Leith, William Read Online Free Page B

am now. I must have been 215 lbs! It would take me a month of hard gym-work to get back to where I was then. This thought flashes through my mind, and I try to push it away, and it won't go, and I grab my pretzel packet and ream my finger around the inside, picking up some pretzel-dust, and I rub the pretzel-dust on my tongue, a bit like a coke addict rubbing the last little bit of white powder into his gums, and the thought still won't go away, and I think of this fat guy I used to see in the gym, he was a bit fatter than me, looking at him made me perversely happy because I was not as fat as him, and now I am, and I think: I must do something, I must do something, and I open my bag and take out a magazine and stare at the cover, and I wonder if it would help if I flipped through the magazine and found something distracting, like pictures of women in their underwear, and I flip a few pages, and I can't settle on any image.
    Anyway, I did the Montignac diet, which is based on the Glycaemic Index, or GI. The GI measures the effect different carbohydrates have on your blood-glucose level. Pure glucose has a GI of 100. Hardly surprising. More surprising is that mashed potato has a GI of 70. A bagel is 72. White bread is 70. Carbohydrates, in other words, quickly turn to sugar when you eat them.
    That's the science behind the Montignac diet, which works
    on the same principle as the Atkins diet. The upshot is that carbohydrate, particularly refined carbohydrate, makes you hungry. When you eat it, glucose is released into the blood, which causes your pancreas to pump out insulin; when you eat too much of it, your pancreas pumps out too much insulin, which eats up too much blood glucose, which gives you a blood-sugar crash, which makes you feel hungry. A vicious circle develops you eat carbs, you crave carbs. You get fat. You become miserable. You need comfort. You eat more carbs. You crave more carbs. You get even fatter.
    And Sadie she kept telling me I was too fat. Sometimes it was just little hints, funny looks at the dinner table, mean little rolls of the eyeball (oh, that can crush you) and sometimes it was The Frank Discussion. Sadie told me that I was becoming so fat that I was beginning to be unattractive to her. I was only mildly porky when I met her 208 lbs but then, somehow, in a horrible, inexorable way, I'd started to get fatter and fatter. I couldn't understand what had happened. `Your weight,' she said, 'is a problem.' And: 'Should you be eating that?'
    And: 'Don't have any more of that.'
    And: 'Do you really need that?'
    And: 'Come on, why don't you just leave some?' And: 'I told you before, your weight's a problem.' And: 'No I'm not sulking.'
    And: 'Why are you always thinking about food?' And: 'I'm just tired, that's all.'
    And: 'I've got a headache.'
    And: 'I know, I know. But I really do have a headache.' And: 'Can't you do something about it?'
    And: 'Would you want to have sex with me if I was fat?' And: 'Have you ever considered therapy?'
    Sadie absolutely hated fat, the very idea of it.
    I remember one time we'd arranged to go and see Sadie's mother. We had to rush out of the house without having breakfast. We arrived at lunchtime and went out and sat in the garden. It was hot; I was hungover and cranky with low blood-sugar. After about twenty minutes, I realised that the reason lunch had not been mentioned was that lunch was not going to be mentioned. I looked at Sad ie. She looked away. And I asked if I could have something to eat. And I remember what I got part of a baguette, torn off, with a bit of cheddar. And I realized that the world is made up of two types of people. Those who measure out their lives in terms of food, and those who don't.
    In any case, Sadie withheld sex as a motivation for me to lose weight. When we did have sex, she would take charge. I was fat, and she hated fat; in her eyes, I was diminished. So naturally, she felt a need to take charge. She had this one position she favoured. I