Leith, William (20 page)

This is what I'm thinking as Atkins lies in a coma in hospital in New York. I'm thinking about death, about

paradigms, about scientific revolutions. Is lowcarb a scientific revolution? For thirty years, the nutritional establishment has had the same paradigm fat is bad, carbs are good. Cut down on fat. Eat a balanced diet. Watch your intake of sugar and salt. A healthy diet is a low-fat diet. We're fat because we eat too much fat and sugar. Cut down on sweets. When you buy food, check the labels for fat content. That's the paradigm. And we've had thirty years of normal science to back it up. During those thirty years, vast economic interests have clustered around the paradigm, too supermarkets and farmers and bakers and producers of breakfast cereal. Naturally, the political establishment has fallen into line, making sure the boat is steady, protecting people's jobs, enhancing revenue, collecting taxes. And the media, whose job is to sell readers and viewers to advertisers they are believers, too.

And Atkins came along and rocked the boat. In the 1960s, when he started his lowcarb diet, he fitted Kuhn's model perfectly. He was in his early thirties. He was a cardiologist, rather than a nutritionist. He hadn't discovered his lowcarb diet he'd read about it in a medical journal and tried it on himself. He was an outsider. He was not eminent. He had nothing to lose.

In the obituary, I say that, just over a year ago, Atkins suffered a heart attack, 'but, as he pointed out, this was caused by an infection and had nothing to do with the Atkins diet', even though I do not know this for sure. I quote him from one of his last appearances on Larry King Live, on which he said, 'Carbohydrate is the bad guy.'

When Atkins dies, on 17 April, having been in a coma fjust over a week, my obituary, like many articles on Atkins, is illustrated with a picture of the doctor looming over a huge chunk of meat, holding carving tools in the air, posing, grinning.

My first thought is: no! The Atkins diet is not about eating huge amounts of meat! It's about avoiding carbohydrate!

And I think about Thomas Kuhn, about the paradigm theory, about denial. Was Thomas Kuhn, the expert seeker of denial, himself in denial? Because the paradigm theory is, of course, itself a paradigm. And when you base your scientific or intellectual world on a paradigm, you do not see it as a paradigm you see it as the truth. As Kuhn says, 'What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

Well, my visual-conceptual experience has taught me to see that I've lost weight. And I believe that carbohydrates were my problem. If you asked me, that's what I'd tell you right now. It was simple. Carbs were my problem.

And I don't see that as a paradigm. I see it as the truth.

A Simple Mistake

When I quit alcohol, on New Year's Day, it was easy. It didn't even take any willpower. I drank a lot on New Year's Eve, of course, and woke up the next day, as usual, feeling fuzzy and nauseous, and the day after that I felt fuzzy and nauseous, too. For a few weeks, having drunk nothing in the evening, I Would wake up, and my first thought would be, 'Jesus! How

much did I put away last night?' and I'd get out of bed, my head throbbing, and then I'd go into the bathroom, and look at myself in the mirror, and only then would it hit me: I hadn't drunk any alcohol at all. And then, after about five minutes, my head would clear, and I'd feel strangely hollow and shaky. Being hungover every morning, of course, had been awful. But waking up without a hangover was no picnic, either.

This was something I had not factored in. Walking along the street, with a clear head, you find yourself assailed by all kinds of unfamiliar emotions. To remove hangovers from your life is to open a door somewhere in the deep recesses of your mind. As you go about your daily business, you have no idea what might come through that door. Like a teenager, you feel sudden bolts of joy, and dark waves of creeping confusion and terror. This is a very vulnerable state; sometimes you feel like a released prisoner yearning for the comfort of his cell. Like a fat person who, having lost weight, feels naked.

Early spring has turned into late spring, and I'm still losing weight. I'm not eating carbs, I'm not drinking alcohol. Incidentally, I'm not getting on especially well with my girlfriend. Giving up alcohol was easy, although it made me binge on carbs. Giving up carbs was just as easy. I don't think I'll go back to bingeing on carbs again or any food, for that matter. But I never intended to give up alcohol for ever. What I wanted, what I always wanted, was a sensible relationship with alcohol. I wanted to have a couple of drinks, every now and again. And, yes, to get drunk once in a while. But I didn't want to be smashed out of my head every night, and I didn't want to feel fuzzy and nauseous every day.

The funny thing is that I miss the hangovers more than I miss being smashed.

One morning I'm walking past a French wine shop, and the guy who runs the place walks into the doorway and waves at me, and we exchange greetings, tradesman to former customer, and I walk on, and the thought occurs to me again, yet again, that you haven't truly beaten alcohol If you just give it up. That's the easy option. And that's the moment I know that, sometime in the near future, I will visit the French wine shop again, and say hello to the guy again, and buy a bottle of wine, and try to have a sensible relationship with it.

My girlfriend's away somewhere, and I go home and try to do some work. I can't settle. I look out the window, and get up from my desk, it's the middle of the afternoon now, and I put on my jacket and ten minutes later I'm back at home, with a bottle of wine, with which I believe I can have a sensible relationship.

I'll open it at seven o'clock.

I'll open it at six-thirty.

Six o'clock.

I have a very clear memory, from the time when I drank a lot, of an evening, six or seven years ago, when I had arranged to meet some friends and go to see a play. At the time, my habit was to start drinking at lunchtime, have a couple of vodkas and some wine with my lunch, and maybe a brandy or two afterwards, and then stop drinking and work through the afternoon, getting progressively sober, and then start drinking again in the early evening. On this particular day, I arrived at the theatre bar at seven o'clock, feeling bleary,

it, has said that the best solution, the only solution, is to stop drinking altogether and never go back to it. I once interviewed Billy Connolly, a former alcoholic, or probably it, recovering alcoholic is how he would rather define it, and he said he believed that if, as an alcoholic, you quit drinking, and then start again a few years later, you do not pick up where you left off, in terms of addiction, but where you would have been if you hadn't stopped. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I've heard other people say it, too.

Former alcoholics they're always warning you off. In her book Drinking: A Love Story, the late Caroline Knapp wrote, `Liquor creates delusion ... A single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as rock over time.' Knapp quit drinking because she changed her mind about one thing in particular. She had spent her adult life, she wrote, believing that she drank because she was unhappy. And then, she thought, 'Maybe,, just maybe, I'm unhappy because I drink.'

But isn't there a third possibility a third way? What if Knapp drank because she was unhappy, and became even unhappier when she drank? And what if she had looked deeply into herself, and sorted out why she was unhappy in the first place, and become happy? What would happen if she drank when she was happy? She once wrote that her mother, worried about her drinking, had taken her for a walk on the beach, and said, 'This is very serious. It's more serious than smoking.' In the end, her mother might have been wrong; Knapp quit drinking, but died of lung cancer in 2002, at the age of 43.

inflamed, toxic, and slightly feverish not too bad, in other words. I sat down, ordered a drink.

`Oh,' I said, to one of the people I had arranged to meet, a woman who had just arrived, 'would you like a drink?' `Ooh, thanks. I'm dying for a glass of wine.'

I ordered the wine.

She said, 'I just love that first glass of wine in the evening. Don't you?'

And I thought, my God, no, absolutely not, I hate the first glass of wine in the evening. Right now, my hangover's just kicking in, and the wine I'm about to drink will be a grim, painful experience. It will taste thinly acidic, and I'll have to force it down, and it will affect me like a mild sleeping pill and a bash on the head. No, the first glass of wine in the evening is my enemy, because it stands between me and my friends, the fourth and fifth glasses of wine, the cocktails, the shooters and shorts I will consume in the early hours.

I said, 'Yes, the first glass of wine.' I laughed, shook my head slowly. 'The first glass of wine.'

And then the wine arrived, and I paid for it, and I watched the woman take a sip, and then a gulp, and I had an inkling of what it might be like to have a healthy relationship with alcohol.

And now I'm looking at a bottle of wine, and the evening is approaching, and I fully intend to enjoy a glass or two of wine, just like the woman in the bar. I'm confident that I'm going to pull this off, to have this healthy relationship. I'm absolutely determined. Nothing will stop me.

Of course, just about everybody who has ever written about having a drink problem, or talked in public about

Yes, they always say the same thing. Get off it, and stay off it. In his memoir A Million Little Pieces, James Frey, a former alcoholic and crack addict, describes what happened to him after he drank and took drugs for the last time. He woke up on a plane, with absolutely no idea how he had got there. q look at my clothes,' he tells us, 'and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit, and blood.' In the book, Frey is being taken by his parents to a rehab centre. After his parents leave, he tells us, 'I am lost. I am completely fucking lost.' His response:

`I scream.

I piss on myself.

I shit my pants.'

When he leaves rehab, Frey walks into a bar and orders a whisky. But he doesn't want to drink it. He wants to stare it out. In a passage that reads like the script of a gunfight, Frey describes the struggle between the part of himself that wants the whisky, and the part that absolutely does not want the whisky.

`I stare at the glass. The Fury rises from its silent state it 0 screams bloody fucking murder it is stronger than it has ever been before. It screams you are mine, motherfucker. You are mine and you will always be mine. I own you, I control you and you will do what I tell you to do. You are mine and you will always be mine. You are mine, motherfucker. I stare at the glass.'

Frey doesn't drink the whisky. And he makes an interesting point the problem is not the whisky. It's himself.

And my problem was not drink, is not drink. It was overeating, caused by hyperinsulinism due to the overeatingof carbohydrates. Which made me fat. Which made me unhappy-Which sucked me into a fat, unhappy mindset, which meant that, when I drank, I drank too much.

I walk into the kitchen and open the kitchen drawer with its knives and forks and spoons, all messed up in their tray, no particular order, the knives with the forks, forks with spoons, which, I'm sure, says something about my attitude to food, and I pick up the corkscrew, my old 'waiter's friend', which I used to think was the best corkscrew design in the world, it's roughly the shape of a spanner, with fold-out tools for prying and penetrating and levering, and an ingenious pull-out mechanism for slicing the thick foil or sharp plastic at the top of the bottle. Just holding the corkscrew makes me feel heady and weak.

Is this what Caroline Knapp referred to as 'the dark fear' experienced by the drinker the moment before drinking? Possibly.

And I remove the cork, and pour myself a glass of wine, and take a sip, and sixteen hours later I wake up, in my own bed, alone, feeling fuzzy and nauseous, and a flock of images streetlights and taxis and bars, assignations made on my mobile phone, more bars, a kebab shop, friends and strangers in my flat who stayed until God knows when these images are all rattling on a door deep inside my brain. But I feel terrible, laden down with heavy pain, and I will not open the door. I move my head, trying to get more comfortable, but then I learn that it is better not to move at

all.

It was a simple mistake, a mistake anybody could make. I know I've made it many times before. And I'll clear up all the

mess and drug paraphernalia later on. I can't face anything right now.

Luckily, though, I don't have any obligations to do anything. I have a hangover to deal with.

Broken Heart

`Do you mind if I smoke?'

`No. Not at all.'

Stretching out on his bed in a London hotel room, James Frey says, 'I feel great. I don't really smoke. I don't smoke when I'm at home because it drives my wife crazy, but I'm smoking now because I'm stressed out. But I feel great. My body's in pretty good shape. Luckily, the liver is the only organ in the body that regenerates itself, and that's where the most profound damage was. So I feel great. I'm in great shape.'

We are talking about addiction. Frey was addicted to crack and to alcohol. Crack, he says, is like 'powder cocaine', but it's 'a much dirtier high. Have you ever sniffed glue?'

`Well ... when I was at school we used to sniff solvents.'

`Smoking crack is like a combination of snorting the strongest powder cocaine you could ever have, and sniffing glue at the same time. One way I've described glue it's like that Pink Floyd song.'

Frey begins to hum 'The Great Gig in the Sky'. `OK.'

`The first couple times you smoke crack, when you take the hit, you have this moment of ... perfection. Perfect confidence. Perfect understanding. Perfect orgasm. Perfect pleasure. So you're always chasing that initial moment, and it diminishes over time.'