It begins with me walking past a parked car. I'll have caught my own reflection in a window and glimpsed something horrible pushing out of my shirt. No, I'll reassure myself. It's just a distortion. It's the shape of cars, isn't it? They bulge in the middle and, when you walk past them, they make you look as if you bulge in the middle – which you don't. So I walk slowly past a squarer vehicle. Like a van. Hm. OK, what about an estate agent's window? Oh no, surely not. Finally, at home, I'll stand in front of my wife's full-length mirror, turn to the side, and lift up my shirt. And there it is, the missile-head of blubber pushing out of my torso. My gut. It's back.
I go through this routine about three times a year before having to diet, miserably, only to start the cycle all over again. By the car window phase, I'll have already been through weeks of denial: my stomach's swollen because I'm hungry; my stomach's swollen because I've just eaten; the tumble dryer's shrinking my trousers again. I'll find myself crossing my arms in the company of slender friends; of sucking myself in near cameras and attractive women. In the perilous naked moments, when undressing for bed, my eyes will fix themselves on the curtains. And the next thing you know, there I am, under that lightbulb, pregnant with shame.
It's not that I'm obese. Most of me, aged 38, is just as it was as at eight. Puny. Until I was in my early 20s, there was barely anything of me at all. Weedy at school, I still recall the despair of the 11-year-old me seeing Sinitta's So Macho video. I knew, as I watched the lady prancing with beefcake, that there wasn't a girl in the world who would kiss me. If you could have told me that, come the 1990s, there'd be Kurt Cobain and then Hedi Slimane, and the desirable shape for a man would change overnight from triangle to stick, I'd have been delighted.
But not for long. Because then I'd have discovered what was going to happen to me in my early 20s. When I moved in with a girlfriend, my diet changed from amphetamines, gin and toast to lager, pasta and Revels. I'll never forget the moment I realised the effect all this was having on my body. After a lifetime of "he's nothing but skin and bone", it felt like an impossible betrayal. I was working in telesales at the time, and had caught my reflection as I walked away from the bathroom mirror. I noticed a pressure, an alien presence, pushing against the inside of my red Pavement T-shirt. I lifted my top, peeked underneath, and found a whole new way to hate myself.
Fifteen years later, I've learned that there's nothing uglier in nature than the naked middle-aged male. Especially white ones who work behind desks. It's the contrast between yellow skin and curling black hair; the sloping shoulder; the sallow buttock; the nubby, ribby little tits, their useless pink nipples rimmed with spider's legs. But it's the gut that sets the whole thing off, adding the comic to the tragic.
In 2000, the UK's bestselling men's magazine was the beery FHM. Today, it's the protein-shakey Men's Health
Male bellies are different. Ours don't have the invitingly soft appearance of female tummies, nor do they sympathetically trace the body's natural lines. They're a swell of grotesque dough that balloons out horizontally. When I've allowed my stomach to expand too much, I find myself grabbing at it, aggressively, as if it's not part of me. And that's actually how it feels. My gut isn't a metaphor for all the times I've lost control of my eating; it's a physical manifestation. It's not a body part, like a leg or an eye; it's a psychological flaw that's been made physical. It's shame that I can touch.
That shame isn't mine alone. In 2000, the UK's bestselling men's magazine was the beery FHM. Today, it's the protein-shakey Men's Health. A significant component of Men's Health's rise was surely their realisation that so many men secretly share my dread of the expanding stomach. Their monthly promise is the ultimate stomach, defined by its abs. I'm sure that many of its first-time readers are where I was, in their early to mid-30s, hitting that critical point of decision. Their bodies are deteriorating. Their systems are slowing. They're running to fat. Will they do something about it? Or give a fatalist shrug and allow themselves to ripen, like brie, into middle age?
I was on holiday when that critical moment came to me. My wife and I were coming to the end of a four-year stay in Australia and enjoying a long-planned road trip in a camper van through the remote tropical north. I didn't understand why, at the time, but we just couldn't get along. The scenery was dazzling, the sun was huge, but, no matter how hard I tried to be pleasant, everything was crotchety and wrong. It was only later that she confessed the reason we kept falling out. She felt resentful of me and embarrassed. I'd put on too much weight. I know how that might sound. My wife should love me for who I am! She shouldn't care if I get a little tubby in the middle! But I accepted what she said, because I felt she was right.
Of course, what we feel and what we believe are often in conflict. I believe that I'm middle-aged, and decaying, so nobody should judge me by the landslide of hairy mush that I store inside my jumper. I believe that our desire for our partners shouldn't dim for any reason related to their appearance, and that I should feel sexually attracted to my wife even if she were to wake up, say, with a fisherman's beard. I believe I have far more important things to think about than my waistline: my failure to have children, for example; my high familial risk of prostate cancer; or my lack of pension and savings, or the total impossibility of my job as a secure long-term career, or the whole world outside my stomach. And yet, sometimes, when it gets really bad, my flab is all I think about.
The only buzz I've experienced from running is the "thank God it's over, now I can have some cheese" one
Another thing I firmly believe is that neither men nor women should be objectified. And yet when I see a beautiful naked body, I'm transported. Am I allowed to admit that? Beauty is not a myth. It applies to all things, no matter how unfair that might feel. If a human eye can fall upon an object, then that object will inevitably generate an automatic response somewhere on the scale between attraction and revulsion. I'm just scared of making people go "urgh".
And that includes my wife. When I realised how much my appearance was affecting my relationship, and my self-esteem, macho man that I am, I did Weight Watchers. You can log your progress online these days, so there are no humiliating weigh-ins in church halls on Wednesday evenings. The people at Weight Watchers have somehow indexed the entire world of food, assessing the protein, fibre, carb and fat content of everything that can be eaten, and have assigned it a points score. If you don't exceed your given points limit, goes the theory, you'll be in calorific deficit. Your gut will go.
Weight Watchers is one of the world's most successful diet plans, with more than two million users in 25 countries. When I signed up, I think I sussed out why. You can have a healthy apple for one point, if you fancy it. Or, for the same point, you can eat a deliciously unhealthy caramel marshmallow bar. You can have some tuna in brine for three points. Or a Cadbury's Curly Wurly. How's about lunch? Ten points will get you a brown rice biryani salad. Or a McDonald's chicken sandwich. It didn't seem possible, back in 2007, that it would work. Could I really eat a bag of Wotsits every day and lose weight?
As it turned out, I could. I lost 10 kilos eating junk food. I was hungry quite a lot, but it was worth it. The day I left Sydney, I felt good about my stomach for the first time in more than a decade. Trousers I'd owned for years would fall, still fastened, to my ankles. I could enjoy baths without having to use bubbles to cover the island of mottled paunch. When my wife and I arrived back at Heathrow, into the welcome fuss of our families, it was obvious that our years in Australia had been nothing but a complete success. Why? Because we'd come back thin.
What you're supposed to do, on Weight Watchers, is stay on it for ever. You're allocated a few more points to live off when your diet ends, but for the rest of your days, you're meant to keep measuring out your milk for every cup of tea. That wasn't going to happen. So I took up running, half an hour every weekday and an hour on Saturdays and Sundays.
It worked, for a while. It slowed the gain. But I'll never comprehend people who breathily insist they've become addicted to exercise. Are they telling the truth? Exercise hurts. It's dirty and time-consuming and often cold and wet – unless you go to a gym, in which case it's smelly and expensive. People claim to become hooked on the endorphin buzz. The only buzz I've experienced from running is the "thank God it's over, now I can have some cheese" one.
Just as consuming alcohol is not a response to thirst, two family-size Domino's and a tub of Ben & Jerry's has nothing to do with hunger
Although I've given up the gin and amphetamines, I still have my sources of needy pleasure. Today, it's sugar and fat. I'm addicted to unhealthy food. I gorge on chocolate as I once did on cheap red wine. I eat alone in expensive restaurants as I once drank alone in cheap pubs. And just as consuming alcohol is not a response to thirst, two family-size Domino's and a tub of Ben & Jerry's has nothing to do with hunger. When my wife goes away, I'll treat myself to takeaways and experiment with fattening meals of my own invention – a barbecued pulled pork lasagne; a cider, cheddar and bacon risotto. It's a blitzkrieg of indulgence. I'll stuff it in and stuff it in until I can hate myself no more. Unfortunately, for my gut, that's the kind of assault that no amount of jogging can outrun.
Then, in 2010, there was a disaster. Weight Watchers changed their system. Perhaps to avoid criticism of their surprising one apple = one caramel marshmallow bar equation, they came up with a new algorithm. In essence, the bastards upped the score of everything else just so they could make fruit zero points. I sent many livid emails. No one listened. But after some months nearly passing out on the 5:2, I returned to the mumsy discipline of Weight Watchers. To this day, when using their online "food tracker", I manually score apples one point, just to spite them. Although it's much less enjoyable now, the diet still works. When I emerge from several mean weeks of 10ml doses of semi-skimmed in each mug of tea, I'm never actually flat-bellied, and my face appears unhealthily gaunt. But the crucial zone from belt-buckle to rib is once more looking correct. I am happy. In control. I feel like an adult.
It's an irresistible association, fitness and grown-up-ness. It has its dark corollary in those weekends on the sofa, surrounded by sweet wrappers, sticky-fingered and burping. Those nights on which I might as well be wearing a nappy. And it's at night, invariably, when the binges happen. It's as if the effort of all that impulse-control has become too much. That daylight voice that insists I should be thin and well-mannered and hard-working and have my hair brushed and teeth white and have a pension and security and two little children, healthy and wealthy and wise, has finally broken me. Every mouthful of delicious gunk is another punch to his head.
Two years ago, my relationship with my gut took on a dramatic complication. My wife was appointed editor of Women's Health magazine. She started leaving the house at 6am so she could attend something called Barry's Boot Camp before work. She gave me lists for the supermarket that contained things like kale and agar syrup. Instead of a coffee, in the morning, she'd have a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon. My awareness of my spherical middle became ever more acute. The fitter she became, the fatter I felt.
As my wife thinned and toned, she remained kindly diplomatic in her responses to my expanding state. She has three lines that she uses, on seeing me with my top off, each of which tells me roughly where I am in my boom-and-bust cycle. When I'm fresh from a diet, she'll say (untruthfully), "Not an ounce of fat!" When I'm glumly pinching at three or four inches, it's, "So what? You've got a little tummy." When it's really bad, she gives a flat smile and says, "Don't worry. You'll get rid of it." And then I sulk. Because I don't feel as if I have a choice. To keep myself in some sort of shape, for my wife, is just good manners.
It's not only about her. I'm nearly 40, now. As I've grown older, I've noticed that my response to the human form has changed. These days, I'm as likely to feel sorrow upon seeing physical beauty as I am arousal. I find I don't like being around young people. They remind me of death. But I'm not convinced my war against gut is about resurrecting the ghost of my youth. Neither is it all vanity. With my too-small mouth and my Old Man Steptoe chin, I've never been one for mirrors. Perhaps, then, it's something specific about my age. These are my early middle years. I'm still overwhelmed by all the things I'm losing, and have yet to discover the compensations of age. I hope there are some. I hope I don't care this much about my gut for ever.
