A couple of months ago I picked up a family member at a train station. I hadn’t seen him for some time. He used to be a big man, imposing, heavy, probably heavier than he should have been, but it seemed integral to his character. Anyway, he came through the barrier on this recent occasion, smiling, looking about 10 years younger.
He’d recently retired. I thought to myself, oh look, that’s what freedom does. It pares away the years. I was wrong; his joie-de-juvenile turned out to be the result of simple old weight loss. He was on the fasting diet.
Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it: it’s “the radical new approach to weight loss” or, should I say, the current “radical new approach to weight loss”.
The diet’s shtick is this: five days a week, you eat like a normal human being; two days a week, you weep. To be specific, for two days of the week you cut your daily calorie intake to 500 if you’re a woman, 600 if you’re a man.
For breakfast on "fasting days" you eat a piece of cardboard with a palmful of smoked newt on it, and then nothing until dinner. That lively evening feast usually contains an assortment of green beans and spinach with something pale and poached on top.
Don’t even think about having a glass of wine with this bounty, but do feel free to run amok on water and lemon juice and herbal teas that offer intoxicating refreshment and a calm and steady mind, and taste like a potion from a warlock’s tarnished cup.
My relative had lost a stone and a half (in old money) and was soon twirling around the kitchen in his sharp new shirt. Even the cat looked vaguely impressed.
My Listowel-born grandmother, a woman of limited maternal instinct, who always looked as if she’d rather be some place else, used to ask: “If I jumped into the fire, would you jump in after me?” I found the question a little obtuse when I was six and trying to copy the way she warmed her bird-like bottom by the open grate, while sucking the life blood out a Player’s No 6 – but now I get it. She was right: I haven’t an original impulse in my head.
No sooner had my newly skinny relative returned to his home in London town than I fleet-footed it to my local bookshop and purchased diet world's latest holy text. "This is not a diet, this is a revolution," the book claims, a statement that is not entirely true, unless on one of my more enraged and dissolute fasting days I find the authors and publicly flog them, inciting zombie-like hordes of self-deniers to storm regional patisseries.
Questions and answers
Forgive my uncharitable notions, but I'm battling a profound sense of irritation bordering on a kind of existential despair. I'm feeling about as tolerant and Zen-like as Napoleon with a skipping rope. I'm bloody starving.
There’s a question-and-answer section in the book, an amalgam of queries from blighted eejits like me. “What are the implications of cheating and having a few crisps or a cookie?” asks the collective voice of those whose waistbands leave little tyre tracks around their middles, to which the authors reply: “This book is about the voluntary abstention from eating food.”
A smart riposte, activating a guilty conscience, and we all know how powerful that little fairy can be. As with Lenten sacrifice, you can lie behind the couch licking your Easter eggs and rewrapping them in the shiny Smartie paper, but you’re not fooling anybody but yourself.
Diet plans aren’t hairy-chinned revolutionaries with daisies embroidered on their blue jeans; they are pitiless dictators whose jack-booted stormtroopers stomp along the corridors of your mind, kicking open doors and dragging you off the Brie wheel.
I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight. I don’t have a weighing scales; I don’t like them. The weighing scales, courtesy of the Green Shield Stamp catalogue, accompanied the family through my childhood: every time we moved house we had to find a new spot on the bathroom floor for it where it read lightest, in a dip or a curve in the lino, or on a winnowed crack in the floorboard that clawed back a few ounces from the dial.
Anyway, I’m furious with myself for embarking on this seasonal solipsistic crusade, this vain, empty-headed trek into a dark wood of guilt, envy, self-flagellation and anxious glances in other people’s mirrors. I swear that as soon as I can fit into my kaftan I’ll throw the book on the barbecue.
There is an entire world out there of effort and endeavour and imagination, and I’m in my suburban kitchen counting bleedin’ beansprouts.