Leith, William Read Online Free Page A

in his salary cheque, and found himself taking $100 out. 'And everything just seemed to go blank.' He walked into a grocery store and bought a cake, several slices of pie, and some cookies. Then he got in his car and drove, one hand on the wheel, the other stuffing food into his mouth. Next, he 'set off on a furtive round of restaurants', staying a few minutes in each restaurant, eating small amounts of food and moving on. He felt in constant terror that he might be discovered. He knew that what he was doing was bad. Later,he went into a deli, bought $20 worth of food this is the 1950s, remember and ate 'until my gut ached'.
    Cohen said, `I didn't enjoy it at all. It just happened. It's like a part of me just blacked out. And when that happened there was nothing there except the food and me, all alone.'
    Stunkard described the Hyman Cohen case in a 1959 report in Psychiatry Quarterly titled 'Eating Patterns and Obesity'. One thing he had noticed, of Cohen, was that, `Almost any kind of frustration, or achievement, could trigger his eating.'
    Since then, of course, bingeing has grown exponentially. I read books about bingeing all the time. I binge on them. Elizabeth Wurtzel writes about bingeing on drugs, Caroline Knapp about bingeing on alcohol, the former Arsenal and England soccer captain Tony Adams about bingeing on alcohol, William Donaldson about freebasing cocaine, Ann Marlow about heroin, Geneen Roth and Betsey Lerner about bingeing on food. James Frey has written a memoir about his binges on crack and alcohol and cigarettes and self-harm and food. Gus Van Sant has bought the film rights. In his book, A Million Little Pieces, Frey says, `It's always been the same, I want more and more and more and more.'
    And all of these bingers have something in common. There's something hollow, right in the middle of their psyche. Something missing. Something they've spent their lives not wanting to talk about.
    Sometimes every few days, in fact the Trisha show is about people who have been bingeing on food. You should see some of them. They're mostly women. Susie Orbach, the writer and psychotherapist, thinks that a lot of women binge
    because they can't cope with their sexuality. They can't cope with the sexual demands of the modern world. The sexual revolution didn't solve women's problems it made them worse. It made them fat. They binge to make themselves fat, to stop guys hitting on them.
    Susie Orbach thinks that women get fat because, on some level, they want to be fat. I think this is happening to men, too.
    On Trisha, bingers ease on to the stage, hunched, bowed, shamed, brave, the Lycra in their oversize clothes stretched to the limit. Sometimes they slowly glide across the stage as if limbless, like galleons moving through the water. Sometimes they are like big trucks trying to manoeuvre through city traffic. When they come to rest, they park at odd angles, engines hot, brakes tested to the limit. People in the audience whoop and cheer, as if witnessing a miracle.

On the Plane
    On the plane I eat a welcome-pack of pretzels and another pack of pretzels and a chicken meal with gravy and wet mash and softish vegetables and a salad with Italian dressing and a bread roll and a soggy cake and, later, an egg-mayonnaise sandwich and a chicken sandwich. I have a feeling about Dr Atkins and his lowcarb mantra I think it might just be the future. About four years ago, when I was having a really bad time in a really bad relationship with a woman called Sadie, I picked up a book by a Frenchman called Michel Montignac. The book was called Dine Out and Lose Weight. Well, I was
    dining out a lot, as you do in bad relationships. Being in a restaurant gives you less to squabble about. You eliminate the need to argue about the shopping and the cooking, for instance. And we never argued about the bill, because I always paid it. So there I was, dining out. But I wasn't losing weight. Boy, was I not losing weight.
    Still, I wasn't as fat as I