I give
Up
Stuart Reid
MY appetite deserted me 20 years ago at the Royal Free Hospital, in Pond Street, Hampstead, after I had been given a barium enema ('You may find the tip of this tube just a little cold, Mr Reid. . . At lunch following my humiliation I discovered that I was not hungry. This shocked me; I had always been hungry. Nevertheless, I ate. Here's an odd, or perhaps shameful thing: my loss of appetite was not accompanied by loss of greed. You may wonder how a man who is not hungry can be a glutton. The answer is simple: guts, drive and determination. Moral theologians call it obstinacy in sin.
It was not hypochondria alone that had driven me to the Royal Free. I had just given up alcohol and in sobriety had developed a permanent hangover, which expressed itself as general malaise, especially in the large and small intestine, though there were also the usual symptoms: crawling skin, itching eyes, non-specific paranoia. The liver specialist at the Royal Free said, a little smugly, that I had diverticulitis and told me to eat high-fibre breakfast cereals. This was the first piece of dietary advice I'd ever been given and, assuming that the specialist knew what she was talking about, 1 did as I was told. Result: I felt even more wretched.
Yet diets of one sort or another, accompanied occasionally by alternative therapies, were now to become part of my life. To begin with I was not trying to lose weight. On the contrary. In the months immediately after giving up booze I dropped to nine stone, which is not an ideal weight for a man of 5ft 1 lins, as I then was. The doctors agreed that there was something wrong but. since I was eating, could not tell me what.
Being an impressionable chap — I was only 39 — 1 decided to look beyond conventional medicine. I consulted Malcolm Carruthers, who had a theory that to be healthy a chap had to be in touch with the left-hand side of his brain (or maybe it was the right). He was unable to help me, but went on to become a star of radio talk shows, and is now an internationally recognised authority on erectile disfunction. I also saw a New Zealand woman in Wigmore Street who had me crawl through a magnetic hoop to increase my flow of positive energy.
It got worse. Towards the end of the 1980s — still suffering from hangovers, though my weight was now approaching 11 stone — I read an article about a yeast infection of the gut known as Candida. I went to see the man reckoned to be the top authority in England on the condition. Let's call him Stephen King. I should have fled Dr King's surgery the moment I looked down on him as he sat at his desk and saw that his hair was knotted into his unnaturally flat and broad skull.
Dr King's diagnostic technique was fairly conventional by alternative standards. First, he placed snuff boxes (or were they small glass bottles?) containing different mineral elements on my tummy; then he pressed down my extended right arm. If there was resistance, it indicated that I had Candida (or vice versa). In fact, of course, resistance in my arm depended solely on the pressure the doctor applied, or on my willingness to yield.
He diagnosed Candida (naturally), and put me on a diet that excluded bread and butter and chocolate and milk — the usual nonsense — but that included a white powder used to treat athlete's foot. I was told to mix a couple of tablespoons of this in a litre of bottled water twice a day and drink it. It was a disgusting mixture: the powder did not dissolve but hung suspended like dandruff in the water. The container in which the powder came had printed on its side 'for external use only', whatever that means. The 'treatment' did not work.
How can I have been so stupid? The neurologist I saw later may have the answer, but if he has, he is not telling me. Still, time and 'acceptance' (fortified by the occasional prescription for mood-altering drugs) are great healers. Towards the end of the 1990s I began to feel rather better. The downside was that my food cravings became more intense. I began to increase my intake of sweets and puddings, even though I knew from bitter experience that sugar made me poorly. I began drinking large McDonald's chocolate milk-shakes. I developed an addiction to a brand of cinnamon Danish so rich in fat and sugar that it is still good to eat after five days left in a brown paper bag in an overheated office. What follows is pretty revolting, but readers of The Spectator expect nothing less than the truth in their Autumn Food and Drink Special. In the course of a day I was (still am) capable of consuming not only a milk-shake and a Danish but also: one pizza, one large bowl of fresh spaghetti topped with passata and half a pound of shredded mozzarella, two Mars Bar ice-creams, two chunky KitKats and — if I was thinking about my health — one pound of seedless grapes.
I began to put on weight again, or at least to develop a pot belly. By early summer I was heading towards 13 stone (which may not sound much but I am a smallboned man, and I should not go above 12 stone). I knew that I'd have to get a grip.
For reasons that I still cannot fathom, my wife had recently joined Weight Watchers. So I followed the diets in the books she had been given at meetings (which cost £4.50 to attend). The trick is simple: keep down your intake of calories and saturated fats. You measure your intake using a points system. You are supposed to stick to 18 points a day. Here is how it works. For breakfast: hot water and lemon juice (1 gave that up after two days and returned to tea), medium bowl of cornflakes with skimmed milk, small glass of orange juice. Lunch: tuna sandwich made with small can of tuna plus tomatoes (as many as you like) and low-fat mayonnaise. That makes a big and satisfying sandwich. You can have an apple and grapes for pudding. Dinner: medium-grilled chicken breast with medium-baked potato and water-based ratatouille, followed by fruit and meringue case with low-fat yoghurt. That comes to about 18 points.
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