, in the previous chapter. 200

You have: • Acquired scales, mirror, tape measure • Removed some excess from your diet and stuck to it for ten days • Found out, I trust, that it isn’t so bad after all The next thing you need to do is to ‘Start Your Diet’. I put it like that, because you are thinking right now: “Hold on, Whichelow. If I haven’t yet ‘Started My Diet’, what the hell have I been doing for the last week and a half?” Well, whatever it is, it isn’t dieting. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve merely been proving that you have enough willpower to lose weight. Anyway, now we start in earnest. First, I would like you to go and weigh yourself and jot down the answer. Now dig out the piece of paper from 10 days ago and look at the weight you wrote down against the time of day closest to the time you weighed yourself just now. Don’t worry, for the time being how far different those weights are, especially if you appear to have put on a pound or two (worry if you are a stone up but not a pound). You now need to calculate your Starting Point. “Surely my weight ten days ago was my Starting Point?” you ask. I fear not. One thing you hear all the time from dieters is: “I started out on this diet and lost half a stone straight away. Then nothing for weeks. I must be doing it 201

wrong.” This is how every diet in the world goes. OK, every diet in the world, bar one. Which one? Why; the Notso Fatso Diet, that is which one. Worse still, the reason that every diet goes like this is well known to dieticians and punters alike, but it seems to be the truth that dare not speak its name. The Bloat Bladder The reason is that every human body has a certain amount of ‘bloat’ to it. Most people call it ‘waterretention’ but I think ‘bloat’ puts it so much more realistically. Whilst the body is maintaining its status quo on an ongoing basis, the ‘Bloat Bladder’ retains a reservoir of goodness in the same way as the sump of a car contains a fruity rich pool of mineral gravy. Contents of the Bloat Bladder are: - Water - for water-retention purposes. - Slime - for processing into fat and depositing in your dewlap, beer gut, or elsewhere. - Amino Lego - the building blocks for muscles, organs etc. as yet unused. - Paraffin - stuff for burning to keep you nice and sweaty. - Poo - overeaters always have a couple of spares in the pipe. When any diet starts and I mean any diet, the first thing to go is the content of the Bloat Bladder. This is why you always get off to such a good start. The Bloat Bladder contains easily shiftable stuff, especially in comparison with the fat cells around 202

the body. In order to lose proper weight, fat must be recalled from deep storage in a process that is as taxing as having a decrepit old retainer retrieve obscure volumes from the mustiest hallways of the British Library. In contrast, the Bloat Bladder empties with the ease of a caretaker’s bucket. Yet, even though we all know it, no one will ever tell you this. The diet industry has, as a whole, benefited to the tune of billions of pounds over the years, simply by not drawing attention to this one simple fact. How? By ensuring that every single dieter who takes up any plan, believes that the flying start they have got off to is something to do with the genius of the author, that is how. And by not mentioning this one fact, they also fail to mention that once you come off the diet, the very first thing that is going to occur is … yes, you’ve got it … the Bloat Bladder is going to fill up again. This is why 86% of all diets produce weight loss of less than 1st and weight regain of a similar amount over a similar time period. It is because the diet never progressed deeper into the body than the Bloat Bladder. But Notso Fatso is here now and things are going to change. Your diet isn’t going to start until the Bloat Bladder is empty. Emptying the Bloat Bladder The simple way, for the disciplined dieter, which I’m sure you will turn out to be, to find out when the 203

Bloat Bladder is empty, is to start the diet, lose a few pounds and check to see the point at which you cease to lose any more weight. It may be 4lbs, it may be a stone and a half and this very much depends on how fat you are to start with. Here is a quick readyreckoner if you want a guide to the weight of the Bloat Bladder. Catorgory Out of Shape Tubby Gut Bucket Hippo

How overweight < 3st 3 - 5st 5 - 8st 8 +st

Weight of a Bloat Bladder 4 – 6lb 7 – 10lb 11 – 14lb Up to 20lb

And how do you know how overweight you are? To keep it simple, your ideal weights are: Lady - up to 5’2” Lady - up to 5’7” Lady - over 5’7” Man - up to 5’7” Man - up to 6’0” Man - over 6’0”

8st 9st 10st 11st 12st 13st

I know that is to over-simplify a very delicate physiological calculation. I also know that you are thinking ‘I’m only four foot nine, but I’ve always had the bones of a six footer…’. Well, forget it! If you are a five foot nothing woman weighing in at 15st you are borderline ‘Hippo’ and no amount of whining is going to change that.

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Now we know the extent of the Bloat Bladder, we can get on with emptying it and finding our Start Point. Carrie, at 5’6” is of average height. She weighs, as we found out before, somewhere in the 14 ½ to 15st region. Using the tables above, she can calculate, if she so desires, a rough estimate of her Starting Weight. With an ideal weight of 9st, she is up to 6st over par putting her in the Gut Bucket category. This gives her a Bloat Bladder weighing in at roughly 12lbs. She can take this from her heaviest weighing (15st dead) and give herself a Starting Weight of 14st 2lbs. Now, calculate your own starting weight and let’s get down to business. The Rules Now we’re ready to begin in earnest, I’m going to lay down a few rules. As you know, I’m no authoritarian and try to keep the Do’s and Don’ts to a minimum. We’re all adults here (at this point I would like to suggest that any huge great children reading put the book down and go and ask their parents what the hell they thought they were doing letting you get like that) so are able to regulate our own discipline. However, these rules must be followed, otherwise you are simply wasting everybody’s time and patience.

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RULE 1. YOUR TARGET WEIGHT MUST NEVER BE MORE THAN HALF A STONE AWAY. RULE 2. YOU MUST ALLOW YOURSELF A DAY A WEEK OFF THE DIET RULE 3. YOU MUST NOT BEGIN YOUR EXERCISE REGIME UNTIL YOU HAVE HIT YOUR FIRST TARGET RULE 4. YOU MUST NOT REPLACE FOODSTUFFS YOU HAVE CUT, WITH OTHER THINGS RULE 5. YOU MUST WEIGH, MEASURE AND LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR FREQUENTLY AND REGULARLY RULE 6. DO NOT BURDEN INNOCENT PARTIES WITH YOUR DIET Let us examine each of those in a wee bit more detail. 1) Half Stone Targets - Your real target weight may be 3 or 5 or 10 stones lighter than you are at present. But who the hell is going to stick to a diet with such a distant goal? If your starting weight is 15st and want to get to 12st, then your next target 206

weight is 14½st; then 14st and so forth. This gives you realistic and achievable goals. 2) Your Day Off - A lot of diets do this now and it isn’t a bad idea. Most people would take their day off on a Saturday as this is the usual ‘big night’, but if your day off is Tuesday, then so be it. On your day off you just carry on as normal. If Saturday saw you down Lakeside shopping, then Big Mac and Supersize Fries, then home for a Chinese Takeaway and six pink gins, then that is exactly what you are to continue with. It is exceptionally good for the soul! 3) Keep Off The Exercise - This may even be the most important rule of the lot. When you begin a diet, you are Hungry, Grumpy, Slothful and Dopey (if you are Bashful, Doc and Sneezy as well, you have the full set). When you begin an exercise programme, you stretch and strain muscles that need fuelling and repairing. Firstly, you will be in no mood to do a stroke of exercise when you’ve just started dieting. Second, your body won’t be able to cope with the sudden demand for food coupled with the sudden deprivation and will rebel against you. Do not exercise until you’ve hit Target No 1! By this time you will be ready. One other interesting point is that the first time you begin exercising you will gain weight. This is quite normal - the body needs to pump goodies into the muscles to build and maintain them - but also quite alarming. I need you to be well on your way before this nasty shock comes along. 207

4) Do Not Replace Foodstuffs - This isn’t a Glutton’s Friend Diet. If you are cutting out bread, don’t introduce potato waffles into your breakfast in place. If you’ve dropped pastries, don’t add a bar of Bournville chocolate to your elevenses. In short, just because you have not cut it from your diet, it does not mean you are allowed to pig out on it to fill the gaps that have been made. One exception to this that I will allow is that you may supplement missing potatoes with green vegetables. But not unlimited - weight for weight and this is only so as your dinner plate doesn’t look depressingly empty. 5) Weights and Measures - I want you to weigh yourself twice a day. If you start going to a gym eventually, weigh yourself on their machine as well. I also want you to measure any problem areas once a week - chest, gut, thighs, upper arms etc. - you can choose which bits to get the tape round (same bits every time please). Finally, get naked and have a good look at yourself in a full length mirror every day. The reason will become obvious as your diet progresses, but if you can’t wait, here is the answer. Dieting is highly objective, you would think. Start at 15st, end at 11st, what could be more cut and dried? Well, yes and no. Firstly, your weight will fluctuate on a daily basis by an alarming amount - possibly half a stone. You need to get a feel not for your weight, but for your ‘range’. This will take a lot of weighing, but it will become second nature before long. The same applies to some of your measurements (particularly in the ladies, I fear) 208

and not to others. Get a feeling for the variations in your waist and breasts (girls only!) against the real gains in arms and legs. Finally, keep an eye on your naked body. See the difference a few pounds make; or a stone; or 3st. Go on, enjoy it! That is after all, what we’re here for. 6) Keep It Schtum - Innocent people don’t want to hear about your diet, nor do they want to suffer because of it. The first thing that happens when you tell people that you are on a diet is that they feel the urge to tell you that you are looking fantastic. Well a) you aren’t, and b) why did they not tell you that five minutes ago? So don’t put them in that position because you will only hear lies. Another reason is that people don’t want to ask you round to dinner and hear that you can’t possibly eat such-and-such, because you are on a diet. It is embarrassing and rude to boot. This also applies to eating out. You don’t want to be eating an egg-white omelette and beansprouts in a Michelin-starred restaurant, do you? Just get on with it. So, in company, take another day off. It is better for everyone. Getting To First Base Now we all know the rules, by which we’re to live, we need to get to first base. As I set out above, this means getting to our Starting Weight, whatever that may be. Now, as we stand, you have two weights written down - your ‘Starting Weight Plus Bloat Bladder’ weight and your ‘Ten Days On’ weight.

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One of three things will have happened: 1) You have gained weight. 2) You have neither gained nor lost weight. 3) You have lost weight. If you’ve lost weight, simply keep going until the Bloat Bladder is empty and you achieve Starting Weight. Then proceed to the next stage. If you’ve gained weight, don’t panic! If you feel you are really making the effort, then simply continue another ten days and another until you see the trend. If you are not getting anywhere you will need to prune some more food out of the diet before you can start turning your particular supertanker around. Keep up the measurements though. You will soon get the result. If you’ve neither gained nor lost, simply wait another ten days (and another and another if needs be) until it becomes clear which way you are going. If you are ‘flatlining’ or heading north, then prune. If south, sit tight and wait for the Bloat Bladder to empty. Pruning As we sit twiddling our thumbs waiting for the Starting Weight bell to ring, a word about ‘Pruning’. I mentioned it above and it is something you will be doing from time to time. If we go back to Carrie in Chapter 12, her original average day was 210

Breakfast: Bowl of natural yoghurt with honey, walnuts and sliced banana. 3 Toast + butter. Orange juice. Elevenses: 4-finger Kit Kat, coffee & milk. Lunch: Large pasta salad with a buttered bap. Crisps. 6 Chocolate digestives. Hot soup. Banana Snack: Peanut butter and jam sandwich. Tea, milk. Dinner: Pie or pastie with chips, peas, gravy, bread & butter. 2 individual chocolate mousses. Banana. Coke. Extras: Chocolate bars (one or two). Bread and butter. Glass of wine or two. Bananas. What she needs, based around this framework, simply to exist is: Breakfast: Natural Yoghurt, 1 Toast & Butter, Orange Juice. Elevenses: Coffee Lunch: Soup, roll & butter. Banana. Chocolate biscuit. Snack: Tea Dinner: Meat or Pie & 2 veg. Fruit. Chocolate Mousse. Diet Coke/Glass of wine. Extras: The odd chocolate biscuit. Frankly, she could survive on a lot less than that, but I’m in a mood to be nice to the poor girl. Looking at the second list, that doesn’t look to me like subsistence rations and I’m sure it doesn’t look that way to you either. She gets chocolate two or three 211

times a day, three decent meals and not one ridiculous and humiliating product has been introduced. Rispinos, Modifast, Snack-a-Jacks, etc all for the birds! It might therefore come as a surprise that to get from the first menu to the second, though, she is going to have to cut out: • Nuts • Several bananas • 6 slices of bread • Kit Kats • Pasta • Crisps • 5 chocolate digestives • Peanut butter • Pastry • 1 mousse • Several chocolate bars Ouch! That is going to hurt, surely? Not if you do it right, is my answer. The real answer is: “Yes of course it’s going to hurt, Fatso, but who are you going to blame?”, but nobody wants to hear that. So we will minimize the pain, by ‘Pruning’. I was originally tempted to call this process ‘The Ratchet Effect’, but changed my mind at the last moment. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, The Ratchet Effect is descriptive of the way things change by a process of attrition. It is sometimes heard in political circles to excuse the way that 212

opposition parties moan like billy-ho about things like privatisation, taxation changes and the like but never reverse the change once they get into power. Then, when the original perpetrators return to the hot seat, they make another small move in the original direction, about which Her Majesty’s Opposition kicks up another unseemly stink and swear on their constituents lives to reverse, only to suffer a collective crisis of hypocrisy once the electorate sees fit to give it another opportunity. Anyway, the point with the Ratchet Effect is that there is no reversal. In Notso Fatso, there is plenty of reversal. When you prune a plant, the object is for the pruned area to grow back rather than to die off completely. Hence when you cut out bread from your diet, it isn’t the object of the exercise that you should never let another crumb pass your lips. Obviously the same is true of chocolate, Danish pastries, spuds or whatever your poison is. The idea of pruning is that you remove one dietary influence and, once you’ve shown that you can live without it, you are then in a fit position to be allowed to judge how much of it is to be allowed back on to the menu. A good moment to allow the ‘pruned’ limb to enjoy some regrowth is at the time a target point is passed. Carrie, en route to her ideal weight, will have cut out a few things completely:

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• • • • • •

Bread Potatoes Chocolate Pastry Puddings Booze

But you will have noticed, that all of these things still make an appearance in her final list. This is the joy of pruning. Nothing goes for ever. Hitting Those Targets You may be blessed with the sort of willpower that would have kept an Argonaut at the bilge pump when the Sirens launched into their close harmony a capella. By the look of you, though, I would say that this isn’t the case. This means that we’re going to have to tiptoe up to those targets rather than going at them like a freight train. You will be able to achieve the best results by sticking to the Golden Rules I have set out for you. This means: • Reasonable targets that you can imagine achieving within your lifetime • Pruning rather than starving yourself or making wholesale changes to your diet • Weighing, measuring and examining your body. Get an idea of what is going on. • Not cheating. It does not matter to me, but you are the one buck-naked in front of the mirror. 214

How fast you are going to achieve your starting weight and then reach each target weight really depends on you. If you can bear to cut out bread, potatoes, chocolate and alcohol all in one go, then you will get there faster than cutting them out one at a time. The flip side of this is that you will be the most wretched sourpuss anyone could ever hope to cross the road to avoid. My advice is ‘Prune and See’. Then ‘Prune and See’ again. If you prune and nothing happens, don’t prune again until you are comfortable with what you are eating. There is no point in slashing a thousand calories a day off your intake if you are already ravenous from dawn to dusk. Give yourself a chance to acclimatise. This is particularly important if and when you take up an exercise regime. This will place significant extra demands on you that will take some getting used to. Continuing with our trial pruner, Carrie’s regime may have followed this track: - Stage 1: Prune all ‘large’ down to ‘small’ (see previous chapter) - At ‘Starting Weight’: Prune all potatoes. - At Target 1: Prune all bread - At Target 2: Prune chocolate - potatoes now reintroduced (unfried, at dinner only) to supplement new exercise programme, starting here (one target late, but losing the bread was a bit of a shock.) - At Target 3: Prune booze - reintroduce the odd choc (bread can wait for now!) esp after exercise. 215

- At Target 4: Going along swimmingly - no adjustments required except to lower target. - At Target 5: Prune pastry & puddings - breakfast toast & brown roll at lunch now allowed. Etc etc. By this time Carrie is a few pounds over 11st and looking good. She hasn’t given up anything for ever and she still has her Saturdays to look forward to. Everything that is being pruned is growing back slowly and in a healthy way and is now controlled within her diet rather than being the defining lust of her every waking hour. All in all, she is doing Notso Fatso proud. How to tell when she reaches a target weight The first thing Carrie realised when she started out on the Plan, was that she does not have a ‘weight’ as such. From her twice a day trips to the scales, she soon figured out that she had a range of weights - in her case 14st 4lbs to 15st depending on time of day, week or month. This, naturally enough, makes hitting those target weights either relatively easy (if measuring from the top of her range) or relatively hard (if measuring from the bottom). Carrie has set her Starting Weight at 14st 2lbs and the question is, how does she know when she gets there? The simple answer is to pick a system and stick to it. I don’t recommend the ‘Target is only met when I never exceed Target Weight’ method. Although it has its merits (particularly if you are a professional boxer) it makes your first steps far bigger than you would wish them to be. 216

Popular criteria are that the Target is met when: • You hit Target weight for the first time ever • You are below Target for two consecutive weighings (i.e. a.m and p.m.) • The middle of your range hits Target • You feel happy and confident enough to lower your target again As long as you stick to the same method each time, then you are not cheating the system. You will have been making the same objective judgments every time. The one Target that differs from the others is the Starting Weight. Since this is the indication of when the Bloat Bladder is empty and, since the Bloat Bladder is, pretty much, the reason your weight goes up and down on a daily basis, I strongly recommend that you call this Target as soon as the criteria above allow. This means that the weight of the Bloat Bladder should be taken from your heaviest weight in your range and that you can declare Starting Weight is met when you hit it for the first time ever. Fluctuations over this mark are then down to the whim of the Bloat Bladder’s mechanism and are not to be confused with the real business of losing weight. Picking The Prunes As you will have realised long ago, the responsibility for your diet rests solely in your hands. There is no recipe book, nor calorie-counter, nor ‘sins’ list to use as a crutch. It is all down to you. 217

The speed at which you lose weight is entirely your decision and it depends entirely on the Picking of the Prunes. By this I mean that during the course of the diet, you are going to need to prune not once but several times. • To clear the Bloat Bladder, you have to prune, possibly twice or even three times if you are really jerking me about! • You will have to prune after most (maybe not all, but the majority) Targets have been reached. • You may have to re-prune a reintroduced item if it is getting out of hand. The trick is to Pick Your Prunes. By this I mean get the right ones. Obviously I can’t tell you what the right prunes are to pick. But I will bet my arse to a Turkish bank-note that you do. Come on, now. Let us not be coy. What is it that you eat way too much of? What is it that causes you to feel most guilt? What is it you hide in the airing cupboard to consume? What is it that leaves you feeling so full you just want to puke but dare not lest you lose its precious goodness? Let us put them down in descending order, most evil at the top. A sample list might look like: • Things that live in bakery shop windows (custard tarts, cream horns, shortcake etc) • Anything composed of part-potato, part-oil (chips, crisps) • Lager • Puddings 218

• • • • •

Anything chocolate Mighty fry-ups Butter (on everything) Toast Etc.

But your list will undoubtedly look different. By the way, don’t feel tempted to include things on your list such as apples, Ryvita, boiled cabbage, mineral water, plain rice and so forth. As I keep saying, you would only be cheating yourself. Ideally, this list is now in the correct order for pruning. For a start, you almost certainly have it down in the correct descending order of the amount of damage each item is doing you. Second, the sooner you prune, the sooner the object can be slipped back into the food chain. Aha! You hadn’t thought of that had you? And away you go. You have the rules laid down, the equipment and the will to lose a few pounds of the old unsightly. Now get on with it. How Long Is It Going To Take? Sorry old pal. No clues! I’m afraid, the answer is that I simply don’t know. The truth of the matter is that only you can decide on how long the diet is going to continue. Losing a stone will take far less time than losing 10st. Equally, a vicious pruner will lose weight faster than a tentative one. 219

This being said it really makes no odds how long it takes you to hit each target. One thing you will find is that the slower you go at it the easier it is on the insides. You acclimatise better to the pruning. As we have seen earlier on, sudden shifts in weight are painful and very hard to make permanent. For this reason I would suggest that you plan for the long haul. If you lose a stone in a year you will probably feel like you’ve been living a pretty normal life during that time. If you’ve shed 5st, then you will almost certainly feel like you’ve been on starvation rations for most of that time and that can be damaging in terms of keeping it going. For what it is worth (not very much!) I would suggest that you don’t look to lose weight at a rate of more than 15% of your body weight per year. If you can’t be bothered to do the maths, that is half a stone for every 3½st you weigh, so:

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Weight (St)

1yr Loss(lb)

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

19 21 23 25 27 29 32 34 36 38 40 42

And for those of you who really can’t be bothered to do the maths, there are 14lbs in a stone, so 21lbs is a stone and a half and 42lbs is 3st. Again, I’m not going to come over all domineering on this subject. It is entirely up to you what speed you lose it. All I’m saying is that I, in my own little way, do not recommend that you lose weight at a faster rate than this. That is most certainly not to say that you should look to lose exactly 15% of your body weight in a year. Do it at 3% a year if you really want, see if I care. Why? Because it is really all about this being the last diet you will ever need. Now that could mean one of two things. Either, every time you need to lose weight, this will be the diet to which you turn, or,

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and I think we can all see the joy of this option, you won’t actually need to go on another diet again. What!? (Sharp intake of breath). No! Surely once you get past a certain age and weight, your life is one long drudgery of fighting the creep of fat? It is the curse of the middle-aged. Sure we all know myriad people who spend their life on one diet, or another, yet are constantly padded out like the Michelin man. Similarly, do we not also all know people who have never turned down a scrap of food in their lives, yet are still getting into their demob suit with inches to spare? On the one hand, the perpetual diet-victims never lose an ounce whilst others chow down as hard as they can and never put an ounce on. Is there some sort of magic trick to it? Maybe, but if there is, they’re keeping it very much to themselves. The only thing we can draw from this is that it is possible to be slim without being in a permanent state of malnutrition. So why 15%? Simple. Have you any idea how hard it is to lose weight faster than that? People who go on these crash course diets experience two rather unpleasant side-effects: 1) They’re ready to kill anyone who even breathes noisily in their general direction 2) They become so resentful of what it is they’re required to eat they are unlikely ever to touch it again after the end of their diet and this cuts down their healthy options somewhat. 222

It is statistically likely that you, as dieter, are between 20% and 50% overweight. That would equate to around 2 – 7st over ideal for around 95% of people starting diets. It is statistically likely, also, that you are considering a diet regime that will bring you back within the ‘non-fat’ zone in a period of six weeks to six months. Again about 95% will be looking for that sort of result. It isn’t going to happen. 6 months’ hard labour followed by release back into the community. What are the chances of you going straight, with that behind you? Knacker-all to a jam tart that is what. So the short answer is that it will take as long as it takes.

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Chapter 13 FOOLING YOURSELF PART II

Playing Games Earlier, I droned on for a while about how we bluff our way round truth, reality and anything else unpalatable enough to make us want to avoid thinking about it, by playing silly games with ourselves. Now, much as I would like to say: ‘There is no need for this any more. We’re all capable of handling the truth face on’, the fact is that we’re not. I don’t mean this in a bad way, far from it. No one squares up to the truth, neither the most confident person nor the most charming, nor the most self-contained, nor yet the most introspective. In fact the more you admire someone, the more likely it is that their entire life is one whopping great lie. After all, what is charm other than lies? What is self-confidence other than blindness to one’s own sheer god-awfulness? What is self-examination other than a search for a quality that isn’t obvious for the simple reason that it isn’t there?

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Chances are that the person, to whom you should theoretically look up, if it is plain ‘honesty’ you are after, is the most boorish, impatient, opinionated and self-centred git you’ve ever met and never wish to meet again. In any case, the fact is that we’re not in the business, here, of wringing self-loathing out of you in a cruel and insensitive manner. What would be the point of that? You would end up hating yourself and probably me as well. No, far more productive is the idea that we can download a new set of games into your hard drive and that these will help you deal with the change in your situation. Don’t forget, you are about to make a radical change in your life. Your brain is programmed to cope with fat, ugly, lazy, greedy, snivelling you (steady on!). It is most certainly not ready for slim, beautiful, energetic, generous, whatever the opposite of snivelling is, you. As is the case with most of this book, you will have to find out what works best for you. Here is a selection of little silly games you can play with yourself and others to keep you going. By the way, I would point out here, before the thick, sports-fan types start getting all worked up into a lather, that these aren’t actually games. We’re not going to be kicking a ball about a back garden or tugging plastic skewers out of a KerPlunk tube or shouting ‘Snap!’. This is about fooling your brain into thinking everything is going swimmingly when it knows full well that it hasn’t seen a bag of chips for a week and is in danger of lapsing into a permanent vegetative 226

state if the situation isn’t rectified immediately. It is about telling yourself that what is going on in your life is normal, healthy, productive, beneficial and worthy, when all your body wants to do is kick you, hard, up the arse and then start shovelling packs of shortbread into your drooling maw. The Games Targets.- I have said it before, but it certainly bears repeating. Don’t go mad! You would be amazed at the number of people who fail to reach their target weight or fitness level, because their aim was to shed half of their entire body-weight or to finish in the top ten in the Honolulu Iron Man Event from a position of having to pause halfway up flights of stairs. Keep it achievable! This gives you the chance to ‘win’ every so often. Do Not Lose Any Weight. Does that sound a bit thick or what? To you, maybe, but I know what is coming. The thing is that most dieters are an amount overweight. Our dear chubby friend Carrie is on the rack again at the moment, trying to shed a pound or thirty. As far as she is aware, she started at a certain weight and has now lost 12lbs. When people ask her she will tell them that she has lost nearly a stone and that her first target (keep to the targets, old girl) 227

requires her to lose another 2lbs. After that she will set a target of losing another 7lbs and her final goal, she reckons, is to lose a total of 3st 10lbs. Nothing wrong with that, you think. It is something with which we can all identify. The trouble is that our brain has painted a picture in our heads of what we are. Now you know damn well that you never think of yourself as being the age you are - we saw that before - but as for the shape you are in … That, when you consider it, is a different matter. What shape do you think Carrie is in? What shape, while we’re asking, does Carrie think Carrie is in? The truth is that Carrie is, in her mind, a fat person losing weight. Every thought she has about her diet is based around ‘Carrie as Fatso’. Her weight is relative to how much she has lost. Her ideal weight is relative to how much she has to lose. Her next target is based on how much she must pare away to get there. In other words ‘base’ Carrie - the Carrie around whom the diet is fashioned - is fat Carrie. Fat Carrie is the norm, thin Carrie the aberration. And this is why it is no great disappointment for Carrie to regain her lost weight. This is why her target weight, when reached, is never viewed as sustainable but merely a staging post in Thinsville for the Fatland to Tub City Express. Barry, by contrast, sees it the other way. Barry started his diet, after wringing out his Bloat Bladder of course, at, say, 3st heavy. His first job was to get down to 2st 7lbs overweight. This involved him 228

going from 7lbs over the top down to 6lbs over, then 5lbs over and so forth until he reached the target. After this he recalibrated by starting off again as 2st 7lbs over ideal and 7lbs over target. When people ask Barry how much he has lost, like any good politician he answers a different question. “Baz, you’re looking a million bucks there, mate. How much have you lost?” “Well, I’m around 2lbs over my next target weight.” “Which is how much weight lost then?” “2lbs less than my target.” “So you weigh what now?” “2lbs too much.” “And your target is?” “2lbs away.” Etc ad nauseam. Barry’s friend really only wants to remind Barry of what a blob he used to be, because he is consumed with envy for anyone who improves themselves in any way, shape or form. And which amongst us can honestly say that the success of our friends does not summon up as bitter a throatful of bile as the success of our enemies? Everyone? Good. Keep those lies coming. Remember that this weight loss programme is going to go on for a heck of a long time. I’m not promising you that you will be ‘down a dress size in three weeks’, so you have a long old time to convince yourself that you are either a) basically a fat person who is trying to amend their ways, or, b) a normal sized person simply reverting to type. 229

So, don’t ‘lose weight’. That is what fat people do. Cleaning Out The Closet Carrie is in a dilemma. She has a closet full of stuff that does not fit her any more. Those beautiful leather trousers - the ones that gathered up her buttocks, firmed them up like a pair of footballs - are so big now that they just hang off her. That lovely and unaffordable skirt she got in the sales when it just about got into her price range. That would just fall clean off her at the moment. What about the dress she bought for the wedding? That flaps off her so hard in a light breeze she feels she should have a couple of bronzed, Vendée-Globe Round-the-World crew members winching it taut. Ok, she could take the skirt in herself, but what if she botches it? It is far too expensive to replace. And the leather trousers? She could never do them herself and the local dry cleaners have quoted her £25 to do the job. Well screw that. Once you take the bum in the legs never look right anyway. And where to start with that dress? Who knows? So they all hang in her cupboard. There is £300 worth of very high quality kit there, so it she is certainly not going to give it to Mandy down the hairdressers, nor her sister and she couldn’t bear the shame of giving them to her mum. So, for the time being anyway, there they will stay. Hmmmmm.

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Sorry, Carrie, I’m afraid not. I have said this quite enough times to make myself clear. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it properly. Get rid of them and once they’re gone, go and buy new stuff. “You simply can’t hang on to stuff that is too big for you. This is very important. Please don’t flick over the page to see if there is a slightly more userfriendly game to play later on. Get rid of it.” “But it is so beautiful …” “You bought it when you were fat. You bought it because you were fat. When you wore it, you were a fat person in nice clothes. Get rid of it!” “I can take it in …” “If you can take it in you can let it out again. Get rid of it!” “I’ll give it to my sis …” “If you give it to that fat lump you can simply nick it back off her when she grows out of it. Get rid of it!” “It was so expensive …” “Worth getting fat again for? Get rid of it!” If you haven’t got the message by now, then you are either crazed due to lack of carbohydrate, a dyed-inthe-wool miser or, possibly, a clothing fetishist. GET RID OF IT! In some cases, this is going to involve, in the course of a diet, slinging out three, four or five, entire wardrobes of clothes. It will cost you a bomb, if you insist on buying designer gear for interim weights. But it will do you a power of good. Nothing will be too big for you. You have no safety net, no fallback 231

and, very importantly, no reminder of where you’ve come from. Plus you get to indulge in some glorious retail therapy. Also, without wishing to get too postindustrial about the whole thing, you will be doing wonders for the economy. But one doubt remains. What a waste of fine clothing, you are thinking. Just chucking it away, are we? No, of course not. We’re going to give it to charity. Why? Because it does wonders for our souls, it does something positive for those less fortunate than ourselves and, boy does it stop us wanting to get our hands back on those clothes seeing them hanging there between yellowed polyester blouses with no two buttons the same and marmalade tweed skirts from ‘Lady Astor at Spedegue’s-in-the-Strand’ with inch thick hems and lining antiqued with decades of feminine perspiration. So, off you go, down to Oxfam, Imperial Cancer Research, Scope or the like and make friends with some old biddies. Watch out, though. They will have the coat off your back too if you drift away for a second. Get Mean Now that your Versace is about to be retailed to the local scavenger for £1.50, you are probably on the verge of flying into a miserly rage. Good. This will help.

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The trick with the next game is to try to spend as little money as possible on food. That is, to eat as cheaply as possible. The catch is, you must not make radical alterations to your general intake - that would negate the whole thing - but must simply try to spend as little as possible doing it. Why? Because you will diet in a greater cause, namely that all-encompassing vice, money. Does it work? You betcha it does, in two ways: 1) Expensive food is usually more full of stuff you shouldn’t be eating than cheap food, like cream, sugar and oil. This not only increases the harm it does you, but it makes it taste better and lowers the already infinitesimal chance of you actually leaving any uneaten. 2) When choosing by price you tend to buy less, make do with smaller and find it easier to go without little luxuries, than when you are merely thinking of the great gaping hole in your face. This one is all about convincing yourself that your ‘diet’ is actually the by-product of a much greater plan. Get mean! Save those pennies! By the way, if you are thinking that you are hardly going to be put off your food by price consideration, don’t forget that successive governments, elected by you, are gaily applying this policy to fags, booze and petrol, so have a dig at them before me. Thank you.

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Get Cold Of course. That is just what you want. To be miserable, hungry, exhausted and cold at the same time. If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, it soon will, but as you lose weight, you will also start getting colder. In fact every stone you put on is the equivalent, in heat terms, of slipping on another vest under your clothing, so as you lose weight, it is rather like an extremely pedestrian strip-tease. During the summer you will feel the benefits enormously - who among us wants to lumber around in 80ûF and 99% humidity wearing seven or eight sodden vests? However, in the winter you will start to feel the chill wind nipping at organs, which are a foot closer to the surface than they used to be. This will result in the desire to compensate by: • Eating • Donning three extra jumpers • Turning the heating up full blast • Staying in bed all day Resist these urges. Remember that cold-induced lethargy is the start of hypothermia, so unless you want to die of exposure in your own bed, get up and move around. The cold can be your friend. Remember the two greatest burners of calories are: 1) Generating body heat – 80% 2) Moving around – most of the rest. 234

When it gets cold, swaddling yourself in a kapok cocoon and curling up in front of a fire may sound comfy, but it is doing you no good at all. Shed a few layers, get up and charge around a bit. Learn to Love Disease This isn’t as stupid as it sounds. How could it be? All I want you to do is to learn to live with the fact that you are going to get ill from time to time. For a start, you will be eating less than usual, so your main natural defence, to wit, the smothering of all unfriendly bacteria with an avalanche of sugared delicacies, isn’t going to be effective. As your mother told you many times, no doubt, you ‘feed a cold and starve a fever’. I don’t know how much starving of fevers goes on in your house - not a lot, I reckon - but the first part of this wise old saw is pretty easy to execute. “Oh, Mum, I’m so ill,” snivels Barry. “Maybe, I could just manage some soup.” “Don’t be ridiculous, love,” scolds his mother, fussing over him like an old hen. “It’s that silly diet of yours. Now you get some proper food inside you.” She delivers an Edwardian banquet on a mighty table-top of a tray to a, now, ruddy cheeked and slavering walrus, who is sitting up in bed with a bath towel tied round his neck to prevent cake crumbs from ending up in the crease of his bottom. He goes through the heap of food with a savagery that would have kept a pack of jackals at 235

observation-only distance and necks two litres of Lucozade straight from the bottle. Finishing off with a belch that rattles the bedroom window in its frame he settles back to mopping a sweaty brow and pretending that it is illness-related rather than due to immense peristaltic exertion. In any case, Barry isn’t ill any more, since his mother has applied an amount of medication to him that would make even the Royal Family blanch for very shame. This type of indulgence is really not a good idea. Whilst acknowledging the male of the species as the great malingerer, I would also like to point out that it is the girls who will use all ‘feminine logic’ (i.e. unfathomably specious leaps of idiocy) at their disposal to shovel in a mighty meal whenever there is the lamest of excuses so to do. So heads up! This applies to everyone. First things first. You will experience an increase in the occurrence of: • Nasty little colds • The Squits • Stomach Bugs (You will also get headaches, mood swings and constipation, but there is nothing useful to be gained from these, so I will merely pretend they aren’t going to happen.) Not altogether pleasant, I agree, but so much easier to live with than: • Heart Disease • Ulcers • Bowel Cancer

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• Strokes • High Blood Pressure • Etc. Learn to love your colds, your diarrhoea, your stomach bugs, your shivering fits. Pretend you are in the jungle or something, fighting malaria or dysentery or yellow fever. However you cope with them, though, don’t feed them! For a start, your body has to get used to living with what you are eating now, not what you were eating before. Don’t batter your tiny malaises with food. Don’t batter them with drugs. Just let them work their way through. More importantly, you get a damned good result out of a couple of days with a temperature of 100ûF. All that sweat and heat generation and the pounds just melt away. The same goes for the screaming abdabs. Whoosh! 20lbs of rusty water shot out in a couple of days does you no end of good. You need to replace it of course, with the clean rather than rusty variety, but it certainly lets you know that your tract is fully purged. Wrapping up in three duvets and sitting in front of Home and Away, or whatever passes for daytime entertainment these days, with two packs of chocolate digestives, a gallon of Day Nurse and a box of Black Magic does you absolutely no good. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start loving your diseases. They can be your friends too.

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The lawyers would like me, at this juncture, to remember to remind you that, whilst I feel that you are quite able to recover from a tiny dry cough unaided, you should really seek medical advice if you feel you are starting to exhibit the symptoms of Influenza, Cholera, Typhoid, Scarlet Fever, Rubella, Sleeping Sickness, Venereal Disease, Whooping Cough, Creuzfeld Jakobs, Legionnaires’ Disease and many more. In fact, screw it! Just visit the doctor the moment your nose starts dripping! It is only someone else’s time and money you are wasting and the last thing I need is an ugly scene with your litigious relatives at the cemetery gates. Deny Everything One of our golden rules is that we don’t impose our diet on others. A game you might like to play, to add spice to this theory is simply to deny everything. Some people thrive on shallow, transparent blandishments: “Carrie, my dear?” “Yes, Mr Blithers.” “Have you … erm, lost a few pounds recently?” “Yes, Mr Blithers.” “Oh (phew), good. Yes … er, you look … um, very nice.” “Thank you, Mr Blithers.” Some people would be thrilled with this. Carrie might or might not, I don’t know. The fact is that the cretinous Blithers hasn’t a clue whether Carrie has lost weight or not. Since he is a Fellow of The 238

Institute of Chartered Accountants but only an associate member of the human race, he lacks the social skills to do anything than repeat socialconversation-starters off the backs of matchboxes. Come on Carrie, dear! Make the old turd work for it. “Oh! No, Mr Blithers, I haven’t. Sorry.” Then she shuffles off, looking dejected. Now Blithers feels like a worm. He has just pointed out what a tub his personal assistant is and she is near-mortally wounded. He tries again about a fortnight later as Carrie continues to shrivel before his eyes. “Now, look here Carrie,” he mutters. “I’m sure you’re looking a wee bit slimmer than you were last month.” “That’s kind of you to say so, Mr Blithers,” Carrie replies, deadpan, “But I really don’t think so.” She turns this way and that and examines her profile. “Are you on a … er,” Blithers walks into the bear trap as if guided by a big neon arrow, “Diet?” he croaks. “No,” says Carrie simply and slopes off. Within a few months Carrie is half the woman she used to be and Blithers is about a quarter of the man. Now I have nothing against Blithers per se, other than the fact that he believes his partnership and holiday cottage in Cornwall give him the right to contradict, in a shrill little chirrup, everything I say at mutual friends’ dinner parties. Whether he 239

recovers from being constantly withered by his contact with Carrie is of no consequence. The point is that every time he mentions Carrie’s figure, or diet, or healthy glow, it is a mention that has been earned. And by earned, I mean that I could go back to my old office tomorrow and tell everyone I have been on a diet for the last six months. Despite the fact that I weigh exactly the same now as I did when I last saw that particular collection of dysfunctionals half a year ago, they will all make the usual noises: “Ooh, don’t ‘e look gooooood”, “You’re wasting away, you are”, “You got AIDS, yer big poof?” etc. Remember, no one knows how heavy you were, are or should be. They just make the noise to remind everyone else that they’re there. That is their game you get on and play yours. Obviously, sooner or later you are going to have to ‘fess up. However, do not admit to anything until you’ve made people absolutely insist on paying you compliments. Now that feels good. Imaginary Savings This is a tricky one. The game here is to imagine that you are actually turning down food. I know this sounds unlikely, but it can be beneficial. Unfortunately, with this particular game, doing the first part is easy, but doing the second isn’t so. You should indulge in this particular piece of mental chicanery about once or twice a week and it should 240

be used when you are buying a single meal from somewhere that is self-serviced. You can’t do this in Little Chef for obvious reasons, nor when you are trolleying up your weekly shop. It goes like this:Part 1. Next time you are in Tesco or Pret a Manger or Marks & Spencer Sandwich Shop picking up your lunch or dinner, ignore the item you know you should be having - and will eventually have - and pick up something larger, more expensive, fuller of fat and calories and so forth and pop it in the basket. For instance ignore the ham sandwich and pick up a bacon, egg and tomato baguette; pass over the small tuna salad in favour of the large potato salad; eschew the skinless chicken breast and grab the pork chop twin-pack. Then saunter over to the fridge and get your drink or your yoghurt, or pick up a banana or a Kit Kat whatever else you went there for. Part 2. Go and join the back of the queue, to pay. Then immediately leave the queue go back to the item you know you should be having, and swap it for the larger, more expensive, fattier item that you originally picked. Return to checkout, pay and leave What has all this arsing around achieved? It has told your brain that today you’ve been extra good. You’ve traded down a lunch (or dinner). There you were in the queue, two juicy pork chops in hand, ready to gnaw the crispy fat off them, when, blow me if you didn’t just nip back to the meat counter and before you know it you are eating a grilled, skinless chicken breast. How good does that make 241

you feel? You haven’t actually made a sacrifice, but you’ve tricked your brain into thinking you have.

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Chapter 14 FOR EVER AND EVER, AMEN

Q. How do I stick to my diet? A. You don’t. Your diet sticks to you. Q. Why do you talk such a load of bollocks? A. No, straight up! The fact is that, by the time you are reading this chapter, you should already be enjoying the fruits of your labour. That mirror we acquired way back when - I bet that is getting a bit of use now. Looking good, eh? Of course. Anyway, you have, as you will probably be the first to admit, changed. You look better and feel better. You no longer have to take a break halfway up staircases. The checkout girl in Sainsbury’s no longer has to scan half a dozen empty wrappers when you shop. Your skin is no longer an important source of lamp-oil. What has also changed about you is the amount you eat. Why should it have? It never did on previous diets. We will come to that in a minute, if that is OK. But, believe me it does happen.

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My Father-in-law, the Wingco, recently took me to task for spoiling a holiday he took in France. Now, generally speaking, a holiday spoilt by yours truly would require my presence for at least a couple of days and, even then, there would be at least an even chance that the little darlings had a hand in it. But no. This time the fault lay fair and square on the shoulders of his newly-crafted Notso Fatso PostPlan Dietary Requirement. For those of you not familiar with the Wingco, he has always been somewhat on the corpulent side, even during his flying days. In fact on his last operational flight, it became apparent that he was in excess of tolerance even for an organisation that serves buckets of fried potatoes in its Officers’ Mess for 50p a throw. During this ‘farewell’ mission, the Wingco was forced to bail out over the Pembrokeshire coast after a particularly savage piece of cornering ripped the decals off the wings of his Hawk trainer. Having been attempting to give a young trainee Pilot Officer the thrill of his short life, courtesy of his wealth of aerobatic expertise, he then gave him the unexpected bonus of inviting him to bail out. Eyewitnesses report that the young would-be pilot was propelled safely from the aircraft in the usual way and landed unscathed, but slightly white of face, on Solva beach. A second or so after the first ejection, came the Wingco himself. He heaved on his black and yellow handle and the rockets fired. Onlookers report - and this was backed up by some rather wobbly video footage taken by a holiday244

maker and later confiscated by some of the Forces’ strong-arm boys - that, at the point of firing, the Wingco himself continued to travel on an unaltered trajectory, whilst the stricken aircraft was propelled downwards, with some force, into St Bride’s Bay. After a quick consultation with Newton’s First Law of Physics, the Wingco was given a desk to fly, not to mention a reinforced chair. Some time later, the Wingco was introduced and successfully converted to Notso Fatso. It took some time and a modicum of willpower at first, but in the end it paid off and he became, he claimed, a new man. Following his conversion, he and the very much unconverted Mrs Wingco took a motoring holiday to the South of France, there to absorb the delightful weather, plentiful wine, uncompromising attitude of the locals to foreigners and, of course, the cuisine. Now, reconstructed or no, the Wingco is still tainted by a near lifetime of the gourmand approach to food and so his eyes lit up at the culinary treats on offer. Egged on by a wife who, being the genteel type that she is, isn’t prepared to engulf course after course of rich delicacies unaccompanied, not to mention by restaurateurs who know a good thing when they see it, the Wingco made a unilateral decision to allow himself off the regime for a few days and to get in some serious trough-work. This, as I am sure you are aware, is death to most diets, but not to this one. In fact I do encourage

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dieters to pig out every once in a while when the fancy takes them. The sad upshot of the story is that the Wingco seriously over-estimated his capacity - he probably based his intake on pre-Notso considerations - and the consequences were not pretty. He had forgotten one of the basic premises of Notso Fatso and that is that your body will change. Fifty-something year-old Wingco would have scarfed the lot and called for more. Sixty-something year-old Wingco’s body simply couldn’t take it. The fact is that over-eating and dieting are two sides of the same coin. Just like you cannot simply stop eating, you cannot simply start eating again. To enjoy a banquet of moules marinières, truffles, soufflé, langoustes, mille feuilles and so forth takes training. (On a smaller scale, ask anyone who has prepared for a huge dinner by not eating all day, how they coped. Not half as well as the person who prepared by scoffing a huge breakfast and enormous lunch, I’ll be bound.) The Wingco had left this training behind him and, in exactly the same way as he should never be allowed in the cockpit of an F16, sitting him at the controls of French cuisine could only lead to disaster. He spent the night groaning and griping, the next morning retching and puking and the rest of the week clutching his chest, swilling Milk of Magnesia down him like a park-bench bum with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine and farting part gas, part liquid.

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And what did he learn? That you can’t revisit former glories without doing yourself an injury. Does This Diet Ever End? I can see what you are pushing at here and am wary of answering this question. There are many and various problems with diets. We have looked at the silly games we play to avoid dieting at all and we have examined what happens when the diet is so unappealing that we simply will not concern ourselves with sticking to it. However the main threat to the success of a diet isn’t what happens whilst it is going on - we lose weight; we all know that. It is what happens once it stops. There are two distinct ways for a diet to end: 1) Thank the Lord I’m rid of this stinking diet for ever! 2) What, you mean I have to stay on this damned diet for the rest of my life? Kill me now! Be honest, which way would you rather finish a diet? No. 1? Of course. But which way do you think is going to be the one that will actually keep the weight off you for more than five minutes? No. 2, obviously. And there is the problem. You want out, but you know that is the path back to obesity. So we need to find a way of combining the two and would you credit it? That is exactly what Notso Fatso does for you. How? As a matter of fact it just happens that way. Maybe that is the nature of true 247

genius - that things ‘just happen that way’. Or maybe it did, literally, just happen that way. Whatever the truth is, Notso Fatso does the job in the way that, say, the Skinniquik Diet falls down like a decrepit Great-Aunt on a frosty doorstep. Let us examine, on a very general basis, what you are eating on the last day of your diet (D) and the first day of New You (NY). Diet Gloop High Protein Red Day, Green Day Glutton’s Friend Any other diet

Menu D Some food, mainly gloop 100% meat all the way plus raw veg All protein or no protein All the pasta you can eat Avoid certain stuff

Menu NY Please God, anything but puke Baked potatoes! Mmmmm……. Steak and chips, fish and chips, Ham and chips, sausage and chips All you can find, you eat Stuff it!

The common feature with all these things is that on End of Diet Day, you reach the end of a regime that disqualifies certain foodstuffs. They are almost invariably foodstuffs you crave, desire and generally hold a torch for - that is why you were so fat in the first place - and because of this they’re the very first thing you stick in your face once the bell rings and the diet is over. In fact they’re the very reason that your diet is seen to have such a defined finish date. 248

So that you can tick off time served until you are back on the sweets trolley like a sugar-crazed horsefly. Where Notso Fatso succeeds over all this other nonsense is that you are not ‘on a diet’ in the conventional sense of the word and so you never ‘come off it’ in the way you would understand. The important factors are: • Nothing is taboo - eat what you please, but within the parameters you set down for yourself in preceding chapters • Notso Fatso is really a succession of mini-diets that you dip into and out of as the Plan progresses. Hence you never really come off a diet. • If there is anything, which, after you’ve been on the Plan for some time, you haven’t had for ages and are really missing, then you aren’t doing it right. Go down the shop, right now, buy yourself one and eat it at the till as the girl is trying to hand you your receipt. (Note, you may need a tin opener if your craving is for Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pie or similar.) • The Plan is a long-term affair rather than a threemonth boot camp. Coming off it would be more of a shock than staying on it. What I am really pressing at here is the same point as I raised right at the start and then, rather tediously, several times subsequently and that is that, if you are fat it is because you eat too much.

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You have two options from here: 1. Eat less - if you continue to eat too much you will simply remain or return to being fat. 2. Increase your requirement for food - become a professional sportsman, move to the Arctic Circle, that sort of thing. I can’t see you at the moment - probably just as well - but it is a 90% certainty that option 2 is just not viable. Not because Coventry City won’t entertain your request for a trial, nor because property on Baffin Island is outside your pocket, but because you simply eat so damned much that you are going to have to cut it out. The good news is that you only have to cut it out for as long as you want to be slim. What is that? You want to be slim indefinitely? Oh. I think you can see where this is going. In a way this is the hardest thing for dieters to accept and that explains why few (in fact a statistically insignificant number) ever do. What you - yes you, Fatso - require, to stay alive and healthy on an ongoing basis, is an amount of food that will cause your subconscious, in its pre-diet cocoon of gastronomical satisfaction, to scream: ‘Noooooooo! Eat that and starve to death!’ By the time most diets are over, the subconscious is still screaming in your ear and you are helpless to resist. You spent years building up the belief that you need to eat your own body-weight every other day just to keep breathing.

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Three months on the Gloop is never going to change that. However, Notso Fatso presents the poor maladjusted subconscious with a series of tiny little steps to redemption. By the time you are done, you will have no idea it is over and your inner voice will be as quiet as a room full of human-rights solicitors from Islington three-eighths of a second before you suggest that imprisoning asylum-seekers on prison ships, while their cases are heard, isn’t such a hardship for people reputedly fleeing torture and death. Good Luck We’re pretty much done now. You’ve read the book and are presently wondering if you’ve treated it nicely enough to be able to get your money back for it. Well don’t forget that I had you ink in your weight, in a box, way back in Chapter 2, so tough titties! I told you there was a good reason for that. So all that is now left to you to do is to get on with it. Good luck.

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