Leith, William Read Online Free

if you check yourself into a clinic for a bout of liposuction. The sandwich I bought was a BLT, two slices of thick, soft white bread with crisp, pale lettuce, bland slices of water-bomb tomatoes, somebody's own-brand mayonnaise from a tub the size of a bucket, and hard, oily bacon with fat the colour of aspic. Perfect. I put my newspaper under my arm. Right there, in the doorway of the shop, I gripped the clear plastic sandwich box in my fingers. Three
    or four panicky tugs and the cellophane seal was off. The sandwich practically fell down my throat; it was like dropping a billiard ball down a well.
    `Hey, excuse me!'
    `Mmm ... horry.'
    Mid-morning I went back and got another sandwich. Egg mayonnaise on white. Close to confectionery. I sucked it up. The thing is, I should have bought it when I got the BLT, but then I would have had to put it in the fridge and leave it alone for two hours.
    By lunchtime, I was hungry. I cooked myself one of my favourite lunch recipes:
    You fill the kettle.
    While the kettle is boiling, you take a good fistful of three-minute spaghetti.
    Snap the spaghetti in half, and put it in the pan on the hob. The pan is still there from yesterday lunchtime, the last time you cooked this meal. It has some white-looking residue on the inside, but that doesn't matter.
    Pour the boiling water in the pan.
    Oh yes light the gas.
    You can put some salt in the water. But I never do. Put two handfuls of frozen peas in a sieve.
    Pour the rest of the boiling water over the peas. Wait ninety seconds. The pasta is now ready.
    Pour the pasta into the sieve containing the almost-thawed peas.
    Shake it about.
    Put it on a plate.
    Add butter, salt and pepper. I would put grated cheese on,
    but if there's cheese in the fridge I'll have already eaten it. In my kitchen, cheese is lucky to get to the fridge.

Peanut Butter
    Later on, towards dusk, I had a thing with some peanut butter. Afterwards I lay on my bed. The sky darkened. The nausea passed.
    'I Didn't Enjoy It at All'
    I'm feeling guilty because I've eaten too much, and I have a problem, and I need help, but I don't want to talk about it, because I'm a guy, and guys don't have problems like this, and if they do they sort the problems out on their own. My problem is: I overeat. My problem is: I am hungry. I'm hungry for food, but I know it's not really food that I crave. It's something else.
    It's everything.
    I'm hungry for sex, for drugs, for alcohol.
    I want to go out and spend money!
    I can't keep still.
    If we have a core problem, here in the Western world, I am an embodiment of that problem.
    I'm hungry, and I'm out of control. My hunger is emotional, but this is something I find hard to admit. I have a very powerful, top-of-the-range psychological override mechanism, which I use to disengage my emotions. And this mechanism runs on heavy fuel. It needs a lot of food and drink and drugs and sex. To use the technical term, I'm a binger.
    And I'm not alone. More and more of us are bingeing. The term was coined in 1959 by Albert J. Stunkard, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. One day, a patient called Hyman Cohen turned up at Stunkard's practice. Cohen was 37 years old, 5 foot 9 inches tall, and weighed 272 lbs. He was obese. He was a compulsive eater. He told Stunkard he wanted to lose weight 'in order to qualify for the position as principal' at the school where he taught.
    Cohen told Stunkard he had 'no psychological problems'. What he needed help with, he said, was his willpower. 'Right now,' he said, 'my willpower just doesn't seem to be up to it. That's where you come in. It's like hiring a policeman to check on me.'
    Stunkard did check on Cohen, to the tune of weekly sessions of psychotherapy. Cohen began to lose weight. After five weeks, he was 10 lbs lighter than he had been at the beginning. On the sixth week, though, he was back up to his starting weight.
    Something had happened. Cohen described it. He'd gone to the bank to pay