FAT IS A LEAN WORD
Sion Simon on how he lost seven stone while working as The Spectator's restaurant critic
THERE has been a lot of fat in the news lately. The yoof, it would seem, is chubbier than it used to be. One report shows it eat- ing more sugar and fewer vegetables than in the Fifties. Another has it eating just as badly now as in the Seventies, but exercis- ing less; hunching spitefully in front of game-consoles when once it would have gambolled through forests and fields. Sta- tistically, children were just as likely then as now to be seized and mutilated, but it was not the done thing in the old days to fret about perverts.
Whether due to dearth of movement or surfeit of sugar, the effect on the yoof is the same: it is fat. Fat. Now there — as my music teacher used to say of a boy's name before he hit him — is a word to conjure with. So small and compact; so frugal. So lean. Yet so bursting with its adipose mean- ing. It is such a working-class word. Never has a vowel been shorter than is the 'a' in fat. It is a northern comedian's word, happi- est in phrases like 'my mother-in-law's so FAT', bursting to escape from its tightly-but- toned polyester shirt. Nicholas Soames is not really fat at all. Notwithstanding the girlfriend who likened their nocturnal rela- tions to having a wardrobe fall on top of her with the key sticking out, Soames is too posh to be truly fat. Jowly, corpulent, fleshy, by all means. But nothing so vulgar as fat. Such accolades belong to Les Dawson and, particularly, Roy Kinnear.
Though probably less literally dense than Fatty Soames, Kinnear was more truly, metaphysically fat. And he turned his excess body mass to the advantage of his career. If stuck for a laugh he could always take his shirt off, and often did. Yet the same action could also, if desired, achieve the opposite effect: witness the tremendous pathos of Kinnear's fat-wob- bling scenes in Sidney Lumet's 1965 film (with Sean Connery and Harry Andrews), The Hill. At one point, as I recall, he com- bines a devastating cabaletta of flab undu- lation with some virtuoso fat-boy crying. He had clearly been influenced by Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies, made two years earlier, in which Hugh Edwards's Piggy sobs for England. Or Nubs, as we call it when fat people keen.
In general, though, being fat is a foolish and counter-productive way to carry on. It impedes one's progress down the centre of a railway carriage, and causes premature death. In my own case I was irritated by the former difficulty, but only stirred to action by the latter. I went to a doctor who duly confirmed that my blood pressure, aged 30, was so dangerously high that I would have to either lose weight or take remedial drugs. He prescribed a diet, which works. In six months I have lost seven stone. By the time I have finished, I expect to have halved my weight. And I am not as tall as Nicholas Soames. Indeed, I'm not even sure that I'm as tall as Boris Johnson. Which really isn't very tall at all. One of the reasons it's so embarrassing to talk about my diet is that its success, which so bizarrely delights people, is predi- cated on having been so grotesquely fat in the first place. The pleasure people derive from someone else shedding fat is remark- able. They are more than 'pleased for you; it is seen as a deeply moral act which adds to the sum not just of human happiness, but of ethical worth. The other day a com- plete stranger stopped me in the street near my house. Obviously embarrassed at her unaccustomed and unorthodox inter- vention, but unable to resist, she said 'Excuse me, you're Sion, aren't you?' I could not deny it. She explained that she knew my wife and children (she was sport- ing sprogs of a similar age) and had 'seen me around over the years'. Then she said 'I hope you don't mind, but I just had to stop you and say how absolutely marvellous it is that you've lost so much weight. You've done so fantastically well. It's just such a wonderful achievement that I had to stop and tell you. We're all so pleased.' And so on. 'Thank you very much,' I replied, 'that's very kind of you. Most kind. Oh yes. Thank you very much.' I was genuinely touched.
But I also felt slightly uneasy at being so lavishly lauded for correcting a failure entirely of my own making. And then I started thinking, when the smugness had cooled, that the obverse of such love must be loathing. Six months ago the same woman would presumably have shuffled past me in silence, drawing her daughters closer as the fat man approached, thinking, 'Look at that fat bastard, lumbering along, puffing and wheezing and wobbling all over the place. Disgusting.' Despicable, in fact. The idea will seem absurd to those who have never been properly fat, but it didn't seem like a million miles from such con- tempt to being kicked to death in a corner for not having the moral fibre to be thin. Discovering that so many people attach such extraordinary moral value to major weight loss has made me even more con- scious than I was as a fat man of how hated and despised we are.
By now you are desperate to know indeed, you have probably skipped straight to this bit — what diet it was. It is the first question everybody asks. Although, like all questions which are the first question everybody asks, no one is really interested in the answer. They just want to give their own views. On diets, everybody has them. Only love and sport are more immutably ensconced in the land of cliche. And king of them all is `Ah, yes, but it's keeping it off, that's the thing.' It is tedious to be told, when you are trying to concentrate on los- ing your 115th pound in a row, that you are almost certain eventually to regain every one of them, and more, But what is worse is that it is self-evidently true. Which is why writing this seems appallingly hubristic; and why I am trying not to lapse into hating fat people.
The diet? Plentiful quantities of any meats, fishes and citrus fruits, and nothing else. When I gobble professionally, as a Spectator restaurant critic, I selflessly abro- gate the rules. Anything less would short- change the reader, Otherwise I eat no fats or carbohydrates whatsoever. But that's not really the point. Dieting — as my other favourite cliché points out — is all in the head.
Sign Simon writes a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph.
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