I can pinpoint exactly when I realised I was fat. Two years after leaving, I visited my old sixth-form college and found myself aimlessly wandering old haunts in the manner of all who discover a place that had been theirs is now strangely alien. As I explored I suddenly found myself face to face with the college nurse: not a woman I'd known well, but a reminder of happy days gone by. I smiled with pleasure. She looked at me in swift judgment, said, "You've got terribly fat" and departed. I cannot even say I was deflated since, clearly, I had become a human barrage balloon.
She was right, of course. At 18 I had been lithe. My college yearbook shows a slim young man. By 20 I was fat, and I stayed fat. At one point my trouser choices were restricted to billowing jogging bottoms, until I undertook the first of many expeditions to the comfort-cut department of Marks & Spencer, where the town's only supply of 40-inch jeans could be found.
These days there is a far wider choice in XL clothing. You don't even have to submit to trial by cubicle mirror as one online retailer exists solely to ensure that rotund men are not excluded from the current fashion for clothes that make thirtysomething dads look like oversized five-year-olds. This is useful, since bright colours, bagginess and distracting, oversized logos particularly suit fat men – perhaps because we look our best when our chubbiness puts people in mind of puppy fat, rather than morbid obesity.
Today, however, I am not fat. Nor am I thin exactly. But as I write, I approach the end of a diet-and-exercise regimen that has removed four and a half stone from my frame. I was 18, now I hover just above 13 stone. Mind you, scales can deceive. I prefer to measure my changing body by the irregular bullet line of newly punched holes in my belt.
Yet I'm all too aware that a diet is a passing success. I am carrying less weight, but am left with a challenge. Having been fat for nearly 20 years, how do I maintain a low weight for the next two decades? In approaching this question, I feel the need for some accounting, not of the diet, but of my past. What made me fat? Why did I choose to remain fat for so long? Can understanding why I was fat stop me from getting fat again?
Food was never that important to me growing up. My mother was not an amazing cook, but nor was food at home dreadful or scarce. In fact, I barely remember thinking about food as a child.
Neither can I claim that teenage angst caused excessive consumption. When I arrived at university, I threw myself into student politics and ended up president of the university student union. I never felt unpopular, or alienated, or conscious of any great need for comfort.
So I can't trace my weight gain to childhood trauma or adult misery. That said, despite a relatively hectic social life, I was alone regularly – after meetings, or late at night, or when I was supposed to be studying. And when I was alone, I ate. And ate. The kebab van was an institution at my university and most nights I would have a Super Burger: two burgers, an egg, cheese, mayo and chilli sauce, topped with large quantities of kebab meat. Later, I discovered the delivery pizza and the special Hungry Man deal – a bottle of Coke, two pizzas, a portion of garlic bread, potato wedges or onion rings, and a tub of ice-cream. I became an expert at assessing how much food was available for a certain price. I did not need to be asked if I wanted to super-size, as I had already calculated what combination of orders represented maximum intake for minimum expenditure. At McDonald's, for example, I felt supplementing a Value Meal with a cheeseburger was a better use of scarce resources than the few extra fries and slurp of Coke you could get by "going large".
I enjoyed good food, but when I was alone, my taste was always to the vast and cheap. After graduating, when I stayed on for a year to work in the student union, I discovered a sandwich shop that advertised itself on the size of its portions. I think it was called Fatty Arbuckle's. Their standard sandwich was a half baguette, loaded with mayo-heavy filling, with which you got a large pack of crisps. I would order one and go and eat my lunch in a place where I was sure none of my fellow student politicians would disturb me. Often I would eat again, later in the afternoon, nipping out for a cake, or ice-cream, or chocolate.
Listen to the language: if you are eating a Fatty Arbuckle mega-meal, a Hungry Man pizza or Super Burger, and feel "going large" is insufficient to your needs, you can't blame some capitalist conspiracy for making you fat. You can't claim those who sell you this stuff are cruelly deceiving their customers. I ate with open eyes and open maw.
In recounting all this, I am strangely conscious of how often I did not particularly like the food I went to such great lengths to procure. I've lost count of the number of bad kebabs I've eaten, or the quantities of doughy, flavourless pizza.
When I lived in Newcastle, I lived next to a sandwich shop that catered mostly to the city's bin collectors, men who would be doing a full day's hard physical work by the time I had emerged from my Saturday slumber. This shop sold a breakfast-in-a-bun that comprised three rashers of bacon, two eggs, black pudding, beans, fried mushrooms, a hash brown, fried onion and two sliced sausages. At £1.60, we can assume the ingredients were more Bernard Matthews than River Cottage and in truth I didn't enjoy eating my fry-up very much. Yet I ate it, every week, before going to meet friends or attend the launch of some political campaign.
The same goes for chips. I've ordered hundreds of large portions and never once have I got to the end without it becoming a test of will over taste. The classic chip-shop chip has a brief half-life before becoming unpleasantly cold, oily, almost slug-like. Or take the battered sausage. I do not like battered sausage. It is a thoroughly nasty menu item. I can confidently say I have never had a good battered sausage. Yet as a delivery mechanism for cheap food, it is almost world-class.
All of which makes me wonder – why? Why did this incessant intake matter so much to me? Well, although I had many bad meals, there was still a pleasure in each of them. Anticipation as the box opened or paper came off. The first sharp hit of vinegar on potato, the softness of melted cheese on pizza, the rich chill of a spoonful of ice-cream. This was heady stuff.
Nor do I want to give the impression that I was constantly eating in secret. Perhaps I would gorge two or three times a week. It wasn't that I was hiding from people to eat all the time. Just sometimes… and it seemed the solitude was as attractive as the food.
So the only answer that makes sense to me was that eating was a secret, solitary pleasure. Consuming huge quantities of food was something I enjoyed that didn't rely on the approval or permission or agreement of anyone else. Eating was a moment when the only focus was on my own needs and pleasures, on sating my own hunger.
As I waxed, I discovered the truly terrible secret of being fat. It doesn't greatly matter to other people whether or not you are. Given a certain level of talent, charisma or passionate interest, or even without any of these things, other people's interest in your weight is pretty minimal, unless you're some sort of celebrity.
Most people are not so superficial as to judge you on your weight alone, nor as interested in your flaws as you might wish. Unless you are the fabled One-Tonne Man, or mind-bogglingly boring, your weight simply cannot be the most interesting thing about you.
Because I was fat, I was probably attractive to fewer people. But I was attractive to a number greater than nil, which was amazing enough. Or take politics, where the people whose votes I sought as I went from student hack to local councillor to party staffer couldn't have cared less.
My friends teased me occasionally, but never seemed to exclude me from fun permitted only to those below size XL. If there was any exclusion it was self-imposed (such as my realising I snored badly because I was fat, so declining trips where rooms would be shared). There may, of course, have been slights that I did not notice, or avoided being aware of – I have never been asked to play Cassius in a production of Julius Caesar, for example – but I have not felt the loss keenly.
Perhaps it was this sense of being able to get away with it that fuelled my behaviour. I could be popular enough, good-looking enough, successful enough and still eat as much as I wanted. If I had a vice, it was innocuous, with little consequence for how I was seen by the world.
I recall one flatmate's horrified look on realising that the two dozen doughnuts I had bought on Saturday afternoon were consumed by Sunday morning, but he never mentioned the incident, at least not within my hearing.
Yet I may have been more fearful of others' gaze than I knew. Looking back, I notice that in photos I am absent, or half-hidden. The same might be true of my career. From being a student politician, I moved to becoming an adviser, a staffer, a speechwriter: one of those who live "in the dark".
But if I was judging myself, it was subconsciously. As far as I was aware, my size caused me no more than fleeting moments of dismay. A fat joke, a passport photo, the jarring reflection where it took me a moment to grasp that the hulking figure beside me was my very own self.
Not that I paid much attention to those closest to me who did dare venture the occasional suggestion about eating a little less, exerting myself a little more. My reaction to any such criticism was usually petulance until the issue was forgotten and life went on.
And life did go on. Have I ever been dumped for being fat? I don't think so. At least, if I have been dumped for being fat, it's been for being fat and rude, or fat and neglectful, or fat and unfaithful. Of all the things I'm ashamed of in relationships, not being skinny is very low down the list.
As I write this, I feel the exposure of an unpleasant selfishness. I wanted to eat, and if no one was going to stop me, I would damn well eat. All I wanted or expected from others was unconditional love and support, and I got what I wanted. I must have had an ego even bigger than my belly. I ate, it seems, as a statement of the most literal self-indulgence.
Which is not to say I never dieted. I have undertaken three grand diets in my life, the first in my mid-20s. For almost six months, I ate only fat-free tuna, pasta and chopped tomato every night. It worked very well, and for a few months I was slim.
The second great diet was seven years ago. I had a girlfriend who lived abroad. The last time I had visited, a friend of hers had referred to me as "the fat Englishman" and, mortified for us both, I'd resolved that the next time I saw her, I would be thin. The giant bowls of tuna and pasta returned. I was slim for a brief period, and once the initial focus waned, my weight grew once more. It was odd that I chose to diet in a way that allowed me to eat a whole packet of spaghetti every night. If I couldn't have tasty, I could still have stuffed full.
The final great diet is the current one. I won't bore you with the details, other than to say it is more exercise heavy and less monomaniacal than previous efforts. It began with the realisation, two weeks before my old sixth-form college reunion, that, 18 years after my last visit, I would be returning to the same place, and the judgment of the college nurse was still as accurate as ever.
Obviously, a fortnight is no time to make any great difference, but it did at least give me a spur and, just as importantly, a foil for any observations about the gap between past and present me. I've continued the effort for five months, and am just a few pounds from a broadly "acceptable" weight – though I am not yet, and may never be, thin.
I'm conscious that if I'm to succeed in the years to come, it is my attitude to the pleasures of steady, solitary eating that have to be addressed. This gives me some hope. Over the past few years, both my life and my diet have changed. I eat alone less, more with friends or with my partner. As a result, I tend to eat less "crack-food". I don't want to exaggerate this – I put on two and a half stone after my last diet, after all – but over the past few years, my weight has been broadly stable, if high.
One reason for this is that I've discovered I like running. Over the past six years I've run half-marathons, even two full marathons – very, very slowly. I was fat, but I didn't have to be unfit. Of course, losing weight makes running much easier, and vice versa. I knocked 11 minutes off my personal best for a half-marathon last month. One day I hope to be able to match my partner's easy stride over a long course.
Yet for all the value of diet and exercise, I think my best hope lies in a change in how I see myself. I'm not the same person I was in my 20s. I'm less arrogant about my own talents and importance, more conscious of my weaknesses and mistakes. Why? Because it's gradually dawning on me that there are priorities greater than the need to please myself. I want to be fit so I can enjoy life with my partner, so I can make her feel proud of me when we're out, and because looking healthy might have some beneficial effect on how I am seen by a world whose approval I'm increasingly aware I do actually need. (Don't worry, I'm not getting toe-curlingly romantic. It's just as true that if I were dumped tomorrow, the best chance of finding someone would be if I resembled early Brando, not late Welles.)
As I've slimmed down, I've noticed a greater professional confidence. I'm less shy of having my photo taken, or being on TV, or speaking in public. But all this is a welcome consequence, not a driving factor. What is more important is I was avoiding these things before, without quite acknowledging why.
As I near the end of this first stage of losing weight, there's no sense of crisis or of great revelation, just a dawning thought that actually, I'd rather not be fat. As I enter the second stage – keeping the weight off – I've come to think I don't need the indulgence of great piles of food, because other indulgences – a weekend away, a pleasant run, companionship, even good food – have supplanted that desire. Or so I hope. I doubt I'll take it on trust for a while yet.
So what does any of this mean, for anyone other than me? I hesitate to prescribe anything. But I can say this. If we want people to stop being fat, then hectoring them about their calorie intake or fats might not work for everyone. Forcing suppliers to offer healthy options and taxing fat might make things better for many, but someone like me would have found a way to eat too much even if pizza were twice the price of tobacco. I wasn't ignorant, or stupid, or lied to. I knew I was eating too much bad stuff, and still I carried on.
Perhaps the lesson is simply that for some of us, eating too much fills a void, offering a way to secure a pleasure you don't know you are missing. That void will stay constant until something else, almost imperceptibly, fills it up. If that's the case, then staying a decent weight is both relatively simple and hideously complicated. For me it meant understanding that other pleasures could replace the vice of food, and a dawning realisation that my consumption affected others, changed their views of me, and perhaps occluded my view of myself.
Will this new awareness mean I don't eat so damn much? Well, I don't feel now any urge to slip to the Laughing Haddock, or visit the sandwich store at half past three, when I know they cut the price by half. I suspect all this is because I'm a bit happier, a bit more settled, a bit less arrogant and selfish, less worried by hopes of success and fears of failure.
But just in case that's all nonsense, and I was just fat because I am at heart a greedy pig, and will always be, I think I'll keep on weighing myself, and boring those around me with the tale of the tape.
Perhaps I'm still quite selfish, after all.
