Free Leith, William by The Hungry Years Page A

interesting point. Elasticated waistbands are the thin end of the wedge. What about the larger-sized chairs being fitted into many restaurant chains?
    Will we grow into them?
    The Million-dollar Question
    I'm right behind the obese woman, close enough to observe the doughnut of fat she wears around her neck like a brace, like a shameful necklace, and I'm wondering what it's like to be as fat as this, and I'm thinking of Shelley Bovey's heartrending description, 'A Day in the Life of a Fat Woman'. Interestingly, even though Bovey writes in the first person, she switches to the third person when things get beyond a certain point of horror, when things get really personal.
    When she wakes, the fat woman feels tired. 'She always feels tired, no matter how much sleep she gets.' She also feels
    weak with hunger. She breakfasts on cereal carbs for a quick energy boost. In the car, 'she cannot do up her seatbelt without it digging in so that she can't breathe out'. She 'drives her car unbelted, breaking the law and feeling precarious and unsafe'.
    On the train, she is 'the focus of many eyes as the train lurches on its way and the cause of irritation to the passengers whose arms she accidentally jogs as she passes them'. When she squeezes into her seat, she is 'jammed for a few agonising moments as her stomach sticks on the hard rim of the table and she is wedged astride the central divider'. In the street, she is jeered at by workmen. At the office, she is desperate for a doughnut, but too ashamed to eat in front of her colleagues.
    Later, during a hospital appointment, the hospital gown does not fit in order to cover her breasts, she must wear it back to front, exposing her bottom. In a clothes store, she is intercepted by an assistant, who says, 'I'm afraid we've got nothing in your size.' On the way home, she visits a supermarket to buy some carbohydrate snacks for her children, because she feels 'the working mother's guilt'. At the checkout, she stuffs the snacks in the store's plastic bag as quickly as she can. Later still, weary and desperate, she goes home on the train. She is too tired to fight for a seat, so she stands. She wonders: is it just being fat that brings about this utter dreariness of body and spirit?
    Or is there something else, something that caused Bovey to be fat? That, of course, is the million-dollar question. It's a question she never answers. It's a question I'd like to put to her.
    Ten More Pounds and I'm Finished
    Looking at the obese woman in front of me, this lost soul, this woman who I guess must have some terrible problem, who, I would bet, overeats, who almost certainly has a relationship with food which is pretty disgusting, looking at this woman and thinking of her and thinking of myself makes me feel uncomfortable, and I would much rather be looking at someone else, thinking about someone else's dress sense. How much longer before I have to upsize? How much longer before I Go Floaty? Because, of course, part of me is still certain, absolutely certain, that Dr Atkins is wrong, that I am fat and getting fatter and will be fat for ever, that all I have to look forward to, as Clive James once put it, is 'a lifetime of thigh-chafing misery', that Geoffrey Cannon was right, that diets don't work, that I'll never solve my problems at all, that my girlfriend, who says she doesn't mind about my weight, actually, secretly, does, that my bulk will increase relentlessly, like Robbie Coltrane ...
    Why am I fat?
    I'm fat because I overeat.
    And why do I overeat?
    For a moment, I stop, watching the woman as she walks, haltingly, past the golden arches. Which makes a certain amount of sense. When I have talked to very fat people about fast-food restaurants, they mostly say they never go in them they're too self-conscious. They don't like the sneering. What they don't like, precisely, is for people to make the connection between their weight and their eating. They do not like people to see the cause and the